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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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38 mariner of the Indomitable, a non-conformist old tar of a serious turn, made it even in daytime his private oratory. In this retired nook the stranger soon joined Billy Budd. There was no moon as yet; a haze obscured the star-light. He could not distinctly see the stranger’s face. Yet from something in the outline and carriage, Billy took him to be, and correctly, one of the afterguard. “Hist! Billy,” said the man in the same quick cautionary whisper as before; “You were impressed, weren’t you? Well, so was I”; and he paused, as to mark the effect. But Billy, not knowing exactly what to make of this, said nothing. Then the other: “We are not the only impressed ones, Billy. There’s a gang of us.Couldn’t you-help-at a pinch?” “What do you mean?” demanded Billy, here thoroughly shaking off his drowse. “Hist, hist!” the hurried whisper now growing husky, “see here”; and the man held up two small objects faintly twinkling in the nightlight; “see, they are yours, Billy, if you’ll only-” But Billy broke in, and in his resentful eagerness to deliver himself his vocal infirmity somewhat intruded: “D-D-Damme, I don’t know what you are d-d-driving at, or what you mean, but you had better g-g- go where you belong!” For the moment the fellow, as confounded, did not stir; and Billy springing to his feet, said, “If you d-don’t start I’ll t-t-toss you back over the r-rail!” There was no mistaking this and the mysterious emissary decamped disappearing in the direction of the main-mast in the shadow of the booms. “Hallo, what’s the matter?” here came growling from a forecastleman awakened from his deck-doze by Billy’s raised voice. And as the Foretopman reappeared and was recognized by him; “Ah, Beauty, is it you? Well, something must have been the matter for you st-st-stuttered.” “O,” rejoined Billy, now mastering the impediment; “I found an afterguardsman in our part of the ship here and I bid him be off where he belongs.” “And is that all you did about it, Foretopman?” gruffly demanded another, an irascible old fellow of brick-colored visage and hair, and who was known to his associate forecastlemen as Red Pepper; “Such sneaks I should like to marry to the gunner’s daughter!” by that expression meaning that he would like to subject them to disciplinary castigation over a gun. However, Billy’s rendering of the matter satisfactorily accounted to these inquirers for the brief commotion, since of all the sections of a ship’s company, the forecastlemen, veterans for the most part and bigoted in their sea-prejudices, are the most jealous in resenting territorial encroachments, especially on the part of any of the afterguard, of whom they have but a sorry opinion, chiefly |
