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We ran to where the gun lay, and lifted it between us, straining under its weight; lurched with it to the side, heaved it up, and sent it over into the second boat with a crash. Prompt on the crash came a yell, and we stared in each other's faces, giddy with our triumph, as John Worthyvale came tottering out of the cook's galley with two fresh red-hot handspikes.
We spent the next half-hour in dragging the gun aft, and fetching up from the hold a dozen basket-loads of stone. It required a personal appeal from my father before old Worthyvale would part with so much of his treasure. But no sooner had we loaded the little gun and trained her ready for use, than my father, pausing to mop his brow, cried out that the Moor was losing her breeze again.
Towards the close of the day, too, Roger Wearne had made shift to crawl on deck and bear a hand. Captain Pomery lay in the huddle of the forecastle, no man tending him: and old Worthyvale awaited burial, stretched in the hold upon the ballast.
At fifty yards the musketeers in their bows opened fire, while my father whistled to old Worthyvale, who, during Dr. South's sermon, had been bringing the points of half a dozen handspikes to a red heat in the galley fire. The two seamen, Nat and I, retorted with a volley, and Nat had the satisfaction to drop the steersman of the boat making towards our starboard quarter.
Well, well poor old John Worthyvale won't mourn it. I left him below past praying for." "Look here, Master Prosper," shouted Billy. "If the ship won't steer we must get that mains'l in, or we're lost men. Run you and cast off the peak halliards while I lower! The Lord be praised, here's Mike, too," he cried, as Mike Halliday appeared at the hatchway, nursing a badly burnt arm.
Likewise in bottles twelve dozen of the Hermitage and as much again of the Pope's wine, of Avignon?" "It all went in, sir. Master Gervase checked it on board by the list." "For the rest we are reduced to stones? Then, Prosper, there remains no other course open to us." "Than what, sir?" I asked. "We must enlist this old man; and that fulfils our number." "Old John Worthyvale?" "Why not?
But here another strange noise drew our eyes up the lane, as an old man in a smock-frock a pensioner of the estate, and by name John Worthyvale came hobbling round the corner and down the hill towards us, using his long-handled road hammer for a staff and uttering shrill tremulous cries of rage. "Vengeance, Sir John! Vengeance for my l'il heap o' stones!"
The vexation I could understand for your seaman naturally hates calm weather but scarcely the degree of it in a man of temperament so placid. Hitherto he had taken delight in the strains of Mr. Badcock's flute. Suddenly, and almost pettishly, he laid an embargo on that instrument, and moreover sent word down to the hold and commanded old Worthyvale to desist from hammering on the ballast.
"Where's the ammunition? We don't carry a single round shot aboard, nor haven't for years. Besides which, she'd burst to a certainty." "There's time enough to make up a few tins of canister," argued my father. "Or stay " He smote his leg. "Didn't I tell you old Worthyvale would turn out the usefullest man on board?" "What's the matter with Worthyvale?"
But Nat, having passed through a real gale, had saved not sufficient fondness for his verse to blush, for it. We should have been mournful for old Worthyvale, but that night we knew only that it was good, being young, to have escaped death. Under the stars we made bad jokes on Mr. Badcock's sea-sickness, and sang in chorus to Mr. Fett's solos "With a fa-la, fa-la, fa-la-la!
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