"If he makes a squeal, this will be his last ship. Chips has seen worse than he got, and should have kept his mouth shut. He gets forty dollars a month, ten more than the second mate. The Squarehead's no fool."
"Well, I call it a dirty piece of work."
"Righto!" agreed Australia. "That rotten bull ought to be hung by his thumbs."
While little was said about this particularly raw piece of brutality, it made a great difference to us in so far as we seemed to realize, of a sudden, that the fo'c'sle was apart from things aft, and that it was just as well that we felt a little more agreeable toward each other.
The constant rubbing noses over the stinking grub, and the continued driving, with no rest in the afternoons, made life anything but pleasant while we lingered in the tropics. But the blood spilled by the mate, as I have said, clarified our atmosphere forward.
Talk of the days to come again waxed plenty, and plans were gone over and over in the night watches. In calm, we fretted and fumed, watching and whistling for a breeze as though our very lives depended upon the blowing of a gale. Hitchen, one calm Sunday afternoon, cut a cross in the mainmast in order to bring on a wind; as this piece of vandalism was done in the second mate's watch, and in a place where it could not be seen without a search, no evil consequences ensued.
As on Sunday we got our watch below in the afternoon, word was passed to us of the port watch, about the cross on the main mast, and in the first dog watch I went aft and inspected it, pretending to hitch up a coil of rope that hung inside of the fife rail. We lay with our head yards sharp up to starboard, and the after yards back against the starboard rigging, on the other tack, the courses were guyed out by slap lines, and as the ship yielded to the gentle roll of the swell, the reef points would ripple against the canvas in a way that sounds different from anything else in the world.
We were speculating upon the efficacy of the cross.
"We will have a wind before midnight," declared Frenchy with positive conviction, and during the dog watches we talked of nothing else.
Charlie Horse came out on deck in the second dog watch carrying his Bible, with a quotation about the wind. "Thou hearest the sound, but canst not tell whence it cometh," he read, "for the wind bloweth where it listeth." Charlie Horse placed a deep significance upon the cutting of the cross in the mast. The faithful became more and more perturbed as the sun set and no sign of wind rewarded their belief in the cross.