"Do what I say—and I'll forget that desertion charge and you'll get your full pay when we get home."
They were not impressed. Whipped men already, they gazed glumly at the coasters.
"What makes you think we're ever going to get home?"
"Well, I'll tell you," said Adam; and he did.
It would be sacrilegious to use the Book itself, so he brought out his log. From that distance they wouldn't know the difference. Neither would they be able to hear what he said, so he determined not to speak any real prayers, though he remembered well the chapter from Second Corinthians he had recited last week when they slid Eliphalet Mellish overside:
"And as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly ... for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed."
He could remember the splash, too. Well, he would never forget it.
He shivered. His head low, as though he lacked strength to hold it up, he bent over the log book. He stood amidships on the larboard side, in full sight of them.
"Mumble-mumble-bumble," he practiced.
Resolved Forbes, feet dragging, came to him. Resolved Forbes would not have made a good playactor; but at that distance it was all right.
These two were the only ones in sight aboard the Goodwill. The sagging mainsail, the boom being inboard, blocked off the starboard side of the deck.
"They're scared," Resolved Forbes reported, leaning droopingly against the wale, a position so unnatural to him that it all but caused Adam to giggle. "They want to know how can they be sure the stitches will give."
"Thunderation! Some men just won't let you save their lives!" Adam thrust the log book into his mate's hand. "Here, you conduct the first services. I'll demonstrate."
On the far side of the mainsail he found the rest of the crew. Carl Peterson and Eb Waters were stark naked. On the deck were two lengths of cut sail, seven feet by four, firmly sewed together at each end, while at each end, too, a weight was attached. The weight was conspicuous.
"All very well for you to say it'll be easy," Peterson blubbered, "but how can we—"
"Allright-loofe!"
Adam stripped. He took a knife. He lay down on one of the pieces of canvas, the knife on his chest, his two hands over it.
"Go ahead, Jeth."
The bosun sewed the two sides together—not firmly but loosely, with large sloppy stitches it must have pained him to make.
Adam lay still while John Bond and the boy Rellison heaved him to their shoulders.
"Stagger more, you beefwits!" he scolded from inside the canvas.
So they lurched and stumbled aft on the larboard side to where Resolved Forbes slouched, making out like they were going to drop Adam at any moment. They put him on a plank balanced along the top of the gunwale amidships; and he heard his mate go "Glub-glub-glubbi-blub," which was his way of putting it.
Adam could not see anything, and when the plank teetered this way and that it was might scary, so that he had all he could do to keep from screaming.
The mate stopped glub-blubbing; the plank was tilted; Adam slid off.
That was even scarier. He could feel himself falling—a sickish coldness in the stomach, a tightness in the chest.
He hit with a tremendous splash, on his left side, and started instantly to sink, pulled down by the weights. With his knife he slashed the sloppy stitches, and he wriggled out of the shroud.
His right big-toe got caught in some loosened thread, and pulled him down. He leaned over, pawing it, seared by panic; but it came free, and he started up. He put his knife into his mouth and began to swim. The Goodwill was unexpectedly beamy. It seemed to him that he swam hundreds of feet, and yet whenever he'd roll his head the gray cover was still above him, the schooner's bottom.
His ears hurt, his lungs hurt. But he made it. They were waiting for him, with a knotted line out, on the starboard side where he couldn't be seen by the coasters. On deck he started briskly to dress.
"Well, now you know. Make it look as if you was fetching 'em out of the forecastle each time. And remember to stagger!"
He took the log book back from Resolved Forbes and with head bent over it he could still look up through his eyebrows at the clustered boats of the pirates. Those boats were closer together, suggesting uncertainty, even fear. Now and then one would approach the schooner; but after a moment it would scurry back. The stench was truly terrible.
The sun lay red on everything. There was still no hint of breeze.
Swathed in canvas, sewed up, weighted, Carl Peterson was carried to the plank and placed on it.
"Mumble-bumble-bumble-bee-bumble ... It ain't hard . . . Mumble-mumble . . . Remember, don't start slashing till you're under . . . And mind the barnacles!"
The plank was tipped. There was a splash. Seth Selden, unseen back of the mainsail, sewing up Eb Waters, caught the spirit of the performance and though uninstructed began to wail like a man in uncontrollable grief.
"Good," said Adam. "Mister Forbes—crawl to the cabin hatch and tell Lady Maisie to do that, too. Top of her lungs."
The boats of the coasters stirred restlessly.
Eb Waters was carried out, and Adam mumble-mumbled, and Waters was dumped.
Meanwhile Carl Peterson had surfaced on the far side, and he was being enshrouded again.
And soon Eb Waters came up there and was hauled in.
The Honorable Maisie proved to be a most convincing wailer, a banshee on a bad night. Just to hear her would have halted a rampaging lion.
Seth Selden tempered his own wails, saving his strength, only letting out a long low one every now and then. He was busy, of course. They were all busy.
Peterson had gone to his Maker for the third time and they were toting Eb Waters out for his third funeral when the coasters broke.
Somebody out there screamed. Boat after boat was turned.
The most Adam Long had hoped for was that they'd pull back a bit for a conference. He'd sought time, while he could pray for the coming of a land breeze and maybe think of something else.
But wild panic seized them. With a flash of oars, and bending low over the thwarts, they flustered away like a flock of shot-over birds.
An hour later, when the sun had set and a breeze had come at last, there was no sign of them.
"You have a voice of rare quality," the skipper told his passenger that night, "but I like it better up near like this."
"Maybe— Maybe what that man said is right."
"Maybe it is."'
"We keep on this way, Adam—the two of us here every day, every night—" She was trying to make it sound frivolous, as became her training, fashionable; but when he swiveled his eyes toward her he saw that she was staring mighty hard at a horizon that had nothing notably interesting about it and in fact could hardly be seen. "La, sir, it could even be that on some tropic night, under the rich rolling Caribbean moon, you could—well, sir, you could conceivably seduce me into bundling with you.
"You bundle with me," Adam said sententiously, "and it won't be with your skirt tied down over your feet."
She tried to laugh at this, but the sound of a sob was heard, and when she started away he was afraid he had wounded her. But she came right back.
"No, really, maybe you'd better, Adam! Better return to Jamaica!"
He looked at her a long time, and it all but made his heart stop, she was so beautiful. Sitting next to her, occasionally brushing her arm or being brushed by a stray fluttering lock of her hair, perhaps watching her hands in her lap, was not like this now—gazing smack into her eyes. He seemed to rock and wobble. He felt that he might explode, blow up like a bombard, or else faint dead away. It was too much. He couldn't keep it up.