Page:The Dark Frigate (Hawes).djvu/193

Then Jacob came out of his corner and spoke to Phil. “I will watch first,” said he. ‘‘The cook hath laid a fine supper on the cabin table. Go you down and eat your fill, then come up and keep the deck and I will go down and eat in my turn.”

At something in the man’s manner, which puzzled him, Phil hesitated; but the thought was friendly, and he said, ‘‘I will not be long.”

“Do not hurry.”

When Phil turned away, old Jacob cleared his throat.

“Boatswain — ”

"Yea?"

“Do not hurry.”

As Phil sat at the table in the great cabin, which was so dark that he could scarcely see the plate in front of him (although he ate with no less eagerness because of the darkness), the planks and timbers and transoms and benches were merged into an indiscriminate background of olive-black, and there hung before him by chance a mirror on the forward bulkhead, in which the reflection of the yellow sky threw into sharp outline the gallery door at his back. Having no means at hand for striking a light, he was hungrily eating and paying little heed to his surroundings, when in the mirror before his eyes, against the yellow western sky the silhouette of a head wearing a sweeping hat appeared over the gallery rail.

There was not the faintest noise, and no slightest motion of the ship was perceptible in the brown stillness of the evening. The head, darkly silhouetted, appeared in the mirror as if it were a thing not of this earth, and immediately, for he was one who always kept his wits about him, Phil slipped silently off the bench, and let-