Page 90 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

in knots, had no heart even to smoke, but gloomily stared
at each other. Vickers was in the cuddy writing; Blunt was
in his cabin; and Pine, with two carpenters at work under
his directions, was improvising increased hospital accom-
modation. The noise of mallet and hammer echoed in the
soldiers’ berth ominously; the workmen might have been
making coffins. The prison was strangely silent, with the
lowering silence which precedes a thunderstorm; and the
convicts on deck no longer told stories, nor laughed at ob-
scene jests, but sat together, moodily patient, as if waiting
for something. Three men—two prisoners and a soldier—
had succumbed since Rufus Dawes had been removed to
the hospital; and though as yet there had been no complaint
or symptom of panic, the face of each man, soldier, sailor,
or prisoner, wore an expectant look, as though he wondered
whose turn would come next. On the ship—rolling cease-
lessly from side to side, like some wounded creature, on
the opaque profundity of that stagnant ocean—a horrible
shadow had fallen. The Malabar seemed to be enveloped in
an electric cloud, whose sullen gloom a chance spark might
flash into a blaze that should consume her.
The woman who held in her hands the two ends of the
chain that would produce this spark, paused, came up upon
deck, and, after a glance round, leant against the poop
railing, and looked down into the barricade. As we have
said, the prisoners were in knots of four and five, and to
one group in particular her glance was directed. Three men,
leaning carelessly against the bulwarks, watched her every
motion.