his height, but just the old-fashioned kind,
slow and awful, and if the steward hadn't come round with a tray of
glasses and some square-face I guess I would have just sunk right down
where I was. The crew made one panic-stricken gallop for the side, and
popped over, nobody trying to stop them, though Rau asked, quite calm,
was he to shoot, and the captain said No. The Nieue steward was the only
one that didn't go, but crouched down in the scuppers with his teeth
chattering.

Then Coe leaned over the rail and talked to the prisoners in the waist;
told them that he was going to string up one an hour, children and all,
till Mrs. Tweedie was brought back safe; and he ordered Lum to cast
loose one of the old women so that she might swim ashore and carry the
news. My, if she wasn't over that rail like lightning, and striking out
for home with her skinny arms! Coe knew mighty well that Afiola had a
string of people up the mountain keeping him informed of everything that
happened--the Kanaka telegraph, we used to call it. Then, besides, up
there they could see for miles, and Coe had kedged the schooner acrost
the fairway so that Afiola might reckonize his relations in the rigging.
You might wonder that such an unmitigated black villain would care what
Coe did, so long as he had his wicked way with Mrs. Tweedie, and a whole
trackless mountain to lose himself in; but there's an awful soft streak
in Kanakas for their own blood, and we had his whole family in our
hands, not to speak of the two kids. It seemed almost like a waste of
lives to look up and see not a speck, or the least sign whatever, that
was hid under the tree tops, and it was hard to convince oneself that
Coe was doing the right thing, and that from those rocky cliffs there
was sharp Kanaka eyes taking us all in, with Alethea Tweedie tied hand
and foot, and Afiola in a sweat about his children.

The captain sat on a chair at the forrard end of the house, smoking a
cigar, and occasionally searching the woods with his binoculars. There
was a stack of loaded rifles beside him, and a keg of dynamite with a
loose lid to it. Some of the sticks had touch-and-go fuses to them,
ready to throw if they tried boarding; and sometimes he would take out
his watch and look at it hard, and every time he looked the people in
the waist would set up a kind of a wail. At one o'clock we ran up
Filipo, Afiola's brother, and settled down to another spell of waiting.
Somewheres along of t