w passed
straight down the line, without looking to the right or left. He had
said just enough, and he reached the door amid a chorus of "'Ear, 'ear!"
"Bravo!" "True for you, docther!" and so on. But when he got fairly
outside, he breathed more freely. He had performed a ticklish task, and
he knew it.

"'Ark at 'em," growled the Moocher from his corner, "a-cheerin' at the
bloody noos!"

"Wait a bit," said the acuter intelligence of Jemmy Vetch. "Give 'em
time. There'll be three or four more down afore night, and then we'll
see!"

CHAPTER VIII. A DANGEROUS CRISIS.

It was late in the afternoon when Sarah Purfoy awoke from her uneasy
slumber. She had been dreaming of the deed she was about to do, and was
flushed and feverish; but, mindful of the consequences which hung upon
the success or failure of the enterprise, she rallied herself, bathed
her face and hands, and ascended with as calm an air as she could assume
to the poop-deck.

Nothing was changed since yesterday. The sentries' arms glittered in
the pitiless sunshine, the ship rolled and creaked on the swell of the
dreamy sea, and the prison-cage on the lower deck was crowded with the
same cheerless figures, disposed in the attitudes of the day before.
Even Mr. Maurice Frere, recovered from his midnight fatigues, was
lounging on the same coil of rope, in precisely the same position.

Yet the eye of an acute observer would have detected some difference
beneath this outward varnish of similarity. The man at the wheel
looked round the horizon more eagerly, and spit into the swirling,
unwholesome-looking water with a more dejected air than before. The
fishing-lines still hung dangling over the catheads, but nobody touched
them. The soldiers and sailors on the forecastle, collected 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 accommodation. 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 obscene 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