Rough Passage to London(29)
“I will make him tell me what happened to Abraham,” Morgan replied with conviction.
“And what if this Englishman tells you he killed your brother?”
“Why then, I . . .” Morgan bit on his lip, looked up at the sails, and didn’t say anything. At that point, Morgan was leaning against the wheel, concentrating on Cooper and not the ship’s progress. He hadn’t noticed a sudden shift in the wind. Champlin emerged from below decks and looked up at the fluttering sails that were snapping back and forth in the gray fog.
“Fall off, boy, damn you, the fore-topgallant is luffing.”
When his watch was over at eight o’clock, Morgan rushed to tell Hiram that he had met the famous author James Fenimore Cooper. He found his friend spinning yarn in the forecastle with some of the other sailors. The sailors, half undressed, were reclining on their sea chests or sitting on their bunks smoking their small half pipes and chewing wads of tobacco. They were listening to one of the old-timers, who was in the middle of a tale. Hiram didn’t even know who Cooper was. His eyes were bugged out of his head, his face red and splotched, and his breath was hot like a panting dog. He was in a blurred stupor that Morgan recognized only too well. He pulled his friend out of the smoky, steamy forecastle into the cool, foggy night air. They walked over to the far forward section of the bow where they could talk in private.
“You been quilling rum again?” Morgan asked under his breath.
Hiram nodded with a satisfied smile, and then started to speak in a hoarse, slurred whisper.
“Yeah, I’ve been quilling that sweet Jamaican grog fairly regular on this passage. You won’t believe what I seen down there in the hold last night. I thought I was all alone with them rats scurrying all around me. I had just put the quill through the gimlet hole in the head of the barrel when I heard some commotion in and around the crates. At first, I thought it was just the rats, but then I started hearing rustling noises, and some heavy breathing. I never been so frightened, I thought it might be a ghost or something. I started to run back through the dark, bumping my head on the stores hanging from the heavy timbers. I was dodging and weaving through the maze of crates. I almost made it to the ladder, but I tripped on a coil of rope. Then I seen this lantern light swinging toward me in the darkness. I couldn’t see nothing more than that light running at me like a horse coming at me full gallop. Then I heard a voice yell out, ‘Who’s there? Who’s there, damn ye!’”
“Who was it?” Morgan asked excitedly, wondering if there was a stowaway on board.
Hiram raised his eyebrows and leaned closer to Morgan to whisper in his ear, “It was Mr. Brown.”
Morgan drew back in surprise.
“I tripped and fell. Then that critter was on me. He bent down and put that light in my face, and asked if I’d been quilling rum. That’s when I recognized the mate. I could see his rotten teeth and smell his foul-smelling breath. I lied and told him Scuttles had sent me down there, but he wasn’t convinced. He asked me in a real threatening voice what I’d heard. ‘Tell me now, Smith, or I will beat it out of you.’ I told him I just heard rats and ran because I was scared. Mr. Brown looked like he was going to kill me right there.”
“Go on,” Morgan urged. He was now beginning to understand why the second mate was paying so much attention to Hiram.
“This is the worst part,” Hiram recounted with a worried frown. “Then I seen that new cabin boy named Dalrymple holding up a lantern. Why, he came out of the shadows and calls out all scared-like to Mr. Brown, and the mate, he whirled around and yells at him to get back on the foredeck. . . .” Hiram paused for a moment, and then spoke in almost a whisper, a twisted smile on his face. “I reckon the second mate, when he gets out at sea, he feels certain needs.”
It took several seconds for the reality of what Hiram was saying to register. Morgan had wondered why the second mate was always snuffing around the freight hold, and why he always wanted to know where Hiram was. Now he knew. Brown was afraid he would be discovered by Hiram in his secret lair. Jack Brown was just making sure that no one else was down there in the guts of the ship.
“Man alive! Then what happened?” Morgan asked in a more serious tone.
“Brown grabbed me by my shirt and shoved that lantern in my face and then said, ‘Whatever you heard, Smith, you better keep to yerself or you’ll find yerself climbing up Jacob’s ladder and not climbing down.’”
Morgan said nothing for a moment, and then turned to Hiram, shaking his head. He pulled the quid of tobacco he’d been chewing out of his mouth and handed it to his friend.