A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [66]
First, stages were rigged over the bows and stern, and José and a paint-pot went over the rail to add _Lizzie Green_ to the many names which from time to time had decorated the schooner's escutcheon. Not content with that, he had it painted on every other appropriate place-- the boats, the buckets--it was as well to be thorough. Meanwhile, many of the sails were taken down and new ones bent--or rather, old ones, distinctive sails that a man would swear he couldn't have forgotten if he had ever seen them before. Otto sewed a large patch to the mainsail, where there was no hole. In his zeal Jonsen even considered lowering the yards and rigging her as a pure fore-and-after: but luckily for his sweating crew, abandoned the idea.
The master-stroke of his disguise was permanent--that he carried no guns. Guns can be hidden or thrown overboard, it is true: but the grooves they make in the deck cannot, as many a protesting-innocent sea-robber has found to his cost. Jonsen not only had no guns to hide, he had no grooves: any fool could see he had no guns, and never had had any. And who ever heard of a pirate without guns? It was laughable: yet he had proved again and again that one could make a capture just as easily without them: and further, that the captured merchantman, in making his report, could generally be counted on to imagine a greater or less display of artillery. Whether it was to save their faces, or pure conservatism--presumption that there must have been guns--nearly every vessel Jonsen had had dealings with had reported masked artillery, manned by "fifty or seventy ruffians of the worst Spanish type."
Of course if he met and was challenged by a man-ofwar, he would have to give in without a fight. But then, it never pays to fight a man-of-war anyhow. If he is a big one, he sinks you. If he is some little cock-shell of a cutter, commanded by a fire-eating young officer just into his teens, you sink him--and then there is the devil to pay. Better be sunk outright than insult the honor of a great nation in that fashion.
When he at last remembered to take the hatches off the children, they were half dead with suffocation. It was hot enough, stuffy enough anyhow down there, only the square opening above for ventilation; but with the hatches even loosely in place it was a Black Hole. Emily had at last dropped asleep, and slept late, through a chain of nightmares: when she did wake in the closed hold, she sat up, then fainted immediately, and fell back, her breath coming in loud snores. Before she came to again she was already sobbing miserably. At that the little ones began to cry too: which sound it was that reminded Jonsen, rather late, to take the hatches off."
He was quite alarmed when he saw them. It was not till they had been out in the morning freshness of the deck for some time that they even summoned up interest in the strange metamorphosis of the schooner that was in progress.
Jonsen looked at them with a troubled eye. They had not indeed the appearance of well-cared-for children: though he had not noticed this before. They were dirty to a fault: their clothes torn, and mended, if at all, with twine. Their hair was not only uncombed--there was tar in it. They were mostly thin, and a yellowy-brown color. Only Rachel remained obstinately plump and pink. The scar on Emily's leg was still a blushing purple: and they all were blotched with insect bites.
Jonsen called José off his painting job: gave him a bucket of fresh water: the mate's (the only) comb: and a pair of scissors. José wondered innocently: they did not look to him particularly dirty. But he did his duty, while they were still too sorry for themselves to object actively, to do anything more than sob weakly when he hurt them. Even when he had finished their toilet, of course, he had not reached the point at which a nursemaid usually begins.
It was noon before the _Lizzie Green_ looked herself-- whoever that might be: and a little after noon she was still