- end_line
- 1642
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1580
- text
- XII
Not many days after the last incident narrated, something befell Billy
Budd that more gravelled him than aught that had previously occurred.
It was a warm night for the latitude; and the foretopman, whose watch at
the time was properly below, was dozing on the uppermost deck whither he
had ascended from his hot hammock--one of hundreds suspended so closely
wedged together over a lower gun-deck that there was little or no swing
to them. He lay as in the shadow of a hillside stretched under the lee
of the _booms_, a piled ridge of spare spars, and among which the ship’s
largest boat, the launch, was stowed. Alongside of three other
slumberers from below, he lay near one end of the booms which approached
from the foremast; his station aloft on duty as a foretopman being just
over the deck station of the forecastleman, entitling him according to
usage to make himself more or less at home in that neighbourhood.
Presently he was stirred into semi-consciousness by somebody, who must
have previously sounded the sleep of the others, touching his shoulder,
and then, as the foretopman raised his head, breathing into his ear in a
quick whisper, ‘Slip into the lee fore-chains, Billy; there is something
in the wind. Don’t speak. Quick. I will meet you there’; and
disappeared.
Now Billy, like sundry other essentially good-natured ones, had some of
the weaknesses inseparable from essential good-nature; and among these
was a reluctance, almost an incapacity, of plumply saying _no_ to an
abrupt proposition not obviously absurd on the face of it, nor obviously
unfriendly, nor iniquitous. And being of warm blood had not the phlegm
to negate any proposition by unresponsive inaction. Like his sense of
fear, his apprehension as to aught outside of the honest and natural was
seldom very quick. Besides, upon the present occasion, the drouse from
his sleep still hung upon him.
However it was, he mechanically rose, and sleepily wondering what could
be _in the wind_, betook himself to the designated place, a narrow
platform, one of six, outside of the high bulwarks, and screened by the
great dead-eyes and multiple columned lanyards of the shrouds and
back-stays; and, in a great warship of that time, of dimensions
commensurate to the ample hull’s magnitude; a tarry balcony, in short,
overhanging the sea, and so secluded that one mariner of the
_Indomitable_, a nonconformist old tar of a serious turn, made it even
in daytime his private oratory.
In this retired nook the stranger soon joined Billy Budd. There was no
moon as yet; a haze obscured the starlight. He could not distinctly see
the stranger’s face. Yet from something in the outline and carriage,
Billy took him to be, and correctly, one of the afterguard.
‘Hist, Billy!’ said the man, in the same quick, cautionary whisper as
before; ‘you were impressed, weren’t you? Well, so was I’; and he
paused, as to mark the effect. But Billy, not knowing exactly what to
make of this, said nothing. Then the other: ‘We are not the only
impressed ones, Billy. There’s a gang of us. Couldn’t you--help--at a
pinch?’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Billy, here shaking off his drouse.
‘Hist, hist!’ the hurried whisper now growing husky; ‘see here,’ and the
man held up two small objects faintly twinkling in the night light;
‘see, they are yours, Billy, if you’ll only----’
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