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Blood,
and whispered: "Forward - after me."
Crouching low, they glided, noiseless as shadows, to the quarter-deck
rail, and thence slipped without sound down into the waist. Two
thirds of them were armed with muskets, some of which they had found
in the overseer's house, and others supplied from the secret hoard
that Mr. Blood had so laboriously assembled against the day of escape.
The remainder were equipped with knives and cutlasses.
In the vessel's waist they hung awhile, until Mr. Blood had satisfied
himself that no other sentinel showed above decks but that
inconvenient fellow in the prow. Their first attention must be for
him. Mr. Blood, himself, crept forward with two companions, leaving
the others in the charge of that Nathaniel Hagthorpe whose sometime
commission in the King's Navy gave him the best title to this office.
Mr. Blood's absence was brief. When he rejoined his comrades there
was no watch above the Spaniards' decks.
Meanwhile the revellers below continued to make merry at their ease
in the conviction of complete security.


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