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 hospital; and though as yet there had been no complaint or symptom of panic, the face of each man, soldier, sailor, or prisoner, wore an expectant look, as though he wondered whose turn would come next.