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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 he 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 drowse 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 drowse.

‘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—’

But Billy broke in, and in his resentful eagerness to deliver himself, his vocal infirmity somewhat intruded. ‘D—d—damme, I don’t know what you are d—driving at, or what you mean, but you had better g—g—go where you belong!’ For the moment the fellow, as confounded, did not stir; and Billy, springing to his feet, said, ‘If you d—don’t start, I’ll t—t—t—oss you back over the r—rail!’ There was no mistaking this, and the mysterious emissary decamped, disappearing in the direction of the mainmast in the shadow of the booms.

‘Hallo, what’s the matter?’ here came growling from a forecastleman awakened from his deck-doze by Billy’s raised voice. And as the foretopman reappeared, and was recognised by him, ‘Ah, Beauty, is it you? Well, something must have been the matter, for you st—st—stuttered. ’

‘Oh,’ rejoined Billy, now mastering the impediment; ‘I found an afterguardsman in our part of the ship here, and I bid him be off where he belongs. ’

‘And is that all you did about it, foretopman?’ gruffly demanded another, an irascible old fellow of brick-coloured visage and hair, and who was known to his associate forecastlemen as Red Pepper. ‘Such sneaks I should like to marry to the gunner’s daughter!’ by that expression meaning that he would like to subject them to disciplinary castigation over a gun.

However, Billy’s rendering of the matter satisfactorily accounted to these enquirers for the brief commotion, since of all the sections of a ship’s company the forecastlemen, veterans for the most part, and bigoted in their sea-prejudices, are the most jealous in resenting territorial encroachments, especially on the part of any of the afterguard, of whom they have but a sorry opinion, chiefly landsmen, never going aloft except to reef or furl the mainsail, and in no wise competent to handle a marling-spike or turn in a dead-eye, say.