*No tide-waiter in England knows a*—something—*from a cooper's hoop. They go in the hold as cooperage. Past Finisterre we*—the captain turned his head, and the words went sideways out of sight, and came back—*Portuguese colours, and Ormerod's widow may whistle for her brig.*
Jory stood very still with the bridle in his hand.
He had not understood all of it. He never understood all of it; nobody who read faces did, whatever people liked to believe. The lips gave you a third and the wits gave you the rest, and the wits could be wrong. But he had understood *forty pair, with the bolts*, and he had understood *Portuguese colours*, and his mind, which was quick and had been trained hard, had already gone running down a dark road ahead of him and come back with a word in its teeth that he did not want.
He looked at the captain's mouth to see what it would say next, and the captain's mouth stopped.
Calloway had turned. His eyes, pale grey and very steady, had found the ostler at the trough. For a moment neither of them moved. Then the captain's lips shaped something short and hard, and Jory, caught, half a beat too slow, did not answer it, because he had not seen the beginning of it; and then the captain said something more to the side, to the men behind him, and his face changed in a way Jory knew very well from the faces of other men in other yards.
It was the face of a man who has decided that something beneath him has insulted him.
Jory let go of the bridle. He took a step back. His shoulders met the wet stone of the stable wall.
There were two seamen with the officers, big men in tarred jackets, and a third man, older, grizzled, with a boatswain's silver call on a lanyard around his neck. The captain jerked his chin at them, and Jory saw the end of it as he swung round:
*—show him what happens to servants who stare.*
The sneer sat on the words like a gull on a post.
The two seamen came at him. One had his arm before he could think to move it; the other caught the back of his collar and twisted, so that his neckcloth bit into his throat. They hauled him off the wall and out into the middle of the yard, where the light from the taproom windows lay across the wet stones in long yellow bars, and they turned him round to face their captain like a man being shown to a crowd.
Jory did not struggle. He had learned long ago that a deaf man who struggles is a madman, and a madman can be done anything to. He stood with his arm wrenched up behind him and watched.