When his admonitory instructions were ended, Barnstable stepped again to
the opening in the cabin-hood, and, for a single moment before he spoke,
once more examined the countenance of his prisoner, with a keen eye.
Dillon had removed his hands from before his sallow features; and, as if
conscious of the scrutiny his looks were to undergo, had concentrated
the whole expression of his forbidding aspect in a settled gaze of
hopeless submission to his fate. At least, so thought his captor, and
the idea touched some of the finer feelings in the bosom of the generous
young seaman. Discarding, instantly, every suspicion of his prisoner's
honor, as alike unworthy of them both, Barnstable summoned him, in a
cheerful voice, to the boat. There was a flashing of the features of
Dillon, at this call, which gave an indefinable expression to his
countenance, that again startled the sailor; but it was so very
transient, and could so easily be mistaken for a smile of pleasure at
his promised liberation, that the doubts it engendered passed away
almost as speedily as the equivocal expression itself. Barnstable was in
the act of following his companion into the boat, when he felt himself
detained by a slight hold of his arm.
"What would you have?" he asked of the midshipman, who had given him the
signal.
"Do not trust too much to that Dillon, sir," returned the anxious boy,
in a whisper; "if you had seen his face, as I did, when the binnacle
light fell upon it, as he came up the cabin ladder, you would put no
faith in him.
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