A MIDNIGHT SCARE.
Captain Greaves stepped aft, calling to me, as I have said, and I
followed him below to his berth, after pausing to make sure that Yan Bol
had taken charge of the brig; for it would be his watch till six, and
mine till eight, and his again till midnight.
The captain closed the door of his berth, and exclaimed:
“I have no bond or agreement bearing Tulp’s signature to offer you,
because the document he signed was made out in the name of Van Laar, and
is, consequently, worthless; but _my_ undertaking will secure you as
effectually as though it bore Tulp’s name; and I now propose to make out
such a bond for you.”
He took a sheet of foolscap from a drawer, seated himself, dipped a
quill into an ink-dish, and wrote.
I have lost that paper. Years ago I mislaid it, though there were few
memorials of my life that I could not have better spared. Its substance,
however, I recollect, of course, and what Greaves wrote was to this
effect:
That having appointed me chief mate of the brig _Black Watch_, in the
room of Jacob Van Laar, he agreed that the share in dollars--to wit,
30,556--that was to have been Van Laar’s had he proved himself a
competent mate and remained in the ship, should be paid to me--that is
to say, to William Fielding; and here he entered certain particulars
stating my age, place of birth, my professional antecedents; and he
likewise sketched very happily in words my face and appearance, “that
Tulp,” said he, “shall not be able to pretend you are not the right man,
and so wriggle out of what this document commits him to, in case I
should not live to reach home.”
More went to this document than I need trouble you with. I watched him
while he wrote. There was an expression of enthusiasm in his face, as
though he found a sort of joy in writing freely about thousands of
dollars. “Should it prove a dream,” thought I, stooping to caress
Galloon, who lay at my feet, “what will the jolly Dutch and English
hearts of this brig say when we arrive at the island--if such an island
exists!--and find not only no ship, but not even a cave?” But the vision
of Tulp came to the rescue again. A specter, formed mainly of a leering
eye, a sleek and wary grin, and a velvet cap, seemed to gaze at me from
behind Greaves; and I pocketed the document with a feeling that almost
rose to conviction after I had read it, at my friend’s request, and
thanked him very warmly for his kindness and for his friendly and
particular interest in me.
We sat talking over what had passed between him and the crew.
“One point,” said he, “I believe I have scored: I have made them
understand that the fewer they are the richer they will be. I hope this
notion may not lead to some of them chucking the others overboard.
They’ll all stick to the ship till the island is reached and the dollars
are stowed. _Afterward_ will be my anxious time. But the adventure must
be gone through, and it remains also to be seen whether the brig is not
to be navigated during the homeward run by fewer men than we now carry.
The fewer the better. I should wish to see six men forward--no more--and
three of us aft, for Jimmy is to be reckoned as a cabin hand, and,
saving Bol and Wirtz, there’s not a man, in my humble opinion, whose
spine that knock-kneed, shambling, slobbered Cockney lad--a creature you
would set down as a funeral-and-wedding idiot merely--has not the
strength to snap.”
Soon afterward we went to supper, for at sea the last meal is so called,
and in the cabin we supped at half-past five; at six I relieved Yan Bol.
The men seemed to be waiting for him to come off duty. They were smoking
and talking round about their favorite haunt--the caboose. Some of them
were so hairy and some of them so flat of countenance that it was
impossible to gather what was in their minds from the looks of them. Bol
went into the caboose, whence presently issued a quantity of tobacco
smoke in a procession of puffs. I heard his voice rumbling; it was like
the groaning of a distant tempest. I was too far aft to hear what he
said, and there was likewise much noise of wind in the rigging, and a
shrill lashing of brine alongside.
The sailors made a press at the caboose door, some in and some out, and
those who were out stood in hearkening postures, their heads eagerly
bent forward, the hand of the hindmost upon the shoulder of his fellow
in front of him. Bol’s voice rumbled. It was clear he was reading aloud,
so continuous was the rumbling, and presently I found that I had guessed
right when I saw the outermost man hand his paper in through the caboose
door. In short, every sailor wanted his document read aloud, two men
only being able to read, and of these two Yan Bol was the more
intelligible to the Englishmen.
Well, after this for some days I find nothing worth noting. A thing then
happened, a trifling ocean incident some might deem it, but it left an
odd strong impression upon me, and after all these years I can live
through it again in memory as though now was the hour of its happening.
We had sailed out of the northeast trade wind, and had entered that zone
of equatorial calms and baffling winds which is termed by sailors the
doldrums. To this point we had made a fine run. Such another run down
the South Atlantic must promise us a prompt arrival at the island,
unless we should meet with the Dutchman Vanderdecken’s devil’s luck off
the Horn. Neither Bol nor I spared the men, when our forefoot smote the
greasy waters of the creeping and sneaking parallels. To every breath
that tarnished the white surface of the sea we braced the yards, making
nothing of running a studding sail aloft, though five minutes afterward
the watch might be hauling it down with all aback forward and the brig
going astern. By this sort of watchfulness, and by the willingness of
the men, and by the slipperiness of our coppered bends, we sneaked our
keel forward, every twenty-four hours showing what sometimes rose to a
“run.”
It was in about one degree north, that down east at sunrise, in the
heart of the dazzle there, we spied a sail, a topsail schooner, that as
the morning advanced lifted toward us as though she were set our way by
a current, for, often as I looked at her, I never could see that she
shifted her helm to close us whenever a draught of air swept the shadows
out of her canvas and held them steadily shining and gave her life for a
while.
A serene cloudless day was that, the light azure of the sky whitening
into a look of quicksilver where it sloped to the brim of the sea, and
the sea floating thick and hushed and white, with a long and lazy heave
that ran a drowsy shudder through our canvas. Greaves thought the
schooner a man-of-war, something British stationed on the West African
coast, well out in the Atlantic for a sniff of mid-ocean air, brought
there by a chase, and now bound inward again, though subtly lifting
toward us at present, attracted by the smartness of our rig, and
inspired by a dream of slaves. But I did not think her a man-of-war, I
did not believe her English. A Yankee I did not reckon her. In short, I
seemed to know what she was not.
The morning wore away. At noon the schooner was showing to the height of
her covering board, that is to say, she had risen her bulwarks above the
line of the horizon, but the refraction was troublesome; she swam in the
lenses of the telescope, she was blurred as though pierced with
fragments of looking-glass along the risen black length of her, and
sometimes I seemed to see gun-ports, and sometimes I believed them an
illusion of the atmosphere.
“What do you think of her, Fielding?” said Greaves, while we stood at
noon, quadrants in hand, taking the altitude of the sun.
“I don’t like her looks, sir,” I answered.
“Nor I. I believe now that she is a large Spanish schooner with hatches
ready at a call to vomit cut-throats in scores. We’ll test her.”
A light breeze was then blowing off the starboard quarter. Our helm was
shifted, the yards braced to the air of wind, and the brig was headed
about west. We made eight bells, and grasped our quadrants, waiting and
watching. For about ten minutes the schooner, that was now dead astern,
held steadily on; her broad spaces of canvas then came rounding and
fining down into a thin silver stroke, somewhat aslant. Greaves picked
up the glass and leveled it at her.
“She is after us,” he exclaimed, “and, blank her, it won’t be dark for
another seven hours!”
“She may yet prove an English man-of-war,” said I.
“I wish I could believe it now,” said he; “we must make a stern chase of
it. Our heels are as smart as hers, I dare say, and this is good weather
for dodging until the blackness comes, unless the beast should send
boats, in which case there are thirteen of us; mostly Englishmen.”
He went below to work out the sights, leaving me to put our brig into a
posture of defense, and to make the most of the weak catspaws which
breathed and died. Ammunition was got up, the two long brass guns loaded
with round shot, the carronades with grape to slap at the first boat
that should come within range. In a very little while our decks
presented a somewhat formidable appearance with chests of muskets and
pistols loaded with ball and slugs, round and grape shot ready for
handling, a cask full of cartridges, a sheaf of boarding-pikes,
cutlasses at hand to snatch, and so on, and so on.
It is old-fashioned stuff to write about! yet your grandfathers managed
very handsomely with it, _somehow_, old stuff as it is. It’s the city of
Amsterdam that is shored up and held on end by piles; so does the
constitution of this country rest on the boarding-pike. You clap a
trident in the hand of your goddess of the farthing and the halfpenny.
Why not a boarding-pike? _That_ is Britannia’s own symbol. It was not
with a trident that this invincible goddess charged into the channels,
and swarmed over the bristling and castellated sides of her
thrice-tiered thunderous enemies, and swept all opponents under hatches
and battened them down there. It was the boarding-pike that did _that_
work. But a weapon, the most victorious of all in the hands of the
British tar, is doomed, I fear. Its fate is sealed. The giant Steam has
laid it across his knee, and waits but to fetch a breath or two to break
it in twain. Be it so. But laugh at me not as an old-fashioned proser
when I say that it will be an evil day for England when the
boarding-pike shall have been stowed away as a weapon that can be no
longer serviceable in the hands of the British Jacks.
We ran the ensign aloft; the schooner took no notice. Some breathing of
air down her way enabled her to slightly gain upon us. She sneaked her
hull up the sea to the strake of her water line, but she was end on, and
little was to be made of her. It then fell a sheet calm, and the
stranger at that hour might have been about five miles astern of us. It
was a little after four in the afternoon. The heat was fierce. The
planks of the deck burnt like hot furnace-bricks through the soles of
the shoes, the pitch bubbled between the seams, and in the steamy vapor
that rose from the brig’s sides the lines of her bulwark rails snaked
faking to her bows as though they were alive. The very heave of the sea
fell dead; at long intervals only came a rounded slope sluggishly
traveling to us, brimming to the sides of the brig, slightly swaying
her, and making you think, as it rolled dark from t’other side of the
vessel, of the sullen rising of some long, scaly, filthy monster out of
the ooze to the greasy chocolate surface of a West African river.
“What is that?” suddenly exclaimed Greaves, who had been standing at my
side looking at the schooner.
I pointed the glass.
“A boat, sir,” said I. “A minute--I shall be able to count her oars.
Five of a side. She is a big boat and full of men.”
He took the telescope from me and leveled it in silence.
“She is a privateersman,” said he. “There’s nothing of the man-o’-war in
the rise and fall of those blades; and if yonder oarsmen are not
foreigners, my name is Bartholomew Tulp. Fielding, those scoundrels must
not arrest this voyage, by Isten! There is nothing for them to plunder.
They will cut our throats and fire the brig. Oh, blow, my sweet breeze!
What sort of a gunner are you?”
“A bad gunner,” I answered.
“I’ll try ’em myself. I’ll try ’em with the first shot!” he cried, with
his face full of blood and his eyes on fire. “There will be time to load
and slap thrice at them before they’re alongside, and then----” He
turned, and shouted orders to the men to arm themselves to repel
boarders and to prepare for a bloody resistance. “Every man of ye will
have to fight as though you were three!” he roared. “You will know what
to expect if you let those beauties board you. Yan Bol----” and he
shouted twenty further instructions, which left the men armed to the
teeth, ready to leap to the first syllable of order that should be
rendered necessary by the movements of the boat.
But at this moment I caught sight of a dim blue line on the white edge
of the sea in the north. It was a breeze of wind, something more than a
catspaw. The color was sweet and deep, and it spread fast; yet not so
fast but that it was odds if the boat were not alongside before our
sails should have felt the first of the wind.
Greaves sighted the long brass stern-piece, lovingly smote it, and then
directed it on its pivot as though it were a telescope.
“Stand by to load again, men!” he cried to a couple of sailors who were
at hand, and applied the match.
The explosion made a noble roar of thunder. The gun might have been a
sixty-four pounder for _that_--nay, big as one of those infernal pieces
which worried well-meaning Duckworth in the Dardanelles. The ball flew
ricochetting for the boat, rhythmic feathers of water attending its
flight, as though it chiseled chips of crystal out of the mirror it
fled along. It missed the boat, but it fell close enough to flash a
burst of white water that may have wetted some of the rogues; and,
indeed, it was so finely aimed that our men roared out a cheer for the
marksman.
That round shot achieved an unexpected result. The oars ceased to
sparkle, the boat came to a stand; and this while our piece was loading
afresh.
“Oh, ye saints, one and all, give it to me to smite ’em this time,”
prayed Greaves through his teeth.
Wink went a gun in the bows of the boat; a puff like a cloud of tobacco
smoke out of Yan Bol’s mouth rolled a little aside, and floated
stationary and enlarging. The report came along like the single bark of
a dog, but we saw nothing of the ball.
“Oh, come nearer--oh, come nearer!” groaned Greaves in his throat; and
again he laid the piece, and again he applied the match, and a second
volcanic burst of noise followed the fiery belch.
The final flash of water was astern of the boat this time; but Greaves’
second dose, leveled with amazing precision, considering the range,
coming on top of the wind, the fresh, dark blue shadow of which would
now be visible to the fellows astern, satisfied them. With mightily
relieved hearts we beheld them pull the boat’s head round for the
schooner, and, some minutes before they were got within the shadow of
her side, the breeze was rounding our canvas, and the brig was wrinkling
the water as she gathered way to the impulse aloft.
“Those gentry have not yet arrived at the Englishman’s notion of
boarding,” said Greaves. “Your brass gun always speaks loudly. There was
a note in the voice of this chap that deceived them. Their own schooner,
probably, carried nothing so heavy.”
He slapped the breech of the brass piece, sent a contemptuous look at
the schooner, and fell to pacing the deck.
The breeze slightly freshened and we drove along--considerably off our
course, indeed, but that could not be helped: for the blue shadow of the
wind was over the schooner; she was heeling to the small, hot gush of
the draught; she had picked up her boat and was in pursuit of us. We
waited awhile, and then, finding that she held her own--nay, that she
was very slowly closing us, indeed--we put our helm up and squared away
dead before it, leaving her to follow us as best she might with nothing
more that would draw than a square topsail and topgallant sail and a big
squaresail.
By sunset we had run her into an orange-colored star on the edge of the
dark blue sea in the north; yet the cuss was still in chase, and, when
the dusk came, we braced up on the larboard tack, with the hope of
losing her, and steered southeast.
It was dark at eight o’clock, and a strange sort of darkness it was. All
the wind was gone, and the sea gleamed like black oil smoking. The
atmosphere had that smoky look; spiral folds of gloom seemed to stand up
on the ocean, stretching tendrils of vapor athwart the stars and hiding
most of them. ’Twas a mere atmospheric effect; yet all this blending of
dyes, this thickening and thinning of the dusk, this heavy and stagnant
intermingling of shadow around the sea produced the very effect of
vapor. Sight was blinded at the distance of a pistol-shot, and the ocean
lay as though suffocated under the burden of the hush of the night.
We kept all lights carefully screened, and the lookout was told to keep
his ears open; but neither Greaves nor I felt uneasy. The schooner had
been far astern when the evening fell, and our shift of helm, with a
pretty considerable run into the southeast, could scarcely fail to throw
her off the scent. But it is true, nevertheless, that vessels in
stagnant weather have a human trick of turning up close together. I have
been in a flat calm with a ship a long mile and a half distant from us,
and in a few hours both vessels have had boats out towing, to keep the
ships clear. Have vessels sexes? I believe so. It will not do to talk of
the magnetic influence of _wooden_ fabrics. Ships are sentient; the male
ship with the nostrils of her hawse-pipes sniffs the female ship afar,
and the twain, taking advantage of a breathless atmosphere, and of the
helplessness of skippers--which there is no virtue in cursing to
remedy--all imperceptibly float one to the other till, if permitted,
they affectionately rub noses, then, lover-like, quarrel, snap jib
booms, bring down topgallant masts, and behave in other ways humanly.
It was somewhere about ten o’clock that night that Greaves and I were
seated on the skylight, smoking and talking, but all the while keeping
an eye upon the deep shadow in whose heart the brig was sleeping, and
listening for any sound upon the water. All hands were on deck. They lay
about, dozing or mumbling in conversation; but they were in readiness,
armed as when the boat had been approaching, and the carronades and two
great guns were loaded and deck lanterns were alight below, hidden. The
brig was prepared, nay, doubly prepared; for it was no man’s intention
to let the boats of the schooner take us unawares. Our voyage and our
lives were not to be brought to a hideous and untimely end by a
scoundrel picaroon.
I had seen Yan Bol that afternoon before the dusk closed in, after
looking at the schooner, advance his fearful fist and writhe it into an
incomparable suggestion of throttling, with such an expression of
countenance as was as heartening as the accession of a dozen picked men.
And this little circumstance was I relating to Greaves as we sat
together on the edge of the skylight, smoking.
“He is a heavy, terrible man,” said Greaves. “If the schooner’s people
are Spanish, as I believe, I shall reckon Yan Bol good for ten of them,
at least. The other Dutchmen would be good for four apiece, and the
remainder may be left to our own countrymen of the jacket.”
“The Dutch fight well,” said I.
“Deucedly well,” he answered; “often have they proved our match. I would
rather have fought the combined fleets at Trafalgar than De Winter’s
ships. Duncan’s was a more difficult, and, therefore, a more splendid
victory than our nation seems to have realized. But the truth is, little
Horatio’s flaming sun filled the national sky at that time with its own
blazing light, and all was sunk in the splendor, though there were other
suns; oh, yes, there were _other_ suns!”
“Hark!” I cried, “we are hailed.”
“Hailed?” he echoed in a whisper.
We listened. A figure came out of the darkness forward and said in a low
voice, “There’s something hard by, hailing us.” Greaves and I went to
either rail and searched the thick and silent darkness, over which
hovered a faint star or two, pale and dying. I strained my ears. I could
hear no sound of oars, not the least noise of any kind to tell that a
vessel was near us. I looked for a sparkle of phosphorus, for any blue
or white gleam of sea-glow, such as the stroke of an oar, whether
muffled or not, will chip out of the water in those parts. The hail was
repeated. It was the same hail I had before heard. It sounded like “Ship
there!” and seemed to proceed out of the blackness over the larboard
bow.
Galloon barked sharply and furiously.
“Silence, you scoundrel!” hissed Greaves at the dear old brute, and the
dog instantly ceased to bark. “Do you see anything, Fielding?”
“Nothing, sir,” I answered, crossing the deck. “The cry seemed to me to
come from off the water on the larboard bow, and if it is our friend of
to-day or any other ship, she is _there_.”
He went forward and I lost his figure in the blackness.
All hands were now wide awake. The gloom was so deep betwixt the rails
that nothing was to be seen of the men, but I gathered from their voices
that they were moving briskly here and there to look over the side and
to peer into the smoky gloom over the bows. I went right aft, and first
from one quarter and then from the other of the brig I stared and
hearkened, straining my vision against the blackness till my eyeballs
ached, straining my hearing against the incommunicable hush upon the
ocean until I felt deaf with the sound of the beat of the pulse in my
ear. Oh, it was such a night of wonderful silence that, had the full
moon been overhead, the imagination might have heard the low thunder of
the orb as it wheeled through space.
Greaves arrived aft.
“Is that you, Fielding?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can see nothing, and the sea is as silent as a graveyard o’ night. Is
that hail some piratic trick? I tell you what: the words might have been
English, but they were not delivered by an English throat. I shall make
no answer. There is nothing to be done but to watch for fire in the
water; should it show, to hail _then_, and to let fly if the answer is
not to our liking.”
He called for Yan Bol. The Dutchman’s deep voice responded, but even
while he approached us the hail was repeated.
“There again!” cried I.
“Was it in English?” said Greaves.
“It was ‘ship ahoy,’ sir, very plain indeed, but thin, more distant than
before, I fancy, and still off the larboard bow.”
At this instant there was a great commotion forward; I heard laughter,
the cackling of affrighted cocks and hens, followed by a shout in the
voice of the boy Jimmy:
“Here’s the chap as has been a-hailing, master.”
A singular noise of the beating of wings approached us, and I discerned
the figure of the boy Jimmy, as he stood before us grasping something.
“Shall I wring un’s neck, master?” he cried, with a note of idiotic
mirth in his voice.
“What the devil is all this about?” shouted Greaves. “What have you
there?”
“The big Chaney cock with the croup, master,” answered the boy.
I burst into a laugh, but a laugh that, perhaps, was not wanting in a
little touch of hysteria, so poignant was the feeling of relief after
the deep uneasiness of the last quarter of an hour. The men, heedless of
the discipline of the vessel, had come pressing aft in the wake of the
boy, and forward there continued a wild concert of cocks and hens
cackling furiously.
“Fetch a lantern, one of you,” bawled Greaves; “curse that poultry! Who
started them all? That row’s as bad as a flare if there’s anything near
on the lookout for us.”
A lantern was brought and the glare of it disclosed the tall, muscular,
knock-kneed form of the youth Jimmy, grasping by the neck a huge,
long-legged, ostrich-shaped cock, of the kind known as Cochin China. The
faces of the seamen crowding aft to hear and see showed past him in
phantom countenances, contorted out of all resemblance to themselves by
their grins and stare of expectation, and by the dim light that touched
them, and by the deep darkness behind them.
“What have you got there?” cried Greaves.
“It’s the big cock, master. He’s croupy,” answered the lad in his
imbecile voice, continuing to grasp the fowl so tightly by the neck
that, croup or no croup, the thing hung silent, as though dead, save
that now and again it would give an uneasy, sick, protesting flap of its
wings. “He wasn’t well this afternoon no, master. I was passing the
coop, when I heard him sing out, ‘Ship ahoy!’ and I stopped to listen,
and he sung out, ‘Ship ahoy!’ again. He was standing on one leg and the
skin of his eyes was half drawed down, and I speaks to the cook about
him, who tells me to go and be d----d.”
“He gooms, captain, vhen I vhas busy mit der crew’s supper; I had
shcalded myself. No vonder I spheaks short,” exclaimed the voice of the
cook among the crowd behind the lad.
“Bear a hand with your yarn, Jimmy!” cried Greaves.
“Well, master, when I hears that we was hailed, I came out of the bows,
where I was lying down, and I listened, and I hears nothing; but by and
by the hail comes, and I says to myself, ‘Aint I heard that woice
before?’ and I stands listening till it sounds again. ‘It’s old
Chaney,’ says I, and steps aft to the hen-coop, knowing in what part he
lodges, and here he is, master. Shall I wring un’s neck?”
“Cook,” exclaimed Greaves, “take that cock from Jimmy and put it back in
its coop. Go forward, men, but keep your eyes lifting till this
thickness slackens. That hail _may_ have come from a cock with the
croup, as the lad says, but all the same, be vigilant till we can use
our eyes. There may be something damnably close aboard even while I’m
talking.”
The men answered variously in their gruff voices, and the mob of them
rolled forward and vanished in the deep obscurity. The lantern which had
been brought on deck was again taken below, and all now being silent
fore and aft, Greaves and I lay over the side, listening and straining
our sight into the murkiness; but not a sound came off the sea. No
sparkle anywhere showed the life of a lifted blade; no deeper dye of ink
indicated the presence of anything betwixt us and the horizon.
For an hour Greaves and I patrolled the deck, talking over the cock with
the croup, over false alarms at sea; taling about the preternatural hush
and sepulchral repose of the night; and then we talked of the voyage, of
the island, of the ship in the cave; and on such matters did we
discourse. And while we were conversing--an hour having passed since the
incident of the croupy cock--we heard afar the tinkling and musical,
fountain-like rippling of water brushed by wind, and a few minutes
later, a pleasant breeze was cooling our cheeks, steadying our canvas,
and propelling the brig, whose wake, as it streamed from her, trailed
like a riband of yellow fire, while the wire-like lines which broke from
her bows shone, as though at white heat, with the beautiful glow of the
sea. The wind polished the stars and cleansed the atmosphere till you
could see to the gloomy line of the horizon. By midnight the moon was
shining, the heavens were a deep blue, and Greaves had gone below,
satisfied that the brig was the only object in sight within the whole
visible compass of the deep.
Though it had been Yan Bol’s watch from twelve to eight, yet, while the
captain and I remained aft, he had kept forward. Now that Greaves had
gone below, and my watch would be coming round shortly, Yan Bol came
along to the quarter-deck.
“She vhas an oneasy time, Mr. Fielding,” he exclaimed in his trembling,
deep voice, that made one think of thunder heard in a vault.
“It was,” said I; “but the sea is clear, and there’s an end to the
trouble.”
“We should hov fought, by Cott,” said he, “had der needt arose. Ve did
not like dot dis voyage should be stopped by a bloydy pirate. It vhas
strange, Mr. Fielding, dot der cock should cry out in English.”
“It sounded English,” said I.
“Oh, she vhas goodt English. I like,” said he, broadly grinning, “dot my
English vhas always as goodt. She vhas an English cock, maype, though
schipped at Amsterdam. Had she been Dutch she vouldt hov spoke my
language.”
At this moment eight bells--midnight--were struck. I thought to see Yan
Bol instantly trudge forward with the alacrity of a seaman whose watch
below has come round, but he evinced a disposition to linger, as on a
previous occasion.
“I likes to findt a ship in a cave full of dollars, Mr. Fielding,” said
he.
“There is a very great deal that one would like,” said I.
“Sixty-von tousand dollar,” he continued, “vhas a goodt deal of money.
Dot money us men vill take oop. Und how much vill she leave, I vonder?”
“Eh?” said I. “Yes, Bol, that will be a matter of counting, won’t it?”
“I like to know, Mr. Fielding, vy she vhas sixty-one tousand dollar? Vy
not a leedle more or a leedle less, or much more, or some tousands less?
Dot’ll mean,” he continued after a pause, during which I remained
silent, “dot dere vhas a large share ofer und aboove der sixty-one
tousand dollar; but how vhas us men’s share arrived at I like to know?”
“Why do you not ask the captain? Why do you ask me these questions? I am
not the captain.”
“No, dot vhas very right. But you hov der captain’s confidence; und vy
do I ox, Mr. Fielding? Because der captain’s yarn is vonderful----” He
broke off, looking at me very earnestly.
“Do you distrust the story?” said I.
“Hov I said so, hov I said so, Mr. Fielding? But she vhas vonderful all
der same.”
I was silent. He continued to look at me for some moments in a dull
Dutch way, then, seeming to check some observation he was about to make,
he exclaimed:
“Veil, der coast vhas clear. I feel like sleeping. Good-night, Mr.
Fielding.”