"Tom, don't ye know me, owld chappie?" cried Mick, for, of course, it
was him; though, what with my deadly struggle and rescue by `Gyp,' whom
I thought thousands of miles away, besides the fact of my old chum
coming so unexpectedly on the scene, I felt perfectly bewildered,
thinking that I must be in a dream. "Begorrah, ye're starin' at me,
sure, ez if I wor a ghost or a banshee, bedad!"
"Really, Mick," said I, when I could at length speak and was convinced
that it was himself in proper person and no phantom of my imagination,
gripping his fist in a hearty grasp that expressed more than I could say
and which he understood better than all the words in the world, "you
don't mean to say it's you! How did you come here?"
"Faith, on the sowl of me fat," he answered, with his jolly laugh,
speaking in that racy brogue which sounded like music, it being so long
since I had heard it. "Sure, Oi've marched oop from the coast the same
ez yersilf, alannah!"
"But," said I, still wondering at the unlooked-for sight of him there
all of a sudden like that, "I thought you were on the West Coast,
cruising about the Bight of Benin, or up the Niger, or somewhere
thereabouts?"
"So I wor," he replied, with a grin at the stupefied look on my face;
"but you forgits, Tom, our squadron's coom round here with the admiral
to give ye a hilping hand, sure, in yer shindy with these blissid Arab
thayves here. So, faith, Oi've coom along with the rest in the owld
_Grampus_, bedad. But, Oi'm lookin' for our cap'en now. Have you sayn
him, Tom, at all--he wor in the thick of the foightin' jist now summat
about heres?"
"Your cap'en," said I, trying to repress `Gyp's' frantic joy at seeing
me again; the faithful animal, who had stuck to the Arab chief with a
tenacious grip, only releasing him when he was assured of his not being
likely to trouble any of us any more, now coming up to me and springing
up, trying to lick my face as he yelped and whined with delight. "Who
is your cap'en?"
"Why, Tom, I thought you knowed," he replied, looking from me down at
`Gyp,' whose stumpy tail, and every hair on his white coat as well,
seemed on the wag, his excited affections only finding outlet in this
way. "Faith, he's Cap'en Sackville, to be sure, be all the powers!"
"What--"
"Yis," said Mick Donovan before I could get any further, answering my
unasked question; "the same ez we lied aboord with us in the owld _Saint
Vincent_."