Pieces of Eight | Page 9

particularly anxious as to whether he pleased or not, but looking competent, and civil enough, without being sympathetic.
Next came the engineer, a young hulking bronze giant, a splendid physical specimen, but rather heavy and sullen and not over-intelligent to look at. A slow-witted young animal, not suggesting any great love of work, and rather loutish in his manners. But, he knew his engine, said Charlie. And that was the main thing. The deck-hand proved to be a shackly, rather silly effeminate fellow, suggesting idiocy, but doubtless wiry and good enough for the purpose.
While they were busy getting up the anchor of the Maggie Darling, I went down into my cabin, to arrange various odds and ends, and presently came the captain, touching his hat.
"There's a party," he said, "outside here, wants to know if you'll take him as passenger to Spanish Wells."
"We're not taking passengers," I answered, "but I'll come and look him over."
A man was standing up in a rowboat, leaning against the ship's side.
"You'd do me a great favour, sir," he began to say in a soft, ingratiating voice.
I looked at him, with a start of recognition. He was my pock-marked friend, who had made such an unpleasant impression on me, at John Saunders's office. He was rather more gentlemanly looking than he had seemed at the first view, and I saw that, though he was a half-breed, the white blood predominated.
"I don't want to intrude," he said, "but I have urgent need of getting to Spanish Wells, and there's no boat going that way for a week. I've just missed the mail."
I looked at him, and, though I liked his looks no more than ever, I was averse from being disobliging, and the favour asked was one often asked and granted in those islands, where communication is difficult and infrequent.
"I didn't think of taking any passengers," I said.
"I know," he said. "I know it's a great favour I ask." He spoke with a certain cultivation of manner. "But I am willing, of course, to pay anything you think well, for my food and my passage."
I waived that suggestion aside, and stood irresolutely looking at him, with no very hospitable expression in my eyes, I dare say. But really my distaste for him was an unreasoning prejudice, and Charlie Webster's phrase came to my mind--"His face is against him, poor devil!"
It certainly was.
Then at last I said, surely not overgraciously: "Very well. Get aboard. You can help work the boat"; and with that I turned away to my cabin.
CHAPTER IV
In Which Tom Catches an Enchanted Fish, and Discourses of the Dangers of Treasure Hunting.
The morning was a little overcast, but a brisk northeast wind soon set the clouds moving as it went humming in our sails, and the sun, coming out in its glory over the crystalline waters, made a fine flashing world of it, full of exhilaration and the very breath of youth and adventure, very uplifting to the heart. My spirits, that had been momentarily dashed by my unwelcome passenger, rose again, and I felt kindly to all the earth, and glad to be alive.
I called to Tom for breakfast.
"And you, boys, there; haven't you got a song you can put up? How about 'The John B. sails?'" And I led them off, the hiss and swirl of the sea, and the wind making a brisk undertone as we sang one of the quaint Nassau ditties:
Come on the sloop John B. My grandfather and me, Round Nassau town we did roam; Drinking all night, ve got in a fight, Ve feel so break-up, ve vant to go home.
Chorus So h'ist up the John B. sails, See how the mainsail set, Send for the captain--shore, let us go home, Let me go home, let me go home, I feel so break-up, I vant to go home.
The first mate he got drunk, Break up the people trunk, Constable come aboard, take him away; Mr. John--stone, leave us alone, I feel so break-up, I vant to go home.
Chorus So h'ist up the John B. sails, etc., etc.
Nassau looked very pretty in the morning sunlight, with its pink and white houses nestling among palm trees and the masts of its sponging schooners, and soon we were abreast of the picturesque low-lying fort, Fort Montague, that Major Bruce, nearly two hundred years ago, had had such a time building as a protection against pirates entering from the east end of the harbour. It looked like a veritable piece of the past, and set the imagination dreaming of those old days of Spanish galleons and the black flag, and brought my thoughts eagerly back to the object of my trip, those doubloons and pieces of eight that lay in glittering heaps somewhere out in those island wildernesses.
We were passing cays of jagged