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قراءة كتاب The Island Treasure
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being released at last, when, as if he’d only been playing with them—as a cat plays with a mouse—he arrested their rush below with another shout,—
“Belay thaar! All hands ’bout ship!”
“Ha! ha!” sniggered Jefferson Flinders, the first-mate, behind him, enjoying the joke amazingly; “guess ye had ’em thaar, cap. Them coons ’ll catch a weasel asleep, I reckon, when they try working a traverse on a man of the grit of yourn!”
“Bully for ye,” echoed the captain, grinning and showing his yellow teeth, while his pointed beard wagged out. “Say, Flinders, I’ll fix ’em!”
The men, though, did not relish the joke; nor did they think it such an amusing one! It might, certainly, have been necessary to put the ship about, for the leeway she was making, coupled with the set of the cross tides, was causing her to hug the Irish coast too much, so that she was now bearing right on to the Saltee rocks, the vessel having covered the intervening twenty odd miles of water that lay between the Tuskar and this point since the hands had been first called up; but Captain Snaggs could have done this just as well off-hand after the topsails were reefed, without waiting until the men were ready to go below again before giving the fresh order.
It was only part and parcel of his tyrannical nature, that never seemed satisfied unless when giving pain and annoyance to those forced to serve under him.
And so, the men grumbled audibly as they came back once more from the fore hatch, manning the sheets and braces, when the skipper’s warning shout was heard,—
“Helm’s a-lee!”
“Tacks and sheets!” the next order followed; when the head sails were flattened and the ship brought up to the wind.
Then came,—
“Mainsail haul!” and the ponderous yards were swung round as the Denver City payed off handsomely, close-reefed as she was, on the starboard tack, shaping a course at a good right angle to her former one, so as now to weather the Smalls light, off the Pembroke shore, at the entrance to the Bristol Channel—a course that required a stiff lee helm, and plenty of it, as the wind had now fetched round almost due south, well before the beam.
“Thet will do, the watch!” then called out Captain Snaggs once more; but the men were not to be taken in a second time, and waited, grouped about the hatchway, to see whether he would call them back again.
He did not, however.
So, their stopping there made him angry.
“Thet’ll do, the watch! D’ye haar?” he shouted a second time. “If ye want to go below fur y’r grub, ye’d better go now, fur, I guess I won’t give ye another chance, an’ yer spell in the fo’c’s’le ’ll soon be up. Be off with ye sharp, ye durned skallawags, or I’ll send ye up agen to reef tops’ls!”
This started them, and they disappeared down the hatchway in ‘a brace of shakes,’ the skipper turning round to the first-mate then, as if waiting for him to suggest some further little amusement for the afternoon.
Mr Jefferson Flinders was quite equal to the occasion.
“Didn’t you call all hands, cap, jist now?” asked he, with suspicious innocence; “I thought I kinder heerd you.”
“Guess so,” replied Captain Snaggs. “Why?”
“’Cause I didn’t see thet precious nigger rascal, Sam Jedfoot. The stooard an’ thet swab of a Britisher boy ye fetched aboard at Liverpool wer thaar, sir, an’ every blessed soul on deck but thet lazy nigger.”
“’Deed, an’ so it wer, I guess,” said the captain musingly, as if to himself; and then he slipped back from the binnacle, where he had been talking to the first-mate, to his original position on the break of the poop, when, catching hold of the brass rail as before, he leant over and shouted forward at the pitch of his twangy voice; “Sam Jedfoot, ye durned nigger, ahoy thaar! Show a leg, or ye’ll lump it!”
Chapter Two.
“A Gen’leman ob Colour.”
“Thet swab of a Britisher boy,” so opprobriously designated by the first-mate as having been “fetched aboard at Liverpool” by the captain, as if he were the sweepings of the gutter, was really no less a personage, if I may be allowed to use that term, than myself, the narrator of the following strange story.
I happened, as luck would have it, to be standing just at his elbow when he made the remark, having come up the companion way from the cabin below the poop by the steward’s directions to tell Captain Snaggs that his dinner was ready; and, as may be imagined, I was mightily pleased with his complimentary language, although wondering that he gave me the credit of pulling and hauling with the others in taking in sail on ‘all hands’ being summoned, when every idler on board ship, as I had learnt in a previous voyage to New York and back, is supposed to help the rest of the crew; and so, of course, I lent my little aid too, doing as much as a boy could, as Mr Jefferson Flinders, the captain’s toady and fellow bully, although he only played second fiddle in that line when the skipper was on deck, could have seen for himself with half an eye.
Oh, yes, I heard what he said; and I believe he not only called me a ‘swab,’ but an ‘ugly’ one as well!
Indeed, I heard everything, pretty nearly everything, that is, and was able to see most of what occurred from the time when we were off the Tuskar Light until Captain Snaggs hailed the cook to come aft; for I was in and out of the cuddy and under the break of the poop all the while, except now that I went up the companion, and stood by the booby hatch over it, waiting for the captain to turn round, so that I could give him the steward’s message.
But the skipper wasn’t in any hurry to turn round at first, sticking there grasping the rail tightly, and working himself up into a regular fury because poor Sam didn’t jump out of his galley at the sound of his voice and answer his summons; when, if he’d reflected, he would have known that the wind carried away his threatening words to leeward, preventing them from reaching the negro cook’s ears, albeit these were as big and broad as the bell-mouth of a speaking trumpet.
The captain, though, did not think of this.
Not he; and, naturally, not recognising the reason for the negro’s non-appearance immediately on his calling him, he became all the more angry and excited.
“Sam—Sambo—Sam Jedfoot!” he roared, raising his shrill voice a pitch higher in each case, as he thus successively rang the changes on the cook’s name in his queer way, making the first-mate snigger behind him, and even I could not help laughing, the captain spoke so funnily through his nose; while Jan Steenbock, the second-mate, who was standing by the mainmast bitts, I could see, had a grim smile on his face. “Sam, ye scoundrel! Come aft hyar at once when I hail, or by thunder I’ll keelhaul ye, ez safe ez my name’s Ephraim O Snaggs!”
The bathos of this peroration was too much for Jan Steenbock, and he burst into a loud “ho! ho!”
It was the last straw that broke the camel’s—I mean the captain’s—back, and he got as mad as a hatter.
“Ye durned Dutch skunk!” he flamed out, the red veins cross-hatching his face in his passion. “What the blue blazes d’ye mean by makin’ fun o’ yer cap’n? Snakes an’ alligators, I’ll disrate ye—I’ll send ye forrud; I’ll—I’ll—”
“I vas not means no harms, cap’n,” apologised the other, on the skipper stopping in his outburst for want of breath, the words appearing to be choking in his mouth, coming out too quick for utterance, so that they all got jumbled together. “I vas hab no bad respect of yous, sare. I vas only lafs mit meinselfs.”
“Then I’d kinder hev ye ter know, Mister Steenbock, thet ye’d better not laugh with yerself nor nary a body else when I’m on the