Story 1—Chapter XXIV.
Sailor Bill’s Story.
After the sad ceremony which he had just performed, Mr Rawlings did not feel much inclined for gold-seeking or any worldly affairs, although he went towards the mine as a matter of duty; and when he reached the stamps he found Ernest Wilton already standing there, but looking pale and perturbed, as if anxious about something.
“What is the matter?” said Mr Rawlings. “You seem out of sorts, beyond what the loss of these poor fellows would have affected you?”
“Yes, I am,” replied the other. “I can’t help thinking of that cousin of mine, and why I did not recognise him when I first saw him; but then he was quite a little boy at school, and who would have dreamt of your picking him up at sea?”
“Strange things do happen sometimes,” said Mr Rawlings. “When was it that you last saw him in England?”
“Four years ago last Christmas, if I recollect aright. He was then a little schoolboy not half his present size. How on earth did he manage to get to sea? my aunt had a perfect horror of a sailor’s life, and would never have let him go willingly. But, there, it only serves me right for my selfish neglect! As you told me before, I ought to have kept up my communication with my family, and then I should have known all about it. I can’t help now fancying all sorts of queer things that may have occurred. My poor aunt, who used to be so fond of me, may be dead; and my uncle, who was of a roving nature kindred to mine, may—”
“Nonsense!” said Mr Rawlings, good-naturedly, interrupting him. “If you go on like that, you’ll imagine you’re the man in the moon, or something else! Sailor Bill, or rather your cousin Frank, as we must now call him, will wake up presently and enlighten us as to how he came to be in his present position—or rather in the Bay of Biscay, where we picked him up; for we all know his subsequent history; and then you’ll learn what you are now puzzling your brains about, without any bother. I confess I am curious in the matter too, for I wish to know the secret of that mysterious packet round his neck; but we must both wait with patience, and dismiss the subject for the present from our minds. Come along with me now, my boy,” he added, as the body of the miners hastened up after paying their last tribute of respect at their comrades’ graves. “I’m just going to have a look at your sluices, and see whether the stuff is coming out as rich as before.”
This invitation at once caused the young engineer to brighten up, as the idea of action had aroused the miners from dwelling on what had happened.
The yield upon being examined proved fully as rich as before the first experiment.
“You see, Mr Rawlings,” said Ernest, cordially holding out his hand for a friendly grip, “the lead has turned out just as I fancied it would do, and my efforts to open it out proved successful. You are now, as I told you would be the case, the richest man in this State, or in Montana either, for that matter, with all their talk of Bonanza Kings there.”
“You bet,” chimed in Noah Webster, who felt equally proud and delighted with the young engineer at the result of their joint operations; but Mr Rawlings could say little.
The Indian attack had hitherto prevented his realising this sudden change of fortune, and now that he was fully conscious of it, all he could do was to silently shake Ernest Wilton’s hand first, and then Noah Webster’s; and after that each of those of the miners who pressed near him for the purpose, full of sympathy with “the good luck of the boss,” and forgetting already the fate of their lost comrades in the sight of the glittering metal before them—their natural good spirits being perfectly restored a little later on, when Mr Rawlings assured them, on his recovering his speech, that he fully intended now keeping to the promise he had given when the venture was first undertaken, and would divide half the proceeds of the mine, share and share alike, among the men, in addition to paying them the wages he had engaged to do.
The ringing hurrahs with which the jubilant miners gave vent to their gladness on the reiteration of Mr Rawlings’ promise, were so loud that they reached the ears of Seth, who was watching by the sleeping boy, and the latter woke up immediately with a frightened air, as if suffering from the keenest terror.
“It’s all right, my b’y, all right,” said Seth soothingly; and at the same time Wolf, who had entered the house and crept up by the side of the bed, leapt up on the boy and licked his face.
“Where am I, Sam?” he said to Seth, the dog’s greeting having apparently calmed him down as well as the ex-mate’s kindly manner; “are they after me still, Sam?”
“You are here with us,” saith Seth, puzzled at the boy’s addressing him so familiarly; “but my name arn’t Sam, leastways, not as I knows on.”
The boy looked in his face, and seemed disappointed.
“No, you are not Sam, though you are like him. Oh, now I recollect all?” and he hid his face in his hands and burst into a passionate fit of crying, as if his heart would break.
“There, there,” said Seth, patting him on the back, “it’s all right, I tell you, my b’y; an’ when Seth says so I guess he means it!”
But the boy would not stop weeping; and Seth, thinking that some harm might result to his newly-awakened reason if he went on like that, strode to the door and summoned help, with a stentorian hail that rang through the valley as loudly as the cheer of the miners had done one instant before.
“Ahoy there, all hands on deck!” he shouted, hardly knowing what he was saying, adding a moment afterwards, “Wilton, you’re wanted! Look sharp.”
“Here I am,” cried Wilton, hurrying up, with Mr Rawlings after him. “What is the matter now, Seth?”
“I can’t make him do nothing” said that worthy hopelessly. “He takes me to be some coon or other called Sam, an’ then when I speaks he turns on the water-power and goes on dreadful, that I’m afeard he’ll do himself harm. Can’t you quiet him, Wilton; he kinder knowed you jest now?”
“I’ll try,” said Ernest; and kneeling by the boy’s side, he drew his hands away from his face and gently spoke to him.
“Frank! look at me: don’t you know me?”
“Ye–e–es,” sobbed he, “you—you are Ernest. But how did you come here? you weren’t on board the ship. Oh, father! where are you, and all the rest?”
And the boy burst out crying again, in an agony of grief which was quite painful to witness.
Presently, however, he grew more composed; and, in a broken way, Ernest managed to get his story from him—a terrible tale of mutiny, and robbery, and murder on the high seas.
This was his story, as far as could be gathered from his disconnected details.
Frank Lester, much against his mother’s wishes, had persuaded his father to take him with him in the early part of the previous year to the diamond fields in South Africa, whither Mr Lester was going for the purpose of purchasing some of the best stones he could get for a large firm who intrusted him with the commission. The object of the journey had been safely accomplished, and Mr Lester and Frank reached Cape Town, where they took their return passage to England in a vessel called the Dragon King.
Seth nudged Mr Rawlings at this point.
“Didn’t I say that was the name of the desarted ship?” he asked in a whisper.
And Mr Rawlings nodded his assent.
The Dragon King—to continue Frank’s, or Sailor Bill’s story—was commanded by a rough sort of captain, who was continually swearing at the men and ill-treating them; and, in the middle of the voyage a mutiny broke out on board, started originally by some of the hands who wished merely to deprive the captain of his authority, and put the first mate, who was much liked by the men, in his place; but the outbreak was taken advantage of by a parcel of desperadoes and ne’er-do-weels, who were returning home empty handed from the diamond diggings, and were glad of the opportunity of plundering the ship and passengers—whence the mutiny, from being first of an almost peaceful character, degenerated into a scene of bloodshed and violence which it made Frank shudder to speak about.
His father, fearing what was about to happen, and that, as he was known as having been up the country and in the possession of jewels of great value, the desperadoes would attempt to rob him first, placed round Frank’s neck, in the original parchment-covered parcel in which he had received them from the bank at the diamond fields, the precious stones he had bought, with all his own available capital as well as his employers’ money, thinking that that would be the last place where the thieves would search for them.
“And now they are lost,” added the boy with another stifled sob, “and poor mother will be penniless.”
“Nary a bit,” said Seth; and pulling out the little packet by the silken string attached round his neck—which the poor boy had not thought of feeling for even, he was so confident of his loss—he disclosed it to his gaze. “Is that the consarn, my b’y?” he asked.
“Oh!” exclaimed Frank in delighted surprise. “It is, with the bank seal still unbroken, I declare!”
And opening the parchment cover he showed Ernest and the rest some diamonds of the first water, that must have been worth several thousand pounds.
After his father had given the parcel into his care, Frank went on to say, events transpired exactly as he had anticipated. Most of the passengers were robbed, and those that objected to being despoiled tranquilly, murdered. Amongst these were his father, whom the ruffians killed more out of spite from not finding the valuables they expected on him. He, Frank, escaped through the kindness of one of the sailors, who took a fancy to him, and hid him up aloft in the ship’s foretop when the men who had possession of the ship would have killed him.
“This sailor,” said Frank, “was just like that gentleman there,” pointing to Seth.
“Waal neow, that’s curious,” said Seth. “Was his name Sam?”
“It was,” said the boy.
“This is curious,” said Seth, looking round at the rest; “it is really. I wouldn’t be at all surprised as how that’s my brother Sam I haven’t heerd on for this many a year, or seed, although he’s a seafarin’ man like myself, an’ I oughter to ’ave run across his jib afore now. Depend on it, Rawlings, that the reason the boy stuck to me so when he hadn’t got his wits, and came for to rescue me aboard the Susan Jane, and arterwards, was on account of my likeness to Sam.”
And as nobody could say him nay, it may be mentioned here that that was Seth’s fervent belief ever after.
The last recollection that Frank had of the ship and the mutineers was of an orgie on board the Dragon King in the height of a storm, and of one of the murderous villains finding out his retreat in the foretop, where the sailor who protected him lashed him to the rigging, so that he could not tumble on deck if he should fall asleep. He remembered a man with gleaming eyes and great white teeth swearing at him, and making a cut at him with a drawn sword. After that, all was a complete blank to him till he had just now opened his eyes and recognised Ernest.
“An’ yer don’t recollect being picked up at sea an’ taken aboard the Susan Jane, and brought here, nor nuthin’?” inquired Seth.
“Nothing whatever,” said Frank, who showed himself to be a remarkably intelligent boy now that he had recovered his senses. “I don’t remember anything that happened in the interval.”
“Waal, that is curious,” observed Seth.
That was all the story that Frank Lester could tell of the mutiny on board the Dragon King, and his wonderful preservation.
All the mutineers, and some of their victims too most probably, met their final doom shortly afterwards in the storm that had dismasted the ship, leaving it to float derelict over the surface of the ocean; all but the three whose corpses the visiting party from the Susan Jane had noticed on the submerged deck. These must have survived the tempest only to perish finally from each other’s murderous passions, after having lingered on in a state of semi-starvation possibly—although Frank said that the desperadoes from the diamond fields, who were the ringleaders on board, were originally the most attenuated, starved-looking mortals he had ever seen in his life.