I was speechless,—so astounded at the man’s “assumptiveness” that he had been hired that I could not find words to inform him of his mistake,—and by the time I recovered from my astonishment he had disappeared in the forecastle.
Sam stood by, chuckling to himself.
“Ah ’spec’s he may be a good sailor, Chief,” he vouchsafed. “An’ we’re in need o’ two han’s, Chief.”
“All right, Sam,” I replied. “I suppose he [[19]]doesn’t need a nose to run aloft or tail onto a rope.”
And so Trouble came unto us, but if ever a man belied his name it was “Henry Francis William Nelson Wellington Shand, sir,” for Trouble was a very treasure of a hand. He was as much at home in the water as on land or deck, and when, later, our anchor fouled one day, in fifteen fathoms, Trouble made nothing of diving down and releasing the fluke from its lodgment under a mass of coral and rock, while the height of his enjoyment was to challenge Sam to dive overboard and kill a big shark in a single-handed duel beneath the sea. And Sam, though a diver by profession, who had killed many a man-eater with a blow of his long, keen-bladed knife, freely admitted Trouble’s amphibious superiority.
Aloft he was a very monkey; he was ever scouring decks or polishing brass; he was as good-natured as he was ugly, and even dignified Joseph unbent and passed many a half-hour chinning with this weird waif of the sea. As for the other members of the crew, after one or two tests and trials they abandoned all attempts to out-talk or out-argue him, for his ready flow of multisyllabled words left them floundering in a vocabulary totally inadequate to cope with Trouble’s “expandulations” [[20]]and “supercil’ous methodictions.” On one occasion I overheard a bit of argument between our Antiguan find and a recent addition to the crew—for the older members invariably egged on new recruits to argue with Trouble.
I do not know what the argument had been about nor what the new man had said, but as he was a French mulatto from Dominica,—or, as the other islanders have it, a “patois man,”—I presume he had been referring in no complimentary terms to Henry Francis et cetera’s native heath.
“Yo’ worthless specimen o’ misguided humanity yo’!” exclaimed Trouble. “Yo’ insignificant an’ fragment’ry yaller element! For wherefo’ yo’ have de audacity to let yo’ imagination direc’ yo’ to dat assumption? Who yo’ t’ink yo’ addressin’ in dat highfalutin’, presumptious, dictatious manner? Ah desire yo’ to distinc’ly an’ def’nitely absorbinate de eminen’ly interestin’ an’ important info’mation Ah’s propoundin’, an’ if yo’ declinates to precip’tately reconsider de sentiments yo’ jus’ expressed an’ at once an’ immediately an’ hereby and in witness whereof retrac’ yo’ asservations once, forever, an’ henceforth, der’ ’s boun’ for to occur a casulty an’ a deceased patois nigger, an’ de gentleman is goin’ for to be compulsified for to discommode hisself to acquire another incumbent for [[21]]to fill de work what yo’ lack o’ intellec’ don’ fit yo’ for.”
Needless to say, in the face of this dire threat—which to the fear-stricken recipient savored of an incantation by a witch doctor or “obeah man”—the French islander promptly and “precip’tately” reconsidered and retracted whatever it was that had inadvertently brought on Trouble’s outburst.
To the last day of the voyage Trouble was with us in name if not in spirit, and never did I regret that he had hired himself, so to speak.