‘We must run back through the shoal,’ says I.
The captain paused a moment. ‘There is no other hope,’ quoth he. ‘Fetch the dwarf on deck;’ and immediately Bedloe made his appearance, and gazed anxiously at the weather. Captain Jem went below.
‘You offered to pilot us already,’ I said, ‘and you know the shoal well. I have seen your chart of it. You must bring us through now.’
Captain Jem at this moment returned on deck, carrying two large pistols.
‘If the schooner as much as scrapes a ridge of sand,’ says he, and he pressed the muzzle of one of the pistols so hard upon the dwarfs forehead, that when he took it away there was a round blue ring left above the eyebrow; ‘if the schooner as much as taps one oyster upon the coral, you cease to live!’
‘That is no news,’ answered the dwarf, with the old shrug of the shoulders; ‘if the schooner strikes we all of us cease to live. Pooh, pooh, man! bullying avails not now. We are all of us more near being drowned than I am of being shot. Put up your pistols.’
I declare I positively began to admire the dwarf. His cool courage was heroic. Captain Jem turned all manners of colours, whistled, grinned, then tried to appear stern; and at last stuck the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, looking rather sheepish than otherwise. Then there was a pause, which the dwarf broke by saying in the old jeering tone—
‘Well, captain, do you want a pilot?’
‘Do you undertake to run the schooner through these shoals into the open sea to the northward?’ I replied.
‘Why, I told you from the first I would run you into the open sea,’ says the imperturbable Mr. Bedloe.