‘Hum!’ said the sergeant, ‘that is but a bad tone to take. We shall see about that to-morrow. However, the thing is your own business, not mine; so come along, and if you are used to lying hard, you can sleep upon it.’
I followed my jailer, who really was not an uncivil man, through several long passages, with great doors, studded like the doors of tolbooths, with iron nails. The lantern cast a dim fickle glare in these hot airless passages, and the cockroaches went whirring along, dashing their horny bodies and buzzing wings against the glass covering the light, and in our faces.
‘Here is your quarters, my Buccaneer,’ said the sergeant, stopping at a door nail-studded like the rest, and marked No. 15. ‘There are worse rooms in the place, so you have to thank me for this. Your countrymen are not always so civil when we fall into their clutches.’
I hastened to assure him that he was quite mistaken in that matter, but he cut me short, and, unlocking the door, made a sign for me to enter, saying that there was a chair on which I could sleep if I had a mind. Then he locked the heavy door behind me with a great clang and crash, and shot two or three bolts, after which I heard his footsteps die away as he walked back to the guard-room. The cell or dungeon in which I was confined was a narrow, bare room; the door paved with flagstones and very filthy. This I ascertained by the first step I took. I felt the walls; they were composed of large roughly hewn stones, very strong and dungeon-like. Up in one corner, close to the roof, and almost ten feet from the floor, was a small window, barred with iron. Through this a ray of bluish-tinted moonlight streamed down, and showed me the chair which the sergeant spoke of. I dragged it into a corner, and sitting down with a heavy heart, I began, for the first time since I was taken, to meditate on my situation. I had never before sat a prisoner in a jail, and the gyves felt sad and strange upon my wrists. How silent, and dismal, and hot, the place was! what a change from the breezy deck and the clattering voices aboard the ’ Will-o’-the-Wisp.’ I listened and listened until I almost thought I could distinguish the deep hoarse tones of Stout Jem and Nicky Hamstring’s cheering laugh. Was I ever to see them again? I had my doubts of it. For the present, at all events, our enterprise was balked. The Spaniards would doubtless send out a squadron of their armadilloes. The schooner would be forced to leave the coast, and when or where, even supposing I was to get scot free out of the hands of my present jailers, I could meet her again, was but a discouraging question to put to myself. To-morrow I was to appear before the alcaide, and perhaps his court was but a stage on the way to the gallows. To be strung up and choked at the end of a rope—faugh! why did I not die upon a bloody deck, amid the thunder of our guns, and with the anthem of my comrades’ cheers ringing through my brain? Or, why was I not to take up my rest like my father before me in the sea, which was my home, swept over by a stifling wave in some wild mid-watch, or calmly sinking with the sinking ship? These were not pleasant subjects to ponder on, but they would flow into my head as water drains into a leaky vessel. I tried hard, but vainly, to keep them out. I tried to sing a jolly sea song I had often heard my comrades chant most lustily:
“Aloof! and aloof! and steady I steer,
’Tis a boat to our wish,
And she slides like a fish,
When cheerily stemm’d and when you row clear!
She now has her trim,
Away let her swim.