"Not I!" he replied with unexpected determination. "Look 'ee, Master Ormerod, I went to sea for to be a swearin', cutlass-lashin' pirate, and they put me in a livery-shuit! All my life I been wearin' livery o' one kind or another. Now if you, or Cap'n Flint, we'll say, was to hail Ben Gunn and argyfy as how ye'd take him out o' livery—never a livery-shuit again—and make him a reg'lar sailorman as pulls on ropes and climbs masts and holds a wheel and swabs decks—if you was to do all this, why, maybe Ben Gunn, he'd do 'most anything for you—or Cap'n Flint, if so be as Flint spoke fust."
"'Tis I speak first," I replied. "If I ever command a ship you shall be a tarry sailorman aboard her, Ben. Or if I don't have a ship of my own I'll help you to a berth on another such as you desire."
He came close to me, and his eyes bored into mine with an earnestness that was pathetic.
"That's a solemn-honest promise, ain't it, Master Ormerod? Ye wouldn't go for to fool Ben Gunn, would 'ee, now?"
"No, no," I promised. "But if you don't hide us quickly, Ben, I'll never be able to make good on it."
He caught my hand in his.
"You jes come along o' me. Ben Gunn knows a thing or two, he does. I'll show 'ee, my master. You jest come along o' me."
Peter and I sopped after him up the companionway to a door for'ard of the staterooms we occupied, which led by way of a steep flight of ladder-stairs to the galley and service quarters, a space partitioned off from the vast sweep of the gundeck. Ben unhooked a lanthorn from the wall, opened a trap in the deck and signed us to follow him. At the bottom of a second ladder we found ourselves in a lazaret such as had been our prison aboard the Walrus. But there was this difference in our surroundings: That they were clean. The walls were whitewashed, and around them were ranged kegs and pipes of wines, ale and rum, and racks laden with bottles of various liquors.
"'Tis Murray's wine-cellar," I commented aloud.
Ben Gunn deposited the lanthorn in the middle of the floor and approached his mouth to my ear.