The pirates must have been thunderstruck at our apparently successful attack upon the armed negroes, and the game way in which we walked off with the boat under their very noses. It was of course extremely tantalizing for them, especially as they had felt so sure of capturing us.
However, we were not out of the wood yet, as we were presently to discover.
For some minutes I lay in the bows of the boat, feeling wretchedly ill and thoroughly done up. How I wished I could get rid of my saturated clothes and don dry ones, for I began to feel chilled to the bone.
The gunner and Ned Burton were well to the fore at this crisis in our fortunes. Luckily, they both had iron constitutions, with plenty of stamina and reserve of force; in proof of which they rowed like madmen, so as to get the boat out of range of the musketry fire which was being continuously kept up from the shore.
One of the negroes, seeing that I was rather in a collapsed state, crawled along the bottom of the boat to me, carrying in his hand a green cocoa-nut, of which there was a supply in the stern-sheets.
With his knife he cut off the top, and handed me the brimming nut.
“Drink him, massa,” he whispered; “plenty mosh good.”
I needed no second invitation, but drank the contents in one long delicious draught. That dusky negro was like a ministering angel, and I told him so with as much emphasis as I could muster up.
I now began to feel more myself again, and by great good-fortune we began to move out of the dense volcanic atmosphere into the bright sunlight which reigned beyond. I rejoiced greatly at this, for it meant dry clothes for us all.
A spent bullet or slug struck the boat near the water-line. I raised myself and glanced over the gunwale.