The other Kanaka had resumed his squatting position on the deck in front of a little ebony image, which he gazed at with a fixed stare.
The Ocmulgee was a regularly old-timer, and her decks were ornamented with various trophies of the whale-hunt.
The companion entry was made through a part of the huge skeleton lower jaw of a sperm whale; the wheel, which was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, had spokes of sea-ivory beautifully carved, each in the shape of a human arm with closed fist. The fife-rails were likewise decorated and fashioned, whilst the compass could be seen through the grinning teeth of a sea-lion, marvellously worked in polished ebony. Even the worn running gear of this dandy whaler travelled through ivory blocks.
Her bulwark rail was studded like the jawbone of some huge monster with the long teeth of the cachalot, which did duty as belaying-pins.
Four magnificent whaleboats swung from stout wooden davit legs, whilst her decks, which were flush fore and aft and stained by much oil to the deepest mahogany, were singularly spacious.
Amidships were the brick-built tryworks, and forward a small galley, or what used to be called in the old buccaneering days a caboose.
"Geewhittaker!" ejaculated Broncho, as he cast a look of inspection round the deck. "What's this we-alls have strayed into? This here barque seems to me to be a cross between a dime-museum an' one o' them flash saloons. I recalls a saloon one time, way up in the Spokane, they calls the 'Golden Dollar.' Say, boys, but she were a beaute, with a bar-counter a-glitterin' with twenty-dollar gold pieces, let in betwixt mother-o'-pearl, an' opals big as pigeons' eggs, an' that stuff scientific sports calls chrysolite."
"Look at that cannibal worshippin' his idol," said Jim in an awestruck voice. "Ain't he a ferocious-lookin' savage? There's somethin' deuced uncanny about this queer-lookin' ship, an' I'm beginning to wish I was back in the life-buoy."
Meanwhile, Jack, who could patter several of the island dialects, perceiving from his tattooing that the Kanaka was a Marquesan, had begun to put questions in that language, to the evident pleasure of the native.