"Weevily hard tack and dirty warm water wouldn't give anybody joy," replied Jack. "He wants air and exercise; they should let him out for an hour on deck every day."
"Gate an' seat checks for the realms o' light is about what he wants, I reckon," retorted the cattle-ranger.
And Broncho was right. One morning they found him too late; he was lying in a pool of blood with a small piece of broken wood in his clenched fingers. With this poor weapon the Chilian had managed to tear open a vein in his arm, and so bled to death. Thus miserably ended the poor little bucko-killer.
His death brought the superstitious members of the crew to the front again. Pessimistically they prophesied all sorts of evils, and Sam, the chief authority, openly proclaimed that Black Davis, with the death of the ship's cat upon his soul, would be the next victim of the ghostly avenger.
In the south-east trades easy times reigned in the starboard watch. For nearly a week not a sheet, brace, or halliard was touched, except for the usual pull on the braces and general "freshening of the nip" every evening.
In the second dog-watch the men would collect on the foc's'le head, and exchange yarns with eager faces and vehement gestures.
Every man forward had seen life in its more unusual phases. Paddy, Hank, Jack, and the cockney had all been shipwrecked more than once; and even Jim had had a strange crop of experiences crowded into his short life.
One evening Jack had just related a yarn of how he had been wounded in an affray in the New Hebrides, when mate of a "blackbirder," as the schooners recruiting Kanaka labour for the Queensland plantations were called.
"Any money in thet layout?" inquired the gambler.