“I don’t know about comfortable; but if it’s a little rough I’ve no cause for complaint,” answered Wagram pleasantly. “At any rate I’ve escaped with life—though how I got off that waterlogged hulk I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“I know all about that,” interrupted the other roughly. “What I want to know is, how did you get on to her? Eh? How the devil did you get on to her?”
The fierce eyes played upon Wagram’s face as though they would penetrate his brain. Decidedly this man was a rough customer—very; still, he was a white man, and might not be so bad at bottom. At any rate he would be susceptible to a very substantial reward. So he told the story of the wreck of the Baleka, and how he himself had nearly gone down with the ship in trying to save a child that had been lost below.
“Serves you devilish well right for interfering in what doesn’t concern you,” was the reassuring comment on this piece of information. “Look here. Have you the remotest sort of notion as to where you are?”
“A very faint one: somewhere on the west coast of Africa, I take it.”
The other laughed harshly.
“That’s near enough,” he said. “Let me tell you this, then. You’re among the most devilish set of cannibal niggers this world ever produced. You’d have been eaten body and bones before this if—it hadn’t been for me.”
“In that case I cannot be too grateful for your interference; and, as a fellow-countryman, I am going to make further demands upon your kindness by entreating you to show me the way out, to facilitate my return to civilisation. And, I assure you, you will not find me ungrateful.”
These last words he pronounced with some diffidence. In the man’s very ferocity of roughness Wagram’s ear had not been slow to detect a refined accent of speech. Whatever the other might have come to he was certain that he was of gentle birth, and therefore hesitated to offer him material reward. The next words convinced him that he need have felt no such misgiving.
“What’ll you make it worth my while to land you—say at Sierra Leone, this day month?”