"Pardon me, gentlemen," he said in that slow, precise voice, "For the moment I am ill. It is a mere attack of dizziness, but I dare not go below. I must stay in the open air. I beg you will pardon me. I intend no rudeness."
His face did look pale in the half-light, and the others, whatever their suspicions may have been, said nothing to indicate that they doubted him. When Captain Jones of the Merry Jack and Eleanor came toward us a second time and again with oily courtesy asked us all to the cabin, Gleazen and Matterson made excuses for Arnold, and the rest of us went down into the gloomy space below and left him in the gangway whence he could watch the hills, which were now dark against the evening sky, and the black masts of the frigate, which stood by like sentries guarding our lives and fortunes.
There was a fetid, sickening odor about the ship, such as I had never before experienced, and the cabin reeked of rum and tobacco. The skipper had the face of a human brute, and the mate's right hand was twisted all out of shape, as if some heavy weapon had once smashed the bones of it. The more I looked about the dark, low cabin, and the more I saw and heard of the skipper and his mate, the more I wished I were on deck with Arnold. But the punch was brewed in a colossal bowl and gave forth a fragrance of spices, and Sim Muzzy drank with the rest, and for a while the five of them were as jolly as the name of the ship would indicate.
CHAPTER XII
CAPTAIN NORTH AGAIN
First there was talk of old times, for it seemed that Matterson and Gleazen and Captain Jones were friends of long standing. Then there was talk of strange wars and battles, particularly of one battle of Insamankow, of which neither Gleazen nor Matterson had had other news than that which Captain Jones now gave them, and in which it seemed that the British had met with great disaster, although it puzzled me to know wherein such a battle even remotely concerned any of us. After that there was talk of various other things—a murderous plague of smallpox that years before had swept the African coast, a war between the Fantis and Ashantis, a cruiser that they, with oaths and laughter, said had struck her flag in battle with a slaver, a year's journey with desert caravans that traded with the Arabs, and last of all, and apparently most important, curious ways of circumventing the laws of England and America and of bribing Cuban officers of low degree and high.
All this, in a stuffy little place where the mingled smells of rum and spices and tobacco hung heavily on the air as they grew stale, filled me with disgust and almost with nausea. Vile oaths slipped out between each two sentences, if by rare chance they were not woven into the very warp of the sentences themselves; such stories of barbarous and unbelievable cruelty were told and retold as I cannot bear to call to mind, to say nothing of repeating; and always I was aware of that sickening odor, now strong, now weak, which I had detected before we went below.
The first sign that the others gave of noticing it was when Gleazen threw back his head and cried, "Pfaw! What a stench! The smell is all I have against the trade."