“Please yer honour,” answered the boatswain, giving Clare a shove, “this here’s a stowaway in his majesty’s ship, Panther. I found him snug in the cable-tier.—Salute the captain, you beggar!”
Clare had no cap to lift, but he bowed like the gentleman he was. The captain stood looking at him. Clare returned his gaze, and smiled. A sort of tremble, much like that in the level air on a hot summer day, went over the captain’s face, and he looked harder at Clare.
A sound arose like the purring of an enormous cat, and, sure enough, it was nothing else: chained to the foot of the forward binnacle stood a panther, a dark yellow creature with black spots, bigger than Pummy, swinging his tail. Clare turned at the noise he made. The panther made a bound and a leap to the height and length of his chain, and uttered a cry like a musical yawn. Clare stretched out his arms, and staggered toward him. The next moment the animal had him. The captain darted to the rescue. But the beast was only licking him wherever there was a bare spot to lick; and Clare wondered to find how many such spots there were: he was in rags! The panther kept tossing him over and over as if he were a baby, licking as he tossed, and in his vibrating body and his whole behaviour manifested an exceeding joy. The captain stood staring “like one that hath been stunned.”
The boatswain was not astonished: he had seen Clare at home among wild animals, and thought the panther was taken with the wild-beast smell about him.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Clare, rolling himself out of the panther’s reach, and rising to his feet, “but wild things like me, somehow! I slept with a puma last night. He and this panther, sir, would have a terrible fight if they met!”
The captain threw a look of disappointment at the panther.
“Go forward, Tom,” he said.
The man did not like the turn things had taken, and as he went wore something of the look of one doomed to make the acquaintance of another kind of cat.
“What made you come on board this ship, my lad?” asked the captain, in a voice so quiet that it sounded almost kind.
“I did not come on board, sir.”