“Agreed. He’s been growing as cocky as a bantam since we’ve been ill. We must take him down.”
“Why, what for?” I cried.
“Making game of your betters. Sarce, as Tom Jecks calls it.”
We had something else to think of three days later, and in the excitement both my messmates forgot their wounds, save when some quick movement gave them a reminder that even the healing of a clean cut in healthy flesh takes time.
For we overhauled a suspicious-looking, fast-sailing junk, which paid no heed to our signals, but was brought to after a long chase, and every man on board was chuckling and thinking about prize-money.
But when she was boarded, with Ching duly established as interpreter, and all notion of returning to the “fancee shop” put aside for the present, the junk turned out to be a peaceful trader trying to make her escape from the pursuit of pirates, as we were considered to be.
Ching soon learned the cause of the captain’s alarm. The day before he had come upon a junk similar to his own, with the crew lying murdered on board, and, judging from appearances, the wretches who had plundered her could not have gone long.
Mr Brooke was the officer in charge of the boat, and he told Ching to ask the master of the junk whether he had seen any signs of the pirates.
The man eagerly replied that he had seen three fast boats entering the Ayshong river, some thirty miles north of where we then were, and as soon as he found that we really were the boat’s crew of a ship working for the protection of the shipping trade, his joy and excitement were without bounds, and showed itself in presents,—a chest of tea for the crew, and pieces of silk for Mr Brooke and myself; parting with us afterwards in the most friendly way, and, as Ching afterwards told me, saying that we were the nicest foreign devils he ever met.
Our news when we went on board made the captain change our course. We were bound for a river a hundred miles lower down, but it was deemed advisable to go back and proceed as far up the Ayshong, as a fresh nest of the desperadoes might be discovered there.