“No, sir, but I won’t!” he said emphatically. “But I say, sir, do you think if I was to go overboard, and then hitch myself on to the rudder-chains till I was took aboard, the doctor’d give me a dose of that same physic as he give him?”
“Very likely, Tom,” I said. “But you’d rather be without, wouldn’t you?”
He smiled.
“But it was physic?”
“Oh yes, sir, it was physic. But then you see there’s physic as he takes out of one of his little bottles with stoppers, and there’s physic as he makes out of the ship’s rum, hot with sugar. I could take a dose now easy, and it would do me good.”
“Nonsense!” I said, after a glance at the sleeping Chinaman. “But I say, Jecks, how did he manage?”
“Oh, easy enough, sir. Tide would suck him right along the side, and he’d catch the chains.”
“But how did he get in such a tangle?”
“Tied hisself on, sir, with a handkerchy round his left arm, to the chain; and then Dick Spurling says he twissened his tow-chang, as he called it, round and round, and tucked the canister in at the neck of his frock and buttoned it. Dick had no end of a job, as you know, to get him undone.”
“Yes,” I said thoughtfully, “I know that; but a man couldn’t hang by his hair.”