“Now, I wonder, little matey,” he said softly, “whether, if I let you loose, you’d find your master, and take him a message.”
He sat thinking for a while, and then shook his head.
“No, I’m sartain it wouldn’t do; no, not even if you could talk like a poll parrot.”
He strolled on deck, and saw that there was a sentry by the broken skylight and another by the cabin hatch, and this was always the case, for the Cuban kept up the strictest discipline, one so perfect that if anything like it had been the rule under Captain Studwick the vessel could not have been taken.
Sam watched his opportunity, too, when the prisoners came on deck, but he soon found that any attempt to obtain a word with either, even if they had not avoided his glance, would have been fatal to the enterprise which he had in hand.
“I shall have to take to the bird,” he said at last, and at daybreak the next morning he opened its cage door, and the little thing flitted out upon deck, and seemed thoroughly to enjoy its liberty, flying into the rigging, chirping, and ending by descending the cabin hatch, attracted thereto by a peculiar whistle, but after a time it came up again, suffered itself to be caught and replaced in its cage.
“That’ll do,” said Sam to himself, and he went about his work, while that morning the whole of the diving apparatus was rigged up, and Rasp carefully inspected the ground.
“It’s all right,” he said to the Cuban. “Now, then, have ’em up. Here, let’s send old Parkley down.”
Mr Parkley was summoned on deck, and his first idea was to refuse to descend.
“You’d better go down,” said Rasp grinning. “If you don’t go with the soot on it’s my belief that you’ll have to go down without.”