“Who’s Dicky Todd?” I says.
“Why,” says Bob, a-chuckling, “there he goes, that’s him,” and then he stood a-pinting out into the stream where there was what seemed to me to be a bit of rough bark of a tree floating slowly down towards the sea.
“Why, that’s a tree, I says, ain’t it?”
“Ho! ho! ho! what ignorance,” says Bob, “that’s a crorkodile, or a haligator, if you likes to call it so. Dicky Todd, that is, as don’t like his meals fresh, but keeps his game till it gets high, and then enjoys himself with a feast.”
’Nough to make one shudder that was, but it was true enough, for, before the body I had seen floating down had gone much further, there was a bit of a swirl in the water, and both crocodile and body disappeared, while my face felt as if it was turning white, and I knew I felt sick.
We chaps didn’t work very hard though, for there were plenty of black fellows there, ready to do anything for you, and lots of ’em were employed lading the ship, while we were busy touching her up, bending on new sheets, here and there mending sails, painting and scraping, and making right a spar or two that had sprung, for you know there’s always something amiss after a long voyage, and it’s no short distance from Liverpool to Port Adelaide, and then up to Calcutta. Rum chaps some of those blacks was, not werry decent in their ideas of dress, and all seeming to suffer from a famine in stockings. Precious particular too about what they call their caste, which you know is a complaint as exists in the old country too. Why, in our old village it was werry bad, and was like this you know: the squire’s people wouldn’t mix with the doctor’s, and the doctor’s wouldn’t visit the maltster’s, and the maltster’s didn’t know the people at the shop, who didn’t call on the clerk’s wife, who said her gal shouldn’t go to tea at Brown’s, who said Smith’s folks was low; and so on. That’s caste—that is, and they has it werry bad out in Indy. Mussulmans some on ’em, and Brahmins, and all sorts, and lots on ’em you’ll meet with a bit o’ paint on their forehead, to show what caste they belong to, I s’pose, while they’re as proud as Lucifer.
One old chap used to come to work and bring his gang with him to go on with the lading, and one day when he came some of our fellows began to chaff him, for he’d got his head shaved, and what for do you think, but because he was in mourning, and had put away his wife? Not as that seemed to me anything to go in mourning for, since some of our chaps would have been a wonderful deal better without their wives as they left behind in Liverpool. But this chap had divorced his wife because she had let the child die, so he said, and there was the poor woman in double trouble.
“S’pose she couldn’t help the little ’un going,” says Bob to him.
“Ah! yes, Sahib,” says this old chap, Jamsy Jam, as he called himself, “oh yes, Sahib, she let child die—mosh trouble.” But I’m blest if I don’t think it was him wanted to get rid of his wife, and so made this an excuse.
Bob Davis and me one day stood looking over the side o’ the ship, same as we often did, and he says to me, he says:—