“Last time as I was here, we was lying a hundred yards further up the stream, and one day when I was in the bows, I could see something hitched on to the chain as moored us to the buoy, and if it wasn’t one of them poor fellows as had come down with the stream from perhaps hundreds of miles up the country, and there wasn’t one of our chaps as would get him off, so it came to my share to do it, and I undertook it out of a bit of bounce because the others wouldn’t, for I felt proper scared and frightened over it. They often gets hitched in the mooring chains of ships, and p’raps we shall come in for one before we goes.”
About an hour after I goes and looks down at the chain, when if I didn’t turn all shivering, for there was something dusky hitched on sure enough, and I ran and called Bob Davis up to have a look, and see if it wasn’t what he’d been a talking about.
“So it is,” he says; and he went and told the captain and mate, and they came and had a look, when the dinghy was ordered down, and Bob and me in her, to set the body free.
Now I didn’t like the job a bit, and I pulled a long face at Bob, just same time as he was pulling a long face at me; but our captain was a man who would stand no nonsense, so we were soon down in the boat, and I put her along the side, while Bob got hold of the boat-hook, and reached out at the body.
But it warn’t a body of a poor black at all, but a god as was dressed up, and had been sent sailing down from one of their grand feasts somewhere up the river, one of those set-outs where there’s so much dancing and beating of tom-toms and singing in their benighted, un-Christian-like, dreary fashion, all Ea-la-ba-sha-la-ma-ca-la-fa; for it sounds like nothing else to a sailor chap as don’t understand Hindostanee.
Well, we brings this great idol on board, and the captain has it dried and stood on deck; but I’m blest if the black chaps didn’t all turn huffy about it, and kicked up a shine, and then took and went off, leaving all their work. They came back, though, next morning reg’lar as could be, and I says to Bob Davis, “Bob,” I says, “that’s just for all the world like coves at home: cuts off in a passion, and then comes back when they’re cool again.”
“Ah,” says Bob, with a bit of a chuckle; “p’raps it is, but not quite; for they was afraid to work with one o’ their gods a-looking at ’em.”
“Then what made ’em come back now?” I say.
“Because he’s gone again bobbing about among the Dicky Todds and corpuses; and it’s my belief,” he says, “that our watch didn’t keep much of a look-out, or they’d have seen some of the swarthy beggars come aboard and heave it overboard, for it’s gone sure enough.”
Gone it was, and no mistake; and I suppose Bob must have been right; and, though the cap went on a good ’un about losing his curiosity, it warn’t no good at all.