It might have been something wrong in the scenery, or it might have been something wrong with Jones, but he appeared on the upper deck of the pirate boat, and was going to jump down on the lower deck, flourishing a cutlass, when he somehow slipped, and caught behind.
I shall never forget it. He caught somehow by the trousers, and hung there, dangling like an old coat on a peg. Then he tore himself loose with a great wrench, while every one in the house was screaming with laughter, and rushed off the stage.
We took poor Jones away that night, and we liquored him up a lot, and he wept as he told us what he had gone through, and somehow we couldn’t, laugh much as we listened to him.
I don’t know how it happened. I think he said he would go on board with us, and have a final glass, and he was to come back in a boat that had taken some goods on board from the shore. I don’t know how it was, I say; but six hours after we had got fairly out to sea, some one found a pair of legs sticking out from behind something, and at the end of these legs were Jones’s head and body.
When we had shaken him out of a dead sleep, he asked to be put on shore at once, and talked wildly of bringing an action against the skipper. But the skipper put it to Jones in a jocular kind of way, that the general practice was to keel-haul stowaways, when you felt inclined to treat them kindly, or heave them overboard with a shot tied to their heels, if you didn’t; so Jones calmed down after a while, and made up his mind to go to China with us quietly, and make no more fuss about it.
I don’t think a man on board wanted to act unkindly to poor Jones; and, ’pon my soul, I’d not have sat by quietly and seen it. But Jones tempted Providence, as it were, and was the unluckiest beggar alive.
To begin with, I never knew a man so sea-sick that it didn’t kill right off. I never knew a man with more unreliable legs on him; so that there was no saying where he’d be to a dozen yards or so when he once started. And he fell overboard twice. So all this made him rather a laughingstock among the regular hands. But he was so good-natured, and stood the chaff so good-humouredly, that we got all of us to take a mighty fancy to his company.
Poking fun upon one subject only he did not take to kindly, and that was the famous Jack Brine impersonation, which we presently found out, very much to our surprise, he looked upon as little short of perfection.
“I don’t regret this affair altogether,” said he, one day. “You see, all I want is actual experience of the perils of the ocean.”
Before long he had them, too.