“Find out some small vessel going to Jamaica, and arrange with the captain to take us. If we pay him pretty well he will ask no questions about what our luggage is.”
“And you might make him think it was forsles and them what-you-may-call-’em tights. He wouldn’t be much cleverer than the Injins,” said Tom.
“We’ll see about that, Tom,” I said, and my uncle having approved of my plan, we began at once to see if we could not set it in force.
It sounded very easy, but when I had to put it in practice I found it extremely difficult, and to be hedged in with prickles of the sharpest kind.
We wanted to go to Jamaica, as being a suitable port for our purpose, and an easy one to obtain passage home in a mail steamer; but though I could find small vessels, schooners, and brigs going everywhere else, there did not seem to be one likely to sail for Kingston; and try how I would, it appeared as if the very fact of our wanting to go otherwise than by the regular mail route made our conduct suspicious.
In fact more than one of the skippers seemed to think so, and as a rule they declined to take us, saying that it would get them into trouble, while in one case, where the captain of a schooner eagerly agreed to take us, merely stipulating to be well paid, the vessel was such a cranky, ill-found affair that I shrank from trusting my aunt and Lilla in such a crazy hull.
“There’s a chap out in the river yonder going to sail for New York at the end of the week, Mas’r Harry,” said Tom one morning. “I got into conversation with him last night when I was smoking my pipe, and in about half a minute he’d asked me what my name was, where I was born, how many teeth I’d got, why I came here, what I was going to do next; and when I told him I wanted to go back to England, he hit me over the back and says: ‘Case o’ dollars, stranger. I’ll take you.’ He’s coming to see you this morning.”
About an hour after I saw a tall, thin, yellow-looking man coming up to the house. He had a narrow smooth face, and two very dark eyes that seemed to have been squeezed close up to his nose—a sharp nose—and a very projecting much-pointed chin. His face was as devoid of hair as a baby’s, and taking him altogether, if Tom had not told me he was curious, I should have said at once that he was a man who loved to ask questions.
“Mornin’, stranger,” he said to both Tom and me, and then, with his queer-looking sharp little eyes searching me all over, he went on: “I guess you’re the Englishman who wants to get home with all your tots.”
“I am,” I said. “May I ask your name?”