“Hang the fellow!” cried the doctor petulantly. “Why hasn’t he been taught English? I don’t carry canisters of gunpowder about in my pockets. Can any one make him understand that the powder is in the little magazine on the schooner?”
“What does he want? Some gunpowder?” said the Count.
“Yes. I promised him a present of a few pound canisters.”
“We can get at ours,” said the Count quietly, and giving an order to the French sailor who acted as his mate, the latter mounted into the brig, disappeared down the cabin hatchway, and returned in a few minutes with half-a-dozen canisters, with which the man smilingly departed, after distributing a few elaborate Spanish bows.
The weather was glorious, and all that next day good steady progress was made with the brig repairs, while Rodd and his uncle spent most of the time keeping guard over the workmen and sending crocodile after crocodile floating with the tide, to the great delight of the grinning crew of the Spaniard, who lined the new-comer’s bulwarks as if they were spectators of some exhibition, and clapped their hands and shouted loud vivas at every successful shot, while all the time tiny little curls of smoke rose at intervals into the sunny air as the men kept on making fresh cigarettes as each stump was thrown with a ciss into the gliding stream.
“Quiet and lazy enough set, Pickle,” said the doctor. “How they can bask and sleep in the sunshine! It’s an easy-going life, that of theirs. Ah, there’s the skipper! Fierce-looking fellow. He looks like a man who could use a knife. But you don’t half read your Shakespeare, my boy.”
“What’s Shakespeare got to do with that fierce-looking Spaniard using his knife, uncle?”
“Only this, my boy,” said the doctor, drawing the ramrod out of his double gun and trying whether the wads were well down upon the bullets, for a couple of the ugly prominences that arched over a big crocodile’s eyes came slowly gliding down the stream; “I mean that a Shakespeare-reading boy clever at giving nicknames—and that you can do when you like—would have called that fellow Bottom the Weaver.”
“I don’t see why, uncle. Bottom the Weaver?” said the boy musingly, as he slowly raised his gun.
“No, no; stop there, Rodd! That’s my shot. I saw the brute first.”