“To-morrow? Yes, I trust so, too,” said Halcott, musingly. “Shall we go below and talk a little?”
“I confess, my friend,” Halcott continued, after he had lit his pipe and smoked some time in silence—“I confess, Tandy, that I don’t quite like the look of that hill. Have you ever experienced the effects of a volcanic eruption in any of these islands?”
“I have not had that pleasure, if pleasure it be,” replied the mate.
“Pleasure, Tandy! I do not know of anything more hideous, more awful, in this world.
“When I say ‘any of these islands,’ I refer to any one of the whole vast colony of them that stud the South Pacific, and hundreds of these have never yet been visited by white men.
“Years ago,” he continued, “I was first mate of the Sky-Raker, as bonnie a brig as you could have clapped eyes upon. It afterwards foundered with all hands in a gale off the coast of Australia. When I trod her decks, second in command, I was a bold young fellow of twenty, or thereabouts; and I may tell you at once we were engaged in the Queensland black labour trade. And black, indeed, and bloody, too, it might often be called.
“We used to go cruising to the nor’ard and east, visiting islands here and islands there, to engage hands for working in the far interior. We arranged to pay every man well who would volunteer to go with us, and to land them again back home on their own islands, if they did wish to return.
“On these expeditions we invariably employed ‘call-crows.’”
“What may a ‘call-crow’ be, Halcott?”
“Well, you know what gamblers mean on shore by a ‘call-bird’ or ‘decoy-duck.’ Your ‘call-crow’ is the same, only he is a black who has lived and laboured in Queensland, who can talk ‘island,’ who can spin a good yarn in an off-hand way, and tell as many lies as a recruiting-sergeant.