“You said this moment, Ritchie, I wouldn’t see.”
This was a most miserable attempt at a joke on my part, and I felt so at the time.
Ritchie laughed as if it was his duty to laugh.
“Look, look!” I cried. “Look at the fire away in shore yonder, near the cliff foot.”
“I sees him.”
“And look, another on the lee bow—if we have a lee bow to-night—another on the quarter, and is that one far away yonder like a star?”
“That’s one. Them’s the canoe Indians a signalling to each other.”
“The natives of Tierra del Fuego?”
“Yes, drat ’em, and a bad, treacherous lot they be. They’re saying now—‘Look out, there is a barque becalmed.’”
“Would they attack a ship?”