His terrible voice and words came back in an echo from the crag, and they seemed with their intense energy to pierce and shrivel the man before him into sleet. And the pirate would have fallen had not two huge, black, lignum-vitæ paws grappled him about the body, pinioning his arms to his sides as if they had been bolted through and through, while at the same moment another pair of tough, sea-weed flippers wound a lashing round his straight legs, and they laid him gently down on the sandy esplanade.
“The trestle, Banou. And you, Ben, bring the hide strands, the faded old cord, and that black altar-cloth!”
The pirate lay on his back, his eyes wide open––for he could not shut them, since the lids had gone in frost––but the solid balls, light green now in the light, rolled from side to side. He recognized the old apparatus too, though it was in different hands than those of Pedillo and his confederate; and he saw, also, that, though the pale green rope was rotten, yet his knowledge of nautical matters taught him that it yet might bear a taut strain, and that those coils of hide thongs never gave way by any amount of tugging, and he saw as well that they had been recently dipped in grease.
But what was to be done with that rotten, moth-eaten old cloth, which the men used to play monté on on Saturday nights in the sheds, and on which the good padre played his cards likewise in the chapel? It was not to keep the cold air away from him, or shield his half-naked body from the poisonous insects. Then what could it be for?
“Lift him up, men, and when you lash him down, leave only that little finger free!”
Ben Brown squatted himself on a stone beside the bier, and with his cutlass unbuckled and laid on the sand, and sleeves rolled up, began 294 his work as if he had a chafing-mat to make for the dead-eyes of the frigate’s lower shrouds, and, though in a hurry, still intended to make a neat job of it. He had a small and rather sharp-pointed marline-spike, too, which he wore habitually, like a talisman, round his neck, and which stood him in hand in the intricate parts of his task.
Taking in at a glance the exact amount of hide stuff he required, he middled the coils, and passing each strand fair and square, his old bronzed arms went backward and forward, under and over––sometimes pricking a little hole by accident in the pirate’s own thin hide as he passed the strips by the aid of his marline-spike, but always apologizing in his bluff, rough way, though without squirting tobacco-juice into his victim’s face, as did Mr. Gibbs to Jacob Blunt.
“Beg pardon, ye infarnal pirate! but that stick will do ye no harm. It’ll heal much sooner than the iron spike one of yer crew drove through both cheeks of my watch-mate when you gagged him on board the brig.
“I say, old nigger, hand us a little more of that slush, will ye? this ’ere strand won’t lie flat. Thankee, old darkey! Kitch hold on that lower end, will ye? and draw it square up between his pins, and straighten out that ’ere knee-joint a bit––so fashion.
“I wouldn’t hurt ye, you ugly villain, for a chaw of tobaccy.