“Bottle,” interjected the captain, twisting the beak of his nose in a puff of smoke.
“––Rum, why, smash my brains, sir, if he didn’t hack it off with a wood-saw!”
“Well, what next?”
“Then, sir, ye see, we run the schooner down Cape Cruz, where we kept werry snug and quiet till sich times as the old one-eyed Diego judged the coast clear to return to head-quarters.”
“Well, what then?”
“That’s all, Captain Brand!” concluded the narrator his garbled yarn, as he again had recourse to scratching the door-mat on his head, and cast a thirsty look at the brandy-flask.
“That’s all, is it?” hissed the man with the iron jaws, in a tone of concentrated passion, as he sprang with a single bound from the settee, and clutched Master Gibbs with both hands around his hairy throat until his face turned livid purple and his eyes started from the sockets. “That’s all, is it, you drunken beast? That’s all you have to tell after idling away the summer, losing anchors and boats, and more than half my crew, and bringing a hornet’s nest down about our ears! That’s all, is it? And what would you say, now, if I should order the doctor to cut off your other leg close behind your ears, you beast?”
In the last stages of suffocation, the man was hurled on his back to the floor, and there lay, bleeding a torrent from his mouth and nose. His superior stood over him for a moment and put his hand in his trowsers pocket for a pistol, and then he glanced rapidly at the green rope squirming from the beams above; but, changing his purpose apparently, he strode back to the settee and shouted “Babette!”
Presently the door opened from the passage leading to the kitchen, and there appeared a large, powerfully-made negro-woman, with her arms akimbo, and a pair of bloodshot eyes gleaming from beneath a striped Madras turban wound round her head.
“Babette!” repeated the captain, resuming his seat and his habitual polite air and voice, “serve out a barrel of Bordeaux and a beaker of old Antigua rum to the ‘Centipede’s’ crew to drink my health; and I say, my beauty! have a pig or two killed; tell the boatswain to haul the seine, and have a good supper for all hands to-night. 60 And, Baba”––he went on as if he had just thought of something––“there’s my friend Gibbs lying there––I believe he has fallen down in a fit––be very careful of him––a bed in the vault––a little biscuit and water––he may be feverish when he wakes up, you know. And, Babette, old girl, if you are in want of kindling wood, you may as well use that timber leg of our friend Gibbs! I don’t think he’ll want it again. There! doucement, Baba!”