“I was asleep forward, when the skipper howled as if he was most scared out of his life,” he said. “I got up out of the scuttle just as quick as I could, and there he was crawling round behind the stern-house with an axe in his hand, and the mate flat up against the rail.
“‘Shut that slide quick,’ says the skipper. ‘Shut it. He’s crawling up the ladder.’
“‘I guess you can shut it yourself if you want it shut.’ He asked for whisky. ‘Tell him where it is,’ says the mate.”
There was no doubt that the listeners were interested, and the man made an impressive gesture. “It was kind of scaring. There was a soft flippety-flop going on in the stern-house, and I slipped out a handspike. Then the skipper sees me.
“‘There’s a drowned man crawling round the cabin with water running off him,’ he says.
“Then a head came out of the scuttle and a wet arm, and a voice that didn’t sound quite like a drowned man’s says, ‘Oh you–––’”
Acton raised his arm restrainingly, and the narrator made a sign of comprehension.
“He called us fools,” the man explained, “and for ’most a minute the skipper was going to take the axe to him. Then he hove it at the mate for being scared instead, and they all went down together, and I heard them light the stove. After that I went back and dropped off to sleep, and the skipper sent me off at sun-up to fetch the stranger’s clothes. We set him ashore as soon as he’d got some breakfast into him.”
The man rowed away in another minute or two, and, as he had evidently told his story with a relish, Nasmyth wondered whether Martial had contrived to offend him by endeavouring to purchase his silence. There are, of course, men one can offer a dollar to on that coast, but such an act requires a certain amount of circumspection.