“’Ware tail,” exclaimed the second mate warningly. “If any of you chaps catches a smack with it across your shins it’ll snap ’em like pipe-stems. Where’s the cook’s axe?”
The question was promptly answered by the appearance of cookie himself, his sable visage beaming and his eyeballs rolling with delight as he danced nimbly about the deck, dodging the strokes of that terrible tail, with his gleaming axe upraised in readiness to deal a blow at the first opportunity. At length there was a momentary pause in the tremendous struggles, a pause of which Snowball (all black cooks who go to sea seem to be dubbed “Snowball”) promptly availed himself. A quick flash of his axe-blade in the sun, a dull crunching thud, and the back-bone was severed at the junction of the tail with the body; a lightning-like stroke of his long keen knife followed, and the severed tail was flung quivering aside as a long thin jet of blood spouted out from the body, broadly staining the snow-white deck-planks.
But the shark had plenty of fight left in him still, as one of the men speedily discovered when, on thrusting a handspike into the great jaws, the strong, stout wooden bar was promptly bitten in two.
“Here, lay hold, two or three of you, and capsize him,” ordered Ritson; “we must make an end of the beast, or some of yer’ll get hurted yet, I can see. Now then,” as three of the men seized the shark by his enormous fins, “one, two, three, and over with him!”
With a cry of “Yo, heave he!” and a hearty drag the great fish was turned over on his back; and then Snowball, stepping forward once more, placed himself astride the creature and, with a quick, powerful stroke of his knife, slit open its belly, and so put an end to its sufferings. But so tenacious of life was it that even after the removal of the vital organs the heart was seen to be still expanding and contracting, which it continued to do for fully five minutes after being taken out of the fish. The head was next cut off and the back-bone removed for preservation as “curios,” after which the mutilated carcass was thrown overboard and the decks washed down.
Ritson did not wait for the completion of this operation, but, leaving its superintendence to Mr Bowen (who, like the rest of the watch below, had come on deck to see what was the cause of the unusual tumult), retired once more with the telescope to his former post in the main-topmast cross-trees, and resumed his scrutiny of the strange schooner.
George noticed this, and vaguely wondering what had so greatly excited his second mate’s curiosity, glanced in the direction to which the telescope was pointing, to find to his surprise that the upper half of the stranger’s topsail was visible from the deck.
“Why, Ritson,” he hailed, “the schooner must have a little air of wind, surely; she is nearing us perceptibly.”
Ritson, entirely contrary to nautical etiquette, made no reply to the skipper’s hail, but remained with his eye immovably glued to the tube for a full minute longer, when he gently closed the instrument and descended slowly to the deck.
Arrived there, he walked up to Captain Leicester, and first glancing cautiously round to make sure that no one was within ear-shot, murmured in a low voice—