“Me India boy, come long way over black water. They beat me. See!”
He moved the basket a little, disclosing his thin, bare arms and legs, on which were old scars and the long livid weals of recent lashes.
“Cover yourself,” said Martin hastily. “Go on. Tell me more.”
The boy went on to relate, in his halting broken English, a story that Martin heard with indignation and pity. His name was Gundra, and his parents were servants of an English merchant at Surat. He had been allowed to run in and out of the merchant’s godowns, and had thus picked up the little English he knew.
One day, when he was straying some little distance from the factory, he was kidnapped by two big men, who carried him aboard their ship. There he had been kept as a slave, half-starved, and cruelly used. He had not one real friend among the crew, though the captain now and then interposed when the fat cook was thrashing him.
So wretched was his life that he had long wished he might die, and if he were taken back to the ship he would throw himself overboard and let himself drown, though he could swim, as the sahib had seen. More than once he had been tempted to destroy himself, but had been restrained by the hope that some day he might be rescued and restored to his home.
“Keep me to be your slave, sahib,” he pleaded. “Me do all you tell.”
The boy’s woebegone look, and the sight of the wounds on his limbs, moved Martin so deeply that he had already determined to do what he could to save him from his oppressors. But he foresaw great difficulties. What could he do with the boy? There was no room in Dick Gollop’s apartments; besides, he felt sure the constable, as a man of law, would hold strong views about the offence of harbouring runaways.
Yet he could not land the boy and leave him to his own devices. He would be taken up as a vagrant, and what would become of him then? His lot could hardly be worse than it had been on board the Santa Maria; but Martin felt that by giving the boy shelter he had shouldered a certain responsibility, and that he must not throw the little fellow into the uncertain hands of chance.
While he was thinking over the problem so suddenly thrust upon him, he had been paddling gently, but the swift-flowing tide had already borne the boat a good distance up the river. It was clear that he must come to a decision within a few minutes.