"Have I, or have I not, been in these here South Seas afore, Tom Hoggett?" I heard him say, and Hoggett growled that he said he had; whereupon Wabberley continued, "Well then, I ask you again, didn't we leave they two striplings on this very island?"
"You're right, there," says Hoggett, "and one of 'em the sauciest, snarliest son of a" (here a dreadful word) "that ever escaped his proper lickings."
("That's me," whispered Billy, in a great rage.)
"True, but handy all the same," said Clums. "He could do a thing or two with his tools, and I warrant you he made this;" and so saying, he took up Billy's toasting-fork, and held a yam to the blaze.
"'Twas Billy made it, sure enough," said Pumfrey, "for the other chap couldn't ha' done it."
"No, not him," said Wabberley. "He was a overgrown weed, he was, all stalk and no head to it, and I reckon if the truth was known he made this; any fool could do it," and he took up, as it chanced, one of the two-pronged forks that I had made, and of which I was a little proud at the time.
"That's true, Nick," says Joshua Chick, "and what's more, shipmates, no savage ever made a fork in his life, and lor' bless you, didn't we find a hairbrush and a comb, and what savage ever wanted such, d'ye think? And that there pig-sty, now, ain't that like the one where you was brought up, Pumfrey, only a bit rougher, maybe?"
This question was very much resented by Pumfrey the carpenter, who declared hotly that he had built pig-sties, not lived in 'em, and whoever made this pig-sty was a very poor hand at it. To this Wabberley assented, and went on to say that the dirtiest savage as ever breathed would have been ashamed of the miserable things we had made in the way of pots and baskets and other things. It was plain that they had pretty thoroughly ransacked our hut, and I was on thorns lest they should have discovered our secret store-house below, which it appeared, from what followed, that they had not done, and thankful I was. One of the men asked what we lived on, for we couldn't eat, he supposed, nothing but pork and chickens, and they had found nothing else, except the yams in the pig's trough, we having put all the rest of our fruits and vegetables in the store-house.