"The devil you are!" says he, and he stared at me from top to toe as though I had been some strange creature the like of which he had never beheld before. Then, without another word, he put his fingers to his lips and gave a great, long, shrill whistle. I presently heard a great crackling in the bushes and the noise of loud voices, and soon there burst out of the thickets six or eight great, bearded, dirty, villanous rascals, who came running down to the boat, having caught sight of me, and knowing me to be a stranger. "It's Captain Leach," said the one of the pirates who had not yet spoken—a young fellow of not more than twenty.
Some of those who had just come had been drinking, as could be very plainly seen from the way in which they acted. One of them was for killing me off-hand, and I verily believe would have done so, in spite of all that the others could do or say, had not another of them knocked him down with an oar with such a blow that I thought at first the fellow had been killed outright.
After that they bound me hand and foot, and chucked me into the stern-sheets of the boat along with the fellow who had been knocked down by the oar, and who lay without life or motion, as though neither were of more account than so much old junk. After that they shoved off from the beach in the direction of my old craft the Cassandra, which rode at anchor about a mile and a half or two miles away.
The boat had hardly come alongside when the news of my coming ran fore and aft like a train of powder. They hoisted me upon deck and laid me just aft of the main-mast, whilst a great crowd gathered round me and stared at me, some of them grinning and some of them cursing me.
Most of them were more or less in liquor, and it was this circumstance that came nigh to costing me my life, and this was how it happened:
One great fellow with a dreadful scar across his face gave me a kick in the loins which I thought at first had finished me, and for no cause that I could see but that he was drunk and in a savage humor. One or two of them sang out to him not to kill me just then, but he made no answer except by aiming another kick at my head, which I warded off with my arm so that it did me little or no harm. He drew back his foot for another blow, but just then an iron belaying-pin came whizzing through the air and struck the fellow in the jaw, knocking him down upon the deck as though he had been shot.
I turned mine eyes and saw that it was Captain England himself who had struck the blow.
"Look 'ee," says he, "we'll have none of this; if killing is to be done, it is to be done lawyer-like. He's come aboard himself, and if he's to be killed he's to be killed after his trial, and not before."
There was a moment or two of pause, for Captain England had drawn a brace of pistols, and held one cocked in either hand; but just then up stepped a fellow who it was very plain to see was of some account amongst them, for his clothes were of rich stuff, and he had a gold chain with a cross slung around his neck, and golden ear-rings in his ears. He walked up to England until he stood face to face with him.
"Look 'ee, Ned England," says he, "what I've got to say is this: you're carrying things with too high a hand to suit us easy–going fellows. D'ye think you're king or emperor, and that we're nigger slaves, that you knock us about as it suits your humor?"