The captain paused abruptly, both in his walk and speech, for the pained look on Don's blackened but ghastly face told him at a glance that something more than ordinary was amiss.
Slowly setting down the lantern, which he had all along retained in his grasp—most fortunately, as it turned out—Don threw himself on the trampled grass, and, as rapidly as his shortness of breath would permit, summed up the disastrous results of his village expedition. In open-mouthed silence, as was his wont, the old sailor listened; but when he learned of the dark uncertainty that overhung the fate of Jack and Puggles, he hastily brushed aside a tear that straggled down his weather-beaten cheek, and, in a voice husky with emotion, burst into one of his characteristic snatches of song:
“Why, what's that to you if my eyes I'm a-wipin'?
A tear is a pleasure, d'ye see, in its way.
'Tis nonsense for trifles, I owns, to be pipin',
But they as hain't pily—why, I pities they!”
And having delivered himself of this sailorly apology for his weakness, he added in his usual voice:
“Blow me!—as the speakin trumpet says to the skipper—if ever I heard any yarn as beats this 'un, lad. Howsomedever, when the ship's a-sinkin', pipin' your eye ain't a-goin' to stop the leak, d'ye mind me; an' so, just to bear away on the off tack a bit, what d'ye make o' this 'ere confleegration, I axes?”
“I can tell you better what it came jolly near making of me, captain, and that's cinders! But what do you make of it?—and, by the way, what were those shots for? You don't think there's any danger here, do you?”
“Ay,” replied the captain, with an emphatic tug at his neckerchief, “that I does, lad! An' why? you naterally axes. Because, d'ye mind me, the hill's ablaze from stem to starn—blow me if it bain t! Howsomedever,” leading the way towards a jagged remnant of wall that stood out in ghostly solitude amid the ruins, “go aloft an' cast an eye out to lee'ard, lad.”