I leaps to my feet."Pirates—to me? To these men? Simple honest fishermen who know only toil? Who toils harder than they? Pirates—to them! Why, if they were anything but the simplest and honestest set of men, they would have taken that vessel out of my hands and sold her—sold her in the States—and what could you or I or anybody have done about it? But did they—or I? No, sir. As soon as we had finished our Christmas dinner we brought her back."
"But the wine?" shrieks Miller.
"What wine?"
"The wine—the wine—her cargo of wine."
[pg 75]
"Wine? Cargo of wine—what's he talking about?" I looks at my crowd, and they all says: "Wine? Cargo of wine?—he's crazy."
I turns impatiently to the governor and French captain. "Gentlemen, this is a serious accusation, but easily settled. If there was wine in that vessel, surely her papers will say something of it. It will be on her manifest, that is certain."
Now these two, the governor and the French naval officer, were honest men. "That is so," they said. "He is quite right—quite right," and looked at Miller, and Miller, with his eyes like door-knobs, looks at me. And I gives him a wink with my wind'ard eye and he near blew up.
But he begins to see a thing or two, so he goes off with the French officials, but before we had finished smoking our after-breakfast pipeful he comes back—alone now—and says: "What do you propose?" And I said: "Within a thousand miles of here is a friend of mine with a lot of wine—as good a lot as the Aurora had in her hold yesterday—maybe a couple of dozen quarts shy—you know, a Christmas dinner, and so on—and only last night my friend was figuring it up, and he thought there was twenty thousand dollars' worth in this lot of his, and that without figuring in the duty—but he don't care for wine much—but he does love a good Vessel, and he was looking the Aurora over and he [pg 76] said he'd be willing to exchange all that wine for the Aurora. I told him that the Aurora only cost you twenty-five hundred, but he said, 'No matter, I have a weakness for the Aurora,' this friend of mine. Of course there'll be a few little extra expenses you'll have to pay for, like the hawser and the big anchor cut away and the keep of a crew for a week over in Newfoundland, and so on, but that won't be much—five hundred dollars ought to cover it all."