“Ah! Heaven protect such unoffending innocents as serve here against their will, when the allotted time of the cruiser shall be filled!” returned Homespun. “I take it, however, that you, as a sea-faring and understanding man, have not entered into this enterprise without receiving the bounty, and knowing the whole nature of the service.”
“The devil a bit have I entered at all, either in the ‘Enterprise’ or in the ‘Dolphin,’ as they call this same craft. There is master Harry, the lad on the poop there, he who hails a yard as soft as a bull-whale roars; I follow his signals, d’ye see; and it is seldom that I bother him with questions as to what tack he means to lay his boat on next.”
“What! would you sell your soul in this manner to Beelzebub; and that, too, without a price?”
“I say, friend, it may be as well to overhaul your ideas, before you let them slip, in this no-man’s fashion, from your tongue. I would wish to treat a gentleman, who has come aloft to pay me a visit, with such civility as may do credit to my top, though the crew be at mischief, d’ye see. But an officer like him I follow has a name of his own, without stopping to borrow one of the person you’ve just seen fit to name. I scorn such a pitiful thing as a threat, but a man of your years needn’t be told, that it is just as easy to go down from this here spar as it was to come up to it.”
The tailor cast a glance beneath him into the brine, and hastened to do away the unfavourable impression which his last unfortunate interrogation had so evidently left on the mind of his brawny associate.
“Heaven forbid that I should call any one but by their given and family names, as the law commands,” he said; “I meant merely to inquire, if you would follow the gentleman you serve to so unseemly and pernicious a place as a gibbet?”
Fid ruminated some little time, before he saw fit to reply to so sweeping a query. During this unusual process, he agitated the weed, with which his mouth was nearly gorged, with great industry; and then, terminating both processes, by casting a jet of the juice nearly to the sprit-sail-yard, he said, in a very decided tone,—
“If I wouldn’t, may I be d—d! After sailing in company for four-and-twenty years, I should be no better than a sneak, to part company, because such a trifle as a gallows hove in sight.”
“The pay of such a service should be both generous and punctual, and the cheer of the most encouraging character,” the good-man observed, in a way that manifested he should not be displeased were he to receive a reply. Fid was in no disposition to balk his curiosity, but rather deemed himself bound, since he had once entered on the subject, to leave no part of it in obscurity.
“As for the pay, d’ye see,” he said, “it is seaman’s wages. I should despise myself to take less than falls to the share of the best foremast-hand in a ship, since it would be all the same as owning that I got my deserts. But master Harry has a way of his own in rating men’s services; and if his ideas get jamm’d in an affair of this sort, it is no marling-spike that I handle which can loosen them. I once just named the propriety of getting me a quarter-master’s birth; but devil the bit would he be doing the thing, seeing, as he says himself, that I have a fashion of getting a little hazy at times, which would only be putting me in danger of disgrace; since every body knows that the higher a monkey climbs in the rigging of a ship, the easier every body on deck can see that he has a tail. Then, as to cheer, it is seaman’s fare; sometimes a cut to spare for a friend and sometimes a hungry stomach.”