"Master Rodney, I fear we have run our last knot off the log-line, and our sand-glass won't run again, unless heaven gives the order to turn. Yet, if I could but get one of these muskets, to have a shot at the rascally cargo-puddlers before it's all over with us, I would be content. As it is, I am all over blood from clew to ear-ring, and they have wellnigh choked me by shaking a quid down my throat."
"Hush, Tom," said I, for I was listening to a discussion which took place among the Spaniards.
"Do you understand their lingo?"
"A little."
"What are they saying?" he asked, with growing interest.
"I will tell you immediately."
But as they all spoke at once in the sonorous Spanish of the Catalonian coast, mingled with obscure slang and nautical phrases, some time elapsed before I could understand them. Meanwhile, how terrible were the thoughts that filled my mind.
If these fellows murdered and cast us into that awful chasm, the deed would never be known; until the day of doom, our fate and our remains could no more be traced than the smoke that melts into the sky. Even if we escaped unhurt, but were detained so long that the brig sailed without us, what would be our condition, penniless, forlorn, and unknown, in that foreign island? But this was a minor evil.
Then I burned to revenge the lawless treatment to which we were subjected, and the blows and bruises their cowardly hands had dealt so freely.
"Companeros," I heard one say, "one of these fellows is tattooed, and would sell very well to the South American planters with the rest that will soon be under hatches. He is worth keeping, if he cannot ransom himself; as for the other——"