I was in the act of pausing a moment to recover breath, when a loud voice close by me exclaimed,—
"Yoho, brother—avast heaving?"
"A voice—a voice here—in this hitherto silent solitude!" was the question on my lips and in my heart.
Paralysed by actual terror, I remained as if rooted to the spot, like Robinson Crusoe when he first saw the human footprint in the sand of his island. Then a chilly horror—a dread of witnessing something supernatural in the cold twilight of that vast ocean cavern, made the blood curdle in my heart, for I was too much of a Scotchman to withstand the force of such weird ideas.
I turned slowly in the direction from which the voice had issued; but instead of beholding the ghastly spectre of an ancient Spanish mariner, with a peaked beard terminating his sombre visage, a steeple-crowned hat and long toledo—the squat outline of a bulbous-shapen fiend in voluminous trunk hose, or the grislier spirit of a murdered captive, watching over the treasure, the tomb of which I was now violating—instead, I say, of any of these, I encountered only the extremely matter-of-fact face and sturdy form of a well-whiskered, brown-visaged British sailor, clad in a tarpaulin sou-wester, blue checked shirt, and pair of tarry trousers; and who, strangely enough, was tied by the hands and heels to the stump of a decayed tree, on which, as I afterwards found, he had been asleep, when, full of my own thoughts and purposes, I passed close by him.
"Avast heaving!" he repeated; "come, look sharp, whoever you are, and cut and cast off these infernal lashings, for I am as stiff as if I had been here these three hundred years."
The voice grew familiar to me, and on coming close to him, I recognized an old—but certainly not much valued—acquaintance.
"Dick Knuckleduster!" I exclaimed.
"You know me—come! that's devilish odd," he bellowed out. "A red-coat—a soldier too. What! d—n my precious eyes, is it you, Captain Ellis—or what are you?" he added with a scowl in his eye and a growl in his tone. "Now in the name of the living jingo, how came you here?"
"A coincidence fortunate enough for you, I think," said I, and my own voice, so long unused, sounded strangely in my ears. "How came you here?"