The captain seemed to anticipate my wish, even before I could give it utterance.
“Do ye know how to fire a pistol?” he asked Jerrold and me, looking from one to the other of us, with a profound sniff of interrogation. “Have either of ye handled ere a one before?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” said I; while Tom Jerrold laughed.
“Don’t you remember, cap’en,” he cried, “giving me that fat one there, the Colt revolver, last voyage when you thought there was going to be a mutiny; and how you instructed me how to use it?”
“Oh, aye, I remember. I clean forgot, lad; this bother about the ship has turned my head, I think,” snorted he, not a bit angrily though. “Well, take the same weapon again now, lad, as you’re familiar with it; and you, youngster, have you got any choice?”
“I’d like this one, sir,” I replied, fixing on my original selection, as he turned to me and asked this question, “if you’ll let me have it. I won’t hurt it.”
“No, I don’t fancy ye will,” he said, sniffing and chuckling and twitching his nose. “I hope ye’ll hurt some of those rascally pirates with it, though.”
The captain then opened another chest, a smaller iron one, which he also dragged out from under his bunk, unlocking it with a heavy key he took off a bunch which was hanging up on a nail over his writing-desk and throwing back the lid.
This second receptacle, we soon discovered, contained a lot of cartridges for the rifles, there being a hundred or more of various sorts, some for the breech-loaders and some for the Enfields of the old-fashioned regulation size. There were also a variety of smaller cartridges for the revolvers, and “Old Jock” gave Tom and I each a package of these latter for our weapons.
In the chest, likewise, were two or three large flasks of powder and a lot of bullets loose, which the captain crammed into a leathern bag and told us to take on the poop with the rifles, Tom and I carrying up a couple each with the bag of bullets and powder-flasks and then returning for the rest.