“Well I’m blessed!” cried old Masters, completely flabbergasted at this exordium of mine; “I never thought, Mister Haldane, to hear you speak ag’in me like that. I allays believed you was a friend, that I did.”
I pretended not to see him, and so too did Garry O’Neil, “tumbling to my game,” as the saying goes, while I went on with my chaff.
“How did he die?” I asked. “Was he killed at the first rush?”
“Faith, I can’t say corrictly,” replied Garry in a very melancholy tone of voice. “I’m afeard care carried him off, somehow or other, as it killed the cat, for he war the most disconsolate, doleful, down-hearted chap I ivver saw piping the hands to dinner. An’ so he’s d’id! Poor old bo’sun! we’ll nivver see his loike ag’in.”
“Lord bless you!” cried old Masters angrily, stepping up nearer and confronting us, “I’m not dead at all, I tell you—I tell you I’m not—I’m blessed if I am. Can’t you see me here alive and hearty afore you? Look at me.”
“Ah, it’s his ghost!” I said, with an affected and tremulous start. “He told me, poor fellow, he felt himself doomed, and nothing could save him; and I suppose his spirit wants to prove to me he wasn’t a liar, as I always thought he was, the old sinner!”
This was too much for Garry, and he couldn’t hold in any longer, and both of us roared at Masters, who looked scared; and, though angry and highly incensed with us at first, was only too glad at its being but a joke, and not a fact that he was dead, to bear us any ill-feeling long.
We were horrified when we were told later on, while we were committing to the deep the corpses of those slain—negroes and white men impartially sharing the same grave beneath the placid sea, at rest like themselves, the breeze having died away again soon after sunset—that Etienne Brago and François Terne, the two wounded sailors we had left below with the Boissons, and little Mr Johnson and the colonel and Elsie of course, that these were the only ones left of the thirty odd souls on board the Saint Pierre when she sailed from La Guayra a fortnight before!
After all the bodies had been buried in their watery tomb, not forgetting that of poor Ivan, who we all thought merited an honoured place by the side of his biped brethren of valour—well, after all this had been done the skipper had the pumps rigged and the decks sluiced down to wash away all traces of the fray.
A council of war was then held between us all on the poop, the skipper of course presiding, and the colonel coming up from the cabin to take part in the proceedings, as well as old Mr Stokes from our ship, where he had remained attending singlehanded to the duties of the engine-room, denying himself, as Garry O’Neil remarked, “all the foin of the foighting!”