“No, I’ll take my davy I didn’t—that is, not at first,” replied he, grinning in his usual way. “Arterwards, in course, I couldn’t help it, when you and our Chickopee friend here took the bait so finely.”
“Ah! I’ll pay you out, bo, for it,” cried Hiram, interrupting Tom, as I had done, “never you fear. I’ll pay you out, my hearty, ’fore this time to-morrow come-never—both me and Cholly will tew, I guess, sirree!”
“Threaten’d men live long,” observed Tom with a dry chuckle. “Still, that ain’t got nothin’ to do with this here yarn. I com’d up, as I were sayin’, a good half-hour afore you; and, to spin out the time, I goes round to the cave by the way where we first lighted on it t’other day, and gets inside by the hole through the broken old door where we entered it afore our reaching this end.”
“And then?” I asked, on Tom’s pausing for a moment in his narrative—“and then?”
“Why, then I saw poor Sam, with his back turned towards me, a-sittin’ down on that rock as we called ‘the ghost’s pulpit,’ and playin’ his blessed old banjo as sweetly as you please, without thinkin’ that I or any one else were within miles of him! So, seein’ this were a good chance for finding whether Master Sammy, as was thought a ghost hisself aboard, liked ghosts as he didn’t know of, I catches up a bit o’ sailcloth that was lying on the ground, which he’d taken up there to sarve for his bed, and, I claps this over my head and shoulders, like a picter my mother had in the parlour at home of ‘Samuel and the Witch of Endor.’ Then, I lights the port fire and gives a yell to rouse up the darkey, and arter that—ho-ho! my hearties, you knows what happened. Ho-ho! it was as good as a play!”
“Golly! Me taut yer one duppy, fo’ suah, Massa Tom!” said Sam, after another chorus of laughter from all of us all round. “Me taut yer was de debble!”
“Not quite so bad as that, my hearty,” mildly suggested Tom, grinning at the compliment. “Still, I don’t think I made such a bad ghost altogether for a green hand!”
“Don’t ye kinder think ye frit me, bo!” declaimed Hiram vehemently. “It wer the sight o’ thet durned nigger thaar, a-sottin’ an playin’ his banjo—him ez we all thought ez ded ez a coffin nail, an’ buried fathoms below the sea, an’ which all on us hed b’leeved ter hev haunted the shep fur the hull v’y’ge. Ay, thet it wer, streenger, what ez frit me an’ made me fall all of a heap, an’ thaar I lies till Cholly an’ the durned nigger riz me up agen by tumblin’ athwart my hawse!”
“I think I was the most frightened of all,” I now frankly confessed, on Hiram thus bravely acknowledging his own terror. “I really for the moment believed that I was actually looking at two real, distinct ghosts, or spirits—the one that of Sam, which you, Tom and Hiram, know I already thought I had seen before on board the ship; and the second apparition that of the negro slave which Mr Steenbock told us of. But, how is it that Sam is here at all—how did he escape?”
“Let him tell his yarn in his own way, the same as I have done mine,” replied Tom. “Ax him.”