“Thunder!” exclaimed the skipper, puzzled by this. “What dew ye make it out fur to be?”
“Rum, an’ not ‘thunder,’ mister,” at once responded Hiram, equally laconically. “I guess if ye hedn’t took to raisin’ yer elber thet powerful ez to see snakes, an’ hev the jim-jams, we’d all be now, slick ez clams, safe in port at ’Frisco!”
This home truth silenced the captain for the moment, but the next instant he startled us all with an utterly inconsequent question, having no reference to what he had before been speaking of.
“Where hev ye stowed it?”
Hiram stared at him.
“I don’t mean ye,” said the skipper, dropping his eyes as if he could not stand being gazed at; and I could see his face twitching about in a queer manner, and his hands trembling, as he turned and twisted the fingers together. “I mean the nigger an’ thet other skunk thaar—the white man thet’s got a blacker heart inside his carkiss than the nigger hez. Whaar hev they stowed it?”
“Stowed what, cap?” inquired Hiram, humouring him, as he now noticed, for the first time, in what an excited state he was. “I don’t kinder underconstubble ’zactly what yer means.”
“The chest o’ gold,” snorted out the skipper. “Ye know durned well what I means!”
“Chest o’ goold?” repeated Hiram, astonished. “I hevn’t seed no chests o’ goold about hyar. No such luck!”
“Ye lie!” roared the captain, springing on him like a tiger, and throwing him down by his sudden attack, he clutched poor Hiram’s throat so tightly as almost to strangle him. “I saw the nigger makin’ off with it, an’ thet scoundrel the carpenter; fur the buccaneers told me jest now. Lord, thaar’s the skull rollin’ after me, with its wild eyes flashin’ fire out of the sockets, an’ its grinnin’ teeth—oh, save me! Save me!”