Chapter Twenty Eight.
Warm Greetings.
“Tom, don’t ye know me, owld chappie?” cried Mick, for, of course, it was him; though, what with my deadly struggle and rescue by ‘Gyp,’ whom I thought thousands of miles away, besides the fact of my old chum coming so unexpectedly on the scene, I felt perfectly bewildered, thinking that I must be in a dream. “Begorrah, ye’re starin’ at me, sure, ez if I wor a ghost or a banshee, bedad!”
“Really, Mick,” said I, when I could at length speak and was convinced that it was himself in proper person and no phantom of my imagination, gripping his fist in a hearty grasp that expressed more than I could say and which he understood better than all the words in the world, “you don’t mean to say it’s you! How did you come here?”
“Faith, on the sowl of me fat,” he answered, with his jolly laugh, speaking in that racy brogue which sounded like music, it being so long since I had heard it. “Sure, Oi’ve marched oop from the coast the same ez yersilf, alannah!”
“But,” said I, still wondering at the unlooked-for sight of him there all of a sudden like that, “I thought you were on the West Coast, cruising about the Bight of Benin, or up the Niger, or somewhere thereabouts?”
“So I wor,” he replied, with a grin at the stupefied look on my face; “but you forgits, Tom, our squadron’s coom round here with the admiral to give ye a hilping hand, sure, in yer shindy with these blissid Arab thayves here. So, faith, Oi’ve coom along with the rest in the owld Grampus, bedad. But, Oi’m lookin’ for our cap’en now. Have you sayn him, Tom, at all—he wor in the thick of the foightin’ jist now summat about heres?”
“Your cap’en,” said I, trying to repress ‘Gyp’s’ frantic joy at seeing me again; the faithful animal, who had stuck to the Arab chief with a tenacious grip, only releasing him when he was assured of his not being likely to trouble any of us any more, now coming up to me and springing up, trying to lick my face as he yelped and whined with delight. “Who is your cap’en?”
“Why, Tom, I thought you knowed,” he replied, looking from me down at ‘Gyp,’ whose stumpy tail, and every hair on his white coat as well, seemed on the wag, his excited affections only finding outlet in this way. “Faith, he’s Cap’en Sackville, to be sure, be all the powers!”
“What—”