“We got away, all right, the skipper last, of course. But he had to go below to save his pet parrot. He’d just about reached the deck, when—confusion!—up she goes.
“The whole blows up sky high and the skipper with it. One of the men said he had stopped to light his pipe, and the flame of the match touched off all that gas. But I dunno just how that might be. Anyhow, for quite a while we could see that old skipper sailing up to heaven,—’twas the only way he’d ever get there, I heard one of the men say. Then down he comes, kerplunk!
“It was a hard job for us in the boat to reckernize him. You see, he’d had a fine, full beard when he went up, but he come down clean shaved! And the parrot,—well, sir, that parrot looked like a ship without a rudder. Its gum-gasted tail had followed the skipper’s whiskers into oblivion,—as Shakespeare says. Well, we got him into the boat, and two days after we were picked up, but neither the skipper nor the parrot were ever the same man or the same bird again.”
At the conclusion of this touching narrative, Jack saw fit to put a question.
“By the way, what was the name of that ship, Mr. Brown?” he asked mischievously.
“The name?” asked Mr. Brown, with a twinkle in his eyes.
“Yes, I’d like to look that craft up.”
“Well, sir, I’ll not deceive you,” said Mr. Brown. “Her name was the Whatawhopper. It’s an Injun name, they tell me, but gracious, I don’t know anything about those matters! We had on board, besides the coal, a cargo of beans,—took ’em on at Boston,—but they got wet and swelled and we thought——”
But this was too much even for Jack.
“Mr. Brown, you’ve missed your vocation,” he said.