"Is this more of your wonderful notions?"
"It's my plan to save Chris Wickwire," returned the mate firmly, "and I'm bound to try it on. Just as it says here. 'Sirs,' it says, 'sirs, I will practice on this drunken man—'"
He held out the shabby octavo and, considering it again with heightened amazement, of a sudden I knew where I had seen it before.
"Why," I cried, "that's the Book you got for the chief. I can tell from the gilt cross on the cover. That's Wickwire's Bible!"
"It is the book I got for the chief," he said slowly, making plain the case against himself, "and it has a cross on the cover. But it's no Bible. Only an old collection of plays I bought to gammon him with. Shakespeare wrote it.
"There was no cover to it either, so I bought an old cover off a hymn book and pasted it over. You can see for yourselves—the cross is upside down." And, in fact, that we might miss nothing he showed us the cover, wrong way with the pages. "I remember the chief, taking lessons from me but having only the cross to go by, d'y'see—the chief used always to hold the book wrong side up. I remember," he added with an odd smile, quite mirthless—"I remember how I laughed. I used to think it funny."
Someway that made the captain froth. Since our invasion of Colootullah he had been increasingly rigid toward the mate, and here he broke out.
"So we've had nothin' but your damn' lyin' tricks from the start! All the time you was readin' to him—"
"Only gammon, sir. I used to experiment on him with choice bits—calling 'em truth and Scripture."
"And now you're after more fool games of the same kind! Can't you look what's come of 'em? Look there!" He pointed to the stark figure.