As he re-entered the cabin he found the skipper awake, and at once began to charge him with having kidnapped them, and to threaten that if they were not set aboard the first homeward-bound vessel they met, he would have him arrested the moment they again reached Gloucester.
The skipper listened to all this in amazement, and when Breeze had ended said,
“You’d better be careful in your choice of words, my young friend, or you may get yourself into trouble. I never kidnapped you or anybody else in my life, and I don’t know what you mean. You came aboard this vessel of your own free-will just as she was about to start. Your friend on deck there told me that you wanted to ship with us for the pleasure of sailing in his company. I took his word for it instead of talking with you, because you were too drunk to--”
“I drunk!” interrupted Breeze, excitedly. “I never drank a drop of liquor in my life, and anybody who says I was drunk last night lies; that’s all.”
“Oh, come now,” said the skipper, beginning to get angry in turn, “that’s too thin. Didn’t you come stumbling aboard last night as no sober man would have done? Didn’t you raise particular Cain down here in the cabin for a while, and then fall into such a heavy sleep that nothing could wake you from it? Don’t your eyes show that you have been drinking? Wasn’t the smell of whiskey almost strong enough to knock a man down when I came into the cabin to turn in, and nobody’d been here but you and your mate? Besides all this, didn’t I see you myself hanging round Grimes’s not more than half an hour before you came aboard? Don’t tell me again you wasn’t drunk. There’s nothing I despise so much as a sneak that tries to crawl out of a scrape by lying about it. Now wake up that partner of yours and turn him out, or I’ll come down here and do it for you with a bucket of salt-water.”
With this the skipper went on deck, leaving Breeze bewildered and stunned by the charge just made against him, and the amount of apparent proof brought to sustain it.
The worst of it all was that if the skipper had seen him in the vicinity of Grimes’s, others might also have seen him there, and would report the fact when inquiries began to be made for him. Then, too, if the whole crew of the Vixen believed as their captain evidently did, that he had been drunk, would anybody ever believe his simple assertion that he had not been so, against their statement that he was? What would Captain Coffin think? What would his mother think? Would not her heart be broken by this horrid report coming on top of his mysterious and unexplained disappearance? In his agony of mind the poor boy groaned aloud. At this sound a voice behind him exclaimed,
“Hello! What’s the matter, Breeze?”
Turning quickly, he saw Wolfe Brady awake, but still lying in his bunk and regarding him with dull eyes.
“Matter enough,” he answered; “for if ever a fellow was in a worse fix than I am I should like to know it. You ought not to be the one to ask, anyhow,” he added, bitterly.