"Don't say you're not real. Oh, dear God, don't let 'em say that!
Don't let 'em be visions of a dream! Don't, dear God!"
"Oh, speak to him, Jack!" begged Cora. "He thinks it's a vision. Tell him we are real—that we've come to take him away—to find out about our own dear ones—speak to him!"
There was no need. Her own clear voice had carried to the lonely sailor, and had told him what he wanted to know.
"They speak! I hear them! They are real. And now, dear God, don't let them go away!" he pleaded.
"We're not going away!" Jack called. "At least not until we help you—if we can. Come over here and tell us all about it. Are you from the Ramona?"
"The Ramona, yes. But if—if you're from her—if you've come to take me back to her, I'm not going! I'd rather die first. I won't go back! I won't be a pirate! You sha'n't make me! I'll stay here and die first."
CHAPTER XXIV
THE REVENUE CUTTER
The story told by Ben Wrensch—for such proved to be the name of the lonely sailor-cannot be set down as he told it. In the first place, there was little of chronological order about it, and in the second place he was interrupted so often by Cora, or one of the others, asking questions, or he interrupted himself so frequently, that it would be but a disjointed narrative at best. So, I have seen fit to abridge it, and tell it in my own.
As a matter of fact, the questions Cora, her girl chums, or the boys asked, only tended to throw more light on the strange affair, whereas the interruptions of Ben himself were more dramatic. He was so afraid that it was all a dream that, he would awaken from it only to find himself alone again.