“It does,” rejoins Cadwallader; “though, but for the other thing, I’d like it better if we had to stay there—only for a day or two.”
“For what reason?”
“There!” says the midshipman, pulling up his shirtsleeve, and laying bare his arm to the elbow. “Look at that, lieutenant!”
The lieutenant looks, and sees upon the skin, white as alabaster, a bit of tattooing. It is the figure of a young girl, somewhat scantily robed, with long streaming tresses: hair, contour, countenance, everything done in the deepest indigo.
“Some old sweetheart?” suggests Crozier.
“It is.”
“But she can’t be a Sandwich Island belle. You’ve never been there?”
“No, she isn’t. She’s a little Chileña, whose acquaintance I made last spring, while we lay at Valparaiso. Grummet, the cutter’s coxswain, did the tattoo for me, as we came up the Pacific. He hadn’t quite time to finish it as you see. There was to be a picture of the Chilian flag over her head, and underneath the girl’s name, or initials. I’m now glad they didn’t go in.”
“But what the deuce has all this to do with the Sandwich Islands?”
“Only, that, there, I intended to have the thing taken out again. Grummet tells me he can’t do it, but that the Kanakas can. He says they’ve got some trick for extracting the stain, without scarring the skin, or only very slightly.”