"Oh—oh—oh!"—Here all hands of the rogues who were in the secret, began again to roll about and grimace, as if a travelling menagerie of baboons had suddenly burst, and capsized its inmates all about. Quacco all this while was twisting and turning himself, and, although evidently in a deuced quandary, trying to laugh the affair off as a joke.
"Well," at length said he, "I don't believe in fetish—now dat I is among whiteman Christian. So I will tank you, Massa Draining, to hand me over my chocolate."
But I noticed that the devil a drop would he take into his mouth, although he made believe to drink it. The jest went on—at length there was a calm, when who should again break ground but Serjeant Quacco—who made a last attempt to laugh off the whole affair.
"But where de debil can he be?" said he, almost involuntarily—"gone, sure enough."
"Oh—oh—oh—" sung out all hands once more, with their fists stuck into their midriffs.
"Oh, that vile fetish," screamed Lennox; "we must all be bewitched—Quacco, we are all bewitched.'"
"Bewitch!" responded the black Serjeant, jumping off the deck, and now at his wit's end; "and I believe it is so. I hab pain in my tomak too—just dis moment—oh, wery sharp!"
"Confound your fetish," groaned the old cook; "it was just as you stuck those chips of cedarwood into the fire—precisely at the wery moment I snuffed the delicious smell of them, that I saw the devil himself first put his ugly fiz up in the middle of the peas-soup, and gibber, and twinkle his eyes, and say"——
"Say!" shouted Lennox—"why did he really and truly speak, Mr Drainings?"
"Speak!" responded he of the slush bucket—"speak! ay, as plain as I do now."