"A felucca, sir."
"I thought so, by all that is unfortunate." And I turned away, walking aft very fast, when the mate's voice from the top, hailing the deck, evidently in great alarm, arrested me, and glued me to the planks.
"Johnstone, Johnstone!"—This was to one of the ship's people,—"come up here; come up into the top—quick, or he will be over!" And the next moment the telescope fell smash at my feet. I could see that Hause had cast himself down on the grating, and was grovelling convulsively on his face. At length, in his struggles, one of his legs hung over; and I thought he would have slipped through the mate's fingers, and been dashed to pieces by the fall. I looked up enquiringly.
"He's in a fit, sir," cried the mate.
"Well, well, seize him in the top, then—seize him in the top."
But it was unnecessary; the poor fellow got over this paroxysm also, to which the calmness of despair now finally succeeded, and presently he came down on deck.
"I will now give you no more trouble, Mr Brail, you may depend on it; I am in my right senses again, although ruined for ever; and all owing to my infernal folly in not sleeping on board."
"Well, my good fellow," said I, "I question very strongly if your sleeping on board would have made the smallest difference, at least in your favour. If she has been forcibly carried off,—and I am sorry to say it looks very like it,—the party must have been too strong to have allowed your resistance to have been of any avail. In fact, the first thing they naturally would have done must have been either to have secured you below, or given you a more effectual quietus—you understand me. So nothing here is so bad, but it might have been worse. You are better as you are surely, than a prisoner; or, worse still, amongst the fishes in the bay?"
But I was cramming his ear against the stomach of his sense.
"Those on deck would not have been caught in this way had I been on board, take my word for it, sir."