This determination had scarcely been framed in my mind, when, as if my very thoughts had been audible, the smuggler next me on the right hand drew a pistol, and held it close to my starboard ear.
“Friend, if you tries to raise the house, or speaks to any Niger, or other person we meets, I’ll walk through your skull with two ounces of lead.”
“You are particularly obliging,” said I; “but what do you promise yourselves by carrying me off? Were you to murder me, you would be none the richer; for I have no valuables about me, as you may easily ascertain by searching me.”
“And do you think that freeborn Americans like we have kidnapped you for your dirty rings, and watch, and mayhap a few dollars, which I takes you to mean by your waluboles, as you calls them?”
“Why, then, what, in the devil’s name, have you kidnapped me for?” And I began to feel my choler overpowering my discretion, when Mr Paul Brandywine, who I now suspected to be the mate of the smuggler, took the small liberty of jerking the landyard, that had been made fast to the middle of the handspike, so violently, that I thought both my shoulders w ere dislocated; for I was fairly checked down on my back, just as you may have seen a pig-merchant on the Fermoy road bring an uproarious boar to his marrowbones; while the man who had previously threatened to blow my brains out, knelt beside me, and civilly insinuated, that “if I was tired of my life, he calculated I had better speak as loud again.”
There was no jest in all this; so I had nothing for it but to walk silently along with my escort, after having gathered myself up as well as I could. We crept so close under the windows of the overseer’s house, where we picked up a lot of empty ankers, slung on a long pole, that I fancied I heard, or really did hear, some one snore—oh how I envied the sleeper! At length we reached the beach, where we found two men lying on their oars, in what, so far as I could distinguish, appeared to be a sharp swift-looking whale boat, which they kept close to, with her head seaward, however, to be ready for a start should any thing suspicious appear near to them.
The boat-keeper hailed promptly, “Who goes there?” as they feathered their oars.
“The tidy little Wave,” was the answer.
No more words passed, and the men who had, in the first instance, pulled a stroke or two to give the boat way, now backed water, and tailed her on to the beach, when we all stepped on board.
Two of my captors now took each an oar; we shoved off, and glanced away through the darkness, along the smooth surface of the sparkling sea, until we reached the schooner, by this time hauled out into the fairway at the mouth of the cove, where she lay hove short, with her mainsail hoisted up, riding to the land-wind, and apparently all ready to cants and be off the moment the boat returned.