“Nay, then, if Henry joins me,” said Gascoyne, “I think that we two will not have a bad chance against you three.”
“Come, that’s good! so I count for nothing,” exclaimed Corrie.
“Ha! stick up, lad,” observed Bumpus. “The niggers wot you pitched into at the mouth o’ yon cave didn’t think that—eh! didn’t they not?”
“Well, well, if Corrie sides with you I feel that my wisest course is to submit. And now, Henry,” said Gascoyne, resuming his wonted gravity of tone and demeanour, “sit down here and let me know where we are going to and what you mean to do. It is natural that I should feel curious on these points even although I have perfect confidence in you all.”
Henry obeyed, and their voices sank into low tones as they mingled in earnest converse about their future plans.
Thus did Gascoyne, with his family and friends, leave Sandy Cove in the dead of that dark night, and sail away over the wide waste of the great Pacific Ocean.
Reader, our tale is nearly told. Like a picture, it contains but a small portion of the career of those who have so long engaged your attention, and, I would fain hope, your sympathy. The life of man may be comprehensively epitomised almost to a point, or expanded out ad infinitum. He was born, he died, is its lowest term. Its highest is not definable.
Innumerable tomes, of encyclopaedic dimensions, could not contain, much less exhaust, an account of all that was said and done (and all that might be said about what was said and done) by our ci-devant sandal-wood trader and his friends. Yet there are main points, amid the little details of their career, which it would be unpardonable to pass over in silence. To these we shall briefly refer before letting the curtain fall.
There is a distant isle of the sea, a beautiful spot, an oceanic gem, which has been reclaimed by the Word of God, from those regions that have been justly styled “the dark places of the earth.” We will not mention its name; we will not even indicate its whereabout, lest we should furnish a clue to the unromantic myrmidons of the law, whose inflexible justice is only equalled by their pertinacity in tracking the criminal—to his lair!