While Sam and Robin sat down to enjoy a good dinner, or rather breakfast, of which they stood much in need, Letta explained in a disjointed rambling fashion, that after a feed of this kind the naughty men usually had a fight, after which they took a long sleep, and then had the dishes cleaned up and the silver things locked away before taking their departure from the cave for “a long, long time,” by which, no doubt, she indicated the period spent on a pilfering expedition. But on this particular occasion, she added, while the naughty men were seated at the feast, one of their number from their ship came hastily in and said something, she could not tell what, which caused them at once to leap up and rush out of the cave, and they had not come back since.
“And they’re not likely to come back, little one,” said Robin through a mouthful of rice.
“Ha! ha–a!” laughed Sam through a mouthful of pie-crust.
“Ho! ho!” cried the old woman, with a look of surprise, “yous bery brav boy, I dessay, but if dem roberts doos kum back, you soon laugh on wrong side ob de mout’, for dey screw yous limbses off, an’ ho! skrunch yous teeth hout, an’ roast you ’live, so you better heat w’at yous can an’ go hof—fast as you couldn’t.”
“I say, Robin,” said Sam, unable to restrain a smile at the expression of Letta’s face, as she listened to this catalogue of horrors, “that speech might have taken away our appetites did we not know that the ‘roberts’ are all dead.”
“Dead!” exclaimed the old woman with a start and a gleam of serious intelligence, such as had not before appeared on her wrinkled visage; “are de roberts all dead?”
“All,” replied Sam, who thereupon gave the old pair a full account of what had been witnessed on the shore.
Strange to say, the old man and woman were much depressed by the news, although, from what they afterwards related, they had been very cruelly treated by the pirates, by whom they had been enslaved for many years. Nay, old Meerta even dropped a tear or two quietly to their memory, for, as she remarked, by way of explanation or excuse, “dey wasn’t all so bad as each oder.”
However, she soon recovered her composure, and while Sam Shipton returned to the shore to fetch their comrades to the cave, she told Robin, among other things, that the pirates had brought Letta to the island two years before, along with a large quantity of booty, but that she did not know where she came from, or to whom she belonged.
Sam Shipton resolved to give his comrades the full benefit of the surprise in store, therefore, on returning to them, he merely said that he had left Robin in a rather curious place in the interior, where they had discovered both food and drink in abundance, and that he had come to conduct them to it.