I was much surprised by this explanation, and a good deal relieved to find that the vessel, after all, was not a pirate; but instead of replying, I said, “If it be as you state, then why did you take me from my island, and why do you not now take me back?”
The captain smiled as he replied, “I took you off in anger, boy, and I’m sorry for it. I would even now take you back, but we are too far away from it. See, there it is,” he added, laying his finger on the chart; “and we are now here—fifty miles, at least. It would not be fair to my men to put about now, for they have all an interest in the trade.”
I could make no reply to this; so, after a little more conversation, I agreed to become one of the crew—at least, until we could reach some civilised island where I might be put ashore. The captain assented to this proposition; and after thanking him for the promise, I left the cabin and went on deck with feelings that ought to have been lighter, but which were, I could not tell why, marvellously heavy and uncomfortable still.
Chapter Twenty Three.
Bloody Bill—Dark surmises—A strange sail, and a strange crew, and a still stranger cargo—New reasons for favouring missionaries—A murderous massacre, and thoughts thereon.
Three weeks after the conversation narrated in the last chapter I was standing on the quarter-deck of the schooner, watching the gambols of a shoal of porpoises that swam round us. It was a dead calm—one of those still, hot, sweltering days so common in the Pacific, when nature seems to have gone to sleep, and the only thing in water or in air that proves her still alive is her long, deep breathing in the swell of the mighty sea. No cloud floated in the deep blue above, no ripple broke the reflected blue below. The sun shone fiercely in the sky, and a ball of fire blazed with almost equal power from out the bosom of the water. So intensely still was it, and so perfectly transparent was the surface of the deep, that had it not been for the long swell already alluded to, we might have believed the surrounding universe to be a huge, blue, liquid ball, and our little ship the one solitary material speck in all creation floating in the midst of it.
No sound broke on our ears save the soft puff now and then of a porpoise, the slow creak of the masts as we swayed gently on the swell, the patter of the reef-points, and the occasional flap of the hanging sails. An awning covered the fore and after parts of the schooner, under which the men composing the watch on deck lolled in sleepy indolence, overcome with excessive heat. Bloody Bill, as the men invariably called him, was standing at the tiller; but his post for the present was a sinecure, and he whiled away the time by alternately gazing in dreamy abstraction at the compass in the binnacle and by walking to the taffrail in order to spit into the sea. In one of these turns he came near to where I was standing, and leaning over the side, looked long and earnestly down into the blue wave.
This man, although he was always taciturn and often surly, was the only human being on board with whom I had the slightest desire to become better acquainted. The other men, seeing that I did not relish their company, and knowing that I was a protégé of the captain, treated me with total indifference. Bloody Bill, it is true, did the same; but as this was his conduct to every one else, it was not peculiar in reference to me. Once or twice I tried to draw him into conversation, but he always turned away after a few cold monosyllables. As he now leaned over the taffrail, close beside me, I said to him: