“I wish it was, Brown,” retorted Martin; “but you’ve forgotten the cats.”
“So we have!” exclaimed everybody.
“And you may be sure they’ll give us some trouble,” said Christian. “Come, let’s go at ’em at once.”
This estimate of the cats was fully justified by what followed. A considerable number of these useful creatures, black, white, and grey, had been brought from Otaheite for the purpose of keeping down the rats, with which many of the South Sea Islands are afflicted. During the voyage most of them had retired to the privacy of the hold, where they found holes and corners about the cargo, and came out only at night, like evil spirits, to pick up a precarious livelihood. During the recent conflict a few had found insecure refuge in holes and corners about the deck, where yelling and fugitive pigs had convulsed them with horror; and one, a huge grey cat, having taken madly to the rigging, rushed out to the end of the foresail-yard, where it was immediately roused to frenzy by a flock of astonished gulls. Now, these cats had to be rummaged out of their retreats by violence, in which work all the white men in the ship had to take part amid a chorus of awful skirling, serpentlike fuffing, ominous and deadly growling, and, generally, hideous caterwauling, that no pen, however gifted, could adequately describe.
“I see ’im,” cried Mills, with his head thrust down between a nail-cask and a bundle of Otaheitan roots.
“Where?” from John Adams, who, with heels and legs in the air, and head and shoulders down somewhere about the keel, was poking a long stick into total darkness.
“There, right under you, with a pair of eyes blazing like green lamps.”
A poke in the right direction caused a convulsion in the bowels of the cargo like a miniature earthquake. It was accompanied by a fearful yell.
“I’ve touched him at last,” said Adams, quietly. “Look-out there, Brown, he’s goin’ to scramble up the bulkhead.”
“There goes another,” shouted Martin, whose head was so far down among the cargo that his voice had a muffled sound.