“Ay, ay, you are right!” cried the harpooner, much surprised, “but where in the name of heaven, Stump, did you come from? You were not confined here were you? I thought you were in league with the mutineers.”
“That’s the way of the world,” muttered the shipkeeper, mournfully. “Yes—yes, that’s the way with ’em all! Sarcumstances always goes against a man, hows’ever honest he may be! But I didn’t think it, Marline—no, blast me if I did—that you, my chum, would ever mix up my deeds with those of them infarnal scoundrels!”
“Forgive me!” exclaimed the young man, joyfully grasping the hand of his friend as tightly as his irons would admit. “I was altogether too hasty, and I’m sorry for it. But, tell me how you came here.”
“Ay, ay,” said Stump. “I’ll explain matters willingly enough, especially as it will give me a chance to curse those rascally blueskins again, and to show you as I always was for maintaining, that them creatur’s ain’t to be trusted.”
He proceeded to tell his story, commencing with those incidents with which the reader is already acquainted.
“Yes,” continued the exasperated seaman, as soon as he had described the manner in which he had been thrust into the hole, “they fastened the hatches above me, and then I heard ’em go aft, and presently the voice of Tom Lark ordering ’em to cut the cable, and loosen the topsails, broke upon my ears, so that I knowed they had set that big hang-dog rascal at liberty. Scarcely was the ship under way, when I also heard that wild fiend Driko, proposing to Lark to knock me in the head, and thus get rid of me. But Tom, you know, although he is a parfect savage when he holds a grudge against anybody, doesn’t care to shed blood when he can get along without it, and that was the reason, as I take it, that he refused to comply with the polite request of that infarnal pow-wow.”
“Did you overhear any thing that gave you an idea of what Lark intended to do with the ship?”
“Not a bit of it, but I haven’t a doubt that he intends to take the craft into some out o’ the way port, and sell her—cargo and all.”
“That’s very probable,” replied his friend. “It’s a pity,” he added, “it’s a pity that the captain and his boat’s crew didn’t stay aboard as they are in the habit of doing. Then this misfortune might have been prevented.”
“Ay, ay, but we’ll be even with ’em yet,” replied the narrator, “and now I’ll tell you how I came here, which was done by a little of that ‘injunyewity’ for which the Stump natur’ has always been famous. As soon as I perceived that the craft was under way, says I to myself, ‘Why,’ says I, ‘I’m only fastened with ropes, and p’raps if I can find the old saw which is somewhere in the hold, I can make short work of ’em. And so I crept about as well as I was able, looking for the instrument, which I soon came afoul of. It was a long time hows’ever before I could get it in the right position, for I could only use my teeth to do that, and they ain’t quite as parfect as the teeth of a shark, seeing as three of ’em were once knocked out by an old woman, because I took her part against her husband who was beating her—blast him—and the rest are almost ruined by the long use of baccy and the habit of biting off the ends of spun yarn. Well, I tugged and pulled with my teeth for a long time and at last got the saw ship-shape. Then I turned my back to it, and by running the ropes that was about my wrists, up and down the edge, I soon had ’em apart. The rest was easy, and I was glad enough, lad—mightily glad to find myself freed from the cords.”