While we sat on the rail we heard a slight rippling in the water ahead of the vessel. It sounded as if a large fish was making its way slowly across the bows. We listened in silence for some moments while the sounds came nearer. I looked aft and saw two figures in the light from the after companion-way, and I recognized Miss Green and the smaller of the two passengers standing close to the hatch. The sounds in the water interested me no longer, and I gazed rather hard at the figures aft. The two passengers, who were missionaries on their way home, had been aboard ship several times during the last week, but they had always been so pious and reserved in manner that I never once thought to see one of them talking to a young woman alone at such a late hour. But there are many things a sailor must learn not to see. Memory is not always a congenial friend of his.
Suddenly I heard a sound of some one breathing, followed by a smothered oath, coming from the direction of the rippling water which drew more and more beneath us.
“Ha! Voila, me gay sons, que voules vous—si padrone.—Hace bien tiempo, manana—hell-fire but the bloody lingo gets crossways of me gullet,” came a deep voice from the black water.
“Och! stow ye grandsons, ye blathering ijiot, an’ kape yer sinses. If them’s Dagoes on watch ’twill be all up with us. Whist, then! Ye men on the fo’c’stle!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Gantline and I in the same breath.
“Faith, an’ if yez have a drap av th’ milk av human pity in yer hearts, ye’ll give two poor divils a lift out av this haythen country. Say not er whurd, but let us come on deck quiet like. Ef ye don’t, th’ blood av two innocent men will be upon yer sowls fer ever an’ ever, amen. Spake aisy.”
“Now, Lord love ye, what kind of a man is this?” asked Gantline, as a naked man climbed slowly up the martingale-stays and crouched close to the starboard bow out of sight of the man-of-war.
“By th’ luck av Lyndon! Is this old Tom Gantline who talks? Gorry, man, we’ve just escaped from th’ prison on th’ beach. Don’t you remember me? I’m Mike McManus, own cousin to Reddy O’Toole who used to be mate with ye an’ owld man Crojack.”
“No, I don’t remember you,” answered Gantline; “but if you had said you were any one else you would have gone overboard again fast enough. No one but a chip of that devil’s limb, O’Toole, would have come out here in this tideway, right under the guns of that man-o’-war. Who’s with you?” and he peered over at the man who still clung to the bobstays as if uncertain whether to trust himself on board or again swim for it.
“That’s a man called Collins, a ’Frisco man, who got taken along with me, when we was smugglin’ in th’ rifles, up to th’ north’ard. Whist! below there; come up and make yerself known amongst friends. We’re safe.”