An' 'e says, "I was a-watchin' o' your shootin' that 12-pounder of yours this morning, Pat Jones, and says I to mysel', ''E ain't a bad fellow is Jones, an' if 'e took up savings[#] for 'is rum 'e might 'it what 'e aimed at—sometimes'".
[#] Men who do not want their rum are allowed a little more than the actual value of it. This is called "taking up savings".
"Never you mind about that 12-pounder o' mine, Mister Cooky. I don't come 'ere telling you 'ow to cook," said I to him, and was going to put it much more plainer, for he riles me, does Cooky, when along comes the Orficers' domestic a-singing out: "'Ave you got the 'ot water for the Orficers' arternoon tea?" and Cooky, grumbling "'E can't work no blooming miracles, 'e can't", goes off to draw some water, what 'e might have done all the time he'd been jawing to me, so I saunters off with them clothes, which are pretty near dry by this time.
Well, we ar'n't getting much way on this yarn, but we'd got to the island we'd come all this way to see, a middlin'-sized piece o' land, and going in closer, according to a signal from the flag-ship, we sees a bit of a channel running into the middle of it between high cliffs on each side. A nasty-looking coast it was, as ever I saw, without no beach where you could land in comfort, but ugly great black rocks a-sticking out all round, with the big seas a-pounding themselves to pieces on 'em. "If there's to be any boat-work in this 'ere place, look out for trouble, Pat Jones," says I to myself.
We steamed close in, ginger-like, and spied a lumbering junk a-sailing clumsily out towards us, and when she gets nearer we sees her flying the white flag at the peak of her great sail made of matting; and then, strike me pink! if she didn't 'oist the "wish to communicate" flags at her mast-head. If a polar bear came up to you in the street o' Portsmouth and said, "Beg pardon, but can you tell me where I can get a ice", you wouldn't 'ave been more struck aback than we were to see that dirty junk a-'oisting signals all regular-like.
"Bless my rags," I 'eard Mr. Parker say, "but that about takes the currant biscuit for cheek;" and after a bit of rummaging in the signal-book we hoisted "Send a boat", and they answered it from the junk and sent a boat across to us, a man-of-war's whaler which they had tied up at the stern, with a crew of Chinese dressed as bluejackets—stolid-looking ruffians they were, too, as they squinted up at us from their wicked little eyes. They brought a letter for Mister Ping Sang, the fat old gent who, they tell me, forks out the dollars to keep this show going, and has come along o' Captain Helston to see the fun.
Back we goes to the Laird, and Mr. Parker takes it across in the dinghy and comes back, 'alf larfing an' 'alf swearing, with a couple of big portmanties and ten bags of dollars sealed up, and all 'eavy as you could make 'em.
We shoves off back to that junk and 'ands 'em all over to her; but it was all a mystery to me till Mr. Glover tells me afterwards that the fat Chinese gent 'ad been a-playing cards with the pirate chief when he was kept a prisoner and lost all that mint of money, an' 'ad been juggins enough to promise to pay it up and bring the luggage what that Englishman who nabbed him had left be'ind 'im at 'Ong-Kong.
Blister my heels! if it didn't fairly give me the knock-out! And that junk just 'oisted 'er boat aboard and sailed 'ome again with all those dollars, the crew maybe a-cocking snooks at us over the stern.
An', just as her big sail disappears under them cliffs, blest if the pirates didn't fire a big gun at us from the top of 'em, though we were five miles off if we were a yard. It didn't fetch up by a couple o' hundred yards, but splashed into the sea and racochied over'ead, playing ducks-and-drakes a mile the other side.