Then, looking kindly in the negro’s face, he said, in Spanish:
“I think you are Jumbo. I am only a boy, and I am all alone. You are free; you can go where you will.”
And he pointed to the deep, free woods.
Ralph had great difficulty in getting out this amount of Castilian; but the negro, whose own command of that language seemed to be of the most meagre description, comprehended his meaning. He took the spirit, if not the words.
A grateful expression came over his dark face, and again he clasped the boy’s hand, with the same flow of mingled African and Spanish upon his tongue.
Ralph bade him a kind good-by, and he walked away into the forest, waving his sable hand with a gesture full of feeling as he disappeared.
Our young sailor now proceeded to examine the animal he had killed.
It is said that the timid man is afraid before the danger, the coward during it, and the brave man after it. Ralph was afraid after it.
He felt a kind of weakness about the knees, and wondered that he had not noticed it before. He remembered how the bristles had stood up on the boar’s back, how the savage jaws had clashed together, and how he had seen the tusks standing out like long knives as the creature came straight for him.
Now how grim the monster looked as he lay in the mud and water, just where he had dropped dead—not on his side, but with the legs doubled under him, and the stout, hoggish ears sticking up like ears of corn.