“ ‘Why,’ answered the other, as coolly as before, ‘it’s my belief, growin’ in me, the whull v’y’ge, out of things as has turned up, one arter another, that ship and cargo were as good as sold to that aire old Portagee, afore we left the bloody Brazil coast behind.’
“ ‘Why, Charley, man,’ said the cooper, in a startled voice, ‘sure, you don’t mean to say that now, and you niver broached a thought of it afore.’
“ ‘Why, you see, my hearties, I were watchin’ all along to see how the cat jumped, seein’ that the skipper be nyther one to be skeared out of his course by a trifle, nor fathomed with a bit o’ dry yarn like a pump-well. I’m cock-sure of it now—but, hark’e in your ears—one word from me, when we gits up with the Cape, will block his game, deep as he is, and sot that aire manhandlin’, pirate-huntin’ Mister Miller—as he calls hisself—at t’other one’s throat like a Bingal tiger.
“ ‘Hows’iver, jist travel aft, Bungs, an’ strike the bell, whiles the doctor hands out the grog and the prog—I reckon by that aire screechin’, which aire none o’ the pleasantest, that the cholery’s set his claws on more o’ the heathen.’
“I kept my seat while the man went aft and struck the bell, the dismal echoes of the rocks drowning, for a moment, the faint cries to which the carpenter had alluded. Just as the man came back three or four heads were thrust in succession up the forecastle ladder, and as many of the larboard watch clustered round the opposite door of the galley. The fellow who had broken into the cabin was among them, and recognizing the others as old hands, I sat close for a few moments longer, although almost despairing now of learning the magical word by which old Charley was to set the captain and I by the ears.
“However, little of moment was said at first—the talk turning chiefly on the heat, and the cholera, and the prospect of getting to sea. One fellow was beginning a story about the fever on the African coast, when suddenly the carpenter asked the captain’s stroke-oars-man, about the ghost he had seen in the cabin.
“ ‘You see, mate,’ said Kennebunk, ‘the story they made up aft about the jackanapes be all in my eye; and if Frank, here, be of a mind, he can give us the rights of it.’
“ ‘That be blowed!’ said the man-of-war’s man in his wild way. ‘If it weren’t the monkey, with a table-cloth round him, as the steward said, it might have been a ghost, or the devil hisself, for all I care. Pass the pannakin this way—here’s sweethearts and wives, any how!—and no malice to the new mate, for the clout on the sconce with the capstan-bar.’
“ ‘Ay, ay,’ rejoined the carpenter, ‘you men-of-war’s men are all of one mark; you know one another, meet where you may, jist as a shoal o’ whales comes togither, arter a squanderin’.’
“ ‘B—t me!’ said Frank, ‘if ever I sot eyes on him afore he joined this ship, howsomever it may be with you, Chips.’