AN ADVENTURE ON THE WEST COAST OF AFRICA.
BY DAVID KER.
"Any sign of a breeze yet, Mr. Brown?"
"No, sir."
"Humph!"
The Captain's discontented grunt, as he ran his eyes over the lifeless sea and the hot, cloudless sky, was certainly not without reason. To be suddenly becalmed when one is in special haste to get home is at no time the most agreeable thing in the world; but to be becalmed off the pestilential coast of Western Africa, with food and water beginning to run short, and good cause to expect an attack at any moment by an overwhelming force of savages, might overtask the patience of Job himself.
"I guess we've just got to grin and bear it," muttered the Captain. "If the niggers'll only keep as still as the air does! But I'll bet my last dollar they won't. They must have seen us by this time, and a ship in distress to them is like an open door to a tramp."
As he spoke, his keen eye wandered with a troubled look along the endless line of the African coast, one impenetrable mass of dark thicket as far as the eye could reach, except at one single point. Just opposite, the becalmed vessel, a long, low reef of brown rock, masking the mouth of a small river, broke the interminable perspective of clustering leaves; and it was to this point that the Captain's watchful look was most often and most anxiously directed.
His uneasiness seemed to have infected the officers and the crew likewise. Just abaft the foremast a tall, wiry Portlander was turning a grindstone, upon which another sailor was sharpening in turn five or six rusty cutlasses; while a gaunt, keen-looking fellow from Maine was hard at work cleaning the Captain's double-barrelled shot-gun—unluckily the only fire-arm on board.
But there was one on board who seemed to trouble himself very little about the matter. This was the cabin-boy—a brown-faced, curly-haired, bright-eyed little fellow, active as a leopard and fearless as a lion. The way in which he was employed, amid all this bustle and anxiety, would have rather astonished a stranger. With a piece of raw meat in his hand, he dived down the fore-hatchway, ran along the low narrow passage that led between-decks, and opening the door of a small dark recess just abaft the store-room, called out, "Tom!"