"'YOU DOG, WHY DON'T YOU ANSWER?' CRIED LOW."
"You dog, why don't you answer?" cried Low, cocking one of the pistols and putting it to the other's ear. Thus compelled, and yet not knowing what to say, Ashton hesitated no longer, but did what he might have done at firsthand which is always the best thing to do—he told the truth.
"I am a bachelor," he said, whereupon Low appeared to be satisfied, and turned away.
The fact was that this scoundrel, who seemed so heartless, had had a wife of his own, whom he had loved tenderly, but who was dead. She had left him a child, now in the care of trustworthy people at Boston, for whom he felt such tenderness that on any mention of him, in quieter moments—that is, "when he was not drinking or revelling"—he would sit down and shed tears. Judging others by himself, he would never impress in his service married men, who had ties, such as a wife and children, to render them desirous of leaving it.
Moreover, Low would never suffer his men to work on Sunday. What is still more strange, Ashton tells us that he has even "seen some of them sit down to read a good book upon that day."
For all that, he had to join the ship's company, and become a pirate like them, or die. His name was accordingly entered on their books; whereas, when opportunity offered, the married men who had been captured were put on shore.
Ashton was sometimes fired at, and slashed with cutlasses, upon the supposition—which was quite a correct one—that he was planning how to escape. Otherwise he was not, on the whole, ill-treated. He assisted, much against his own will, in the capture of many vessels.
Though very successful in her depredations, the pirate ship was at one time pursued by The Mermaid, an English man-of-war, when Ashton's feelings were more uncomfortable than they had ever been, "for I concluded that we should certainly be taken, and that I, being found in such company, should be hung with the rest, so true are the words of Solomon, 'A companion of fools shall be destroyed.'"
However, one of the ship's men showed Low a sand bar over which his vessel could pass and The Mermaid could not.