“Pull away lads, pull away,” cried Tom; “as Calla says, we shall be saved yet, though I must own I thought at one time we should be caught. I own it ain’t so much the being killed I don’t like, as the being eaten after.”
“Why, what difference can that make?” said Bill and I together.
“Why, I don’t know as it makes any difference, but I owns as I should like to be buried shipshape and Bristol fashion, sewed up in a hammock with a twenty-four pound shot at my feet and a stitch through my nose.”
As we pulled along after this discussion, the drums of our pursuers sounded closer and closer; and presently, mingled with their deep boom, we could hear the war-song of the men who occupied their fighting-decks.
I looked round and saw astern of us, not more than five hundred yards away, the five great double canoes, with their lofty prows ornamented with human hair, skulls, and mother-of-pearl, while high up on their platforms, surrounded by warriors armed with spears and bows, were the sacred drums, on which fellows fantastically painted in white, red, and yellow were vigorously beating a kind of tune, to which the paddles kept time, making their strange craft fly through the water.
As far as I could make out, there were about thirty paddles in each of the canoes, and some twenty warriors on the platform; so that fifty men, as Calla had said, were about the complement of each canoe.
“O Tom,” I said, “do shoot at them; they’re so close.”
“Not yet, mate; wait a bit. We shouldn’t do them no harm now, and every inch brings us nearer to Calla’s friends. Hark! don’t you hear their drums and war-song now?”
Certainly the sound came up to us against the wind, and looking in that direction I saw the six canoes Calla had said were coming to our relief paddling up against wind and sea in a smother of foam, while from a pole on board one of them there floated a tiny flag, which I could not distinguish.
Calla, when he heard the sound of the drums and songs of his fellow-islanders, laid in his paddle, and seizing on an axe and knife commenced a dance in which he defied his late captors, accompanying it with screeches and howls of which I should have thought no human throat could be capable.