Again the gun boomed. But it was a clean miss. Of this I was glad, for there was no occasion for further bloodshed; though I would not have betrayed the thought to Grant Norris, suffering as he did from that shot of the blacks.
We got Norris down under the cabin light, and properly cleaned and dressed the wound. While we were busied thus, Captain Marat had brought the schooner about and set her bow toward the west. In an hour everything was ship-shape, and Norris propped comfortably on a mattress on deck, with the rest of our party squatted about him. Rufe was busy in his galley, for none having had any lust for food at the proper supper time, and now the suspense having snapped, we had developed keen appetites.
"Dey ain't no use you-all tellin' me how yo' feels," Rufe called to us. "I jes' got dat same feelin' in mah insides."
The relief was general; all who were not chattering, were whistling or humming. And the sailors, forward, were mingling their voices in a negro melody. Even the monkey caught the infection, and scampered about like a playful child, times springing from shoulder to shoulder; and once he snatched a biscuit from Rufe's galley and thrust it into my hand, to Ray's pretended disgust.
"I told you the monkey and Wayne are in cahoots," he said.
But before we came to Jamaica, the animal had transferred his chief liking to Ray. None could long resist Ray.
The black boy never tired of roaming about the schooner, which to him was the wonder of wonders, never having so much as seen the picture of a ship, or anything calculated to give him overmuch yearning for the world without those rocky walls of that sink in the mountain. Julian, who had conversed much with the boy, told us that he could not understand the value of that gold on which we put so much store. To him it was nothing but so much dross that had given him so many lame backs with the delving for it.
Andy Hawkins sat there grimacing and jerking his shoulders, and telling such ears as would listen, of the bottles of soda water he would be drinking when he got to the shops. Strangely enough, strong drink had no charms for him, though he made no concealment of his slavery to the drug that had already marked him for an early grave.
"The last time I was in London," he said, "I put four bottles of 'Utchinson's Sarsaprilla sody-water down be'ind my collar; and if Hi 'ad them now, Hi think Hi'd be able to put down a heven dozen."
"You believe in getting full even if you don't get drunk, don't you?" said Ray.