‘I hope the captain will prevail upon them to leave that place,’ said I to him.
‘He won’t, sir,’ answered Cutbill; ‘and blowed if I don’t feel now, Mr. Monson, as if I’d made a mistake in leaving it myself!’
Here the mate of the barque stepped up to me—an immense man, even bigger than Cutbill, in a long white coat with side pockets so vast that one might have thought that he could have stowed the little second mate away in one of them.
‘Do those chaps think that there’s plunder to be found aboard that effigy?’ he asked in a voice rendered unutterably hoarse and harsh by probably years of roaring out in foul weather, supplemented by rum and the natural gift of a deep note.
‘Don’t know about plunder, sir,’ answered Cutbill, ‘but they reckon there may be chests of plate and bullion stowed away aft.’
‘Stowed away in their eye!’ growled the mate. ‘Where did she come from?’
‘The bottom of the sea, sir.’
‘An old galleon,’ said he, cocking his eye at her, ‘and a volcanic burst up,’ he continued. ‘Well, I don’t know, if so be she’s a galleon, likely as not those chaps are right. Why, they thought nothing in the days she belonged to in stowing a matter of six or seven millions of dollars in the lazarettes of craft of that kind.’
‘By the Lord, Mr. Monson,’ burst out Cutbill, ‘I must go ashore, sir! I feel I’m a-doing wrong in being here!’
‘You’ll have to swim then,’ said the mate drily, ‘for that boat is meant for our davits when she comes alongside, and it will then be time to trim sail.’