He gazed at me very earnestly, and looked as though he guessed what was coming.
“One morning,” said I, “a boat put off from the Raja. She hoisted sail and went away toward Cape Town. A burst of wind came down the mountain and capsized her, whereupon a boat belonging to the Rainbow made for the drowning people, picked them up, and put them aboard their own ship.”
He thrust his arm into the hammock and grasped my hand.
“You are Mr. Fielding. You were the second mate of the Rainbow. You it was who saved my life and the lives of the others. Strange that it should fall to my lot to save yours; and for me to suppose that you had been hanged! By Isten! but this is a little world. It is not astonishing that I should not have known you. You are something changed in the face; likewise you have been very nearly drowned. We shall be able to find out how many hours you lay washing about in the Channel. And add to this a very long spell of emaciating insensibility.”
“I was never hanged,” said I.
“No, no,” he said, “but all your babble was about gibbets and chains.”
“If it had not been for a gibbet and a man dangling from it in chains, in all human probability I should not now be here. I was delayed by an object of horrible misery, and the period of my humane loitering tallied to a second with the movements of a press-gang, or I should be on board my own ship, the Royal Brunswicker of which vessel I am mate. Where will she be now?” I considered awhile. “Say she got under weigh at two o’clock this morning—how is the wind, Captain Greaves?”
“It blows fresh, and is dead foul for the Royal Brunswicker if she be inward bound.”
“Then,” said I, “she may have brought up in the Downs again. I hope she has. I may be able to rejoin her before the wind shifts. In what part of the Channel are you?”
“Out of it, clear of the Scillies.”