“D’ye feel able to talk, Mr. Fielding?” said Greaves.
“Very able, indeed,” I answered. “Your madeira has made a new man of me.”
“How happened it,” said he, “that you should be washing about on the oar of a man-of-war’s boat off Ramsgate, the other morning, when we fell in with you?”
I begged him to put a pinch of tobacco into the bowl of my pipe and to hold the lamp to me, and when I had lighted my pipe and he had resumed his seat I began my story; and I told him everything that had befallen me from the time of my arrival in the Downs in the ship Royal Brunswicker down to the hour when I found myself afloat on an oar, heading a straight course east by north with the stream of the tide. He listened with earnest attention, smoking very hard at some parts of my narrative, and emitting several dense clouds, which almost obscured him when I told him how the lightning had liberated the corpse and how, as it might seem, the fiery hand of God himself had delivered the body of the malefactor to the weeping, praying mother.
“It was an evil moment for me when I fell in with that gibbet,” said I. “I had not the heart to leave the wretched mother, though my first instinct on catching sight of her was to run for my life. But I thank God for my wonderful preservation; I thank Him first and you next, Captain Greaves.”
“No more of that. We’re quits.”
“It is clear that you keep a bright lookout aboard this brig.”
“Had your life depended upon the eyes of my men, the perishable part of you would have been by this time concocted into cod and crab. I’ll introduce you to the individual to whom you owe your life.”
He opened the door of the cabin and putting a silver whistle to his lips blew, and in a moment a fine retriever bounded in.
“Galloon, Mr. Fielding; Mr. Fielding, Galloon.”