'They're carrying out the boat to Australia, sir!' said the mate.
The Captain looked hard at Abraham.
'For a consideration, I suppose?' said he.
'Ay, sir, for a consideration, as you say,' responded Abraham, grinning broadly, and clearly very much gratified by the Captain's reception of him.
'Then,' said the Captain, pulling down his whiskers and smiling with an expression of self-complacency not to be conveyed in words, 'I do not for a moment doubt that you are carrying that lugger to Australia, for my opinion of the Deal boatmen is this: that for a consideration they would carry their immortal souls to the gates of the devil's palace, and then return to their public-houses, get drunk on the money they had received, and roll about bragging how they had bested Old Nick himself! Spare boom for a mast, eh?' he continued, peering into Abraham's face. 'What's your name, my man?'
'Abraham Vise,' answered the boatman, apparently too much astonished as yet to be angry.
'Well, see here, friend Abraham,' said the Captain turning up his eyes and blandly pointing aloft, 'my ship isn't a forest, and spare booms don't grow aboard us. And yet,' said he, once again peering closely into Abraham's face, 'you're evidently a fellow-Christian in distress, and it's my duty to help you! I suppose you are a Christian?'
'Born one!' answered Abraham.
'Then, Mr. Jones,' exclaimed the Captain, 'go round the ship with friend Abraham Vise, and see what's to be come at in the shape of a spare boom. Off with you now! Time's time on the ocean, and I can't keep my tops'l aback all day.'
The two men went off the poop. The Captain asked me my name, then inquired Helga's, and said, 'Mr. Tregarthen, and you, Miss Nielsen, I will ask you to step below. I have a drop of wine in my cabin, and a glass of it can hurt neither of you. Come along, if you please;' and, so saying, he led the way to a little companion-hatch, down which he bundled, with Helga and myself in his wake; and T recollect, as I turned to put my foot upon the first of the steps, that I took notice (with a sort of wonder in me that passed through my mind with the velocity of thought) of the lemon-coloured face of a man standing at the wheel, with such a scowl upon his brow, that looked to be withered by the sun to the aspect of the rind of a rotten orange, and with such a fierce, glaring expression in his dusky eyes, the pupils of which lay like a drop of ink slowly filtering out upon a slip of coloured blotting-paper, that but for the hurry I was in to follow the Captain I must have lingered to glance again and yet again at the strange, fierce, forbidding creature.