Abraham looked at him with an eye whose gaze delivered the word damn as articulately as ever his lips could have uttered the oath.
'You two men were going in that small open boat to Australia,' continued the Captain, with a paternal air and a nasal voice, and smiling always. 'Do you suppose you would ever have reached that distant coast?'
'Sartainly I dew, sir,' cried Abraham hoarsely, with a vehement nod.
'I say no, then!' thundered the Captain. 'Two of you! Why, I've fallen in with smaller luggers than yours cruising in the Channel with eight of a crew.'
'Ay!' shouted Abraham. 'And vy? Only ask yourself the question! 'Cause they carry men to ship as pilots. But tew can handle a lugger.'
'I say no!' thundered the Captain again. 'What? All the way from the Chops to Sydney Bay. Who's your navigator?'
'Oy am,' answered Abraham.
The Captain curved his odd, double-lipped mouth into a sneer, that yet somehow did not disguise or alter his habitual or congenital smile, while he ran his eye over the boatman's figure.
'You!' he cried, pausing and bursting into a loud laugh; then, resuming his nasal intonation, he continued. 'Mark you this now. The loss of your lugger alongside my barque is a miracle wrought by a bountiful Heaven to extend your existence, which you were deliberately attempting to cut short by a dreadful act of folly, so dreadful that had you perished by a like behaviour ashore you would have been buried with a stake through your middle.'
He turned up his eyes till little more than the whites of them were visible. Grieved as I was for poor Abraham, I scarcely saved myself from bursting out laughing, so ludicrous were the shifting emotions which worked in his face, and so absurd Jacob's fixed stare of astonishment and wrath.