“It’s a family hairloom,” answered Hawke, pointing to the watchguard with a singular grin.
“This here vatch,” said Mr. Solomons, “is a hundred year old, and a vast curiosity in her vurks. Have you more of this sort of thing to sell? If so, I was the most liberal dealer of any man in Jamaica.”
Hawke gave him a nod and walked out. He found a ship next morning and signed articles as carpenter and second mate. She was sailing for England in a week from that date, and was a plump, old-fashioned barque of four hundred tons. At the sailors’ lodging-house he had put up at he fell into conversation one evening, a day or two before he sailed, with a dark, black-eyed, handsome, intelligent foreign seaman, who called himself simply Pedro. This fellow did not scruple to hint at experiences gained both as a contrabandist and piccaroon.
“D’ye speak many languages?” said Hawke, puffing at a long clay pipe, and casting his grave, slow-moving little eyes upon a tumbler of amber rum at his elbow.
“I can speak three or four languages,” said the foreign seaman.
Hawke surveyed him thoughtfully and then, putting down his pipe, thrust his hand in his pocket, and extracted the paper from the snuff-box without exposing the box.
“What language is this wrote in?” said he, handing the paper to his companion.
The man looked at it, frowning with the severity of his gaze, so dim was the pencil scrawl, so queer the characters, as though the handwriting were the march of a spider’s legs over the page. He then exclaimed suddenly, “Yes, I have it. It is my own language. It is Spanish.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Hawke, “and what’s it all about, mate?”
“How did you come by it?” said the man.