"Ay! a seaman," he answered, carelessly. "But now that you're aboard we will be able to relieve him from that duty."
"Whatever you put me to," said I, "you will find me as willing at it as gratitude can make a man."
He roughly nodded, and asked me what part of England I came from. I answered that I was born near Guildford.
"I hail from Deal," said he. "Do you know Deal?"
"Well," I answered; and spoke of some people whom I had visited there; gave him the names of the streets, and of a number of boatmen I had conversed with during my stay at the salt and shingly place. This softened him. It was marvelous to observe how the magic of memory, the tenderness of recollected association humanized the coarse, harsh, bold, and staring looks of this scarlet-haired man.
"But," said I, "you have not yet told me where this schooner is bound to."
"You will hear all about it," he answered, with his usual air returning to him.
I was not a little astonished by this answer. Had the schooner sailed on some piratic expedition? Was there some colossal undertaking of smuggling in contemplation? But though piracy, to be sure, still flourished, it was hardly to be thought of in relation with those northern seas toward which the schooner was heading; while as for smuggling, if the four seamen whom I counted at work about the vessel's deck comprised—with the fifth man, who was at her helm—the whole of the crew, there was nothing in any theory of a contraband adventure to solve the problem submitted by Captain Dopping's reticence.
He left me abruptly, and walked forward and addressed one of the men, apparently speaking of the job the fellow was upon. I listened for that note of bullying, for that tone of habitual brutal temper, which I should have expected to hear in him when he accosted the seamen, and was surprised to find that he spoke as a comrade rather than as a captain; with something even of careless familiarity in his manner as he addressed the man.
I had now an opportunity for the first time since I came on deck to inspect the schooner. It was easy to see that she had never been built as a yacht; her appearance, indeed, suggested that in her day she had been employed as a slaver. She was old, but very powerfully constructed, and seemingly still as fine a sea-boat as was at that time to be encountered on the ocean. Her bulwarks were high and immensely thick; the fore-part of her had a rise, or "spring" as it is called, which gave a look of domination and defiance to her round bows which at the forefoot narrowed into a stem of knife-like sharpness. She was very loftily rigged and expanded an enormous breadth of mainsail. I had never before seen so long a gaff, and the boom when amidships forked far out over the stern. Her decks were very clean but grayish with brine and years of hard usage. I noticed that she carried a small boat hanging in davits on the starboard side, and a large boat abaft the little caboose or kitchen that stood like a sentry-box forward. This boat, indeed, resembled a man-of-war's cutter—such a long and heavy fabric as one would certainly not think of looking for on board a craft of the size of La Casandra. It was my sailor's eye that carried my mind to this detail. No man but a sailor, and perhaps a suspicious sailor as I then was, standing as I did upon the deck of a vessel whose destination was still a secret to me, would have noticed that boat.