In all his life, Mr. Atkins had never been so spoken to. He sat in a sort of horror, gazing with open mouth and glassy eyes at the sturdy face of the seaman, on which a brown flush had burned out, and the firm, lit eyes of which held him spell-bound. Bangham, too—horror-stricken, wonder-stricken, thunder-stricken—sat staring at Jones for a minute, then burst into a short, rattling laugh, and jumping to his feet, cried, “Oh, he’s mad, he’s mad, he’s mad, he’s got a calenture, he’s got a calenture, he’s mad as a March hare,” capering and hopping and prancing, meanwhile, in his narrow confine, as if he would jump out of his skin.
“You, too, Bangham,” said the mate, making a step toward him, with a menacing gesture, at which the captain stopped capering, and shrank, while Mr. Atkins slightly started in his chair, “you just clap a stopper on that ugly mug of yours, and stop your monkey capers, or you’ll have me afoul of you. I haven’t forgot your didoes with the men aboard the Soliman. Just you say another word now, and I’ll put in a complaint that’ll lay you by the heels in the State Prison, where you ought to have been long ago, you ugly pirate, you!”
The captain evidently winced under this threat, which Mr. Jones delivered with ominous gravity, slowly shaking, meanwhile, his clenched fist at him.
“And now look here, you brace of bloody buccaneers,” continued the irreverent seaman, “short words are best words with such as you. I untied that poor old moke of a nigger last night, and rowed him ashore. What are ye going to do about it?”
Evidently a question hard to answer. Merchant and captain, stupefied and staring, gave him no reply.
“Hark you, now, Atkins,” he went on. “We found that man half dead in the hold when we were three days out—a sight to make one’s flesh crawl. The bloody old pirate he’d run away from, had put a spiked collar on his neck, just as if he was a brute, with no soul to be saved. I’m an old sea-dog—I am; and I’ve seen men ill treated in my time, but I’m damned if I ever seen a man ill-treated like that God-forsaken nigger. He’d run away, and no blame to him for running away. He’d been livin’ in swamps with snakes and alligators, and if he hadn’t no right to his freedom, he’d earned one fifty times over, and it’s my opinion that a man who goes through what he did has more right to his freedom than two beggars like you, who never done the first thing to deserve it. Mind that now, both of ye!”
The mate paused a moment, hitching up his trowsers, and rolling his tobacco from one side of his twitching mouth to the other, and then, with his face flushed, and his blue eye gleaming savagely, went on.
“What’s the first thing that brute there did to him? Kicked him, and he lyin’ half dead. Then in a day or two, when the poor devil got his tongue, he told how he’d got away, and the sort of pirate he’d got away from. God! when we all a’most blubbered like babes, what did that curse there do? Knocked the man down, and beat his head on the deck, till we felt like mutiny and murder, every man of us! And then when we’d got the poor devil below, sorter comfortable, down comes Bangham, and hauls him off to stick him into a nasty hole under hatches, and there he kep’ him the whole passage, half-starved, among the rats and cockroaches. Scarce a day of his life aboard, that he didn’t go down and kick and maul him. He couldn’t keep his hands off him—no, he couldn’t. When I took the man ashore in the dead o’ night, he was nothin’ but a bundle o’ bones and nasty rags, and he made me so sick, I couldn’t touch him. That’s the state he was in. Now, then, look here.”
The mate paused again for a moment, turning his quid, with his face working, and laying the fingers of his right hand in the palm of his left, began again in a voice gruff and grum.
“That infernal buccaneer, Bangham,” he said, “was bent on takin’ the poor devil back to Orleans, after all he’d gone through to get away. Well, he’s a brute, and we don’t expect nothin’ of brutes like him. But you’re a Boston merchant, Atkins, and callin’ yourself a Christian man, you put in your oar in this dirty business, and was goin’ to help Bangham. You thought I was goin’ to stand by and see you do it. No!” he thundered, with a tremendous slap of his right hand on the palm of his left, which made both the merchant and the captain start, “no! I wasn’t goin’ to stand by and see you do it! I’m an old sea-dog and my heart is tough and hard, but I’m damned if it’s hard enough to stand by when such a sin as that’s afoot, and never lend a hand to stop it. I took that man out of your clutches, you brace of pirates, and I set him adrift! You think I’m afraid to own it? No, I’m not, begod! I did it. Ephraim Jones is my name, and I come from Barnstable. There’s where I come from. I’m a Yankee sailor, and, so help me God, I could never see the bunting of my country flying at the truck again, if I let you two bloody Algerine thieves carry off that man to his murder. That’s all I’ve got to say. Take the law of me now, if you like. I won’t skulk. You’ll find me when you look for me. And if James Flatfoot don’t have his harpoon into both of you one of these days, then there’s no God, that’s all!”