Chapter Thirteen.
Our Prisoner.
We kept a strict watch over our wretched prisoner. For his own sake I did not wish him to escape, and, far from having an intention of delivering him up to justice, my earnest desire was to try and reclaim him. I think that, under the circumstances, I should have acted as I did had he been an indifferent person; but I felt sure, from the peculiarity of his features, that he was the youngest son of my kind old patron and friend, Mr Wells. Often in his childhood had he sat on my knee when I came home from sea, and often he had listened attentively to the accounts of my adventures. He was a pretty, interesting little fellow. As he grew up he altered very much; became disobedient to his parents, and ultimately growing wilder and wilder, went, as the expression is, to the bad. For some years I had not even heard of him.
Worn out with fatigue, our prisoner slept on till after the sun was up, and we were busy in marking out the ground for our slate hut, and making preparations for cutting down the nearest trees with which to build it. More than once I looked at his countenance while he slept, and called my wife to look at him. We were both convinced that my surmise was correct.
On awaking at last he gazed round with an astonished, puzzled look, and sighed deeply. I happened to be near, and went up to him.
“Arthur!” I said, gently, “what brought you here?”
“What!—Who are you?—How do you know me?” he exclaimed, springing to his feet. “I’ll answer you though—my own folly and vice and sin. I am in your power. I did not wish to take your life, but I hoped to get your gun and then to force you to give me and my mates food—that was all. You may, however, take me into camp and deliver me up to the governor and his men; if they hang me at once I shall be grateful to you, for I am weary of this life. I am a mere slave to my mates; they would murder me in an instant if I should become burdensome to them; and, bad as I am, they are so much worse that I can even now have no fellowship with them.”
Thus the unhappy man ran on, eagerly discharging, as it were, at once his long pent-up feelings and thoughts. For weeks and months he had been wandering about, nearly starved, and ill-treated and despised by his companions in crime. And this man had been in the rank of a gentleman, and had been educated as one, and had once felt as one! I know to a certainty that there are numbers of such wandering about the world, and others who have died miserably,—outcasts from their friends and, more terrible fate, from their God,—who little thought when they made their first downward step in the path of sin to what a fearful termination it was leading them.
I let our unhappy prisoner grow calm before I again spoke to him.