“Ah, padrone, I cannot assist you there either; for we seamen know little of what happens outside the ship’s planks,” returned the Maltese. “It is not often, though, one goes long in these seas without meeting with a cruiser of our own country, and as for merchantmen they are thick enough; but neither one nor the other are likely to come to such out-of-the-way islands as these are.”
“When will that man have finished selling his fish there?” sang out the officer of the watch. “Manuel, there—Tell him, as soon as he’s done, to shove off. We ought not to hold any communication with the natives,” he muttered to himself, as he continued his quarter-deck walk. “These fellows are as sharp as knives, and, if we let them near us, they’ll be ferreting out something they ought not to know to a certainty.”
“Ay, ay, sir,” replied Manuel. “Come, Mister Fisherman, the officer says you must not be standing talking here all day, so I’ll wish you farewell, and a good haul the next time you let down your nets.”
“Thanks, friend, I am generally tolerably successful in that way,” answered the pretended fisherman. “Farewell, I shall come alongside again to-morrow, and I hope to find plenty of buyers. I live a little way down the coast, and shall sure to be back, so do not buy of any one else. Caralambro Boboti is my name. Don’t forget it. Farewell, again—”
Just as he was uttering these words, and making the usual salaam to the poop, or rather to the officers walking on it, his eye lighted on the countenance of a man ascending the companion-ladder which made even him for an instant turn pale. At first the idea glanced across his mind that he saw an apparition, but the shoulders and the body and legs came next, and he was soon convinced that the person before him was real flesh and blood. No less a person, indeed, than Colonel Gauntlett ascended from below closely followed by his man Mitchell, and stood on the deck of the Ione, glaring at him with a look which convinced him that he was recognised through his disguise. There was not a moment to be lost. If he remained where he stood, the probability was that he would be seized; if he exhibited any fear or hurry, it would be equivalent to condemning himself, and he and his companions would be shot without mercy, as they attempted to escape. He felt at once that his only chance depended on his own coolness so as to make the old officer fancy that he was mistaken in his identity. With the most perfect self-possession, therefore, he repeated his farewell to the Maltese, and was about deliberately to lower himself into his boat, when the colonel threw the whole ship into commotion, by exclaiming in a voice of thunder—
“That’s him!—The scoundrel—the pirate—stop him—fire at him. I’m right, Mitchell, am I not? That’s the villain who attacked the Zodiac, and carried off my poor niece?”
“Not a doubt of it your honour. It’s the thief of the world who murdered us all, and by the holy poker I’ll have him.”
As he uttered these words he sprang towards the gangway, nearly capsizing his master, and almost grasped Zappa by the croup of the neck before anybody else understood what the commotion was all about. He missed him, however, and the pirate, with a spring, which the imminence of his danger would alone have enabled him to take, leaped into his boat, and as he did so, he exclaimed to his crew, who saw that something was wrong—
“Shove off, or we are dead men!”
The pirates waited no further words to excite them to exertion, and a few strokes sent the boat clear off the brig’s side.