palm, fifty, sixty, or maybe seventy years ago.”
“But where were you?” asked Roger.
“In the coconut tree, of course” said Peter Duck, “in the coconut tree, just waking out of my night’s sleep.”
Another idea struck Roger. “Did you snore then, too?” he asked.
“Roger,” said Susan severely.
“He does now,” said Roger. “Beautifully.”
“I reckon I didn’t then,” said Peter Duck slowly, “or they’d have heard me and buried it in some other place. And maybe they’d have buried me too,” he added after a pause.
“Who?”
“Shut up, Roger,” said Captain Flint. “You’ll hear if you keep your ears open and your mouth shut.”
“I’d better begin at the beginning,” said Peter Duck, “and tell you how it all come about. You see I’d slipped my cable out of Lowestoft, and gone to London in a coaster. And I’d run away from her at Greenhithe, and then in the docks I shipped aboard a fine vessel trading to the Brazils, shipped as cabin-boy I had, when I was no bigger than this ship’s boy that keeps wanting me to crowd on topsails before my anchor’s fair out of the ground. We’d a fair passage across the Western Ocean but it ended over soon. Struck a pampero or a Sugar Coast hurricane or one of them other big winds she did, and lost both her sticks and broke her back, and we took to the boats and she smashed one of them, and the other one, the one that I was in, didn’t last long, but a seaman in her lashed me to a spar, and the next I knew was that I was washed up, beached good and proper on a bit of an island. There was a big surf roaring along that shore, and if I’d chosen any other place I’d have had the life pounded out of me at once, but I’d had no choosing in it, being lashed to the spar and half drowned anyways, and I was washed up between some rocks into a narrow little hole of a place where the surf didn’t run though the spray was spouting over from the swell that was rolling in against the rocks outside. I never see any of the others again off that ship. The first thing I did see was crabs.”
“Big ones?” asked Roger, and Titty nudged him with her elbow.
“All sizes,” said Peter Duck, “but mostly small. And these crabs they wasn’t the sort of crabs you know. They look at me greedylike, and come on, waving them clippers of theirs and opening and shutting them. It wasn’t above a minute or so before one of them crabs was taking a hold of the calf of my leg. Well, you may lay to it, I wasted no more time than I could help in getting free from that spar, and then I fetched that crab a kick and threw a stone at the others. I got one, too, and he fell over. And his friends was on him in a minute, and their clippers clacking like a watermill, and waving over him, and then they had him to pieces and into their mouths and crunch, crunch . . . horrible sight it was . . . and them crabs looking greedy at me all the time.
“And then when I walk up that beach to have a look about me and to see if there was any others of us saved, I might have been a drum-major, the way that regiment of crabs come following after, running sideways, and lifting themselves, and clapping their clippers, and goggling at me with them eyes of theirs, set on their faces like them martello towers you see along the south coast. I hadn’t the tonnage of Roger there, and I didn’t like the look of them crabs.
“But in the end I was glad of them. I couldn’t find a thing to eat, not at first. And then, after I’d killed a few more of them crabs, I was listening to the others cracking them and crunching them, and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t have a share. So the next one of them crabs that come too close to me, I killed him with a stone and grabbed him up before them others could get at him, and pulled his clippers off, and smashed his shell with the stone, and found him pretty good eating, particularly the handle end of them clippers of his. The stuff I sucked out of them was good and tasty and there was a bit in there that was decent chewing too. I was hungry, of course, to begin, but the taste of them crabs was a long ways better than what you might think it might be. I ate three or four of them right away.
“And my eating them crabs seemed to do me a bit of good with the others, for pretty soon they’d slither away in a hurry if I stepped sharply, and I had only to pick up a stone to send them scuttling all ways at once. But the worst as you might say was to come. For them crabs that was running about in the daytime was as harmless as lambs beside them that showed up at night. Just as night come down these other crabs come up, and they was the sort that if I threw a stone at one of them he’d just think nothing of catching it in them clippers of his and heaving it back. That was the sort of crabs these was, and they seemed to think as I was just what they was wanting. They was tired of eating them small crabs and I reckon they think I was something new, with a softer kind of shell.
“I legged it just in time, and the biggest of them had a clipper full of the starn of my breeches and I hope it choked him. Them breeches was no good after, no protection at all. But, as I was saying, I legged it, and swarmed up one of them young coconut palms as was growing along that shore a bit above high-water mark. And up in the top of that tree there was some young coconuts, and I cut a hole in one with my knife, and the milk came trickling out, and I found just a little meat in it too. And I slept up in the tree all that night and come down in the morning and took it out of them smaller crabs, and did well enough what with them and the coconuts. But when night come there was them bigger crabs again, and I knew enough now not to let one get a hold of me. I was shinning up that tree with time and to spare.
“And so it went on, day after day and night after night, and I got into a regular way of living, always shinning up that tree at fall of night and coming down again when I felt hungry and the sun was up. It was a lazy kind of life, and the winds used to rock them coconut palms. It was like sleeping in a cradle, or a hammock, an easy kind of motion. It wasn’t no kind of blame to me that I come to sleep long hours. There wasn’t no bells striking, and there wasn’t no bosun after me with a rope’s end. It all come as a kind of a holiday. And then one day when I’d slept maybe longer than usual, I waked up in a hurry with the sound of folk talking under my tree.”
“Who was it?” asked Titty breathlessly, and Roger might have nudged her with his elbow, but he didn’t think of it.
“Lucky for me I looked to see before shouting out,” said Peter Duck. “I looked down through them palm leaves, and there was two men at the foot of my tree, digging a hole in the ground with a long knife.”
“Pirates?” said Titty.
“They looked all that to me,” said Peter Duck. “And they sounded all that, the way they was talking. One of them was crouching and digging, while t’other one of them was looking round. And then that one would dig away and the one that had been digging before would stretch his arms and take a turn at looking round.
“ ‘I’d be sorry for the one that sees us at this,’ says one of them.
“ ‘There’s not one will have thought of following us, not with that keg I let them take ashore,’ says the other.
“No boy gets brought up at a rope’s end, as you might say, without knowing when to keep his mouth shut, and I see quick enough this was no time for talking. So I kept still up there among the leaves at the top of that palm and looking down on them and watching what they was doing. Pretty soon one says he reckons the hole’s deep enough, and the other one says there’s none likely to come seeking for it on this side of the island where there’s no shelter for ships. ‘And it isn’t as if we was going to leave it for long,’ says the other. And with that they takes a sort of a square bag they had from right under the tree where I hadn’t seed it before . . . Square all ways that bag was . . .”
“Couldn’t
