to light his pipe but had somehow forgotten about it.
“That’s just what it likely was,” said Peter Duck. “You could see the corners of it sticking through the canvas. Well, they took this square bag and lowered it down into their hole, and then they scraped the sand and earth in again with their knives and their hands and stamped it down and smoothed it over till they was satisfied, and with that they slapped each other on the back and went walking off again among the trees.
“I was down out of my bedroom quick enough after that. You see, it come to me clear that pirates was humans, which crabs is not, and that them two had a ship somewheres, and that maybe I’d see Lowestoft again, which I’d given up all thought of. So I went legging it away through the trees after them two. And they went clean across the island, with me not so far from them among the trees, over the shoulder of the big hill there is there, and sure enough, looking down the other side, I see a smart brig lying to her anchor. So I hurried me on down on that side of the island, and there was a boat drawn up there by a stream I’d known nothing of, me not daring to go in among the trees before. And there was a fire burning, and half a dozen men singing and laughing round a keg they had there chocked up between a couple of stones. I had sense enough to slip away through the trees till I could come at the men from along the shore, and then I set up yelling and shouting till they see me.”
“What happened then?” said Peggy.
“Shut up, you galoot,” said Nancy. “He’s just going to tell you.”
“They ask me how I come there, and I told them about the shipwreck and how I’d been eating crabs and drinking coconut milk, and one of them give me a hunk of bread and another give me the first swig of rum that ever I had in my life, which near took the skin off my gullet. ‘You’re all right now,’ says one. ‘Captain’s luck holds. You’ll be welcome. It’s as if you knowed we was short of a cabin-boy since the old man threw the last one overboard to teach him swimming one day when he was playful like.’ I can tell you I begin to think I’d have done better to stay by them crabs.
PRACTICE WITH THE HALYARDS
“But just then them other two come, the two that buried that square bag under my bedroom. That’s what I used to call that tree of mine. They was the captain and the mate. They asked me sharp enough where I’d come from, and I told them I didn’t know, but I’d been wrecked out of a London ship and wanted to get home to Lowestoft where I belonged. They took me aboard in the end. Sailing for London they was, and a rare passage they made of it. All the way home across the Western Ocean they kept me on the run fetching tots of rum for them to the state-room aft. I’ve often wondered since how we got as far as we did. And all the time while they was drinking they’d be talking one t’other and t’other back again, secret-like, about something they’d left, which I took to be that square bag. But likely it wasn’t . . .”
“It couldn’t have been anything else,” said Captain Flint.
“ ‘Let ’em lie,’ they’d say, ‘let ’em lie. And then when all’s clear, and they’ve no line on us about the ship, we’ll call for ’em and bring ’em home and sell ’em gradual, and ride in carriages we will and nod to princes when they lifts their hats to us.’ ”
“What was the name of the ship?” asked Captain Flint suddenly.
“The Mary Cahoun,” said Peter Duck. “But that wasn’t the vessel they were talking of. They’d but new got the Mary and they’d come up from round the Horn in some other ship. I knew that from their talk, for when they was meaning this other ship they’d call her ‘the old packet’ and they called the Mary by her name. And from what I heard, the captain and the mate of that other ship had died something sudden, and it’s come to me since that this precious pair I was with had taken their papers and their names at the same time. Captain Jonas Fielder they called one of them, the one that was skipper, but he’d R.C. B. tattooed on his forearm. Many’s the time I see it when he was sitting there in his shirt-sleeves lifting his glass of grog. There was something wrong most ways, it seem to me. They knew it too. The nearer we come to England the more they’d drink. They kept on lifting their glasses and swilling their grog and choking with it, and banging each other on the back as if they was afraid of something and wanted to think of something else. And then other times they would pull out a chart and look at it, and wore a hole in it they did, marking one of the islands with pencil and then rubbing the marks out. And when they’d swigged an extra lot of rum they’d just sit and wink at each other and show each other bits of paper where they’d written down some figures. And then in the morning when they was sober, more or less, they would go hunting round the cabin floor for them scraps of paper and wondering how many they’d left there, and if the crew had found them. And if they found one of them scraps of paper they’d lay into me with a rope’s end for not tidying it overboard. And if they didn’t find one they’d lay into me and say I’d picked it up for myself. Well naturally in the end I come to know those scraps of paper pretty well, and I see they all had the same figures, and I sewed up one of them in the inside of my jacket thinking whatever it was I’d paid for it in rope’s-ending anyways.”
“And those were the bearings of the island?” Captain Flint dropped another burnt but unused match on the floor and put his foot on it.
“Longitude and latitude they was. No more. Them two reckoned to find that island again, and needed no more to help them find their square bag, for they’d buried it themselves, and I dare say they’d taken all the bearings they needed. They knew those figures by heart, did them two, and before we come to the end of the voyage I knew them too, with seeing them so often. Anyhow the figures was no good to either of them chaps, for they come home with a westerly gale and full skin of rum apiece, and they piled the Mary Cahoun on Ushant rocks. There was nobody saved out of her but the bosun and me, and the bosun had his ribs stove in and his skull cracked, and he was dead when some of them French fishermen come by and take us off the rock we was on just before the tide rose high enough to sweep us off. Another ten minutes and they’d have been too late for me. They was too late for the bosun anyway.
“That’s the yarn. That’s all there was to it, and you never would have thought it’d have sent half the young lads of Lowestoft crazy when I come to tell it thirty years after, and maybe more than that.”
“But I don’t see what all this has to do with Black Jake,” said Captain Flint.
“I’m coming to that,” said Peter Duck.
CHAPTER VI
AND WINDS IT UP
THERE WAS a short breathless pause. Everybody stirred a little and looked round at the others. This story of wrecks and pirates and distant islands had taken them all a long way from the snug little deckhouse of the Wild Cat lying comfortably against the quay in Lowestoft inner harbour. Peter Duck lit his pipe, took a puff or two, and then once more rammed his thumb into the bowl.
Titty leaned forward and looked eagerly up at him.
“What happened when you got home?” she asked.
“I didn’t get home,” said Peter Duck. “Not that year nor many a year after. I worked for my keep with them French fishermen, and then one day off Ushant there was a fine clipper becalmed near where they was fishing and they rowed up to her and put me aboard in exchange for a bag of negro head . . .”
“What’s that?” asked
