the evening of which we write he had beguiled some time with Carteret, when a slight sound was heard outside the cavern.
Starting up with the nervous susceptibility induced by a guilty conscience, he seized his musket and cocked it. As quickly he set it down again, and smiled at his weakness. Next moment he heard a voice shouting. It drew nearer.
“Hallo, sir! Mr Christian!” cried John Adams, stooping down at the entrance.
“Come down, Adams, come down; there’s no occasion to keep shouting up there.”
“True, sir; but do you come up. You’re wanted immediately.”
There was something in the man’s voice which alarmed Christian. Grasping his musket, he sprang up the ladder and stood beside his comrade.
“Well?”
“It’s—it’s all right, sir,” said Adams, panting with his exertions in climbing the hill; “it’s—it’s a boy!”
Without a word of reply Christian shouldered his weapon, and hurried down the mountain-side in the direction of home.
Chapter Nine
Sally’s Chief Joys—Dark Clouds Overspread the Pitcairn Sky, and Darker Deeds are done
Just before John Adams left the settlement for the purpose of calling Christian, whose retreat at the mountain-top was by that time well-known to every one, little Sally had gone, as was her wont, to enjoy herself in her favourite playground. This was a spot close to the house of Edward Young, where the débris of material saved from the Bounty had been deposited. It formed a bristling pile of masts, spars, planks, cross-trees, oars, anchors, nails, copper-bolts, sails, and cordage.
No material compound could have been more dangerous to childhood, and nothing conceivable more attractive to Sally. The way in which that pretty little nude infant disported herself on that pile was absolutely tremendous. She sprang over things as if she had been made expressly to fly. She tumbled off things as if she had been created to fall. She insinuated herself among anchor-flukes and chains as if she had been born an eel. She rolled out from among the folds of sails as if she were a live dumpling. She seemed to dance upon upturned nails, and to spike herself on bristling bolts; but she never hurt herself,—at least if she did she never cried, except in exuberant glee.
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