As a matter of fact, however, there had been a very considerable slip-up in "Slant's" carefully doped slate. That was plain from a number of little things which sunk into even my absinthe-addled brain in the few minutes I spent in his and Rona's company while paddling them off to the _Cora_. How staggering a slip-up it must have been for him I was not able to figure until I got my nerves under control the following day.
I was still far from pulled together when I came back to the village after my day of hiding (for that's what it amounted to) on the other side of the island. With my head twanging like an overstrung banjo, I was feverishly anxious to get home and seek relief in the only thing I knew would relax the tension of my breaking nerves. I had told Laku to "putem littl' fella pickaninny in rock-a-bye belonga him" just as soon as he got back to the shack. This was a long-standing joke between us, and I knew that he would interpret aright this _bêche-de-mer_ order to "put the baby in its cradle" as a strict injunction to lay a certain long green bottle in a little basket of porous coco husk, which, dampened and hung in a draught, answered the purpose of a crude refrigerator. The vision of the slender green trickle I should shortly pour from the dewy fresh lip of that bottle was drawing me on as the thought of the oasis with its fountain draws the thirsting desert traveller.
Between horrors fancied and real--from my struggle at the mouth of the Bottomless Pit to the coming of the Ship of Death--my nerves had suffered a number of trying shocks since the dawning of that accursed day; but the one that came nearest to bowling me over I had still to receive. I had _known_ there was a Bottomless Pit; I had _known_ there was a Death Ship; I had _known_ they were shooting niggers on the beach. As each of these horrors was projected upon my vision in turn I had accepted their reality as a matter of course. Didn't I see them with my own eyes? Didn't I continue to see them after I had bitten my finger? But _Rona, with her arm and her peacock shawl thrown over "Slant" Allen's shoulder, coming out of Bell's house_.... No, that wouldn't do.... That was one thing they couldn't put over on me. My eyes must be playing tricks on my brain. I must be in even worse shape than I thought. Never before had my fancy conjured up a thing so utterly, impossibly absurd. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, I pulled up and started kicking the shin of one foot with the toe of the other. That was another little trick I had of proving whether or not I saw what I "saw."