Chapter Twenty Three. Within Hail.
“By George! is that so?” ejaculated the skipper, starting off with a mad clutch at his cap, which he had thrown off on to a locker close by in the heat of his excitement during the colonel’s yarn. “I’ll be on the bridge in a jiffey! Thank God for that news!”
“Hooray!” shouted Garry O’Neil, as we all immediately jumped from our seats on hearing this joyful intelligence, long though it had been in coming, even the poor colonel, sliding his bandaged leg off its supporting chair and standing on his feet, prepared to follow the skipper on deck without a moment’s delay. “Be the powers! I knew we’d overhaul them divvles before sundown! Faith, an’ I tould ye so, colonel; I tould ye so, you know I did!”
But just then an unexpected interruption arrested us as we all moved towards the companion-way to regain the deck above.
“Look here, colonel,” cried a voice from the skipper’s state room aft, where the commander of the Saint Pierre was supposed to be reposing in an almost insensible condition. “Get out of here! you are not worth being angry with.”
“Begorrah, it’s your poor fri’nd in there!” said Garry O’Neil to the colonel. “What’s the poor crayture parleyvooing about, instid of slaypin’ loike a Christian whin he’s got the chance? Sure, I’ll have to stop his jaundering there, or he’ll niver git betther!”
“Stay a moment; he’s beginning again, poor fellow,” remarked the colonel, holding up his hand.
“Listen!”
“You villains! take that!” called out the Frenchman in a louder key and in a tone of anger, as if battling with the blacks on board the Saint Pierre over again; and then, after a pause we heard a piteous cry. “My God! they are going to shoot me! Look! Look! To the rescue, colonel, quickly, quickly, to the rescue.”
“Bedad, he’s in a bad way entoirely!” said Garry, as he and the colonel, with myself at their heels, entered the after cabin, where we saw Captain Alphonse sitting up in the skipper’s cot and gesticulating frantically. “What can he be after sayin’ now, sor?”
“He is going over the boat scene on the poop of our unfortunate vessel, when the Haytian blacks, as I told you, made at him and the other sailor before I rushed up from below, too late to save him, poor fellow!” explained the colonel. “He’s calling out for help, as I suppose he did then, though I didn’t hear him!”
“It sounds moighty queer, anyhow,” continued the Irishman. “Whisht! There, he’s at it again! What does that extraordinary lingo mean now? I can’t make h’id nor tale of it, sor!”
“Hoist the flag immediately! Close furl the main topsail!” exclaimed the poor wounded man in short jerky sentences, as he sat up there in the swinging cot, with his hands tearing at the bandage that was bound round his head, looking as if he had just risen from the dead, and reminding me of a picture I once saw depicting the raising of Lazarus. His eyes were rolling, too, in wild delirium, and after gazing at us fixedly for a second or two without a sign of recognition on his pallid face, he fell back prostrate again on the mattress, crying out in a pitiful wail, “Alas, for the ship! Too late, too late, too late.”
“Heavens!” said the colonel, turning to Garry. “Can’t you do anything for him?”
“I’ll put somethin’ coolin’ on the dressin’, an’ that’ll make the poor chap’s h’id aisier,” replied the other, suiting the action to the word. “Ice, sure, ’ud be betther; but, faith, there isn’t a morsel aboard!”
Whatever he did apply, however, had a quieting influence, and presently, after tossing from side to side convulsively, Captain Alphonse closed his great staring eyes and began to snore stertorously.
“Heaven be praised!” cried Colonel Vereker. “He’s sleeping again, now!”
“Faith, an’ a good job, too, for him, poor crayture,” said Garry. “He’s in a bad way, I till you, sor! an’ he’d betther die aisy whin he’s about it, sure, than kickin’ up a row that won’t help him.”
“What!” returned the colonel. “Do you think he’s going to die?”
“Begorrah, all the docthers in the worrld wouldn’t save him!”
“My poor friend, my poor friend!” cried the colonel. “I will stay with him then, to the end, so as to soothe his last moments!”
There was evidently a struggle going on in Colonel Vereker’s mind between his desire to do his duty, as he thought, to the dying man, and his natural anxiety to be on deck participating in all the excitement of the chase after the runaway ship and the coming fight with the Haytians, when the black rascals would be called to a final account for all the misery and bloodshed they had caused.
Garry O’Neil saw this, and pooh-poohed the idea of the colonel remaining below.