Page:Paine--Lost ships and lonely seas.djvu/173

Rh who gave them no more water and food than would barely keep soul and body together.

The Arabs traveled in haste to reach the wreck of the Oswego as a rare prize to be gutted. When they arrived on the scene, another desert clan, two hundred and fifty strong, had already swooped down and was in possession. There was much yelling and fighting and bloodshed before a truce was declared and the spoils were divided. Meanwhile Captain Paddock found opportunity to talk with the mate of the Oswego and the band of sailors who had returned to the wreck just in time to be made miserable captives. Presently Captain Paddock was dragged away from them. This was, indeed, a last farewell for of this larger party of American castaways only one was ever heard of again.

Flogged and starved and daily threatened with death, Captain Judah Paddock, Irish Pat, and the two black seamen were carried into the desert until their captors came to a wandering community of a thousand Bedouins, with their skin tents and camels and sheep and donkeys. Amid the infernal clamor the Americans heard a voice calling loudly in English:

"Where are they? Where are they? Where are the four sailors?" And then, as Captain Paddock tells it,