Page:The land of enchantment (1907, Cassell).djvu/110

 hand and foot, and gagged, and was lashed to a couple of planks which was white with a red stripe. He was that pale about the gills that we thought at first he had hopped the twig. Howsomever, we hung him up by the heels, whereby the water he’d shipped ran out of him; and brandy and rubbing did the rest. He was as weak as a church rat, but managed to whisper the word ‘Pirates!’ I looks at the skipper and him at me. Says the skipper, ‘Was the pirate vessel a schooner with a milk-white hull and a red stripe?’ The Mossoo feebly nodded. ‘Shiver my timbers!’ says the captain, ‘but we’ve been nicely tricked. ‘Bout ship!’ says he. ‘Set every stitch of canvas, raise every ha’porth of steam. A fippund note to the mariner what first sights that there furrin barque!’”

“But, Ben,” said puzzled Charlie, “‘you don’t mean to say that the foreign barque was really the pirate schooner?”

“Not exactly, Master Charles; ‘twas in this way, as the skipper guessed, and as we found out for certain afterwards; the Frenchy was a-sailing along one night when every soul aboard was a-roosting under hatches without a thought of guile, the mariner at the ’el-em and the look-out forrud being the only men on deck. Behold you, all of a sudden the pirate schooner ranges up alongside, throws out grappling-irons, and then the rascals swarmed aboard; and it’s all U.P. with the unfortunate Mossoos. They were made to walk the plank, every mother’s son.”

“What do you mean by that?”’ asked Charlie.

“Why,” said Ben, “a plank was put out from the vessel, and then each Mossoo, being blindfolded, was invited to take a walk along it. As the walk ended in the ocean, there was an end of the unfortunate Frenchies. As for the captain, he was bound hand and foot, tied to a piece of the pirate ship, and chucked into the sea, there to die a sure but lingering death, if it hadn’t a-been that we come along, and rescued him from a watery grave just in the nick of time. The barque being a much better craft than the schooner, the pirates shipped aboard her the best of their own cargo, not forgetting, of course, the guns and powder, and finished by blowing{up their own vessel, so as it could tell no tales. I give you my word, Master Charles, we might easily have sailed a wild-goose chase till doomsday in search of the schooner with the milk-white hull and red stripe, and then not found her, she being all the time at the bottom of the briny!

“Next morning, directly we clap our eyes on the horizon, there