Chapter 30 - Page 2

the officers would give him
leave to steal even so good a thing as a spare Bible."

"You may say all that, and then make but a short yarn of the truth,"
returned the messmate who walked by his side: "if there had been such a
thing as a ready-made prayer handy, they would have choused a poor
fellow out of the use of it.--I say, Ben, I'll tell ye what; it's my
opinion that if a chap is to turn soldier and carry a musket, he should
have soldier's play, and leave to plunder a little--now the devil a
thing have I laid my hands on to-night, except this firelock and my
cutlash--unless you can call this bit of a table-cloth something of a
windfall."

"Ay! you have fallen in there with a fresh bolt of duck, I see!" said
the other, in manifest admiration of the texture of his companion's
prize--"why, it would spread as broad a clew as our mizzen-royal, if it
was loosened! Well, your luck hasn't been every man's luck--for my part,
I think this here hat was made for some fellow's great toe: I've rigged
it on my head both fore and aft, and athwart-ships; but curse the inch
can I drive it down--I say, Sam! you'll give us a shirt off that table-
cloth?"

"Ay, ay, you can have one corner of it; or for that matter, ye can take
the full half, Nick; but I don't see that we go off to the ship any
richer than we landed, unless you may muster she-cattle among your
prize-money."

"No richer!" interrupted a waggish young sailor, who had been hitherto a
silent listener to the conversation between his older and more
calculating shipmates; "I think we are set up for a cruise in them seas
where the day watches last six months; don't you see we have caught a
double allowance of midnight!"

While speaking, he laid his hands on the bare and woolly heads of
Colonel Howard's two black slaves, who were moving near him, both
occupied in mournful forebodings on the results that were to flow from
this unexpected loss of their liberty. "Slew your faces this way,
gentlemen," he added; "there; don't you think that a sight to put out
the binnacle lamps? there's darkness visible for ye!"

"Let the niggers alone," grumbled one of the more aged speakers; "what
are ye skylarking with the like of them for? The next thing they'll sing
out, and then you'll hear one of the officers in your wake. For my part,
Nick, I can't see why it is that we keep dodging along shore here, with
less than ten fathoms under us, when, by stretching into the broad
Atlantic, we might fall in with a Jamaicaman every day or two, and have
sugar hogsheads and rum puncheons as plenty aboard us as hard fare is
now."

"It is all