And with his head bowed upon his bosom--with his manacled hands against his brow, and his heart beating loud and fast with anxiety--he offered up a silent but fervent prayer to God, to spare his beautiful Alice--to shield her from all harm--and restore her to the arms of those who loved her.
That prayer was scarcely finished when he felt a hand upon his arm, and on lifting his head, he was enabled to make out in the gloom with which he had by this time become familiar, the outlines of a human countenance.
“Hist!” whispered a low voice, “don’t speak too loud; it’s me--Stump--and this if I ain’t mistaken is Harry Marline!”
“Ay, ay, you are right!” cried the harpooner, much surprised, “but where in the name of heaven, Stump, did you come from? You were not confined here were you? I thought you were in league with the mutineers.”
“That’s the way of the world,” muttered the shipkeeper, mournfully. “Yes--yes, that’s the way with ’em all! Sarcumstances always goes against a man, hows’ever honest he may be! But I didn’t think it, Marline--no, blast me if I did--that _you_, my chum, would ever mix up my deeds with those of them infarnal scoundrels!”
“Forgive me!” exclaimed the young man, joyfully grasping the hand of his friend as tightly as his irons would admit. “I was altogether too hasty, and I’m sorry for it. But, tell me how you came here.”
“Ay, ay,” said Stump. “I’ll explain matters willingly enough, especially as it will give me a chance to curse those rascally blueskins again, and to show you as I always was for maintaining, that them creatur’s ain’t to be trusted.”
He proceeded to tell his story, commencing with those incidents with which the reader is already acquainted.
“Yes,” continued the exasperated seaman, as soon as he had described the manner in which he had been thrust into the hole, “they fastened the hatches above me, and then I heard ’em go aft, and presently the voice of Tom Lark ordering ’em to cut the cable, and loosen the topsails, broke upon my ears, so that I knowed they had set that big hang-dog rascal at liberty. Scarcely was the ship under way, when I also heard that wild fiend Driko, proposing to Lark to knock me in the head, and thus get rid of me. But Tom, you know, although he is a parfect savage when he holds a grudge against anybody, doesn’t care to shed blood when he can get along without it, and that was the reason, as I take it, that he refused to comply with the polite request of that infarnal pow-wow.”