For short moments the delirium must have left me. Once I opened my eyes, and knew that the sun shone upon me, and that the breeze which cooled my forehead blew from the sea; but my fatigue was so great that I fell asleep in the next instant, and enjoyed pure rest during many hours. When I regained consciousness for the second time, it was because rain beat upon my face, a drizzling warm rain of late summer, and there was spray from a fresh sea. For some minutes I set myself to ask where I was; but I knew that I was bound at the left hand and at my feet, and, to my unutterable astonishment, when I raised my head, I saw that I lay in an open boat which was moving very slowly, but my feet were towards the stern of it, and, as my head lay below the level of the gunwale, I could see nothing of the power which moved the boat or of the scene about us.
It was a long time before my throbbing head let me put together a chain of thought to account for my position. The scene at the drinking den would not at first come back to me, think as I would; but when it did, the clue which was lacking came with it. There could be no doubt that I had walked into a trap, and that the hag who had struck me had been in the pay of Paolo and his crew. These men must have taken me as I lay, and so brought me to this boat; but what time had intervened, or where I was, I knew no better than the dead. Only this was sure, that I was in the hands of one of the greatest scoundrels living, and that, if his past were any precedent, my hours of life would be few.
I cannot tell you why it was, but, strange to say, this reflection did not give me very great alarm at the moment. Perhaps I suffered too much from bodily weakness, and would have welcomed any release, even death; perhaps I was buoyed up with that eternal hope which bears its most generous blossom in the springtime of life. In either case, I put away the thought of danger, and set to the task of conning my position a little more closely. The boat in which I lay was painted white, and was of elegant build. She had all the fine lines of a yacht's jolly-boat; and when I raised my head I could see that her fittings had been put in only at great expense. She was not a large boat, but the centre seat had been removed from her to let me lie on a tarpaulin which covered her keel, and the stern seat had been used to bind my feet. A second tarpaulin, folded twice, had been propped under my head, but my left hand was bound close to the boat thwart, and there was a rope doubled round my right forearm so that I could not raise myself an inch, though my right hand was free. The meaning of this apparent neglect I soon learnt. There was a flask on the edge of the tarpaulin which supported my head, and by it half a dozen rather fine captain's biscuits. I had a prodigious thirst on me, and I drank from the flask; but found it to contain weak brandy, and would willingly have exchanged thrice its contents for a long draught of pure water. But the biscuits I could not touch; and I began to be chilled with the rain which fell copiously, and with the sea which sent spray in fountains upon my body.
Up to this time, I had heard no sound of human voices, but the silence was broken at last by a shout, and the boat ceased to move.
"All hands, make sail!" cried someone, apparently above me; and after that I heard the "yo-heave" of the men hauling, as I judged, at a main-sail. The second order, "Sheets home!" proved to me that I was behind a sailing ship, perhaps a yacht which these men had secured, as they got La France—and burnt her. I shuddered at the second thought, and my head began to burn again despite the wet. Did they mean to leave me there until the end of it, when the cold and my wound should do their work? Had they forgotten me? Had they any reason for keeping me alive? My questions were in part answered by a sudden shout from the deck of the ship.
"Ho, Bill, is the young un gone?"
"No, my hearty, he's gone about!"
"Getting his spirits damped, I reckon."
"Some, you bet."
And then I heard a voice I knew, the voice of the Irishman, "Four-Eyes."
"Is it the boi ye're mindin', bedad?"
"Ay, sir, he's moved a point."
"The poor divil. Throw him a sheet, one av yer; it's meself that's not bringing the guv'ner a dead body when he wants a live one, be Saint Pathrick!"
They tried to throw me a sheet as the man had ordered, but we had begun to move rapidly again, and I heard it fall in the water by my head. Though there was more hailing, the thud of the choppy sea against the boat forbade any more hearing, and the sheet never reached me. Yet the men had told me something with their words, and I pondered long on the remark of the Irishman, that the "guv'ner" wanted me alive. It explained much; and it put beyond doubt the reason why I had not been killed in the drinking den. It was quite clear that my life was safe from these men until they reached their chief; but where he was I had no notion, except he were on the nameless ship; and, if that were so, to the nameless ship I was going—that ship of horror and of mystery. Nor could I remember anything in what I knew of Captain Black to lead me to the hope that such a voyage was other than one to death, and perhaps to that which might be worse than death itself.
When this strange procession had lasted about an hour, the rain ceased and the sun shone again with renewed power, drying my clothes upon me and giving me prodigious thirst. I struggled to reach the flask, and in doing so I found that the ropes binding my right arm were tied with common hitches, such as any sailor could force; and my experience as a yachtsman let me get free of them with very little trouble. I did not sit up at once, for I feared to be seen from the decks; but I turned my head to look at the boat which towed me, and saw that she was a barque-rigged yacht after the American fashion; her name Labrador being conspicuous across her stern. My boat, which was no larger than I had thought, was towed by a double hawser; but no man watched me from the poop, and I lay down again reassured. The hope of escape was already in my head, for I judged that we could not be far out from New York, although no land was visible on the horizon. It occurred to me that if they would only let me be until night I could get my left hand and my feet free; and, as the hawser was passed through a ring at the bow, I needed but a knife to complete the business. But I had no knife, for a search in my pockets proved that I had been relieved of all my valuables and trifles; and I knew that another way must be found, and that ingenuity alone would help me. So I sat thinking; and all the long afternoon—I knew it was afternoon, as I saw the sun sinking in the horizon and heard the bells, moreover—I examined such devices as came to me, only to reject them and to seek for others.
Towards the second bell in the second "dog" there was a change in the monotony of the scene. I heard an order to heave the barque to, and presently I made haste to put the ropes back in their places and to await the happening. I felt all motion cease, and then someone hauling at the hawser, so that the jolly-boat was pulled against the side of the bigger ship; and, looking up, I saw half-a-dozen of Black's gang watching me from the quarter-deck. Then a ladder was put over the bulwark, and Four-Eyes himself cried out not in an unkindly tone—
"Gi-me the soop, bhoys, and let's get it in him; begorra, the divil 'll have him afore the skipper if it's no mate you're givin' him!"
He came down the ladder with a great can of steaming stuff; and the sea having fallen away with the sun to a dead calm, he stepped off the ladder to the stern seat, and then bent over me. But I saw this only, that he had a knife in his belt; and I made up my mind in a moment to get it from him.
"The young 'un from Paris," he cried, as he took a long look at me, "and near to axin' for a priest, by the houly saints; but I was tellin' ye to stop where ye was, and it's no thanks ye were giving me. Bedad, and a pretty place ye're going to, sorr, at your own wish—the divil knows what's the end av it—but sup a bit, for it's fastin' ye are by the luk av ye, and long gone at that!"