The Scotch corporal civilly complied; and after a little, we saw him split up a block of wood where the carpenter had been at work in the bows of the felucca, and presently he returned with a bundle of them, which Serjeant Quacco busily employed himself in poking into the fire, blowing lustily with his blubber lips all the while. When Lennox turned away, I could not help noticing, that he stuck his tongue in his cheek, and winked to one of the crew as he went below.
Presently Lanyard desired the boatswain to pipe to dinner. In place of bundling down below, according to the etiquette of the service in larger vessels, he winked, I saw, at the poor fellows breaking away forward into messes, which they contrived to screen from the view of the quarterdeck, by slewing the long yard nearly athwart ships, and loosing the sail as if to dry.
Notwithstanding all this, we could easily see what was going on forward. Close to, sat the old cook himself, with Shavings the carpenter, and Wadding the gunner, warrant officers in a small way, with a little snipe of a boy waiting on them.
About a fathom from them, there was another group squatted on the deck, consisting of Corporal Lennox, old Clinker the master at arms, Dogvane the quartermaster, and no smaller a personage than Serjeant Quacco.
The food was peas-soup, and salt junk and biscuit. The hands, as we turned and returned, seemed exceedingly comfortable and happy; when all at once, the old cook pressed his hands on the pit of his stomach, and began to make a variety of rather odd grimaces. Dogvane looked in his face, and instantly seemed to catch the infection; so he next began to screw himself up into a variety of indescribable contortions. Serjeant Quacco looked first at one, and then at another, as they groaned in any thing but a melodious concert, until he too, through sympathy, or in reality from pain, began also to twist himself about, and to make such hideous faces, that to have trusted him near a respectable pig in the family way, would have been as much as the nine farrow were worth.
At length the contagion became general apparently, and Corporal Lennox began to groan and wince, as he ejaculated, "Oh dear, what can this be! what an awful pain in my stomach! Why, Mr. Drainings, what have you clapt into that peas-soup? Something bye common you must have put into it, for we are all dying here with"——
"My eye!" said old Drainings, speaking slowly and deliberately, as if the paroxysm had subsided, and some strange light had suddenly flashed on him, "you are quite right, Lennox. That same peas-soup is none of the right sort—that is clear now. I have just been telling Mr. Wadding that a wery-most-remarkable circumstance took place in the boiling on't."
Here the old fellow, who had just finished his peas-soup, very solemnly looked upwards, and wiped his muzzle with what hovered between a pocket-handkerchief and a dishclout, of any colour but that of unsunned snow.
"Why," continued the cook, "just when it began to simmer about the edges of the boiler——Ah—ah—oh—there it is again—there it is again," and once more he began to tumble about on the deck, giving friend Quacco several miscellaneous kicks and punches during his make-believe involuntary convulsions. This fit seemed also to pass over.
"Why," said he, "just when the soup began to simmer about the edges of the copper, and thin streaks of white froth began to shoot inwards towards the middle, where the hot soup was whirling round in a bubbling eddy, and poppling up for all the world like the sea on the bar there, I saw—I saw"——Here he looked unutterable things with his one eye, turning it up like a duck in thunder.
"What did you see?" said old Clinker, staring in his face with sham earnestness.
"I saw—so sure as I see Mr. Weevil the purser's d—d ugly mug aft on the quarterdeck there—a small devil rise out of the boiling peas-soup in the very middle of the copper, and fly up and away over the truck like a shot—whipping the vane at the mast-head off its spindle with the bight of his tail.
"No! did you though?" said several voices.
"To be sure I did," rejoined Drainings, "as distinctly as I now see my thumb—none of the cleanest, by the way."
"The devil?" said Lennox, starting up; "what was it like, Mr. Drainings?"
"Why, as like the little heathen god brought on board by Quacco there, as you can fancy any thing."
"Oh—oh—oh," again resounded from all hands.
"But it could not be he," at length struck in the black serjeant. "It could not be he, seeing he is safe stow below de heel of de bowsprit dere."
"Heaven grant it may be so," whined Dogvane.
"If it really be as Quacco says," said Wadding, in a sympathizing tone, "why, then, I will believe it is all fancy—all a barn."
Here the black serjeant, in great tribulation, rose to go forward, evidently with a desire to reconnoitre whether the graven image was really there in the body or no. After a long search, he came back and sat down, blank and stupified, on the spot where he had risen from.
"And pray, Mr. Drainings, when did you see this curious appearance?" persisted Lennox.
"At the wery instant of time," drawled Cookey, with his arms crossed, and his hands stuck into the open bosom of his greasy shirt, that had once been red flannel, and with a short black stump of a pipe in his mouth, from which he puffed out a cloud between every word, "at the wery instant of time, by the glass, that Serjeant Quacco there mended the fire."
"Oh—oh—oh!"—Here all hands of the rogues who were in the secret, began again to roll about and grimace, as if a travelling menagerie of baboons had suddenly burst, and capsized its inmates all about. Quacco all this while was twisting and turning himself, and, although evidently in a deuced quandary, trying to laugh the affair off as a joke.
"Well," at length said he, "I don't believe in fetish—now dat I is among whiteman Christian. So I will tank you, Massa Draining, to hand me over my chocolate."
But I noticed that the devil a drop would he take into his mouth, although he made believe to drink it. The jest went on—at length there was a calm, when who should again break ground but Serjeant Quacco—who made a last attempt to laugh off the whole affair.
"But where de debil can he be?" said he, almost involuntarily—"gone, sure enough."
"Oh—oh—oh—" sung out all hands once more, with their fists stuck into their midriffs.
"Oh, that vile fetish," screamed Lennox; "we must all be bewitched—Quacco, we are all bewitched.'"
"Bewitch!" responded the black Serjeant, jumping off the deck, and now at his wit's end; "and I believe it is so. I hab pain in my tomak too—just dis moment—oh, wery sharp!"
"Confound your fetish," groaned the old cook; "it was just as you stuck those chips of cedarwood into the fire—precisely at the wery moment I snuffed the delicious smell of them, that I saw the devil himself first put his ugly fiz up in the middle of the peas-soup, and gibber, and twinkle his eyes, and say"——
"Say!" shouted Lennox—"why did he really and truly speak, Mr. Drainings?"
"Speak!" responded he of the slush bucket—"speak! ay, as plain as I do now."
"And what said he?" quoth Dogvane.
"Why, just as he shook off the spray from the barb at the end of his tail, says he—'Damme, I'm off,' says he."
"Oh, oh, oh! I am pinned through my ground tier with a harpoon," groaned Drainings.
"Where, in the devil's name, since we have seen him, got you those cedar chips, Quacco?" yelled old Clinker.
A light seemed to break in on the poor Serjeant's bewildered mind. "Chip, chip!—where I get dem chip?" Here the poor fellow gave an idiotic laugh, as if he had been all abroad. "I get dem from Corporal Lennox, to be sure,"—and he turned his eyes with the most intense