" For
the sake of appearances, Hardenberg and Strokher blustered and fumed,
but I could hear the crack in Strokher's voice as plain as in a broken
ship's bell. I was not surprised at what happened later in the day, when
he told the others that he was a very sick man. A congenital stomach
trouble, it seemed--or was it liver complaint--had found him out again.
He had contracted it when a lad at Trincomalee, diving for pearls; it
was acutely painful, it appeared. Why, gentlemen, even at that very
moment, as he stood there talking--Hi, yi! O Lord !--talking, it was
a-griping of him something uncommon, so it was. And no, it was no manner
of use for him to think of going on this voyage; sorry he was, too, for
he'd made up his mind, so he had, to find out just what was wrong with
the foremast, etc.
And thereupon Hardenberg swore a great oath and threw down the capstan
bar he held in his hand.
"Well, then," he cried wrathfully, "we might as well chuck up the whole
business. No use going to sea with a sick man and a scared man."
"An' there's the first word o' sense," cried Ally Bazan, "I've heard
this long day. 'Scared,' he says; aye, right ye are, me bully."
"It's Cy Rider's fault," the three declared after a two-hours' talk. "No
business giving us a schooner with a ghost aboard. Scoovy or no scoovy,
island or no island, guano or no guano, we don't go to sea in the
haunted hooker called the _Idaho Lass_.
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