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Now a great whale swam calmly past the Sea Spell, nosing in toward the land, probably following some school of tiny fish upon which he was feeding. "Wisht I had a crew of bully boys to go after that critter," sighed Captain Tugg, behind his long cheroot. "He'll make more'n a bucket o' ile, you bet!" "You wouldn't want to litter up your tidy schooner with grease, sir," said I, in wonder.
"The porpoises have got at it," I suggested. "Not much they ain't," returned Captain Tugg. "There ain't no porpoises around today. Whatever the critter is that killed the whale, it's at dinner now." And it was true.
Or, at least knows something about him," I added, as I remembered how very little Tom Anderly really knew about the man who had been picked up in the fog off Bolderhead Neck. "I'd like to see that feller," said Tugg. "And I'd like mightily to see your Professor," said I. Tugg looked at me thoughtfully. "Got a job?" he asked. "I'm not sure that I shall wait for the Scarboro," I replied.
To be adventuring about the world "on the loose" as old Tom Anderly called it, had seemed a mighty fine thing. But just at that moment, with the schooner shaking on the shoal, the fires flaring on the beach, and the savages dancing and yelling at us, I would have given a good deal to have been where I could call a policeman! But Adoniram Tugg showed no particular fear.
"Mebbe not; mebbe not. But money's good wherever you find it, and that critter is wuth two or three thousand dollars. By the e-tar-nal snakes!" he added, using his favorite expletive, "I'd love to stick an iron in that carcass." I knew that Adoniram Tugg had been almost everything in the line of sea-going and was not surprised to find that he had driven the iron into many a whale.
We found a place where a huge fire had been built beneath the trees. There was a green liana hanging from a high limb and the end of the liana had been tied around the ankles of a man. The feet shod in American made boots were all of that victim of the savages' cruelty which had not been burned to ashes. "It's a way they have," whispered Tugg.
Matias, San Josefpen, Por Malaspina, Santa Cruz, and clear around to the Pacific seaports of Chili this coastwise trade, I say, is almost like the trade along our Atlantic seaboard. Inland, Tugg told me, there were vast pampasses empty of all but cattle and wild beasts and some tribes of wild men; but a strip of the seacoast south of the mouth of the Silver River is being rapidly developed.
Goin' to be mighty lonesome, too, without the Professor," he added, shaking his head, sorrowfully. Tugg was a money-lover; but I know that he didn't hold the loss of his animals and outfit as anything to be compared to the miserable end of his partner. I liked him for that. I can't say that I enjoyed that canoe trip to the Straits.
Most fellows meeting that sort o' way," continued Captain Tugg, puffing reflectively, "would git chummy. The Professor's never told me a thing about himself. As fur as I know he was born full growed, right there on the rocks where my shanty's built, and ain't got kith nor kin fam'bly or enemy just as lonely as Adam was in Eden before the trouble began!
"They start the poor feller swinging like a pendulum, and every time he swings through the flames he's burned a little more and a little more " I turned sick with the horror of it. There was nothing more to do. Tugg recognized his partner's boots. The savages had made their raid, burned the camp, destroyed all they could, and done their best to wreck the Sea Spell.
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