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Updated: June 27, 2025
"Sir John has gone north again, you say, and will be expecting us off the island? There's naught to prevent our starting this evening?" "Nothing at all," agreed Captain Pomery, to whom by a glance he had appealed. "Leastways and supposing I can get my hawsers out of curl-papers." "That suits you, Prosper?" asked my uncle.
"To be sure I did. She can work round to Ajaccio and repair. She will arrive evidently from the verge of total wreck, an ordinary trader in ballast, with nothing suspicious about her. No questions will be asked that Pomery cannot invent an answer for off-hand. She will be allowed to repair, refit, and sail for reinforcements." "Reinforcements? But where will you find reinforcements?"
"That's true," said he; "I have been congratulating myself too soon. Billy, in the absence of Captain Pomery I appoint you skipper. You have an ugly job to face, but do your best." "Skipper, be I? Then right you are!" answered Billy, with a cheerful smile. "An' the first order is for you and Master Prosper here to tumble below an' heft ballast for your lives. Be the two specimens safe?" "Eh?"
"I don't know how much of it'll ever arrive at this rate," confessed the seaman, dropping the handful of flints and scratching his head. "Tis buying speed at a terrible cost of jettison. But Cap'n Pomery's last order to me was to make haste about it, if we're to catch to-morrow's tide." "Captain Pomery sent you for these stones?"
Well, it seems to me we are more likely to clear up the mystery by sitting still than by beating the woods. Do you agree?" "To be sure," said I, "we may spare ourselves the trouble of searching for it." "I propose then, as our first move, that we step down to the ship together and pack Captain Pomery off to Ajaccio with his orders " "Excuse me, sir," I interrupted.
A fourth, with a long knife clenched between his teeth, stood steadying himself by the main rigging in the act to leap; and in the act of turning I saw Captain Pomery chop at his ankles with a cutlass and bring him down. We made a rush on the others.
We fell to discussing our best way to approach it; my father at first maintaining that the coast would be watched by Genoese vessels, and therefore we should do wisely to take down sail and wait for darkness. Against this, Captain Pomery maintained That we were carrying a fair wind, and the Lord knew how long that would hold.
"Why, Worthyvale, what's the matter?" asked my father, soothingly. "My l'il heap o' stones, Sir John; my poor l'il heap o' stones! What's to become o' me, master? Where will your kindness find a bellyful for me, if these murderin' seamen take away my l'il heap o' stones?" My father laid a hand on the old man's shoulder. "Captain Pomery wants them for ballast, Worthyvale. You understand?
Fett in a hand-cart, we trundled them down to the shore and lifted them aboard. They resisted not, nor stirred. By three o'clock our dispositions were made and Captain Pomery professed himself ready to cast off. I returned to the house for the last time, to awake and fetch Nat Fiennes. As I crossed the wet sward the day broke and a lark sprang from the bracken and soared above me singing.
Whistletrigger turns up his patrician nose at all "pessimists" and broadly intimates that the man who hasn't a new silk cady, seventeen pair o' tailor-made "pants," a silken nightshirt and sufficient provender in his pantry to run a Methodist camp-meeting for a month, would starve to death in a Paradise whose springs run Pomery Sec, and whose trees grew pumpkin pies, hot weinerwurst and pate de foie gras.
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