to find you trader; we t'ought you be pirate. You very like one 'bout the masts."
What conversation the captain had with this man I never heard, but he came on deck again in a quarter of an hour, and, shaking hands cordially with the missionary, ordered us into our boat and returned to the schooner, which was immediately put before the wind. In a few minutes the Olive Branch was left far behind us.
That afternoon, as I was down below at dinner, I heard the men talking about this curious ship.
"I wonder," said one, "why our captain looked so sweet on yon swallow-tailed supercargo o' pigs and Gospels. If it had been an ordinary trader, now, he would have taken as many o' the pigs as he required and sent the ship with all on board to the bottom."
"Why, Dick, you must be new to these seas if you don't know that," cried another. "The captain cares as much for the gospel as you do (an' that's precious little), but he knows, and everybody knows, that the only place among the southern islands where a ship can put in and get what she wants in comfort, is where the gospel has been sent to. There are hundreds o' islands, at this blessed moment, where you might as well jump straight into a shark's maw as land without a band o' thirty comrades armed to the teeth to back you."
"Ay," said a man with a deep scar over his right eye, "Dick's new to the work. But if the captain takes us for a cargo o' sandal-wood to the Feejees he'll get a taste o' these black gentry in their native condition. For my part I don't know, an' I don't care, what the gospel does to them; but I know that when any o' the islands chance to get it, trade goes all smooth an' easy; but where they ha'nt got it, Beelzebub himself could hardly desire better company."
