point is here: How did the Cook and the Bo's'n—that was me—get away from the cannibal savages?" asked Sailor Ben, very impressively. "You might read your 'Swiss Family Crusoe' forty times without comin' within forty fathom of guessin' that little riddle."
"Tell me about it," said the boy eagerly.
"Are you sure you can lie by while I'm tellin' it? I don't like to have you signaled for just as I get all sail drawin'."
"I can wait for half an hour," the boy answered. "They 've all gone in bathing."
"Then put a stopper on that little chatterbox, open both your hearin'-ports, and—don't believe all an old sailor tells you when he's spinnin' yarns to a little landlubber," said Sailor Ben, with a good-natured chuckle. "Here's the way it goes:"
As I remarked in the start, the Speedy Susan wrecked herself off the Tappy-appy-oca Islands in the South Pacific. I was a green youngster then, but with the makin's of a sailor about me. After the brig bumped coral and filled, she thought she'd make a call on Mr. Davy Jones. Not havin' been invited, I made up my mind to stay above water as long as I could.
"Come," says I to the Cook, "you and me ain't captains o' this ungrateful craft. Our betters may go down in glory with the ship, but bo's'ns and cooks can't be spared like officers, and swimmin' ashore is all we 're good for."
The Cook was a level-headed kind of a darky,—he made the best plum-duff I ever see,—and he says: "All right, sah." So over we went like a couple o' flying-fish, and come up like two porpoises. But it was a powerful stretch to swim, bein' a matter o' forty mile or so; and I mistrust whether we might n't 'a' joined Mr. D. Jones's party down below if it had n't been for the Bo's'n (me).
