Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (best historical fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

case-knife, which he told me was stolen. “O,” says he, “let me see him try; I dare him to; I’ll do for him! O, he ain’t the first!” And he confirmed it with a poor, silly, ugly oath.

I have never felt such pity for any one in this wide world as I felt for that half-witted creature, and it began to come over me that the brig Covenant (for all her pious name) was little better than a hell upon the seas.

“Have you no friends?” said I.

He said he had a father in some English seaport, I forget which.

“He was a fine man, too,” he said, “but he’s dead.”

“In Heaven’s name,” cried I, “can you find no reputable life on shore?”

“O, no,” says he, winking and looking very sly, “they would put me to a trade. I know a trick worth two of that, I do!”

I asked him what trade could be so dreadful as the one he followed, where he ran the continual peril of his life, not alone from wind and sea, but by the horrid cruelty of those who were his masters. He said it was very true; and then began to praise the life, and tell what a pleasure it was to get on shore with money in his pocket, and spend it like a man, and buy apples, and swagger, and surprise what he called stick-in-the-mud boys. “And then it’s not all as bad as that,” says he; “there’s worse off than me: there’s the twenty-pounders. O, laws! you should see them taking on. Why, I’ve seen a man as old as you, I dessay”—(to him I seemed old)—“ah, and he had a beard, too—well, and as soon as we cleared out of the river, and he had the drug out of his head—my! how he cried and carried on! I made a fine fool of him, I tell you! And then there’s little uns, too: oh, little by me! I tell you, I keep them in order. When we carry little uns, I have a rope’s end of my own to wollop’em.” And so he ran on, until it came in on me what he meant by twenty-pounders were those unhappy criminals who were sent over-seas to slavery in North America, or the still more unhappy innocents who were kidnapped or trepanned (as the word went) for private interest or vengeance.

Just then we came to the top of the hill, and looked down on the Ferry and the Hope. The Firth of Forth (as is very well known) narrows at this point to the width of a good-sized river, which makes a convenient ferry going north, and turns the upper reach into a landlocked haven for all manner of ships. Right in the midst of the narrows lies an islet with some ruins; on the south shore they have built a pier for the service of the Ferry; and at the end of the pier, on the other side of the road, and backed against a pretty garden of holly-trees and hawthorns, I could see the building which they called the Hawes Inn.

The town of Queensferry lies farther west, and the neighbourhood of the inn looked pretty lonely at that time of day, for the boat had just gone north with passengers. A skiff, however, lay beside the pier, with some seamen sleeping on the thwarts; this, as Ransome told me, was the brig’s boat waiting for the captain; and about half a mile off, and all alone in the anchorage, he showed me the Covenant herself. There was a sea-going bustle on board; yards were swinging into place; and as the wind blew from that quarter, I could hear the song of the sailors as they pulled upon the ropes. After all I had listened to upon the way, I looked at that ship with an extreme abhorrence; and from the bottom of my heart I pitied all poor souls that were condemned to sail in her.

We had all three pulled up on the brow of the hill; and now I marched across the road and addressed my uncle. “I think it right to tell you, sir,” says I, “there’s nothing that will bring me on board that Covenant.”

He seemed to waken from a dream. “Eh?” he said. “What’s that?”

I told him over again.

“Well, well,” he said, “we’ll have to please ye, I suppose. But what are we standing here for? It’s perishing cold; and if I’m no mistaken, they’re busking the Covenant for sea.”