Indian Tales | Page 7

battle, but we never were;
we never were." Charlie shook his head mournfully.
"What a scoundrel!"
"I should say he was. He never gave us enough to eat, and sometimes
we were so thirsty that we used to drink salt-water. I can taste that
salt-water still."
"Now tell me something about the harbor where the fight was fought."
"I didn't dream about that. I know it was a harbor, though; because we
were tied up to a ring on a white wall and all the face of the stone under
water was covered with wood to prevent our ram getting chipped when
the tide made us rock."
"That's curious. Our hero commanded the galley, didn't he?"
"Didn't he just! He stood by the bows and shouted like a good 'un. He
was the man who killed the overseer."
"But you were all drowned together, Charlie, weren't you?"
"I can't make that fit quite," he said, with a puzzled look. "The galley
must have gone down with all hands, and yet I fancy that the hero went
on living afterward. Perhaps he climbed into the attacking ship. I
wouldn't see that, of course. I was dead, you know." He shivered
slightly and protested that he could remember no more.
I did not press him further, but to satisfy myself that he lay in ignorance
of the workings of his own mind, deliberately introduced him to
Mortimer Collins's "Transmigration," and gave him a sketch of the plot
before he opened the pages.
"What rot it all is!" he said, frankly, at the end of an hour. "I don't
understand his nonsense about the Red Planet Mars and the King, and
the rest of it. Chuck me the Longfellow again."
I handed him the book and wrote out as much as I could remember of
his description of the sea-fight, appealing to him from time to time for
confirmation of fact or detail. He would answer without raising his eyes
from the book, as assuredly as though all his knowledge lay before him
on the printed page. I spoke under the normal key of my voice that the
current might not be broken, and I know that he was not aware of what
he was saying, for his thoughts were out on the sea with Longfellow.
"Charlie," I asked, "when the rowers on the gallies mutinied how did
they kill their overseers?"
"Tore up the benches and brained 'em. That happened when a heavy sea

was running. An overseer on the lower deck slipped from the centre
plank and fell among the rowers. They choked him to death against the
side of the ship with their chained hands quite quietly, and it was too
dark for the other overseer to see what had happened. When he asked,
he was pulled down too and choked, and the lower deck fought their
way up deck by deck, with the pieces of the broken benches banging
behind 'em. How they howled!"
"And what happened after that?"
"I don't know. The hero went away--red hair and red beard and all. That
was after he had captured our galley, I think."
The sound of my voice irritated him, and he motioned slightly with his
left hand as a man does when interruption jars.
"You never told me he was red-headed before, or that he captured your
galley," I said, after a discreet interval.
Charlie did not raise his eyes.
"He was as red as a red bear," said he, abstractedly. "He came from the
north; they said so in the galley when he looked for rowers--not slaves,
but free men. Afterward--years and years afterward--news came from
another ship, or else he came back"--
His lips moved in silence. He was rapturously retasting some poem
before him.
"Where had he been, then?" I was almost whispering that the sentence
might come gentle to whichever section of Charlie's brain was working
on my behalf.
"To the Beaches--the Long and Wonderful Beaches!" was the reply,
after a minute of silence.
"To Furdurstrandi?" I asked, tingling from head to foot.
"Yes, to Furdurstrandi," he pronounced the word in a new fashion.
"And I too saw"----The voice failed.
"Do you know what you have said?" I shouted, incautiously.
He lifted his eyes, fully roused now, "No!" he snapped. "I wish you'd
let a chap go on reading. Hark to this:
"'But Othere, the old sea captain, He neither paused nor stirred Till the
king listened, and then Once more took up his pen And wrote down
every word,
"'And to the King of the Saxons In witness of the truth, Raising his
noble head, He stretched his brown hand and said, "Behold this walrus

tooth."'
By Jove, what chaps those must have been, to go sailing all over the
shop never knowing where they'd fetch