"Do you know this dog?" Captain Hull asked the master cook.

"I?" replied Negoro. "I have never seen it."

"That is singular," murmured Dick Sand.

* * * * *




CHAPTER IV.

THE SURVIVORS OF THE "WALDECK."


The slave trade was still carried on, on a large scale, in all
equinoctial Africa. Notwithstanding the English and French cruisers,
ships loaded with slaves leave the coasts of Angola and Mozambique
every year to transport negroes to various parts of the world, and, it
must be said, of the civilized world.

Captain Hull was not ignorant of it. Though these parts were not
ordinarily frequented by slave-ships, he asked himself if these blacks,
whose salvage he had just effected, were not the survivors of a cargo
of slaves that the "Waldeck" was going to sell to some Pacific colony.
At all events, if that was so, the blacks became free again by the sole
act of setting foot on his deck, and he longed to tell it to them.