CAPTAIN BLOOD by Rafael Sabatini

Towards sunset, having seen Nuttall depart to purchase and fetch
the sloop to the prearranged moorings at the wharf, Peter Blood
came sauntering towards the stockade, just as the slaves were being
driven in from the fields. He stood aside at the entrance to let
them pass, and beyond the message of hope flashed by his eyes, he
held no communication with them.
He entered the stockade in their wake, and as they broke their ranks
to seek their various respective huts, he beheld Colonel Bishop in
talk with Kent, the overseer. The pair were standing by the stocks,
planted in the middle of that green space for the punishment of
offending slaves.
As he advanced, Bishop turned to regard him, scowling. "Where have
you been this while?" he bawled, and although a minatory note was
normal to the Colonel's voice, yet Blood felt his heart tightening
apprehensively.
"I've been at my work in the town," he answered. "Mrs. Patch has a
fever and Mr. Dekker has sprained his ankle."
"I sent for you to Dekker's, and you were not there. You are given
to idling, my fine fellow. We shall have to quicken you one of
these days unless you cease from abusing the liberty you enjoy.
D'ye forget that ye're a rebel convict?"
"I am not given the chance," said Blood, who never could learn to
curb his tongue.
"By God! Will you be pert with me?"
Remembering all that was at stake, growing suddenly conscious that
from the huts surrounding the enclosure anxious ears were listening,
he instantly practised an unusual submission.
"Not pert, sir. I... I am sorry I should have been sought...."
"Aye, and you'll be sorrier yet. There's the Governor with an
attack of gout, screaming like a wounded horse, and you nowhere to
be found. Be off, man - away with you at speed to Government House!
You're awaited, I tell you. Best lend him a horse, Kent, or the
lout'll be all night getting there.
They bustled him away, choking almost from a reluctance that he dared
not show. The thing was unfortunate; but after all not beyond remedy.
The escape was set for midnight, and he should easily be back by then.
He mounted the horse that Kent procured him, intending to make all
haste.
"How shall I reenter the stockade, sir?" he enquired at parting.
"You'll not reenter it," said Bishop. "When they've done with you
at Government House, they may find a kennel for you there until
morning."
Peter Blood's heart sank like a stone through water.
"But..." he began.
"Be off, I say. Will you stand there talking until dark? His
excellency is waiting for you." And with his cane Colonel Bishop
slashed the horse's quarters so brutally that the beast bounded
forward all but unseating her rider.
Peter Blood went off in a state of mind bordering on despair. And
there was occasion for it. A postponement of the escape at least
until to-morrow night was necessary now, and postponement must mean
the discovery of Nuttall's transaction and the asking of questions
it would be difficult to answer.
It was in his mind to slink back in the night, once his work at
Government House were done, and from the outside of the stockade
make known to Pitt and the others his presence, and so have them
join him that their project might still be carried out. But in
this he reckoned without the Governor, whom he found really in the
thrall of a severe attack of gout, and almost as severe an attack
of temper nourished by Blood's delay.
The doctor was kept in constant attendance upon him until long after
midnight, when at last he was able to ease the sufferer a little by
a bleeding. Thereupon he would have withdrawn. But Steed would
not hear of it. Blood must sleep in his own chamber to be at hand
in case of need. It was as if Fate made sport of him. For that
night at least the escape must be definitely abandoned.
Not until the early hours of the morning did Peter Blood succeed in
making a temporary escape from Government House on the ground that
he required certain medicaments which he must, himself, procure from
the apothecary.
On that pretext, he made an excursion into the awakening town, and
went straight to Nuttall, whom he found in a state of livid panic.
The unfortunate debtor, who had sat up waiting through the night,
conceived that all was discovered and that his own ruin would be
involved. Peter Blood quieted his fears.
"It will be for to-night instead," he said, with more assurance than
he felt, "if I have to bleed the Governor to death. Be ready as
last night."
"But if there are questions meanwhile?" bleated Nuttall. He was a
thin, pale, small-featured, man with weak eyes that now blinked
desperately.
"Answer as best you can. Use your wits, man. I can stay no longer."
And Peter went off to the apothecary for his pretexted drugs.
Within an hour of his going came an officer of the Secretary's to
Nuttall's miserable hovel. The seller of the boat had - as by law
required since the coming of the rebels-convict - duly reported
the sale at the Secretary's office, so that he might obtain the
reimbursement of the ten-pound surety into which every keeper of a
small boat was compelled to enter. The Secretary's office postponed
this reimbursement until it should have obtained confirmation of
the transaction.
"We are informed that you have bought a wherry from Mr. Robert
Farrell," said the officer.
"That is so," said Nuttall, who conceived that for him this was
the end of the world.
"You are in no haste, it seems, to declare the same at the
Secretary's office." The emissary had a proper bureaucratic
haughtiness.
Nuttall's weak eyes blinked at a redoubled rate.
"To... to declare it?"
"Ye know it's the law."
"I... I didn't, may it please you."
"But it's in the proclamation published last January."
"I... I can't read, sir. I... I didn't know."
"Faugh!" The messenger withered him with his disdain.
"Well, now you're informed. See to it that you are at the
Secretary's office before noon with the ten pounds surety into which
you are obliged to enter."
The pompous officer departed, leaving Nuttall in a cold perspiration
despite the heat of the morning. He was thankful that the fellow
had not asked the question he most dreaded, which was how he, a
debtor, should come by the money to buy a wherry. But this he knew
was only a respite. The question would presently be asked of a
certainty, and then hell would open for him. He cursed the hour in
which he had been such a fool as to listen to Peter Blood's chatter
of escape. He thought it very likely that the whole plot would be
discovered, and that he would probably be hanged, or at least branded
and sold into slavery like those other damned rebels-convict, with
whom he had been so mad as to associate himself. If only he had
the ten pounds for this infernal surety, which until this moment
had never entered into their calculations, it was possible that the
thing might be done quickly and questions postponed until later.
As the Secretary's messenger had overlooked the fact that he was a
debtor, so might the others at the Secretary's office, at least for
a day or two; and in that time he would, he hoped, be beyond the
reach of their questions. But in the meantime what was to be
done about this money? And it was to be found before noon!
Nuttall snatched up his hat, and went out in quest of Peter Blood.
But where look for him? Wandering aimlessly up the irregular,
unpaved street, he ventured to enquire of one or two if they had
seen Dr. Blood that morning. He affected to be feeling none so
well, and indeed his appearance bore out the deception. None
could give him information; and since Blood had never told him
of Whacker's share in this business, he walked in his unhappy
ignorance past the door of the one man in Barbados who would
eagerly have saved him in this extremity.
Finally he determined to go up to Colonel Bishop's plantation.
Probably Blood would be there. If he were not, Nuttall would find
Pitt, and leave a message with him. He was acquainted with Pitt
and knew of Pitt's share in this business. His pretext for
seeking Blood must still be that he needed medical assistance.
And at the same time that he set out, insensitive in his anxiety to
the broiling heat, to climb the heights to the north of the town,
Blood was setting out from Government House at last, having so far
eased the Governor's con***ion as to be permitted to depart. Being
mounted, he would, but for an unexpected delay, have reached the
stockade ahead of Nuttall, in which case several unhappy events
might have been averted. The unexpected delay was occasioned by
Miss Arabella Bishop.
They met at the gate of the luxuriant garden of Government House,
and Miss Bishop, herself mounted, stared to see Peter Blood on
horseback. It happened that he was in good spirits. The fact that
the Governor's con***ion had so far improved as to restore him his
freedom of movement had sufficed to remove the depression under
which he had been labouring for the past twelve hours and more.
In its rebound the mercury of his mood had shot higher far than
present circumstances warranted. He was disposed to be optimistic.
What had failed last night would certainly not fail again to-night.
What was a day, after all? The Secretary's office might be
troublesome, but not really troublesome for another twenty-four
hours at least; and by then they would be well away.
This joyous confidence of his was his first misfortune. The next
was that his good spirits were also shared by Miss Bishop, and
that she bore no rancour. The two things conjoined to make the
delay that in its consequences was so deplorable.
"Good-morning, sir," she hailed him pleasantly. "It's close upon
a month since last I saw you."
"Twenty-one days to the hour," said he. "I've counted them."
"I vow I was beginning to believe you dead."
"I have to thank you for the wreath."
"The wreath?"
"To deck my grave," he explained.
"Must you ever be rallying?" she wondered, and looked at him gravely,
remembering that it was his rallying on the last occasion had driven
her away in dudgeon.
"A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad," said he. "Few
realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world."
"You may laugh at yourself all you will, sir. But sometimes I
think you laugh at me, which is not civil."
"Then, faith, you're wrong. I laugh only at the comic, and you are
not comic at all."
"What am I, then?" she asked him, laughing.
A moment he pondered her, so fair and fresh to behold, so entirely
maidenly and yet so entirely frank and unabashed.
"You are," he said, "the niece of the man who owns me his slave."
But he spoke lightly. So lightly that she was encouraged to
insistence.
"Nay, sir, that is an evasion. You shall answer me truthfully this
morning."
"Truthfully? To answer you at all is a labour. But to answer
truthfully! Oh, well, now, I should say of you that he'll be lucky
who counts you his friend." It was in his mind to add more. But
he left it there.
"That's mighty civil," said she. "You've a nice taste in
compliments, Mr. Blood. Another in your place...."
"Faith, now, don't I know what another would have said? Don't I
know my fellow-man at all?"
"Sometimes I think you do, and sometimes I think you don't. Anyway,
you don't know your fellow-woman. There was that affair of the
Spaniards."
"Will ye never forget it?"
"Never."
"Bad cess to your memory. Is there no good in me at all that you
could be dwelling on instead?"
"Oh, several things."
"For instance, now?" He was almost eager.
"You speak excellent Spanish."
"Is that all?" He sank back into dismay.
"Where did you learn it? Have you been in Spain?"
"That I have. I was two years in a Spanish prison."
"In prison?" Her tone suggested apprehensions in which he had no
desire to leave her.
"As a prisoner of war," he explained. "I was taken fighting with
the French - in French service, that is."
"But you're a doctor!" she cried.
"That's merely a diversion, I think. By trade I am a soldier - at
least, it's a trade I followed for ten years. It brought me no great
gear, but it served me better than medicine, which, as you may
observe, has brought me into slavery. I'm thinking it's more pleasing
in the sight of Heaven to kill men than to heal them. Sure it must
be."
"But how came you to be a soldier, and to serve the French?"
"I am Irish, you see, and I studied medicine. Therefore - since it's
a perverse nation we are - .... Oh, but it's a long story, and the
Colonel will be expecting my return." She was not in that way to be
defrauded of her entertainment. If he would wait a moment they would
ride back together. She had but come to enquire of the Governor's
health at her uncle's request.
So he waited, and so they rode back together to Colonel Bishop's
house. They rode very slowly, at a walking pace, and some whom
they passed marvelled to see the doctor-slave on such apparently
intimate terms with his owner's niece. One or two may have promised
themselves that they would drop a hint to the Colonel. But the two
rode oblivious of all others in the world that morning. He was
telling her the story of his early turbulent days, and at the end
of it he dwelt more fully than hitherto upon the manner of his arrest
and trial.
The tale was barely done when they drew up at the Colonel's door,
and dismounted, Peter Blood surrendering his nag to one of the negro
grooms, who informed them that the Colonel was from home at the
moment.
Even then they lingered a moment, she detaining him.
"I am sorry, Mr. Blood, that I did not know before," she said, and
there was a suspicion of moisture in those clear hazel eyes. With
a compelling friendliness she held out her hand to him.
"Why, what difference could it have made?" he asked.
"Some, I think. You have been very hardly used by Fate."
"Och, now...." He paused. His keen sapphire eyes considered her
steadily a moment from under his level black brows. "It might have
been worse," he said, with a significance which brought a tinge of
colour to her cheeks and a flutter to her eyelids.
He stooped to kiss her hand before releasing it, and she did not
deny him. Then he turned and strode off towards the stockade a
half-mile away, and a vision of her face went with him, tinted with
a rising blush and a sudden unusual shyness. He forgot in that
little moment that he was a rebel-convict with ten years of slavery
before him; he forgot that he had planned an escape, which was to
be carried into effect that night; forgot even the peril of discovery
which as a result of the Governor's gout now overhung him.

CHAPTER VII
PIRATES
Mr. James Nuttall made all speed, regardless of the heat, in his
journey from Bridgetown to Colonel Bishop's plantation, and if ever
man was built for speed in a hot climate that man was Mr. James
Nuttall, with his short, thin body, and his long, fleshless legs.
So withered was he that it was hard to believe there were any juices
left in him, yet juices there must have been, for he was sweating
violently by the time he reached the stockade.
At the entrance he almost ran into the overseer Kent, a squat,
bow-legged animal with the arms of a Hercules and the jowl of a
bulldog.
"I am seeking Doctor Blood," he announced breathlessly.
"You are in a rare haste," growled Kent. "What the devil is it?
Twins?"
"Eh? Oh! Nay, nay. I'm not married, sir. It's a cousin of mine,
sir."
"What is?"
"He is taken bad, sir," Nuttall lied promptly upon the cue that
Kent himself had afforded him. "Is the doctor here?"
"That's his hut yonder." Kent pointed carelessly. "If he's not
there, he'll be somewhere else." And he took himself off. He was
a surly, ungracious beast at all times, readier with the lash of
his whip than with his tongue.
Nuttall watched him go with satisfaction, and even noted the
direction that he took. Then he plunged into the enclosure, to
verify in mortification that Dr. Blood was not at home. A man
of sense might have sat down and waited, judging that to be the
quickest and surest way in the end. But Nuttall had no sense.
He flung out of the stockade again, hesitated a moment as to which
direction he should take, and finally decided to go any way but
the way that Kent had gone. He sped across the parched savannah
towards the sugar plantation which stood solid as a rampart and
gleaming golden in the dazzling June sunshine. Avenues intersected
the great blocks of ripening amber cane. In the distance down one
of these he espied some slaves at work. Nuttall entered the avenue
and advanced upon them. They eyed him dully, as he passed them.
Pitt was not of their number, and he dared not ask for him. He
continued his search for best part of an hour, up one of those
lanes and then down another. Once an overseer challenged him,
demanding to know his business. He was looking, he said, for Dr.
Blood. His cousin was taken ill. The overseer bade him go to the
devil, and get out of the plantation. Blood was not there. If he
was anywhere he would be in his hut in the stockade.
Nuttall passed on, upon the understanding that he would go. But
he went in the wrong direction; he went on towards the side of the
plantation farthest from the stockade, towards the dense woods that
fringed it there. The overseer was too contemptuous and perhaps
too languid in the stifling heat of approaching noontide to correct
his course.
Nuttall blundered to the end of the avenue, and round the corner of
it, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon
an irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged,
clothed him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save
for a broad hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden
head from the rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall
returned thanks aloud to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the
shipwright poured out his dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of
it was that he must have ten pounds from Blood that very morning or
they were all undone. And all he got for his pains and his sweat
was the condemnation of Jeremy Pitt.
"Damn you for a fool!" said the slave. "If it's Blood you're
seeking, why are you wasting your time here?"
"I can't find him," bleated Nuttall. He was indignant at his
reception. He forgot the jangled state of the other's nerves
after a night of anxious wakefulness ending in a dawn of despair.
"I thought that you...."
"You thought that I could drop my spade and go and seek him for you?
Is that what you thought? My God! that our lives should depend upon
such a dummerhead. While you waste your time here, the hours are
passing! And if an overseer should catch you talking to me? How'll
you explain it?"
For a moment Nuttall was bereft of speech by such ingratitude.
Then he exploded.
"I would to Heaven I had never had no hand in this affair. I would
so! I wish that...."
What else he wished was never known, for at that moment round the
block of cane came a big man in biscuit-coloured taffetas followed
by two negroes in cotton drawers who were armed with cutlasses. He
was not ten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl
had been unheard.
Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted
like a rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and
betraying thing that in the circumstances it was possible for him to
do. Pitt groaned and stood still, leaning upon his spade.
"Hi, there! Stop!" bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and
added horrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies.
But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head.
It was his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have
seen his face; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was
quite sufficient to hang any man whom he thought would be better
dead.
Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter
sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the
two negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It
was a bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations
since a slave had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him
a couple of years ago.
"After him, you black swine!" he roared at them. But as they
started he checked them. "Wait! Get to heel, damn you!"
It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was
not the need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him
in that cursed wood. There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and
Pitt should tell him the identity of his bashful friend, and also
the subject of that close and secret talk he had disturbed. Pitt
might, of course, be reluctant. So much the worse for Pitt. The
ingenious Colonel Bishop knew a dozen ways - some of them quite
diverting - of conquering stubbornness in these convict dogs.
He turned now upon the slave a countenance that was inflamed by heat
internal and external, and a pair of heady eyes that were alight
with cruel intelligence. He stepped forward swinging his light
bamboo cane.
"Who was that runagate?" he asked with terrible suavity. Leaning
over on his spade, Jeremy Pitt hung his head a little, and shifted
uncomfortably on his bare feet. Vainly he groped for an answer in
a mind that could do nothing but curse the idiocy of Mr. James
Nuttall.
The planter's bamboo cane fell on the lad's naked shoulders with
stinging force.
"Answer me, you dog! What's his name?"
Jeremy looked at the burly planter out of sullen, almost defiant
eyes.
"I don't know," he said, and in his voice there was a faint note at
least of the defiance aroused in him by a blow which he dared not,
for his life's sake, return. His body had remained unyielding under
it, but the spirit within writhed now in torment.
"You don't know? Well, here's to quicken your wits." Again the cane
descended. "Have you thought of his name yet?"
"I have not."
"Stubborn, eh?" For a moment the Colonel leered. Then his passion
mastered him. "'Swounds! You impudent dog! D'you trifle with me?
D'you think I'm to be mocked?"
Pitt shrugged, shifted sideways on his feet again, and settled into
dogged silence. Few things are more provocative; and Colonel Bishop's
temper was never one that required much provocation. Brute fury now
awoke in him. Fiercely now he lashed those defenceless shoulders,
accompanying each blow by blasphemy and foul abuse, until, stung
beyond endurance, the lingering embers of his manhood fanned into
momentary flame, Pitt sprang upon his tormentor.
But as he sprang, so also sprang the watchful blacks. Muscular
bronze arms coiled crushingly about the frail white body, and in a
moment the unfortunate slave stood powerless, his wrists pinioned
behind him in a leathern thong.
Breathing hard, his face mottled, Bishop pondered him a moment.
Then: "Fetch him along," he said.
Down the long avenue between those golden walls of cane standing
some eight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black
captors in the Colonel's wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his
fellow-slaves at work there. Despair went with him. What torments
might immediately await him he cared little, horrible though he
knew they would be. The real source of his mental anguish lay in
the conviction that the elaborately planned escape from this
unutterable hell was frustrated now in the very moment of execution.
They came out upon the green plateau and headed for the stockade
and the overseer's white house. Pitt's eyes looked out over Carlisle
Bay, of which this plateau commanded a clear view from the fort on
one side to the long sheds of the wharf on the other. Along this
wharf a few shallow boats were moored, and Pitt caught himself
wondering which of these was the wherry in which with a little luck
they might have been now at sea. Out over that sea his glance ranged
miserably.
In the roads, standing in for the shore before a gentle breeze that
scarcely ruffled the sapphire surface of the Caribbean, came a
stately red-hulled frigate, flying the English ensign.
Colonel Bishop halted to consider her, shading his eyes with his
fleshly hand. Light as was the breeze, the vessel spread no canvas
to it beyond that of her foresail. Furled was her every other sail,
leaving a clear view of the majestic lines of her hull, from towering
stern castle to gilded beakhead that was aflash in the dazzling
sunshine.
So leisurely an advance argued a master indifferently acquainted
with these waters, who preferred to creep forward cautiously,
sounding his way. At her present rate of progress it would be an
hour, perhaps, before she came to anchorage within the harbour. And
whilst the Colonel viewed her, admiring, perhaps, the gracious beauty
of her, Pitt was hurried forward into the stockade, and clapped into
the stocks that stood there ready for slaves who required correction.
Colonel Bishop followed him presently, with leisurely, rolling gait.
"A mutinous cur that shows his fangs to his master must learn good
manners at the cost of a striped hide," was all he said before
setting about his executioner's job.

That with his own hands he should do that which most men of his
station would, out of self-respect, have relegated to one of the
negroes, gives you the measure of the man's beastliness. It was
almost as if with relish, as if gratifying some feral instinct of
cruelty, that he now lashed his victim about head and shoulders.
Soon his cane was reduced, to splinters by his violence. You know,
perhaps, the sting of a flexible bamboo cane when it is whole. But
do you realize its murderous quality when it has been split into
several long lithe blades, each with an edge that is of the keenness
of a knife?
When, at last, from very weariness, Colonel Bishop flung away the
stump and thongs to which his cane had been reduced, the wretched
slave's back was bleeding pulp from neck to waist.
As long as full sensibility remained, Jeremy Pitt had made no sound.
But in a measure as from pain his senses were mercifully dulled, he
sank forward in the stocks, and hung there now in a huddled heap,
faintly moaning.
Colonel Bishop set his foot upon the crossbar, and leaned over his
victim, a cruel smile on his full, coarse face.
"Let that teach you a proper submission," said he. "And now touching
that shy friend of yours, you shall stay here without meat or drink
- without meat or drink, d' ye hear me? - until you please to tell
me his name and business." He took his foot from the bar. "When
you've had enough of this, send me word, and we 'll have the
branding-irons to you."
On that he swung on his heel, and strode out of the stockade, his
negroes following.
Pitt had heard him, as we hear things in our dreams. At the moment
so spent was he by his cruel punishment, and so deep was the despair
into which he had fallen, that he no longer cared whether he lived
or died.
Soon, however, from the partial stupor which pain had mercifully
induced, a new variety of pain aroused him. The stocks stood in the
open under the full glare of the tropical sun, and its blistering
rays streamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt
as if flames of fire were searing it. And, soon, to this was added
a torment still more unspeakable. Flies, the cruel flies of the
Antilles, drawn by the scent of blood, descended in a cloud upon him.
Small wonder that the ingenious Colonel Bishop, who so well
understood the art of loosening stubborn tongues, had not deemed it
necessary to have recourse to other means of torture. Not all his
fiendish cruelty could devise a torment more cruel, more unendurable
than the torments Nature would here procure a man in Pitt's con***ion.
The slave writhed in his stocks until he was in danger of breaking
his limbs, and writhing, screamed in agony.
Thus was he found by Peter Blood, who seemed to his troubled vision
to materialize suddenly before him. Mr. Blood carried a large
palmetto leaf. Having whisked away with this the flies that were
devouring Jeremy's back, he slung it by a strip of fibre from the
lad's neck, so that it protected him from further attacks as well as
from the rays of the sun. Next, sitting down beside him, he drew
the sufferer's head down on his own shoulder, and bathed his face
from a pannikin of cold water. Pitt shuddered and moaned on a long,
indrawn breath.
"Drink!" he gasped. "Drink, for the love of Christ!" The pannikin
was held to his quivering lips. He drank greedily, noisily, nor
ceased until he had drained the vessel. Cooled and revived by the
draught, he attempted to sit up.
"My back!" he screamed.
There was an unusual glint in Mr. Blood's eyes; his lips were
compressed. But when he parted them to speak, his voice came cool
and steady.
"Be easy, now. One thing at a time. Your back's taking no harm at
all for the present, since I've covered it up. I'm wanting to know
what's happened to you. D' ye think we can do without a navigator
that ye go and provoke that beast Bishop until he all but kills you?"
Pitt sat up and groaned again. But this time his anguish was mental
rather than physical.
"I don't think a navigator will be needed this time, Peter."
"What's that?" cried Mr. Blood.
Pitt explained the situation as briefly as he could, in a halting,
gasping speech. "I'm to rot here until I tell him the identity of
my visitor and his business."
Mr. Blood got up, growling in his throat. "Bad cess to the filthy
slaver!" said he. "But it must be contrived, nevertheless. To the
devil with Nuttall! Whether he gives surety for the boat or not,
whether he explains it or not, the boat remains, and we're going,
and you're coming with us."
"You're dreaming, Peter," said the prisoner. "We're not going this
time. The magistrates will confiscate the boat since the surety's
not paid, even if when they press him Nuttall does not confess the
whole plan and get us all branded on the forehead."
Mr. Blood turned away, and with agony in his eyes looked out to sea
over the blue water by which he had so fondly hoped soon to be
travelling back to freedom.
The great red ship had drawn considerably nearer shore by now.
Slowly, majestically, she was entering the bay. Already one or two
wherries were putting off from the wharf to board her. From where
he stood, Mr. Blood could see the glinting of the brass cannons
mounted on the prow above the curving beak-head, and he could make
out the figure of a seaman in the forechains on her larboard side,
leaning out to heave the lead.
An angry voice aroused him from his unhappy thoughts.
"What the devil are you doing here?"
The returning Colonel Bishop came striding into the stockade, his
negroes following ever.
Mr. Blood turned to face him, and over that swarthy countenance
- which, indeed, by now was tanned to the golden brown of a
half-caste Indian - a mask descended.
"Doing?" said he blandly. "Why, the duties of my office."
The Colonel, striding furiously forward, observed two things. The
empty pannikin on the seat beside the prisoner, and the palmetto
leaf protecting his back. "Have you dared to do this?" The veins
on the planter's forehead stood out like cords.
"Of course I have." Mr. Blood's tone was one of faint surprise.
"I said he was to have neither meat nor drink until I ordered it."
"Sure, now, I never heard ye."
"You never heard me? How should you have heard me when you weren't
here?"
"Then how did ye expect me to know what orders ye'd given?" Mr.
Blood's tone was positively aggrieved. "All that I knew was that
one of your slaves was being murthered by the sun and the flies.
And I says to myself, this is one of the Colonel's slaves, and I'm
the Colonel's doctor, and sure it's my duty to be looking after the
Colonel's property. So I just gave the fellow a spoonful of water
and covered his back from the sun. And wasn't I right now?"
"Right?" The Colonel was almost speechless.
"Be easy, now, be easy!" Mr. Blood implored him. "It's an apoplexy
ye'll be contacting if ye give way to heat like this."
The planter thrust him aside with an imprecation, and stepping
forward tore the palmetto leaf from the prisoner's back.
"In the name of humanity, now...." Mr. Blood was beginning.
The Colonel swung upon him furiously. "Out of this!" he commanded.
"And don't come near him again until I send for you, unless you want
to be served in the same way."
He was terrific in his menace, in his bulk, and in the power of him.
But Mr. Blood never flinched. It came to the Colonel, as he found
himself steadily regarded by those light-blue eyes that looked so
arrestingly odd in that tawny face - like pale sapphires set in
copper - that this rogue had for some time now been growing
presumptuous. It was a matter that he must presently correct.
Meanwhile Mr. Blood was speaking again, his tone quietly insistent.
"In the name of humanity," he repeated, "ye'll allow me to do what I
can to ease his sufferings, or I swear to you that I'll forsake at
once the duties of a doctor, and that it's devil another patient will
I attend in this unhealthy island at all."
For an instant the Colonel was too amazed to speak. Then -
"By God!" he roared. "D'ye dare take that tone with me, you dog?
D'ye dare to make terms with me?"
"I do that." The unflinching blue eyes looked squarely into the
Colonel's, and there was a devil peeping out of them, the devil of
recklessness that is born of despair.
Colonel Bishop considered him for a long moment in silence. "I've
been too soft with you," he said at last. "But that's to be mended."
And he tightened his lips. "I'll have the rods to you, until there's
not an inch of skin left on your dirty back."
"Will ye so? And what would Governor Steed do, then?"
"Ye're not the only doctor on the island."
Mr. Blood actually laughed. "And will ye tell that to his excellency,
him with the gout in his foot so bad that he can't stand? Ye know
very well it's devil another doctor will he tolerate, being an
intelligent man that knows what's good for him."
But the Colonel's brute passion thoroughly aroused was not so easily
to be baulked. "If you're alive when my blacks have done with you,
perhaps you'll come to your senses."
He swung to his negroes to issue an order. But it was never issued.
At that moment a terrific rolling thunderclap drowned his voice and
shook the very air. Colonel Bishop jumped, his negroes jumped with
him, and so even did the apparently imperturbable Mr. Blood. Then
the four of them stared together seawards.
Down in the bay all that could be seen of the great ship, standing
now within a cable's-length of the fort, were her topmasts thrusting
above a cloud of smoke in which she was enveloped. From the cliffs
a flight of startled seabirds had risen to circle in the blue,
giving tongue to their alarm, the plaintive curlew noisiest of all.
As those men stared from the eminence on which they stood, not yet
understanding what had taken place, they saw the British Jack dip
from the main truck and vanish into the rising cloud below. A moment
more, and up through that cloud to replace the flag of England soared
the gold and crimson banner of Castile. And then they understood.
"Pirates!" roared the Colonel, and again, "Pirates!"
Fear and incredulity were blent in his voice. He had paled under
his tan until his face was the colour of clay, and there was a wild
fury in his beady eyes. His negroes looked at him, grinning
idiotically, all teeth and eyeballs.

CHAPTER VIII
SPANIARDS
The stately ship that had been allowed to sail so leisurely into
Carlisle Bay under her false colours was a Spanish privateer, coming
to pay off some of the heavy debt piled up by the predaceous Brethren
of the Coast, and the recent defeat by the Pride of Devon of two
treasure galleons bound for Cadiz. It happened that the galleon
which escaped in a more or less crippled con***ion was commanded by
Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez, who was own brother to the Spanish
Admiral Don Miguel de Espinosa, and who was also a very hasty, proud,
and hot-tempered gentleman.
Galled by his defeat, and choosing to forget that his own conduct
had invited it, he had sworn to teach the English a sharp lesson
which they should remember. He would take a leaf out of the book
of Morgan and those other robbers of the sea, and make a punitive
raid upon an English settlement. Unfortunately for himself and for
many others, his brother the Admiral was not at hand to restrain
him when for this purpose he fitted out the Cinco Llagas at San Juan
de Porto Rico. He chose for his objective the island of Barbados,
whose natural strength was apt to render her defenders careless. He
chose it also because thither had the Pride of Devon been tracked by
his scouts, and he desired a measure of poetic justice to invest
his vengeance. And he chose a moment when there were no ships of
war at anchor in Carlisle Bay.
He had succeeded so well in his intentions that he had aroused no
suspicion until he saluted the fort at short range with a broadside
of twenty guns.
And now the four gaping watchers in the stockade on the headland
beheld the great ship creep forward under the rising cloud of smoke,
her mainsail unfurled to increase her steering way, and go about
close-hauled to bring her larboard guns to bear upon the unready fort.
With the crashing roar of that second broadside, Colonel Bishop awoke
from stupefaction to a recollection of where his duty lay. In the
town below drums were beating frantically, and a trumpet was bleating,
as if the peril needed further advertising. As commander of the
Barbados Militia, the place of Colonel Bishop was at the head of his
scanty troops, in that fort which the Spanish guns were pounding
into rubble.
Remembering it, he went off at the double, despite his bulk and the
heat, his negroes trotting after him.
Mr. Blood turned to Jeremy Pitt. He laughed grimly. "Now that,"
said he, "is what I call a timely interruption. Though what'll come
of it," he added as an afterthought, "the devil himself knows."
As a third broadside was thundering forth, he picked up the palmetto
leaf and carefully replaced it on the back of his fellow-slave.
And then into the stockade, panting and sweating, came Kent followed
by best part of a score of plantation workers, some of whom were
black and all of whom were in a state of panic. He led them into
the low white house, to bring them forth again, within a moment, as
it seemed, armed now with muskets and hangers and some of them
equipped with bandoleers.
By this time the rebels-convict were coming in, in twos and threes,
having abandoned their work upon finding themselves unguarded and
upon scenting the general dismay.
Kent paused a moment, as his hastily armed guard dashed forth, to
fling an order to those slaves.
"To the woods!" he bade them. "Take to the woods, and lie close
there, until this is over, and we've gutted these Spanish swine.
On that he went off in haste after his men, who were to be added to
those massing in the town, so as to oppose and overwhelm the Spanish
landing parties.
The slaves would have obeyed him on the instant but for Mr. Blood.
"What need for haste, and in this heat?" quoth he. He was
surprisingly cool, they thought. "Maybe there'll be no need to take
to the woods at all, and, anyway, it will be time enough to do so
when the Spaniards are masters of the town."
And so, joined now by the other stragglers, and numbering in all a
round score - rebels-convict all - they stayed to watch from their
vantage-ground the fortunes of the furious battle that was being
waged below.
The landing was contested by the militia and by every islander
capable of bearing arms with the fierce resoluteness of men who
knew that no quarter was to be expected in defeat. The ruthlessness
of Spanish soldiery was a byword, and not at his worst had Morgan or
L'Ollonais ever perpetrated such horrors as those of which these
Castilian gentlemen were capable.
But this Spanish commander knew his business, which was more than
could truthfully be said for the Barbados Militia. Having gained
the advantage of a surprise blow, which had put the fort out of
action, he soon showed them that he was master of the situation.
His guts turned now upon the open space behind the mole, where the
incompetent Bishop had marshalled his men, tore the militia into
bloody rags, and covered the landing parties which were making the
shore in their own boats and in several of those which had rashly
gone out to the great ship before her identity was revealed.
All through the scorching afternoon the battle went on, the rattle
and crack of musketry penetrating ever deeper into the town to show
that the defenders were being driven steadily back. By sunset two
hundred and fifty Spaniards were masters of Bridgetown, the islanders
were disarmed, and at Government House, Governor Steed - his gout
forgotten in his panic - supported by Colonel Bishop and some lesser
officers, was being informed by Don Diego, with an urbanity that was
itself a mockery, of the sum that would be required in ransom.
For a hundred thousand pieces of eight and fifty head of cattle, Don
Diego would forbear from reducing the place to ashes. And what time
that suave and courtly commander was settling these details with the
apoplectic British Governor, the Spaniards were smashing and looting,
feasting, drinking, and ravaging after the hideous manner of their
kind.
Mr. Blood, greatly daring, ventured down at dusk into the town.
What he saw there is recorded by Jeremy Pitt to whom he subsequently
related it - in that voluminous log from which the greater part of
my narrative is derived. I have no intention of repeating any of
it here. It is all too loathsome and nauseating, incredible, indeed,
that men however abandoned could ever descend such an abyss of
bestial cruelty and lust.
What he saw was fetching him in haste and white-faced out of that
hell again, when in a narrow street a girl hurtled into him,
wild-eyed, her unbound hair streaming behind her as she ran. After
her, laughing and cursing in a breath, came a heavy-booted Spaniard.
Almost he was upon her, when suddenly Mr. Blood got in his way. The
doctor had taken a sword from a dead man's side some little time
before and armed himself with it against an emergency.
As the Spaniard checked in anger and surprise, he caught in the dusk
the livid gleam of that sword which Mr. Blood had quickly unsheathed.
"Ah, perro ingles!" he shouted, and flung forward to his death.
"It's hoping I am ye're in a fit state to meet your Maker," said Mr.
Blood, and ran him through the body. He did the thing skilfully:
with the combined skill of swordsman and surgeon. The man sank in
a hideous heap without so much as a groan.
Mr. Blood swung to the girl, who leaned panting and sobbing against
a wall. He caught her by the wrist.
"Come!" he said.
But she hung back, resisting him by her weight. "Who are you?" she
demanded wildly.
"Will ye wait to see my credentials?" he snapped. Steps were
clattering towards them from beyond the corner round which she had
fled from that Spanish ruffian. "Come," he urged again. And this
time, reassured perhaps by his clear English speech, she went without
further questions.
They sped down an alley and then up another, by great good fortune
meeting no one, for already they were on the outskirts of the town.
They won out of it, and white-faced, physically sick, Mr. Blood
dragged her almost at a run up the hill towards Colonel Bishop's
house. He told her briefly who and what he was, and thereafter
there was no conversation between them until they reached the big
white house. It was all in darkness, which at least was reassuring.
If the Spaniards had reached it, there would be lights. He knocked,
but had to knock again and yet again before he was answered. Then
it was by a voice from a window above.
"Who is there?" The voice was Miss Bishop's, a little tremulous,
but unmistakably her own.
Mr. Blood almost fainted in relief. He had been imagining the
unimaginable. He had pictured her down in that hell out of which
he had just come. He had conceived that she might have followed
her uncle into Bridgetown, or committed some other imprudence, and
he turned cold from head to foot at the mere thought of what might
have happened to her.
"It is I - Peter Blood," he gasped.
"What do you want?"
It is doubtful whether she would have come down to open. For at
such a time as this it was no more than likely that the wretched
plantation slaves might be in revolt and prove as great a danger as
the Spaniards. But at the sound of her voice, the girl Mr. Blood
had rescued peered up through the gloom.
"Arabella!" she called. "It is I, Mary Traill."
"Mary!" The voice ceased above on that exclamation, the head was
withdrawn. After a brief pause the door gaped wide. Beyond it in
the wide hall stood Miss Arabella, a slim, virginal figure in white,
mysteriously revealed in the gleam of a single candle which she
carried.
Mr. Blood strode in followed by his distraught companion, who,
falling upon Arabella's slender bosom, surrendered herself to a
passion of tears. But he wasted no time.
"Whom have you here with you? What servants?" he demanded sharply.
The only male was James, an old negro groom.
"The very man," said Blood. "Bid him get out horses. Then away
with you to Speightstown, or even farther north, where you will be
safe. Here you are in danger - in dreadful danger."
"But I thought the fighting was over..." she was beginning, pale
and startled.
"So it is. But the deviltry's only beginning. Miss Traill will
tell you as you go. In God's name, madam, take my word for it, and
do as I bid you."
"He... he saved me," sobbed Miss Traill.
"Saved you?" Miss Bishop was aghast. "Saved you from what, Mary?"
"Let that wait," snapped Mr. Blood almost angrily. "You've all
the night for chattering when you're out of this, and away beyond
their reach. Will you please call James, and do as I say - and at
once!"
"You are very peremptory...."
"Oh, my God! I am peremptory! Speak, Miss Trail!, tell her whether
I've cause to be peremptory."
"Yes, yes," the girl cried, shuddering." Do as he says - Oh, for
pity's sake, Arabella."
Miss Bishop went off, leaving Mr. Blood and Miss Traill alone again.
"I... I shall never forget what you did, sir," said she, through
her diminishing tears. She was a slight wisp of a girl, a child,
no more.
"I've done better things in my time. That's why I'm here," said Mr.
Blood, whose mood seemed to be snappy.
She didn't pretend to understand him, and she didn't make the attempt.
"Did you... did you kill him?" she asked, fearfully.
He stared at her in the flickering candlelight. "I hope so. It is
very probable, and it doesn't matter at all," he said. "What matters
is that this fellow James should fetch the horses." And he was
stamping off to accelerate these preparations for departure, when
her voice arrested him.
"Don't leave me! Don't leave me here alone!" she cried in terror.
He paused. He turned and came slowly back. Standing above her he
smiled upon her.
"There, there! You've no cause for alarm. It's all over now.
You'll be away soon - away to Speightstown, where you'll be quite
safe."
The horses came at last - four of them, for in ad***ion to James who
was to act as her guide, Miss Bishop had her woman, who was not to
be left behind.
Mr. Blood lifted the slight weight of Mary Traill to her horse, then
turned to say good-bye to Miss Bishop, who was already mounted. He
said it, and seemed to have something to add. But whatever it was,
it remained unspoken. The horses started, and receded into the
sapphire starlit night, leaving him standing there before Colonel
Bishop's door. The last he heard of them was Mary Traill's childlike
voice calling back on a quavering note -
"I shall never forget what you did, Mr. Blood. I shall never forget."
But as it was not the voice he desired to hear, the assurance brought
him little satisfaction. He stood there in the dark watching the
fireflies amid the rhododendrons, till the hoofbeats had faded. Then
he sighed and roused himself. He had much to do. His journey into
the town had not been one of idle curiosity to see how the Spaniards
conducted themselves in victory. It had been inspired by a very
different purpose, and he had gained in the course of it all the
information he desired. He had an extremely busy night before him,
and must be moving.
He went off briskly in the direction of the stockade, where his
fellow-slaves awaited him in deep anxiety and some hope.

CHAPTER IX
THE REBELS-CONVICT
There were, when the purple gloom of the tropical night descended
upon the Caribbean, not more than ten men on guard aboard the Cinco
Llagas, so confident - and with good reason - were the Spaniards of
the complete subjection of the islanders. And when I say that there
were ten men on guard, I state rather the purpose for which they
were left aboard than the duty which they fulfilled. As a matter
of fact, whilst the main body of the Spaniards feasted and rioted
ashore, the Spanish gunner and his crew - who had so nobly done
their duty and ensured the easy victory of the day - were feasting
on the gun-deck upon the wine and the fresh meats fetched out to
them from shore. Above, two sentinels only kept vigil, at stem and
stern. Nor were they as vigilant as they should have been, or else
they must have observed the two wherries that under cover of the
darkness came gliding from the wharf, with well-greased rowlocks,
to bring up in silence under the great ship's quarter.
From the gallery aft still hung the ladder by which Don Diego had
descended to the boat that had taken him ashore. The sentry on
guard in the stern, coming presently round this gallery, was
suddenly confronted by the black shadow of a man standing before
him at the head of the ladder.
"Who's there?" he asked, but without alarm, supposing it one of his
fellows.
"It is I," softly answered Peter Blood in the fluent Castillan of
which he was master.
"Is it you, Pedro?" The Spaniard came a step nearer.
"Peter is my name; but I doubt I'll not be the Peter you're
expecting."
"How?" quoth the sentry, checking.
"This way," said Mr. Blood.
The wooden taffrail was a low one, and the Spaniard was taken
completely by surprise. Save for the splash he made as he struck
the water, narrowly missing one of the crowded boats that waited
under the counter, not a sound announced his misadventure. Armed
as he was with corselet, cuissarts, and headpiece, he sank to
trouble them no more.
"Whist!" hissed Mr. Blood to his waiting rebels-convict. "Come on,
now, and without noise.
Within five minutes they had swarmed aboard, the entire twenty of
them overflowing from that narrow gallery and crouching on the
quarter-deck itself. Lights showed ahead. Under the great lantern
in the prow they saw the black figure of the other sentry, pacing
on the forecastle. From below sounds reached them of the orgy on
the gun-deck: a rich male voice was singing an obscene ballad to
which the others chanted in chorus:
"Y estos son los usos de Castilla y de Leon!"
"From what I've seen to-day I can well believe it," said Mr. Blood,
and whispered: "Forward - after me."
Crouching low, they glided, noiseless as shadows, to the quarter-deck
rail, and thence slipped without sound down into the waist. Two
thirds of them were armed with muskets, some of which they had found
in the overseer's house, and others supplied from the secret hoard
that Mr. Blood had so laboriously assembled against the day of escape.
The remainder were equipped with knives and cutlasses.
In the vessel's waist they hung awhile, until Mr. Blood had satisfied
himself that no other sentinel showed above decks but that
inconvenient fellow in the prow. Their first attention must be for
him. Mr. Blood, himself, crept forward with two companions, leaving
the others in the charge of that Nathaniel Hagthorpe whose sometime
commission in the King's Navy gave him the best title to this office.
Mr. Blood's absence was brief. When he rejoined his comrades there
was no watch above the Spaniards' decks.
Meanwhile the revellers below continued to make merry at their ease
in the conviction of complete security. The garrison of Barbados
was overpowered and disarmed, and their companions were ashore in
complete possession of the town, glutting themselves hideously upon
the fruits of victory. What, then, was there to fear? Even when
their quarters were invaded and they found themselves surrounded by
a score of wild, hairy, half-naked men, who - save that they appeared
once to have been white - looked like a horde of savages, the
Spaniards could not believe their eyes.
Who could have dreamed that a handful of forgotten plantation-slaves
would have dared to take so much upon themselves?
The half-drunken Spaniards, their laughter suddenly quenched, the
song perishing on their lips, stared, stricken and bewildered at
the levelled muskets by which they were checkmated.
And then, from out of this uncouth pack of savages that beset them,
stepped a slim, tall fellow with light-blue eyes in a tawny face,
eyes in which glinted the light of a wicked humour. He addressed
them in the purest Castilian.
"You will save yourselves pain and trouble by regarding yourselves
my prisoners, and suffering yourselves to be quietly bestowed out
of harm's way."
"Name of God!" swore the gunner, which did no justice at all to an
amazement beyond expression.
"If you please," said Mr. Blood, and thereupon those gentlemen of
Spain were induced without further trouble beyond a musket prod or
two to drop through a scuttle to the deck below.
After that the rebels-convict refreshed themselves with the good
things in the consumption of which they had interrupted the Spaniards.
To taste palatable Christian food after months of salt fish and maize
dumplings was in itself a feast to these unfortunates. But there were
no excesses. Mr. Blood saw to that, although it required all the
firmness of which he was capable.
Dispositions were to be made without delay against that which must
follow before they could abandon themselves fully to the enjoyment
of their victory. This, after all, was no more than a preliminary
skirmish, although it was one that afforded them the key to the
situation. It remained to dispose so that the utmost profit might
be drawn from it. Those dispositions occupied some very considerable
portion of the night. But, at least, they were complete before the
sun peeped over the shoulder of Mount Hilibay to shed his light upon
a day of some surprises.
It was soon after sunrise that the rebel-convict who paced the
quarter-deck in Spanish corselet and headpiece, a Spanish musket on
his shoulder, announced the approach of a boat. It was Don Diego
de Espinosa y Valdez coming aboard with four great treasure-chests,
containing each twenty-five thousand pieces of eight, the ransom
delivered to him at dawn by Governor Steed. He was accompanied
by his son, Don Esteban, and by six men who took the oars.
Aboard the frigate all was quiet and orderly as it should be. She
rode at anchor, her larboard to the shore, and the main ladder on
her starboard side. Round to this came the boat with Don Diego and
his treasure. Mr. Blood had disposed effectively. It was not for
nothing that he had served under de Ruyter. The swings were waiting,
and the windlass manned. Below, a gun-crew held itself in readiness
under the command of Ogle, who - as I have said - had been a gunner
in the Royal Navy before he went in for politics and followed the
fortunes of the Duke of Monmouth. He was a sturdy, resolute fellow
who inspired confidence by the very confidence he displayed in
himself.
Don Diego mounted the ladder and stepped upon the deck, alone, and
entirely unsuspicious. What should the poor man suspect?
Before he could even look round, and survey this guard drawn up to
receive him, a tap over the head with a capstan bar efficiently
handled by Hagthorpe put him to sleep without the least fuss.
He was carried away to his cabin, whilst the treasure-chests, handled
by the men he had left in the boat, were being hauled to the deck.
That being satisfactorily accomplished, Don Esteban and the fellows
who had manned the boat came up the ladder, one by one, to be handled
with the same quiet efficiency. Peter Blood had a genius for these
things, and almost, I suspect, an eye for the dramatic. Dramatic,
certainly, was the spectacle now offered to the survivors of the raid.
With Colonel Bishop at their head, and gout-ridden Governor Steed
sitting on the ruins of a wall beside him, they glumly watched the
departure of the eight boats containing the weary Spanish ruffians
who had glutted themselves with rapine, murder, and violences
unspeakable.
They looked on, between relief at this departure of their remorseless
enemies, and despair at the wild ravages which, temporarily at least,
had wrecked the prosperity and happiness of that little colony.
The boats pulled away from the shore, with their loads of laughing,
jeering Spaniards, who were still flinging taunts across the water at
their surviving victims. They had come midway between the wharf and
the ship, when suddenly the air was shaken by the boom of a gun.
A round shot struck the water within a fathom of the foremost boat,
sending a shower of spray over its occupants. They paused at their
oars, astounded into silence for a moment. Then speech burst from
them like an explosion. Angrily voluble they anathematized this
dangerous carelessness on the part of their gunner, who should know
better than to fire a salute from a cannon loaded with shot. They
were still cursing him when a second shot, better aimed than the
first, came to crumple one of the boats into splinters, flinging its
crew, dead and living, into the water.
But if it silenced these, it gave tongue, still more angry, vehement,
and bewildered to the crews of the other seven boats. From each the
suspended oars stood out poised over the water, whilst on their feet
in the excitement the Spaniards screamed oaths at the ship, begging
Heaven and Hell to inform them what madman had been let loose among
her guns.
Plump into their middle came a third shot, smashing a second boat
with fearful execution. Followed again a moment of awful silence,
then among those Spanish pirates all was gibbering and jabbering
and splashing of oars, as they attempted to pull in every direction
at once. Some were for going ashore, others for heading straight
to the vessel and there discovering what might be amiss. That
something was very gravely amiss there could be no further doubt,
particularly as whilst they discussed and fumed and cursed two more
shots came over the water to account for yet a third of their boats.
The resolute Ogle was making excellent practice, and fully justifying
his claims to know something of gunnery. In their consternation the
Spaniards had simplified his task by huddling their boats together.
After the fourth shot, opinion was no longer divided amongst them.
As with one accord they went about, or attempted to do so, for before
they had accomplished it two more of their boats had been sunk.
The three boats that remained, without concerning themselves with
their more unfortunate fellows, who were struggling in the water,
headed back for the wharf at speed.
If the Spaniards understood nothing of all this, the forlorn
islanders ashore understood still less, until to help their wits
they saw the flag of Spain come down from the mainmast of the Cinco
Llagas, and the flag of England soar to its empty place. Even then
some bewilderment persisted, and it was with fearful eyes that they
observed the return of their enemies, who might vent upon them the
ferocity aroused by these extraordinary events.
Ogle, however, continued to give proof that his knowledge of gunnery
was not of yesterday. After the fleeing Spaniards went his shots.
The last of their boats flew into splinters as it touched the wharf,
and its remains were buried under a shower of loosened masonry.
That was the end of this pirate crew, which not ten minutes ago had
been laughingly counting up the pieces of eight that would fall to
the portion of each for his share in that act of villainy. Close
upon threescore survivors contrived to reach the shore. Whether
they had cause for congratulation, I am unable to say in the absence
of any records in which their fate may be traced. That lack of
records is in itself eloquent. We know that they were made fast as
they landed, and considering the offence they had given I am not
disposed to doubt that they had every reason to regret the survival.
The mystery of the succour that had come at the eleventh hour to
wreak vengeance upon the Spaniards, and to preserve for the island
the extortionate ransom of a hundred thousand pieces of eight,
remained yet to be probed. That the Cinco Llagas was now in friendly
hands could no longer be doubted after the proofs it had given. But
who, the people of Bridgetown asked one another, were the men in
possession of her, and whence had they come? The only possible
assumption ran the truth very closely. A resolute party of islanders
must have got aboard during the night, and seized the ship. It
remained to ascertain the precise identity of these mysterious
saviours, and do them fitting honour.

Upon this errand - Governor Steed's con***ion not permitting him to
go in person - went Colonel Bishop as the Governor's deputy, attended
by two officers.
As he stepped from the ladder into the vessel's waist, the Colonel
beheld there, beside the main hatch, the four treasure-chests, the
contents of one of which had been contributed almost entirely by
himself. It was a gladsome spectacle, and his eyes sparkled in
beholding it.
Ranged on either side, athwart the deck, stood a score of men in
two well-ordered files, with breasts and backs of steel, polished
Spanish morions on their heads, overshadowing their faces, and
muskets ordered at their sides.
Colonel Bishop could not be expected to recognize at a glance in
these upright, furbished, soldierly figures the ragged, unkempt
scarecrows that but yesterday had been toiling in his plantations.
Still less could he be expected to recognize at once the courtly
gentleman who advanced to greet him - a lean, graceful gentleman,
dressed in the Spanish fashion, all in black with silver lace, a
gold-hilted sword dangling beside him from a gold embroidered
baldrick, a broad castor with a sweeping plume set above carefully
curled ringlets of deepest black.
"Be welcome aboard the Cinco Llagas, Colonel, darling," a voice
vaguely familiar addressed the planter. "We've made the best of
the Spaniards' wardrobe in honour of this visit, though it was
scarcely yourself we had dared hope to expect. You find yourself
among friends - old friends of yours, all." The Colonel stared in
stupefaction. Mr. Blood tricked out in all this splendour -
indulging therein his natural taste - his face carefully shaven,
his hair as carefully dressed, seemed transformed into a younger
man. The fact is he looked no more than the thirty-three years he
counted to his age.
"Peter Blood!" It was an ejaculation of amazement. Satisfaction
followed swiftly. "Was it you, then...?"
"Myself it was - myself and these, my good friends and yours."
Mr. Blood tossed back the fine lace from his wrist, to wave a hand
towards the file of men standing to attention there.
The Colonel looked more closely. "Gad's my life!" he crowed on a
note of foolish jubilation. "And it was with these fellows that you
took the Spaniard and turned the tables on those dogs! Oddswounds!
It was heroic!"
"Heroic, is it? Bedad, it's epic! Ye begin to perceive the breadth
and depth of my genius."
Colonel Bishop sat himself down on the hatch-coaming, took off his
broad hat, and mopped his brow.
"Y'amaze me!" he gasped. "On my soul, y'amaze me! To have recovered
the treasure and to have seized this fine ship and all she'll hold!
It will be something to set against the other losses we have suffered.
As Gad's my life, you deserve well for this."
"I am entirely of your opinion."
"Damme! You all deserve well, and damme, you shall find me grateful."
"That's as it should be," said Mr. Blood. "The question is how well
we deserve, and how grateful shall we find you?"
Colonel Bishop considered him. There was a shadow of surprise in
his face.
"Why - his excellency shall write home an account of your exploit,
and maybe some portion of your sentences shall be remitted."
"The generosity of King James is well known," sneered Nathaniel
Hagthorpe, who was standing by, and amongst the ranged
rebels-convict some one ventured to laugh.
Colonel Bishop started up. He was pervaded by the first pang of
uneasiness. It occurred to him that all here might not be as
friendly as appeared.
"And there's another matter," Mr. Blood resumed. "There's a matter
of a flogging that's due to me. Ye're a man of your word in such
matters, Colonel - if not perhaps in others - and ye said, I think,
that ye'd not leave a square inch of skin on my back."
The planter waved the matter aside. Almost it seemed to offend him.
"Tush! Tush! After this splendid deed of yours, do you suppose I
can be thinking of such things?"
"I'm glad ye feel like that about it. But I'm thinking it's
mighty lucky for me the Spaniards didn't come to-day instead of
yesterday, or it's in the same plight as Jeremy Pitt I'd be this
minute. And in that case where was the genius that would have
turned the tables on these rascally Spaniards?"
"Why speak of it now?"
Mr. Blood resumed: "ye'll please to understand that I must, Colonel,
darling. Ye've worked a deal of wickedness and cruelty in your time,
and I want this to be a lesson to you, a lesson that ye'll remember
- for the sake of others who may come after us. There's Jeremy up
there in the round-house with a back that's every colour of the
rainbow; and the poor lad'll not be himself again for a month. And
if it hadn't been for the Spaniards maybe it's dead he'd be by now,
and maybe myself with him."
Hagthorpe lounged forward. He was a fairly tall, vigorous man
with a clear-cut, attractive face which in itself announced his
breeding.
"Why will you be wasting words on the hog?" wondered that sometime
officer in the Royal Navy. "Fling him overboard and have done with
him."
The Colonel's eyes bulged in his head. "What the devil do you mean?"
he blustered.
"It's the lucky man ye are entirely, Colonel, though ye don't guess
the source of your good fortune."
And now another intervened - the brawny, one-eyed Wolverstone, less
mercifully disposed than his more gentlemanly fellow-convict.
"String him up from the yardarm," he cried, his deep voice harsh and
angry, and more than one of the slaves standing to their arms made
echo.
Colonel Bishop trembled. Mr. Blood turned. He was quite calm.
"If you please, Wolverstone," said he, "I conduct affairs in my own
way. That is the pact. You'll please to remember it." His eyes
looked along the ranks, making it plain that he addressed them all.
"I desire that Colonel Bishop should have his life. One reason is
that I require him as a hostage. If ye insist on hanging him, ye'll
have to hang me with him, or in the alternative I'll go ashore."
He paused. There was no answer. But they stood hang-dog and
half-mutinous before him, save Hagthorpe, who shrugged and smiled
wearily.
Mr. Blood resumed: "Ye'll please to understand that aboard a ship
there is one captain. So." He swung again to the startled Colonel.
"Though I promise you your life, I must - as you've heard - keep
you aboard as a hostage for the good behaviour of Governor Steed
and what's left of the fort until we put to sea."
"Until you..." Horror prevented Colonel Bishop from echoing the
remainder of that incredible speech.
"Just so," said Peter Blood, and he turned to the officers who had
accompanied the Colonel. "The boat is waiting, gentlemen. You'll
have heard what I said. Convey it with my compliments to his
excellency."
"But, sir..." one of them began.
"There is no more to be said, gentlemen. My name is Blood - Captain
Blood, if you please, of this ship the Cinco Llagas, taken as a
prize of war from Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez, who is my prisoner
aboard. You are to understand that I have turned the tables on more
than the Spaniards. There's the ladder. You'll find it more
convenient than being heaved over the side, which is what'll happen
if you linger.
They went, though not without some hustling, regardless of the
bellowings of Colonel Bishop, whose monstrous rage was fanned by
terror at finding himself at the mercy of these men of whose cause
to hate him he was very fully conscious.
A half-dozen of them, apart from Jeremy Pitt, who was utterly
incapacitated for the present, possessed a superficial knowledge
of seamanship. Hagthorpe, although he had been a fighting officer,
untrained in navigation, knew how to handle a ship, and under his
directions they set about getting under way.
The anchor catted, and the mainsail unfurled, they stood out for
the open before a gentle breeze, without interference from the fort.
As they were running close to the headland east of the bay, Peter
Blood returned to the Colonel, who, under guard and panic-stricken,
had dejectedly resumed his seat on the coamings of the main batch.
"Can ye swim, Colonel?"
Colonel Bishop looked up. His great face was yellow and seemed in
that moment of a preternatural flabbiness; his beady eyes were
beadier than ever.
"As your doctor, now, I prescribe a swim to cool the excessive heat
of your humours." Blood delivered the explanation pleasantly, and,
receiving still no answer from the Colonel, continued: "It's a mercy
for you I'm not by nature as bloodthirsty as some of my friends here.
And it's the devil's own labour I've had to prevail upon them not
to be vindictive. I doubt if ye're worth the pains I've taken for
you."
He was lying. He had no doubt at all. Had he followed his own
wishes and instincts, he would certainly have strung the Colonel up,
and accounted it a meritorious deed. It was the thought of Arabella
Bishop that had urged him to mercy, and had led him to oppose the
natural vindictiveness of his fellow-slaves until he had been in
danger of precipitating a mutiny. It was entirely to the fact that
the Colonel was her uncle, although he did not even begin *****spect
such a cause, that he owed such mercy as was now being shown him.
"You shall have a chance to swim for it," Peter Blood continued.
"It's not above a quarter of a mile to the headland yonder, and with
ordinary luck ye should manage it. Faith, you're fat enough to
float. Come on! Now, don't be hesitating or it's a long voyage
ye'll be going with us, and the devil knows what may happen to you.
You're not loved any more than you deserve."
Colonel Bishop mastered himself, and rose. A merciless despot, who
had never known the need for restraint in all these years, he was
doomed by ironic fate to practise restraint in the very moment when
his feelings had reached their most violent intensity.
Peter Blood gave an order. A plank was run out over the gunwale,
and lashed down.
"If you please, Colonel," said he, with a graceful flourish of
invitation.
The Colonel looked at him, and there was hell in his glance. Then,
taking his resolve, and putting the best face upon it, since no
other could help him here, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his
fine coat of biscuit-coloured taffetas, and climbed upon the plank.
A moment he paused, steadied by a hand that clutched the ratlines,
looking down in terror at the green water rushing past some
five-and-twenty feet below.
"Just take a little walk, Colonel, darling," said a smooth, mocking
voice behind him.
Still clinging, Colonel Bishop looked round in hesitation, and saw
the bulwarks lined with swarthy faces - the faces of men that as
lately as yesterday would have turned pale under his frown, faces
that were now all wickedly agrin.
For a moment rage stamped out his fear. He cursed them aloud
venomously and incoherently, then loosed his hold and stepped out
upon the plank. Three steps he took before he lost his balance and
went tumbling into the green depths below.
When he came to the surface again, gasping for air, the Cinco Llagas
was already some furlongs to leeward. But the roaring cheer of
mocking valediction from the rebels-convict reached him across the
water, to drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul.

CHAPTER X
DON DIEGO
Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez awoke, and with languid eyes in
aching head, he looked round the cabin, which was flooded with
sunlight from the square windows astern. Then he uttered a moan,
and closed his eyes again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache
in his head. Lying thus, he attempted to think, to locate himself
in time and space. But between the pain in his head and the
confusion in his mind, he found coherent thought impossible.
An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to open his eyes again, and
once more to consider his surroundings.
There could be no doubt that he lay in the great cabin of his own
ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his vague disquiet must be, surely,
ill-founded. And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the
assistance of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that
here something was not as it should be. The low position of the
sun, flooding the cabin with golden light from those square ports
astern, suggested to him at first that it was early morning, on
the assumption that the vessel was headed westward. Then the
alternative occurred to him. They might be sailing eastward, in
which case the time of day would be late afternoon. That they
were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of the
vessel under him. But how did they come to be sailing, and he,
the master, not to know whether their course lay east or west, not
to be able to recollect whither they were bound?
His mind went back over the adventure of yesterday, if of yesterday
it was. He was clear on the matter of the easily successful raid
upon the Island of Barbados; every detail stood vividly in his
memory up to the moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped
on to his own deck again. There memory abruptly and inexplicably
ceased.
He was beginning to torture his mind with conjecture, when the door
opened, and to Don Diego's increasing mystification he beheld his
best suit of clothes step into the cabin. It was a singularly
elegant and characteristically Spanish suit of black taffetas with
silver lace that had been made for him a year ago in Cadiz, and he
knew each detail of it so well that it was impossible he could now
be mistaken.
The suit paused to close the door, then advanced towards the couch
on which Don Diego was extended, and inside the suit came a tall,
slender gentleman of about Don Diego's own height and shape. Seeing
the wide, startled eyes of the Spaniard upon him, the gentleman
lengthened his stride.
"Awake, eh?" said he in Spanish.
The recumbent man looked up bewildered into a pair of light-blue
eyes that regarded him out of a tawny, sardonic face set in a
cluster of black ringlets. But he was too bewildered to make any
answer.
The stranger's fingers touched the top of Don Diego's head,
whereupon Don Diego winced and cried out in pain.
"Tender, eh?" said the stranger. He took Don Diego's wrist between
thumb and second finger. And then, at last, the intrigued Spaniard
spoke.
"Are you a doctor?"
"Among other things." The swarthy gentleman continued his study of
the patient's pulse. "Firm and regular," he announced at last, and
dropped the wrist. "You've taken no great harm."
Don Diego struggled up into a sitting position on the red velvet
couch.
"Who the devil are you?" he asked. "And what the devil are you
doing in my clothes and aboard my ship?"
The level black eyebrows went up, a faint smile curled the lips of
the long mouth.
"You are still delirious, I fear. This is not your ship. This is
my ship, and these are my clothes."
"Your ship?" quoth the other, aghast, and still more aghast he added:
"Your clothes? But... then...." Wildly his eyes looked about him.
They scanned the cabin once again, scrutinizing each familiar object.
"Am I mad?" he asked at last. "Surely this ship is the Cinco Llagas?"
"The Cinco Llagas it is."
"Then...." The Spaniard broke off. His glance grew still more
troubled. "Valga me Dios!" he cried out, like a man in anguish.
"Will you tell me also that you are Don Diego de Espinosa?"
"Oh, no, my name is Blood - Captain Peter Blood. This ship, like
this handsome suit of clothes, is mine by right of conquest. Just
as you, Don Diego, are my prisoner."
Startling as was the explanation, yet it proved soothing to Don
Diego, being so much less startling than the things he was beginning
to imagine.
"But... Are you not Spanish, then?"
"You flatter my Castilian accent. I have the honour to be Irish.
You were thinking that a miracle had happened. So it has - a
miracle wrought by my genius, which is considerable."
Succinctly now Captain Blood dispelled the mystery by a relation of
the facts. It was a narrative that painted red and white by turns
the Spaniard's countenance. He put a hand to the back of his head,
and there discovered, in confirmation of the story, a lump as large
as a pigeon's egg. Lastly, he stared wild-eyed at the sardonic
Captain Blood.
"And my son? What of my son?" he cried out. "He was in the boat
that brought me aboard."
"Your son is safe; he and the boat's crew together with your gunner
and his men are snugly in irons under hatches."
Don Diego sank back on the couch, his glittering dark eyes fixed
upon the tawny face above him. He composed himself. After all, he
possessed the stoicism proper to his desperate trade. The dice had
fallen against him in this venture. The tables had been turned upon
him in the very moment of success. He accepted the situation with
the fortitude of a fatalist.
With the utmost calm he enquired:
"And now, Senior Capitan?"
"And now," said Captain Blood - to give him the title he had assumed
- "being a humane man, I am sorry to find that ye're not dead from
the tap we gave you. For it means that you'll be put to the trouble
of dying all over again."
"Ah!" Don Diego drew a deep breath. "But is that necessary?" he
asked, without apparent perturbation.
Captain Blood's blue eyes approved his bearing. "Ask yourself," said
he. "Tell me, as an experienced and bloody pirate, what in my place
would you do, yourself?"
"Ah, but there is a difference." Don Diego sat up to argue the
matter. "It lies in the fact that you boast yourself a humane man."
Captain Blood perched himself on the edge of the long oak table.
"But I am not a fool," said he, "and I'll not allow a natural Irish
sentimentality to stand in the way of my doing what is necessary
and proper. You and your ten surviving scoundrels are a menace on
this ship. More than that, she is none so well found in water and
provisions. True, we are fortunately a small number, but you and
your party inconveniently increase it. So that on every hand, you
see, prudence suggests to us that we should deny ourselves the
pleasure of your company, and, steeling our soft hearts to the
inevitable, invite you to be so obliging as to step over the side."
"I see," said the Spaniard pensively. He swung his legs from the
couch, and sat now upon the edge of it, his elbows on his knees. He
had taken the measure of his man, and met him with a mock-urbanity
and a suave detachment that matched his own. "I confess," he
admitted, "that there is much force in what you say."
"You take a load from my mind," said Captain Blood. "I would not
appear unnecessarily harsh, especially since I and my friends owe
you so very much. For, whatever it may have been to others, to us
your raid upon Barbados was most opportune. I am glad, therefore,
that you agree the I have no choice."
"But, my friend, I did not agree so much."
"If there is any alternative that you can suggest, I shall be most
happy to consider it."
Don Diego stroked his pointed black beard.
"Can you give me until morning for reflection? My head aches so
damnably that I am incapable of thought. And this, you will admit,
is a matter that asks serious thought."
Captain Blood stood up. From a shelf he took a half-hour glass,
reversed it so that the bulb containing the red sand was uppermost,
and stood it on the table.
"I am sorry to press you in such a matter, Don Diego, but one glass
is all that I can give you. If by the time those sands have run
out you can propose no acceptable alternative, I shall most
reluctantly be driven to ask you to go over the side with your
friends."
Captain Blood bowed, went out, and locked the door. Elbows on his
knees and face in his hands, Don Diego sat watching the rusty sands
as they filtered from the upper to the lower bulb. And what time
he watched, the lines in his lean brown face grew deeper. Punctually
as the last grains ran out, the door reopened.
The Spaniard sighed, and sat upright to face the returning Captain
Blood with the answer for which he came.
"I have thought of an alternative, sir captain; but it depends upon
your charity. It is that you put us ashore on one of the islands
of this pestilent archipelago, and leave us to shift for ourselves."
Captain Blood pursed his lips. "It has its difficulties," said he
slowly.
"I feared it would be so." Don Diego sighed again, and stood up.
"Let us say no more."
The light-blue eyes played over him like points of steel.
"You are not afraid to die, Don Diego?"
The Spaniard threw back his head, a frown between his eyes.
"The question is offensive, sir."
"Then let me put it in another way - perhaps more happily: You do
not desire to live?"
"Ah, that I can answer. I do desire to live; and even more do I
desire that my son may live. But the desire shall not make a coward
of me for your amusement, master mocker." It was the first sign he
had shown of the least heat or resentment.
Captain Blood did not directly answer. As before he perched himself
on the corner of the table.
"Would you be willing, sir, to earn life and liberty - for yourself,
your son, and the other Spaniards who are on board?"
"To earn it?" said Don Diego, and the watchful blue eyes did not
miss the quiver that ran through him. "To earn it, do you say?
Why, if the service you would propose is one that cannot hurt my
honour...."
"Could I be guilty of that?" protested the Captain. "I realize that
even a pirate has his honour." And forthwith he propounded his
offer. "If you will look from those windows, Don Diego, you will
see what appears to be a cloud on the horizon. That is the island
of Barbados well astern. All day we have been sailing east before
the wind with but one intent - to set as great a distance between
Barbados and ourselves as possible. But now, almost out of sight
of land, we are in a difficulty. The only man among us schooled in
the art of navigation is fevered, delirious, in fact, as a result
of certain ill-treatment he received ashore before we carried him
away with us. I can handle a ship in action, and there are one or
two men aboard who can assist me; but of the higher mysteries of
seamanship and of the art of finding a way over the trackless wastes
of ocean, we know nothing. To hug the land, and go blundering about
what you so aptly call this pestilent archipelago, is for us to court
disaster, as you can perhaps conceive. And so it comes to this: We
desire to make for the Dutch settlement of Curacao as straightly as
possible. Will you pledge me your honour, if I release you upon
parole, that you will navigate us thither? If so, we will release
you and your surviving men upon arrival there."
Don Diego bowed his head upon his breast, and strode away in thought
to the stern windows. There he stood looking out upon the sunlit sea
and the dead water in the great ship's wake - his ship, which these
English dogs had wrested from him; his ship, which he was asked to
bring safely into a port where she would be completely lost to him
and refitted perhaps to make war upon his kin. That was in one scale;
in the other were the lives of sixteen men. Fourteen of them mattered
little to him, but the remaining two were his own and his son's.
He turned at length, and his back being to the light, the Captain
could not see how pale his face had grown.
"I accept," he said.

CHAPTER XI
FILIAL PIETY
By virtue of the pledge he had given, Don Diego de Espinosa enjoyed
the freedom of the ship that had been his, and the navigation which
he had undertaken was left entirely in his hands. And because those
who manned her were new to the seas of the Spanish Main, and because
even the things that had happened in Bridgetown were not enough to
teach them to regard every Spaniard as a treacherous, cruel dog to
be slain at sight, they used him with the civility which his own
suave urbanity invited. He took his meals in the great cabin with
Blood and the three officers elected *****pport him: Hagthorpe,
Wolverstone, and Dyke.
They found Don Diego an agreeable, even an amusing companion, and
their friendly feeling towards him was fostered by his fortitude and
brave equanimity in this adversity.
That Don Diego was not playing fair it was impossible *****spect.
Moreover, there was no conceivable reason why he should not. And
he had been of the utmost frankness with them. He had denounced
their mistake in sailing before the wind upon leaving Barbados.
They should have left the island to leeward, heading into the
Caribbean and away from the archipelago. As it was, they would now
be forced to pass through this archipelago again so as to make
Curacao, and this passage was not to be accomplished without some
measure of risk to themselves. At any point between the islands
they might come upon an equal or superior craft; whether she were
Spanish or English would be equally bad for them, and being
undermanned they were in no case to fight. To lessen this risk
as far as possible, Don Diego directed at first a southerly and
then a westerly course; and so, taking a line midway between
the islands of Tobago and Grenada, they won safely through the
danger-zone and came into the comparative security of the Caribbean
Sea.
"If this wind holds," he told them that night at supper, after he
had announced to them their position, "we should reach Curacao
inside three days."
For three days the wind held, indeed it freshened a little on the
second, and yet when the third night descended upon them they had
still made no landfall. The Cinco Llagas was ploughing through a
sea contained on every side by the blue bowl of heaven. Captain
Blood uneasily mentioned it to Don Diego.
"It will be for to-morrow morning," he was answered with calm
conviction.
"By all the saints, it is always 'to-morrow morning' with you
Spaniards; and to-morrow never comes, my friend."
But this to-morrow is coming, rest assured. However early you may
be astir, you shall see land ahead, Don Pedro."
Captain Blood passed on, content, and went to visit Jerry Pitt, his
patient, to whose con***ion Don Diego owed his chance of life. For
twenty-four hours now the fever had left the sufferer, and under
Peter Blood's dressings, his lacerated back was beginning to heal
satisfactorily. So far, indeed, was he recovered that he complained
of his confinement, of the heat in his cabin. To indulge him Captain
Blood consented that he should take the air on deck, and so, as the
last of the daylight was fading from the sky, Jeremy Pitt came forth
upon the Captain's arm.
Seated on the hatch-coamings, the Somersetshire lad gratefully
filled his lungs with the cool night air, and professed himself
revived thereby. Then with the seaman's instinct his eyes wandered
to the darkling vault of heaven, spangled already with a myriad
golden points of light. Awhile he scanned it idly, vacantly; then,
his attention became sharply fixed. He looked round and up at
Captain Blood, who stood beside him.
"D'ye know anything of astronomy, Peter?" quoth he.
"Astronomy, is it? Faith, now, I couldn't tell the Belt of Orion
from the Girdle of Venus."
"Ah! And I suppose all the others of this lubberly crew share
your ignorance."
"It would be more amiable of you *****ppose that they exceed it."
Jeremy pointed ahead to a spot of light in the heavens over the
starboard bow. "That is the North Star," said he.
"Is it now? Glory be, I wonder ye can pick it out from the rest."
"And the North Star ahead almost over your starboard bow means that
we're steering a course, north, northwest, or maybe north by west,
for I doubt if we are standing more than ten degrees westward."
"And why shouldn't we?" wondered Captain Blood.
"You told me - didn't you? - that we came west of the archipelago
between Tobago and Grenada, steering for Curacao. If that were
our present course, we should have the North Star abeam, out yonder."
On the instant Mr. Blood shed his laziness. He stiffened with
apprehension, and was about to speak when a shaft of light clove
the gloom above their heads, coming from the door of the poop cabin
which had just been opened. It closed again, and presently there
was a step on the companion. Don Diego was approaching. Captain
Blood's fingers pressed Jerry's shoulder with significance. Then he
called the Don, and spoke to him in English as had become his custom
when others were present.
"Will ye settle a slight dispute for us, Don Diego?" said he lightly.
"We are arguing, Mr. Pitt and I, as to which is the North Star."
"So?" The Spaniard's tone was easy; there was almost a suggestion
that laughter lurked behind it, and the reason for this was yielded
by his next sentence. "But you tell me Mr. Pitt he is your navigant?"
"For lack of a better," laughed the Captain, good-humouredly
contemptuous. "Now I am ready to wager him a hundred pieces of eight
that that is the North Star." And he flung out an arm towards a
point of light in the heavens straight abeam. He afterwards told
Pitt that had Don Diego confirmed him, he would have run him through
upon that instant. Far from that, however, the Spaniard freely
expressed his scorn.
"You have the assurance that is of ignorance, Don Pedro; and you lose.
The North Star is this one." And he indicated it.
"You are sure?"
"But my dear Don Pedro!" The Spaniard's tone was one of amused
protest. "But is it possible that I mistake? Besides, is there
not the compass? Come to the binnacle and see there what course we
make."
His utter frankness, and the easy manner of one who has nothing to
conceal resolved at once the doubt that had leapt so suddenly in
the mind of Captain Blood. Pitt was satisfied less easily.
"In that case, Don Diego, will you tell me, since Curacao is our
destination, why our course is what it is?"
Again there was no faintest hesitation on Don Diego's part. "You
have reason to ask," said he, and sighed. "I had hope' it would not
be observe'. I have been careless - oh, of a carelessness very
culpable. I neglect observation. Always it is my way. I make too
sure. I count too much on dead reckoning. And so to-day I find
when at last I take out the quadrant that we do come by a half-degree
too much south, so that Curacao is now almost due north. That is
what cause the delay. But we will be there to-morrow."
The explanation, so completely satisfactory, and so readily and
candidly forthcoming, left no room for further doubt that Don Diego
should have been false to his parole. And when presently Don Diego
had withdrawn again, Captain Blood confessed to Pitt that it was
absurd to have suspected him. Whatever his antecedents, he had
proved his quality when he announced himself ready to die sooner
than enter into any undertaking that could hurt his honour or his
country.
New to the seas of the Spanish Main and to the ways of the
adventurers who sailed it, Captain Blood still entertained
illusions. But the next dawn was to shatter them rudely and for
ever.
Coming on deck before the sun was up, he saw land ahead, as the
Spaniard had promised them last night. Some ten miles ahead it lay,
a long coast-line filling the horizon east and west, with a massive
headland jutting forward straight before them. Staring at it, he
frowned. He had not conceived that Curacao was of such considerable
dimensions. Indeed, this looked less like an island than the main
itself.
Beating out aweather, against the gentle landward breeze he beheld
a great ship on their starboard bow, that he conceived to be some
three or four miles off, and - as well as he could judge her at
that distance - of a tonnage equal if not superior to their own.
Even as he watched her she altered her course, and going about came
heading towards them, close-hauled.
A dozen of his fellows were astir on the forecastle, looking
eagerly ahead, and the sound of their voices and laughter reached
him across the length of the stately Cinco Llagas.
"There," said a soft voice behind him in liquid Spanish, "is the
Promised Land, Don Pedro."
It was something in that voice, a muffled note of exultation, that
awoke suspicion in him, and made whole the half-doubt he had been
entertaining. He turned sharply to face Don Diego, so sharply that
the sly smile was not effaced from the Spaniard's countenance
before Captain Blood's eyes had flashed upon it.
"You find an odd satisfaction in the sight of it - all things
considered," said Mr. Blood.
"Of course." The Spaniard rubbed his hands, and Mr. Blood observed
that they were unsteady. "The satisfaction of a mariner."
"Or of a traitor - which?" Blood asked him quietly. And as the
Spaniard fell back before him with suddenly altered countenance
that confirmed his every suspicion, he flung an arm out in the
direction of the distant shore. "What land is that?" he demanded.
"Will you have the effrontery to tell me that is the coast of
Curacao?"
He advanced upon Don Diego suddenly, and Don Diego, step by step,
fell back. "Shall I tell you what land it is? Shall I?" His fierce
assumption of knowledge seemed to dazzle and daze the Spaniard. For
still Don Diego made no answer. And then Captain Blood drew a bow
at a venture - or not quite at a venture. Such a coast-line as that,
if not of the main itself, and the main he knew it could not be,
must belong to either Cuba or Hispaniola. Now knowing Cuba to lie
farther north and west of the two, it followed, he reasoned swiftly,
that if Don Diego meant betrayal he would steer for the nearer of
these Spanish territories. "That land, you treacherous, forsworn
Spanish dog, is the island of Hispaniola."
Having said it, he closely watched the swarthy face now overspread
with pallor, to see the truth or falsehood of his guess reflected
there. But now the retreating Spaniard had come to the middle of
the quarter-deck, where the mizzen sail made a screen to shut them
off from the eyes of the Englishmen below. His lips writhed in a
snarling smile.
"Ah, perro ingles! You know too much," he said under his breath,
and sprang for the Captain's throat.

Tight-locked in each other's arms, they swayed a moment, then
together went down upon the deck, the Spaniard's feet jerked from
under him by the right leg of Captain Blood. The Spaniard had
depended upon his strength, which was considerable. But it proved
no match for the steady muscles of the Irishman, tempered of late
by the vicissitudes of slavery. He had depended upon choking
the life out of Blood, and so gaining the half-hour that might be
necessary to bring up that fine ship that was beating towards them
- a Spanish ship, perforce, since none other would be so boldly
cruising in these Spanish waters off Hispaniola. But all that Don
Diego had accomplished was to betray himself completely, and to no
purpose. This he realized when he found himself upon his back,
pinned down by Blood, who was kneeling on his chest, whilst the
men summoned by their Captain's shout came clattering up the
companion.
"Will I say a prayer for your dirty soul now, whilst I am in this
position?" Captain Blood was furiously mocking him.
But the Spaniard, though defeated, now beyond hope for himself,
forced his lips to smile, and gave back mockery for mockery.
"Who will pray for your soul, I wonder, when that galleon comes to
lie board and board with you?"
"That galleon!" echoed Captain Blood with sudden and awful
realization that already it was too late to avoid the consequences
of Don Diego's betrayal of them.
"That galleon," Don Diego repeated, and added with a deepening sneer:
"Do you know what ship it is? I will tell you. It is the
Encarnacion, the flagship of Don Miguel de Espinosa, the Lord Admiral
of Castile, and Don Miguel is my brother. It is a very fortunate
encounter. The Almighty, you see, watches over the destinies of
Catholic Spain."
There was no trace of humour or urbanity now in Captain Blood. His
light eyes blazed: his face was set.
He rose, relinquishing the Spaniard to his men. "Make him fast,"
he bade them. "Truss him, wrist and heel, but don't hurt him - not
so much as a hair of his precious head."
The injunction was very necessary. Frenzied by the thought that
they were likely to exchange the slavery from which they had so
lately escaped for a slavery still worse, they would have torn the
Spaniard limb from limb upon the spot. And if they now obeyed
their Captain and refrained, it was only because the sudden steely
note in his voice promised for Don Diego Valdez something far more
exquisite than death.
"You scum! You dirty pirate! You man of honour!" Captain Blood
apostrophized his prisoner.
But Don Diego looked up at him and laughed.
"You underrated me." He spoke English, so that all might hear.
"I tell you that I was not fear death, and I show you that I was
not fear it. You no understand. You just an English dog."
"Irish, if you please," Captain Blood corrected him. "And your
parole, you tyke of Spain?"
"You think I give my parole to leave you sons of filth with this
beautiful Spanish ship, to go make war upon other Spaniards! Ha!"
Don Diego laughed in his throat. "You fool! You can kill me.
Pish! It is very well. I die with my work well done. In less
than an hour you will be the prisoners of Spain, and the Cinco
Llagas will go belong to Spain again."
Captain Blood regarded him steadily out of a face which, if
impassive, had paled under its deep tan. About the prisoner,
clamant, infuriated, ferocious, the rebels-convict surged, almost
literally "athirst for his blood."
"Wait," Captain Blood imperiously commanded, and turning on his
heel, he went aside to the rail. As he stood there deep in thought,
he was joined by Hagthorpe, Wolverstone, and Ogle the gunner. In
silence they stared with him across the water at that other ship.
She had veered a point away from the wind, and was running now on
a line that must in the end converge with that of the Cinco Llagas.
"In less than half-an-hour," said Blood presently, "we shall have
her athwart our hawse, sweeping our decks with her guns."
"We can fight," said the one-eyed giant with an oath.
"Fight!" sneered Blood. "Undermanned as we are, mustering a bare
twenty men, in what case are we to fight? No, there would be only
one way. To persuade her that all is well aboard, that we are
Spaniards, so that she may leave us to continue on our course."
"And how is that possible?" Hagthorpe asked.
"It isn't possible," said Blood. "If it...." And then he broke off,
and stood musing, his eyes upon the green water. Ogle, with a bent
for sarcasm, interposed a suggestion bitterly.
"We might send Don Diego de Espinosa in a boat manned by his
Spaniards to assure his brother the Admiral that we are all loyal
subjects of his Catholic Majesty."
The Captain swung round, and for an instant looked as if he would
have struck the gunner. Then his expression changed: the light of
inspiration Was in his glance.
"Bedad! ye've said it. He doesn't fear death, this damned pirate;
but his son may take a different view. Filial piety's mighty
strong in Spain." He swung on his heel abruptly, and strode back
to the knot of men about his prisoner. "Here!" he shouted to them.
"Bring him below." And he led the way down to the waist, and thence
by the booby hatch to the gloom of the 'tween-decks, where the air
was rank with the smell of tar and spun yarn. Going aft he threw
open the door of the spacious wardroom, and went in followed by a
dozen of the hands with the pinioned Spaniard. Every man aboard
would have followed him but for his sharp command to some of them
to remain on deck with Hagthorpe.
In the ward-room the three stern chasers were in position, loaded,
their muzzles thrusting through the open ports, precisely as the
Spanish gunners had left them.
"Here, Ogle, is work for you," said Blood, and as the burly gunner
came thrusting forward through the little throng of gaping men,
Blood pointed to the middle chaser; "Have that gun hauled back,"
he ordered.
When this was done, Blood beckoned those who held Don Diego.
"Lash him across the mouth of it," he bade them, and whilst, assisted
by another two, they made haste to obey, he turned to the others.
"To the roundhouse, some of you, and fetch the Spanish prisoners.
And you, Dyke, go up and bid them set the flag of Spain aloft."
Don Diego, with his body stretched in an arc across the cannon's
mouth, legs and arms lashed to the carriage on either side of it,
eyeballs rolling in his head, glared maniacally at Captain Blood.
A man may not fear to die, and yet be appalled by the form in which
death comes to him.
From frothing lips he hurled blasphemies and insults at his tormentor.
"Foul barbarian! Inhuman savage! Accursed heretic! Will it not
content you to kill me in some Christian fashion?" Captain Blood
vouchsafed him a malignant smile, before he turned to meet the
fifteen manacled Spanish prisoners, who were thrust into his presence.
Approaching, they had heard Don Diego's outcries; at close quarters
now they beheld with horror-stricken eyes his plight. From amongst
them a comely, olive-skinned stripling, distinguished in bearing and
apparel from his companions, started forward with an anguished cry
of "Father!"
Writhing in the arms that made haste to seize and hold him, he
called upon heaven and hell to avert this horror, and lastly,
addressed to Captain Blood an appeal for mercy that was at once
fierce and piteous. Considering him, Captain Blood thought with
satisfaction that he displayed the proper degree of filial piety.
He afterwards confessed that for a moment he was in danger of
weakening, that for a moment his mind rebelled against the pitiless
thing it had planned. But to correct the sentiment he evoked a
memory of what these Spaniards had performed in Bridgetown. Again
he saw the white face of that child Mary Traill as she fled in
horror before the jeering ruffian whom he had slain, and other
things even more unspeakable seen on that dreadful evening rose
now before the eyes of his memory to stiffen his faltering purpose.
The Spaniards had shown themselves without mercy or sentiment or
decency of any kind; stuffed with religion, they were without a
spark of that Christianity, the Symbol of which was mounted on
the mainmast of the approaching ship. A moment ago this cruel,
vicious Don Diego had insulted the Almighty by his assumption that
He kept a specially benevolent watch over the destinies of Catholic
Spain. Don Diego should be taught his error.
Recovering the cynicism in which he had approached his task, the
cynicism essential to its proper performance, he commanded Ogle
to kindle a match and remove the leaden apron from the touch-hole
of the gun that bore Don Diego. Then, as the younger Espinosa
broke into fresh intercessions mingled with imprecations, he
wheeled upon him sharply.
"Peace!" he snapped. "Peace, and listen! It is no part of my
intention to blow your father to hell as he deserves, or indeed
to take his life at all."
Having surprised the lad into silence by that promise - a promise
surprising enough in all the circumstances - he proceeded to
explain his aims in that faultless and elegant Castilian of which
he was fortunately master - as fortunately for Don Diego as for
himself.
"It is your father's treachery that has brought us into this plight
and deliberately into risk of capture and death aboard that ship of
Spain. Just as your father recognized his brother's flagship, so
will his brother have recognized the Cinco Llagas. So far, then,
all is well. But presently the Encarnacion will be sufficiently
close to perceive that here all is not as it should be. Sooner or
later, she must guess or discover what is wrong, and then she will
open fire or lay us board and board. Now, we are in no case to
fight, as your father knew when he ran us into this trap. But
fight we will, if we are driven to it. We make no tame surrender
to the ferocity of Spain."
He laid his hand on the breech of the gun that bore Don Diego.
"Understand this clearly: to the first shot from the Encarnacion
this gun will fire the answer. I make myself clear, I hope?"
White-faced and trembling, young Espinosa stared into the pitiless
blue eyes that so steadily regarded him.
"If it is clear?" he faltered, breaking the utter silence in which
all were standing. "But, name of God, how should it be clear?
How should I understand? Can you avert the fight? If you know a
way, and if I, or these, can help you to it - if that is what you
mean - in Heaven's name let me hear it."
"A fight would be averted if Don Diego de Espinosa were to go aboard
his brother's ship, and by his presence and assurances inform the
Admiral that all is well with the Cinco Llagas, that she is indeed
still a ship of Spain as her flag now announces. But of course
Don Diego cannot go in person, because he is... otherwise engaged.
He has a slight touch of fever - shall we say? - that detains him
in his cabin. But you, his son, may convey all this and some other
matters together with his homage to your uncle. You shall go in a
boat manned by six of these Spanish prisoners, and I - a
distinguished Spaniard delivered from captivity in Barbados by your
recent raid - will accompany you to keep you in countenance. If I
return alive, and without accident of any kind to hinder our free
sailing hence, Don Diego shall have his life, as shall every one of
you. But if there is the least misadventure, be it from treachery
or ill-fortune - I care not which - the battle, as I have had the
honour to explain, will be opened on our side by this gun, and your
father will be the first victim of the conflict."
He paused a moment. There was a hum of approval from his comrades,
an anxious stirring among the Spanish prisoners. Young Espinosa
stood before him, the colour ebbing and flowing in his cheeks. He
waited for some direction from his father. But none came. Don
Diego's courage, it seemed, had sadly waned under that rude test.
He hung limply in his fearful bonds, and was silent. Evidently he
dared not encourage his son to defiance, and presumably was ashamed
to urge him to yield. Thus, he left decision entirely with the
youth.
"Come," said Blood. "I have been clear enough, I think. What do
you say?"
Don Esteban moistened his parched lips, and with the back of his
hand mopped the anguish-sweat from his brow. His eyes gazed
wildly a moment upon the shoulders of his father, as if beseeching
guidance. But his father remained silent. Something like a sob
escaped the boy.
"I... I accept," he answered at last, and swung to the Spaniards.
"And you - you will accept too," he insisted passionately. "For
Don Diego's sake and for your own - for all our sakes. If you do
not, this man will butcher us all without mercy."
Since he yielded, and their leader himself counselled no resistance,
why should they encompass their own destruction by a gesture of
futile heroism? They answered without much hesitation that they
would do as was required of them.
Blood turned, and advanced to Don Diego.
"I am sorry to inconvenience you in this fashion, but... For a
second he checked and frowned as his eyes intently observed the
prisoner. Then, after that scarcely perceptible pause, he
continued, "but I do not think that you have anything beyond
this inconvenience to apprehend, and you may depend upon me to
shorten it as far as possible." Don Diego made him no answer.
Peter Blood waited a moment, observing him; then he bowed and
stepped back.

CHAPTER XII
DON PEDRO SANGRE
The Cinco Llagas and the Encarnacion, after a proper exchange of
signals, lay hove to within a quarter of a mile of each other, and
across the intervening space of gently heaving, sunlit waters sped
a boat from the former, manned by six Spanish seamen and bearing
in her stern sheets Don Esteban de Espinosa and Captain Peter Blood.
She also bore two treasure-chests containing fifty thousand pieces
of eight. Gold has at all times been considered the best of
testimonies of good faith, and Blood was determined that in all
respects appearances should be entirely on his side. His followers
had accounted this a supererogation of pretence. But Blood's will
in the matter had prevailed. He carried further a bulky package
addressed to a grande of Spain, heavily sealed with the arms of
Espinosa - another piece of evidence hastily manufactured in the
cabin of the Cinco Llagas - and he was spending these last moments
in completing his instructions to his young companion.
Don Esteban expressed his last lingering uneasiness:
"But if you should betray yourself?" he cried.
"It will be unfortunate for everybody. I advised your father to
say a prayer for our success. I depend upon you to help me more
materially."
"1 will do my best. God knows I will do my best," the boy protested.
Blood nodded thoughtfully, and no more was said until they bumped
alongside the towering mass of the Encarnadon. Up the ladder went
Don Esteban closely followed by Captain Blood. ln the waist stood
the Admiral himself to receive them, a handsome, self-sufficient
man, very tall and stiff, a little older and greyer than Don Diego,
whom he closely resembled. He was supported by four officers and a
friar in the black and white habit of St. Dominic.
Don Miguel opened his arms to his nephew, whose lingering panic he
mistook for pleasurable excitement, and having enfolded him to his
bosom turned to greet Don Esteban's companion.
Peter Blood bowed gracefully, entirely at his ease, so far as might
be judged from appearances.
"I am," he announced, making a literal translation of his name,
"Don Pedro Sangre, an unfortunate gentleman of Leon, lately
delivered from captivity by Don Esteban's most gallant father."
And in a few words he sketched the imagined con***ions of his
capture by, and deliverance from, those accursed heretics who
held the island of Barbados. "Benedicamus Domino," said the
friar to his tale.
"Ex hoc nunc et usque in seculum," replied Blood, the occasional
papist, with lowered eyes.
The Admiral and his attending officers gave him a sympathetic
hearing and a cordial welcome. Then came the dreaded question.
"But where is my brother? Why has he not come, himself, to
greet me?"
It was young Espinosa who answered this:
"My father is afflicted at denying himself that honour and pleasure.
But unfortunately, sir uncle, he is a little indisposed - oh,
nothing grave; merely sufficient to make him keep his cabin. It is
a little fever, the result of a slight wound taken in the recent
raid upon Barbados, which resulted in this gentleman's happy
deliverance."
"Nay, nephew, nay," Don Miguel protested with ironic repudiation.
"I can have no knowledge of these things. I have the honour to
represent upon the seas His Catholic Majesty, who is at peace with
the King of England. Already you have told me more than it is good
for me to know. I will endeavour to forget it, and I will ask you,
sirs," he added, glancing at his officers, "to forget it also." But
he winked into the twinkling eyes of Captain Blood; then added
matter that at once extinguished that twinkle. "But since Diego
cannot come to me, why, I will go across to him."
For a moment Don Esteban's face was a mask of pallid fear. Then
Blood was speaking in a lowered, confidential voice that admirably
blended suavity, impressiveness, and sly mockery.
"If you please, Don Miguel, but that is the very thing you must not
do - the very thing Don Diego does not wish you to do. You must not
see him until his wounds are healed. That is his own wish. That
is the real reason why he is not here. For the truth is that his
wounds are not so grave as to have prevented his coming. It was
his consideration of himself and the false position in which you
would be placed if you had direct word from him of what has happened.
As your excellency has said, there is peace between His Catholic
Majesty and the King of England, and your brother Don Diego...."
He paused a moment. "I am sure that I need say no more. What you
hear from us is no more than a mere rumour. Your excellency
understands."
His excellency frowned thoughtfully. "I understand... in part,"
said he.
Captain Blood had a moment's uneasiness. Did the Spaniard doubt
his bona fides? Yet in dress and speech he knew himself to be
impeccably Spanish, and was not Don Esteban there to confirm him?
He swept on to afford further confirmation before the Admiral
could say another word.
"And we have in the boat below two chests containing fifty thousand
pieces of eight, which we are to deliver to your excellency."
His excellency jumped; there was a sudden stir among his officers.
"They are the ransom extracted by Don Diego from the Governor
of...."
"Not another word, in the name of Heaven!" cried the Admiral in
alarm. "My brother wishes me to assume charge of this money, to
carry it to Spain for him? Well, that is a family matter between
my brother and myself. So, it can be done. But I must not
know...." He broke off. "Hum! A glass of Malaga in my cabin,
if you please," he invited them, "whilst the chests are being
hauled aboard."
He gave his orders touching the embarkation of these chests, then
led the way to his regally appointed cabin, his four officers and
the friar following by particular invitation.
Seated at table there, with the tawny wine before them, and the
servant who had poured it withdrawn, Don Miguel laughed and
stroked his pointed, grizzled beard.
Virgen santisima! That brother of mine has a mind that thinks of
everything. Left to myself, I might have committed a fine
indiscretion by venturing aboard his ship at such a moment. I
might have seen things which as Admiral of Spain it would be
difficult for me to ignore."
Both Esteban and Blood made haste to agree with him, and then
Blood raised his glass, and drank to the glory of Spain and the
damnation of the besotted James who occupied the throne of England.
The latter part of his toast was at least sincere.
The Admiral laughed.
"Sir, sir, you need my brother here to curb your imprudences. You
should remember that His Catholic Majesty and the King of England
are very good friends. That is not a toast to propose in this
cabin. But since it has been proposed, and by one who has such
particular personal cause to hate these English hounds, why, we
will honour it - but unofficially."
They laughed, and drank the damnation of King James - quite
unofficially, but the more fervently on that account. Then Don
Esteban, uneasy on the score of his father, and remembering that
the agony of Don Diego was being protracted with every moment that
they left him in his dreadful position, rose and announced that
they must be returning.
"My father," he explained, "is in haste to reach San Domingo. He
desired me to stay no longer than necessary to embrace you. If
you will give us leave, then, sir uncle."
In the circumstances "sir uncle" did not insist.
As they returned to the ship's side, Blood's eyes anxiously scanned
the line of seamen leaning over the bulwarks in idle talk with the
Spaniards in the ****-boat that waited at the ladder's foot. But
their manner showed him that there was no ground for his anxiety.
The boat's crew had been wisely reticent.
The Admiral took leave of them - of Esteban affectionately, of
Blood ceremoniously.
"I regret to lose you so soon, Don Pedro. I wish that you could
have made a longer visit to the Encarnacion."
"I am indeed unfortunate," said Captain Blood politely.
"But I hope that we may meet again."
"That is to flatter me beyond all that I deserve."
They reached the boat; and she cast off from the great ship. As
they were pulling away, the Admiral waving to them from the taffrail,
they heard the shrill whistle of the bo'sun piping the hands to
their stations, and before they had reached the Cinco Llagas, they
beheld the Encarnacion go about under sail. She dipped her flag to
them, and from her poop a gun fired a salute.
Aboard the Cinco Llagas some one - it proved afterwards to be
Hagthorpe - had the wit to reply in the same fashion. The comedy
was ended. Yet there was something else to follow as an epilogue,
a thing that added a grim ironic flavour to the whole.
As they stepped into the waist of the Cinco Llagas, Hagthorpe
advanced to receive them. Blood observed the set, almost scared
expression on his face.
"I see that you've found it," he said quietly.
Hagthorpe's eyes looked a question. But his mind dismissed whatever
thought it held.
"Don Diego..." he was beginning, and then stopped, and looked
curiously at Blood.
Noting the pause and the look, Esteban bounded forward, his face
livid.
"Have you broken faith, you curs? Has he come to harm?" he cried
- and the six Spaniards behind him grew clamorous with furious
questionings.
"We do not break faith," said Hagthorpe firmly, so firmly that he
quieted them. "And in this case there was not the need. Don Diego
died in his bonds before ever you reached the Encarnacion."
Peter Blood said nothing.
"Died?" screamed Esteban. "You killed him, you mean. Of what did
he die?"
Hagthorpe looked at the boy. "If I am a judge," he said, "Don Diego
died of fear."
Don Esteban struck Hagthorpe across the face at that, and Hagthorpe
would have struck back, but that Blood got between, whilst his
followers seized the lad.
"Let be," said Blood. "You provoked the boy by your insult to his
father."
"I was not concerned to insult," said Hagthorpe, nursing his cheek.
"It is what has happened. Come and look."
"I have seen," said Blood. "He died before I left the Cinco Llagas.
He was hanging dead in his bonds when I spoke to him before leaving."
"What are you saying?" cried Esteban.
Blood looked at him gravely. Yet for all his gravity he seemed
almost to smile, though without mirth.
"If you had known that, eh?" he asked at last. For a moment Don
Esteban stared at him wide-eyed, incredulous. "I don't believe
you," he said at last.
"Yet you may. I am a doctor, and I know death when I see it."
Again there came a pause, whilst conviction sank into the lad's mind.
"If I had known that," he said at last in a thick voice, "you would
be hanging from the yardarm of the Encarnacion at this moment."
"I know," said Blood. "I am considering it - the profit that a man
may find in the ignorance of others."
"But you'll hang there yet," the boy raved.
Captain Blood shrugged, and turned on his heel. But he did not on
that account disregard the words, nor did Hagthorpe, nor yet the
others who overheard them, as they showed at a council held that
night in the cabin.
This council was met to determine what should be done with the
Spanish prisoners. Considering that Curacao now lay beyond their
reach, as they were running short of water and provisions, and also
that Pitt was hardly yet in case to undertake the navigation of the
vessel, it had been decided that, going east of Hispaniola, and
then sailing along its northern coast, they should make for Tortuga,
that haven of the buccaneers, in which lawless port they had at
least no danger of recapture to apprehend. It was now a question
whether they should convey the Spaniards thither with them, or turn
them off in a boat to make the best of their way to the coast of
Hispaniola, which was but ten miles off. This was the course urged
by Blood himself.
"There's nothing else to be done," he insisted. "In Tortuga they
would be flayed alive."
"Which is less than the swine deserve," growled Wolverstone.
"And you'll remember, Peter," put in Hagthorpe, "that boy's threat
to you this morning. If he escapes, and carries word of all this
to his uncle, the Admiral, the execution of that threat will become
more than possible."
It says much for Peter Blood that the argument should have left him
unmoved. It is a little thing, perhaps, but in a narrative in which
there is so much that tells against him, I cannot - since my story
is in the nature of a brief for the defence - afford to slur a
circumstance that is so strongly in his favour, a circumstance
revealing that the cynicism attributed to him proceeded from his
reason and from a brooding over wrongs rather than from any natural
instincts. "I care nothing for his threats."
"You should," said Wolverstone. "The wise thing'd be to hang him,
along o' all the rest."
"It is not human to be wise," said Blood. "It is much more human
to err, though perhaps exceptional to err on the side of mercy.
We'll be exceptional. Oh, faugh! I've no stomach for cold-blooded
killing. At daybreak pack the Spaniards into a boat with a keg of
water and a sack of dumplings, and let them go to the devil."
That was his last word on the subject, and it prevailed by virtue
of the authority they had vested in him, and of which he had taken
so firm a grip. At daybreak Don Esteban and his followers were
put off in a boat.
Two days later, the Cinco Llagas sailed into the rock-bound bay of
Cayona, which Nature seemed to have designed for the stronghold of
those who had appropriated it.