A moment he surveyed them now, observing the evil greed in the eyes of each as they watched the fall of the dice over their trifling stakes from the gold and trinkets of which they had rifled him, and over which they were gaming to beguile the time of waiting.
And then he heard his own crisp voice breaking the silence.
«You gamble there for halfpence with a fortune within your reach.»
«Are you beginning again?» growled Sam. But the Captain went on undaunted.
«I'll outbid the Spanish admiral's blood–money by forty thousand pieces. I offer you fifty thousand pieces of eight for my life.»
Sam, who had risen in anger, stood suddenly arrested by the mention of so vast a sum.
Cahusac had risen too, and now both men stood, one on each side of the table, tense with excitement, which, if unexpressed as yet, was none the less to be read in the sudden pallor of their faces and dilation of their eyes. At last the Frenchman broke the silence.
«God of God! Fifty thousand pieces of eight!» He uttered the words slowly, as if to impress the figure upon his own and his companion's mind. And he repeated. «Fifty thousand pieces of eight! Twenty–five thousand for each! Pardi! but that is worth some risk! Eh, Sam?»
«A mort of money, true,» said Sam, thoughtfully. And then he recovered. «Bah! What's a promise, anyhow? Who's to trust him? Once he's free, who's to make him pay, and he's —»
«Oh, I pay,» said Blood. «Cahusac will tell you that I always pay.» And he continued. «Consider that such a sum, even when divided, will make each of you wealthy, to lead a life of ease and plenty. Muchoviño, muchas mugeres!» he laughed in Spanish. «To be sure now, you'll be wise.»
Cahusac licked his lips and looked at his companion. «It could be done,» he muttered persuasively. «It's not yet ten, and between this and midnight we could put ourselves beyond the reach of your Spanish friends.»
But Sam was not to be persuaded. He had been thinking; yet, tempting as he must find the lure, he dared not yield, discerning a double peril within it. Committed now by Spain to this venture, he dared neither draw back nor shift his course. Between the certain rage of the Spaniards should he play them false, and the probable resentment of Blood once he was restored to liberty, Sam saw himself inevitably crushed. Better an assured five thousand pieces to be enjoyed in comparative safety than a possible twenty–five thousand accompanied by such intolerable risks.
«It could not be done at all!» he cried angrily. «So let us hear no more about it. I've warned you once already.»
«Mordieu!» cried Cahusac thickly. «But I say it could! And I say it's worth the risk.»
«You say so, do you? And where's the risk for you? The Spaniards do not even know that you're in the business. It's easy for you, my lad, to talk about risks that you won't be called upon to run. But it's not quite the same for me. If I fails the Don, he'll want to know the reason. And, anyhow, I've pledged myself, and I'm a man of my word. So let's hear no more about it.»
He towered there, fierce and determined, and Cahusac, after a scowling stare into that long, resolute face, uttered a sigh of exasperation, and sat down again.
Blood perceived quite clearly the inward rage that consumed the Frenchman. Vindictive though he might be towards the Captain, the venal scoundrel preferred his enemy's gold to his blood, and it was easy to guess the bitterness in which he saw himself compelled to forgo the more tangible satisfaction, simply because of the risks with which acceptance would be fraught for his associate.
For a while there was no word spoken between the twain, nor did Blood judge that he could further serve his ends by adding anything to what he had already said. He took heart, meanwhile, from the clear perception of the mischief he had already made.
When at last he broke the brooding silence, his words seemed to have no bearing whatever upon the situation.
«Though you may mean to sell me to Spain, sure there's no reason why ye should let me die of thirst in the meantime. I've a throat that's like the salt ponds on Saltatudos, so I have.»
Although he had a definite purpose to serve, to which he made his thirst a pretext, yet that thirst itself was real, and it was suffered by his captors in common with himself. The air of the room, whose door and window were tight–barred, was stifling. Sam passed a hand across his dank brow and swept away the moisture.
«Hell! The heat!» he muttered. «And now I thirst myself.»
Cahusac licked his dry lips.
«Is there nothing in the house?» he asked.
«No. But it's only a step to The King of France.»
He rose. «I'll go fetch a jack of wine.»
Hope soared wildly in the breast of Captain Blood.
It was precisely for this that he had played. Knowing their drinking habit, and how easily suggestion must arouse their desire to indulge it, he had hoped to send one of them upon that errand, and that the one to go would be Sam. With Cahusac he was sure he could make a deal at once.
And then Cahusac, the fool, ruined all by his excessive eagerness. He, too, was on his feet.
«A jack of wine! Yes, yes!» he cried. «Make haste. I, too, am thirsty.»
Almost was there a quiver in his voice. Sam's ears detected it. He stood arrested, pondering his associate, and reading in his face the little rascal's treacherous intent.
He smiled a little.
«On second thoughts,» said he, slowly, «it will be best if you goes and I stays on guard.»
Cahusac's mouth fell open; almost he turned pale. Inwardly Captain Blood cursed him for a triple fool. «D'ye mean that ye don't trust me?» he demanded. «It ain't that — not exactly,» he was answered.
«But it's me that stays.»
Cahusac became really and vehemently angry. «Ah, ca! Name of God! If you don't trust me with him, I don't trust you neither.»
«You don't need to. You know that I dursn't be tempted by his promises. That's why I'm the one to stay.»
For a long moment the two ruffianly associates glowered at each other in angry silence. Then Cahusac's glance became sullen. He shrugged and turned aside, as if grudgingly admittingly that Sam's reasoning was unanswerable. He stood pondering with narrowed eyes. Finally he bestirred himself as if with sudden resolve.
«Ah, bah, I go!» he declared, and abruptly went.
As the door closed on the departing Frenchman, Sam resumed his seat at the table. Blood listened to the quickly receding footsteps until they had faded in the distance; then he broke the silence with a laugh that startled his companion.
Sam looked up sharply.
«What's amusing you now, Captain?»
Blood would have preferred, as we know, to deal with Cahusac. Cahusac was a certainty. Sam was hardly a possibility, obsessed as he obviously was by the fear of Spain. Still, that possibility must be exploited, however slender it might appear.
«Your rashness, bedad!» answered Captain Blood. «Yell not trust him to remain on guard, yet ye trust him out of your sight.»
«And what harm can he do?»
«He might not return alone,» said the Captain darkly.
«Blister me!» cried Sam. «If he tries any such tricks, I'll pistol him at sight. That's how I serves them that gets tricky with me.»
«Ye'd be wise to serve him so in any case. He's a treacherous tyke, Sam, as I should know. Ye've baffled him to–night, and he's not the man to forgive. Ye should know that from his betrayal of me. But ye don't know. Ye've eyes, Sam, but no more sight than a blind puppy. And a head, Sam, but no more brains than are contained in a melon, or you'd never hesitate between Spain and me.»
«Oh, that's it, is it?»
«Just that. Just fifty thousand pieces of eight that I offer, and that I pledge my honour to pay you, as well as pledging my honour to bear no malice and seek no vengeance. Even Cahusac assures you that my word is good, and was ready enough to accept it.»
He paused. The rascally hunter was considering him silently, his face clay–coloured and the perspiration standin
g in beads upon his brow.
Presently he spoke hoarsely.
«Fifty thousand pieces, you said?» quoth he softly.
«To be sure. For where's the need to share with the French cur? D'ye dream he'd share with you if he could make it all his own by slipping a knife into your back? Come, Sam, make a bold bid for fortune. Damn your fears of Spain! Spain's a phantom! I'll protect you from Spain. You can lie safe aboard my flagship.»
Sam's eyes flashed momentarily, then grew troubled again by thought.
«Fifty thousand. Ah, but the risk!»
«Sure, there's no risk at all,» said Blood. «Not half the risk you run when it comes out that you sold me to Spain, as come out it will. Man, ye'll never leave Tortuga alive. And if ye did, my buccaneers would hunt ye to the end of the earth.»
«But who's to tell?»
«There's always someone. Ye were a fool to undertake this job, a bigger fool to have taken Cahusac for partner. Hasn't he talked openly of vengeance? And won't he, therefore, be the first man suspected? And when they get him, as get him they will, isn't it as sure as judgment that he'll tell on you?»
«By Heaven, I believe you in that!» cried the man, presented with facts which he had never paused to consider.
«Faith, you may believe me in the rest as readily, Sam.»
«Wait! Let me think!»
As once before, Captain Blood judged wisely that he had said enough for the moment. So far his success with Sam had been greater than he had dared to hope. The seed he had sown might now be left awhile to germinate.
The minutes sped, and Sam, elbows on the table and head in his hand, sat still and thoughtful. When at last he looked up, and the yellow light beat once more upon his face, Blood saw that it was pallid and gleaming. He tried to conjecture how far the poison he had dropped into Sam's mind might have done its work. Presently Sam plucked a pistol from his belt and examined the priming. This seemed to Blood significant. But it was more significant still that he did not replace the pistol in his belt. He sat nursing it, his yellowish face grimly set, his coarse lips tight with purpose.
«Sam,» said Captain Blood softly, «what have you decided?»
«I'll put it out of the power of that French mongrel to bubble me,» said the ruffian.
«And nothing else?»
«The rest can wait.»
With difficulty Captain Blood bridled his eagerness to force the pace.
Followed an apparently interminable time of waiting, in a silence broken only by the ticking of the Captain's watch where it lay upon the table. Then, faintly at first, but swiftly growing louder as it drew nearer, came a patter of steps in the lane outside. The door was pushed open, and Cahusac appeared carrying a great black jack.
Sam was already on his feet beyond the table, his right hand behind him.
«You've been a long time gone!» he grumbled. «What kept you?»
Cahusac was pale, and breathing rather hard, as if he had been running. Blood, whose mind was preternaturally alert, knowing that he had not run, looked elsewhere for a reason, and guessed it to lie in either fear or excitement.
«I made all haste,» was the Frenchman's answer. «But I was athirst myself, and I stayed to quench it. Here's your wine.»
He set the leathern jack upon the table.
And on the instant, almost at point–blank range, Sam shot him through the heart.
Through the rising cloud of smoke, whose acrid smell took him sharply in the throat and set him coughing, Blood saw a picture that he was to retain in his mind to the end of his days. Face downwards on the floor lay Cahusac with twitching limbs, whilst Sam leaned forward, across the table to watch him, a grin on his long, animal face.
«I take no risk with French swines like you,» he explained himself, as if his victim could still hear him. Then he put down the pistol and reached for the jack. He raised it to his mouth, and poured a full draught down his parched throat. Noisily he smacked his lips as he set down the vessel. Then as a bitter after–taste caught him in the throat he made a grimace, and apprehension charged suddenly through his mind and spread upon his countenance. He snatched up the jack again and thrust his nose into it, sniffing audibly like a questing dog. Then, with eyes dilating in horror, he stared at Blood out of a countenance that was leather–hued, and in an awful voice screamed a single word:
«Manzanilla!»
Then he swung round, and, uttering horrible, blood–curdling blasphemies, he hurled the jack and the remainder of its contents at the dead man on the floor.
A moment later he was doubled up by pain, and his hands were clawing and clutching at his stomach. Then he mastered himself, and without any thought now for Blood, or anything but the torment at work upon his vitals, he reeled across the room and pulled the door wide. The effort seemed to increase his agony. Again he was taken by a cramp that doubled him until his chest was upon his knees, and he howled the while, blaspheming at first, but presently uttering mere inarticulate, animal noises. He collapsed at last upon the floor, a raving, writhing lunatic.
Captain Blood considered him grimly, amazed but no whit intrigued. The riddle did not even require the key supplied by the single word that Sam had ejaculated. It was very plain to read.
Never had poetic retribution more fitly and promptly overtaken a pair of villains. Cahusac had loaded the wine with the poison of the manchineel apple, so readily procurable in Tortuga. With this, and so that he might be free to make a bargain with Captain Blood, and secure to himself the whole of the ransom the Captain offered, he had murdered his associate in the very moment in which, with the same intent, his associate had murdered him.
If Captain Blood had his own wits to thank for much, he had his luck to thank for more.
Gradually and slowly, as it seemed to the captive spectator, though in reality very quickly, the poisoned man's struggles grew fainter. Presently they were merely, and ever decreasingly, sporadic, and finally they ceased altogether, as did his breathing, which at the last had grown stertorous. He lay quite still in a cramped huddle against the open door.
By then Captain Blood was giving his attention to himself, and he had already wasted some moments and some strength in ineffectual straining at his bonds. A drumming on the door of the alcove reminded him of the presence of the woman who had been used unconsciously to decoy him. The shot and Sam's utterances had aroused her into activity. Captain Blood called to her.
«Break down the door! There's no one left here but myself.»
Fortunately, that door was but a feeble screen of slender planks, and it yielded quickly to the shoulder that she set against it. Wild–eyed and dishevelled, she broke at 'last into the room, then checked and screamed at what she beheld there.
Captain Blood spoke sharply, to steady her.
«Now, don't be screeching for nothing, my dear. They're both as dead as the planks of the table, and dead men never harmed anyone. There's a knife yonder. Just be slipping it through these plaguey thongs.»
In an instant he was free and on his feet, shaking out his ruffled plumage. Then he recovered his sword, his pistol, his watch, and his tobacco–box. The gold and the jewels he pushed together in a little heap upon the table.
«Ye'll have a home somewhere in the world, no doubt. This will help you back to it, my girl.»
She began to weep. He took up his hat, picked up his ebony cane from the floor, bade her goodnight, and stepped out into the lane.
Ten minutes later he walked into an excited, torch–lit mob of buccaneers upon the mole, whom Hagthorpe and Wolverstone were organizing into search–parties to scour the town. Wolverstone's single eye fiercely conned the Captain.
«Where the devil have you been?» he asked. «Observing the luck that goes with blood–money,» said Captain Blood.
VI — THE GOLD AT SANTA MARIA
The buccaneer fleet of five tall ships rode snugly at anchor in a sequestered creek on the western coast of the Gulf of Darien. A cable's length away, across gently heaving, pellucid wate
rs, shot with opalescence by the morning sun, stretched a broad crescent of silver–grey sand; behind this rose the forest, vividly green from the rains now overpast, abrupt and massive as a cliff. At its foot, among the flaming rhododendrons thrusting forward like outposts of the jungle, stood the tents and rude log huts, palmetto thatched — the buccaneer encampment during that season of careening, of refitting, and of victualling with the fat turtles abounding thereabouts. The buccaneer host, some eight hundred strong, surged there like a swarming hive, a motley mob, English and French in the main, but including odd Dutchmen, and even a few West Indian half–castes. There were boucan–hunters from Hispaniola, lumbermen from Campeachy, vagrant seamen, runagate convicts from the plantations, and proscribed outlaws from the Old World and the New.
Out of the jungle into their midst stepped, on that glowing April morning, three Darien Indians, the foremost of whom was of a tall, commanding presence, broad in the shoulder and long in the arm. He was clad in drawers of hairy, untanned hide, and a red blanket served him for a cloak. His naked breast was streaked in black and reds in his nose he wore a crescent–shaped plate of beaten gold that hung down to his lip, and there were massive gold rings in his ears. A tuft of eagle's feathers sprouted from his sleek black hair, and he was armed with a javelin which he used as a stag.
He advanced calmly and without diffidence into their staring midst, and in primitive Spanish announced himself as the cacique Guanahani, called by the Spaniards Brazo Largo. He begged to be taken before their captain, to whom he referred also by his Hispanicised name of Don Pedro Sangre.
They conducted him aboard the flagship, the Arabella, and there, in the captain's cabin, the Indian cacique was courteously made welcome by a spare gentleman of a good height, very elegant in the Spanish fashion, whose resolute face, in cast of features and deep coppery tan, might, but for the eyes of a vivid blue, have been that of a Darien Indian.
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