«You talk too much,» said Captain Blood, and tapped him twice over the head with the butt of the pistol, using great science. The Major sank forward gently, like a man asleep.
Captain Blood rose, and peered about him through the dusk. All was still. He went to pick up the leather bags which Macartney had dropped as he fell. He made a sling for them with his scarf, and so hung them from his neck. Then he raised the unconscious Major, swung him skilfully to his shoulder, and, thus burdened, went staggering down the avenue and out into the open.
The night was hot and Macartney was heavy. The sweat ran from Blood's pores. But he went steadily ahead until he reached the low wall of the churchyard, just as the moon was beginning to rise. On to the summit of this wall he eased himself of his burden, toppled it over into the churchyard, and then climbed after it. What he had to do there was quickly done by the light of the moon under the shelter of that wall. With the man's own sash he trussed him up at wrists and ankles. Then he stuffed some of the Major's periwig into his mouth, using the fellow's neckcloth to hold this unpleasant gag in position and taking care to leave his nostrils free.
As he was concluding the operation, Macartney opened his eyes and glared at him.
«Sure now it's only me: your old friend, Captain Blood. I'm just after making you comfortable for the night. When they find you in the morning, ye can tell them any convenient lie that will save you the trouble of explaining what can't be explained at all. It's a very good night I'll be wishing you, Maj or darling.»
He went over the wall and briskly down the road that led to the sea.
On the mole lounged the British sailors who manned the longboat from the Royal Duchess, awaiting the Major's return. Further on, some men of Mariegalante were landing their haul from a fishing–boat that had just come in. None gave heed to Blood as he stepped along to the mole's end where that morning he had moored the pinnace. In the locker, where he stowed the heavy bags of gold, there was still some of the food that he had brought away last night from the Estremadura. He could not take the risk of adding to it. But he filled the two small water–casks at the fountain.
Then he stepped aboard, cast off and got out the sweeps. Another night on the open sea lay ahead of him. The wind, however, was still in the same quarter as last night and would favour the run to Guadeloupe upon which he had determined.
Once out of the bay he hoisted sail, and ran northward along the coast and the shallow cliffs which cast an inky shadow against the moon's white radiance. On he crawled through a sea of rippling quicksilver until he reached the island's end; then he headed straight across the ten miles of intervening water.
Off Grand Terre, the eastern of the two main islands of Guadeloupe, he lay awaiting sunrise. When it came, bringing a freshening of the wind, he ran close past Saint Anne, which was empty of shipping, and, hugging the coast, sailed on in a north–easterly direction until he came, some two hours later, to Port du Moule.
There were half a dozen ships in the harbour, and Blood scanned them with anxiety until his glance alighted on a black brigantine that was bellied like a Flemish alderman. Those lines were a sufficient advertisement of her Dutch origin, and Captain Blood, sweeping alongside, hailed her with confidence and climbed to her deck.
«I am in haste,» he informed her sturdy captain, «to reach the northern coast of French Hispaniola, and I will pay you well for a passage thither.»
The Dutchman eyed him without favour. «If you're in haste you had better seek what you need elsewhere. I am for Curacao.»
«I've said I'll pay you well. Five thousand pieces of eight should compensate you for delays.»
«Five thousand pieces!» The Dutchman stared. The sum was as much as he could hope to earn by his present voyage. «Who are you, sir?»
«What's that to the matter? I am one who will pay five thousand pieces.»
The skipper of the brigantine screwed up his little blue eyes. «Will you pay in advance?»
«The half of it. The other half I shall obtain when my destination is reached. But you may hold me aboard until you have the money.» Thus he ensured that the Dutchman, ignorant of the fact that the entire sum was already under his hand, should keep faith.
«I could sail to–night,» said the other slowly.
Blood at once produced one of the two bags. The other he had stowed in one of the water–casks in the locker of the pinnace, and there it remained unsuspected until four days later, when they were in the narrow seas between Hispaniola and Tortuga.
Then Captain Blood, announcing that he would put himself ashore, paid over the balance of the money, and climbed down the side of the brig to re–enter the pinnace. When, presently, the Dutchman observed him to be steering not, indeed, towards Hispaniola, but a northerly course in the direction of Tortuga, that stronghold of the buccaneers, his growing suspicions may have been fully confirmed. He remained, however, untroubled, the only man who, in addition to Blood himself, had really profited by that transaction on the Island of Mariegalante.
Thus Captain Blood came back at last to Tortuga and to the fleet that was by now mourning him as dead. With that fleet of five tall ships he sailed into the harbour of Basseterre a month later with intent to settle a debt which he conceived to lie between Colonel de Coulevain and himself.
His appearance there in such force fluttered both the garrison and the inhabitants. But he came too late for his purposes. Colonel de Coulevain was no longer there to be fluttered. He had been sent back to France under arrest.
Captain Blood was informed of this by Colonel Sancerre, who had succeeded to the military command of Mariegalante, and who received him with the courtesy due to a filibuster who comes backed by the powerful fleet that Blood had anchored in the roadstead.
Captain Blood fetched a sigh when he heard the news. «A pity! I had a little word to say to him; a little debt to settle.»
«A little debt of five thousand pieces of eight, I think,» said the Frenchman.
«On my faith, you are well informed.»
The Colonel explained. «When the General of the Armies of France in America came here to inquire into the matter of the Spanish raid on Mariegalante, he discovered that Colonel de Coulevain had robbed the French Colonial Treasury of that sum. There was proof of it in a quittance that was found among M. de Coulevain's papers.»
«So that's where he got the money!»
«I see that you understand.» The Commandant looked grave. «Robbery is a serious, shameful matter, Captain Blood.»
«I know it is. I've practised a good deal of it myself.»
«And I've little doubt that they will hang M. de Coulevain, poor devil.»
Captain Blood nodded. «No doubt of that. But we'll save our tears to water some nobler grave, my Colonel.»
Colonel Sancerre eyed him with cold disapproval. «This hardly comes well from you, Captain Blood. It was to save you from the English that Colonel de Coulevain paid over the money, was it not?»
«Hardly to save me from them. To buy me from them so that he might sell me again to Spain at a handsome profit. He had an eye to a profit, your Colonel de Coulevain.»
«But what do you tell me?» cried Sancerre.
«That it's entirely a poetic thing that the quittance he took on my behalf should be the means of hanging him.»
X — GALLOWS KEY
It is impossible now to determine whether Gallows Key took its name from the events I am about to relate or bore it already previously among seafaring men. Jeremy Pitt in his log gives no hint, and the miniature island is not now to be identified with precision. All that we know positively, and this from Pitt's log of the Arabella, is that it forms part of the group known as the Albuquerque Keys, lying in 12° northern latitude and 85° western longitude, some sixty miles north–west of Porto Bello.
It is little more than a barren rock, frequented only by sea–birds and the turtles that come to deposit their eggs in the golden sand of the reef–enclosed lagoon on its eastern side. This strip of beach
shelves rapidly to a depth of some sixty fathoms, and the entrance to the lagoon is by a gap of not more than twenty yards in the rocky amphitheatre which goes to form it.
Into this secure if desolate haven sailed Captain Easterling one April day of the year 1688 in his thirty–gun frigate the Avenger, followed by the two ships that made up his fleet: the Hermes, a frigate of twenty–six guns, commanded by Roger Galloway, and the Valiant, a brigantine carrying twenty, in charge of Crosby Pike, who once had sailed with Captain Blood and was realizing his mistake in making a change of admiral.
You will remember this scoundrel Easterling, how once he had tried a fall with Peter Blood, when Blood was on the very threshold of his career as a buccaneer, and how, as a consequence, Easterling's ship had been blown from under him and himself swept from the seas.
But laboriously, with the patience and tenacity found in bad men as in good, Easterling had won back to his old position, and was afloat once more and in greater strength than ever before upon the Caribbean.
He was, in Peter Blood's own words, just a filthy pirate, a ruthless, bloodthirsty robber, without a spark even of that honour which is said to prevail among thieves. His followers made up a lawless mob, of mixed nationalities, subject to no discipline and obeying no rules save those which concerned the division of their spoils. They practised no discrimination in their piracy. They would attack an English or Dutch merchantman as readily as a Spanish galleon, and deal out the same ruthless brutality to the one as to the other.
Now, despite his ill–repute even among buccaneers, he had succeeded in luring away from Blood's following the resolute Crosby Pike, with his twenty–gun ship and well–disciplined crew of a hundred and thirty men. The lure had been that old story of Morgan's treasure with which Easterling once had unsuccessfully attempted to beguile Blood.
Again he told that hoary tale of how he had sailed with Henry Morgan and had been with him at the sack of Panama; how — as was well known — on the return march across the isthmus there had been all but mutiny among Morgan's followers on a suspicion that the booty divided among them was very far from being all the booty taken; how it was murmured that Morgan had secretly abstracted a great portion for himself; how Morgan, becoming alarmed lest a mutinous search of his personal baggage should reveal the truth of the rumour, had taken Easterling into his confidence and sought his aid in what he was to do. Between them they had buried that treasure — a treasure of pearls and precious stones of the fabulous value of at least half a million pieces of eight — at a spot on the banks of the Chagres River. They were to return to unearth it later when opportunity should serve. Morgan, however, swept by destiny along other profitable pursuits, was still postponing his return when death overtook him. Easterling had never returned because never before had he commanded the necessary force for the penetration of Spanish territory, or the necessary strength of ships for the safe conveyance of the treasure once it was reclaimed.
Such had been the tale to which Blood had scorned to lend an ear but to which Pike succumbed, in spite of Blood's warning against joining forces with so unscrupulous a rogue and his freely expressed conviction that no such treasure existed.
Pitying Pike for his credulity, Blood bore him no resentment for his defection, and feared rather than hoped that the sequel would punish him sufficiently.
Blood himself at this time had been planning an expedition to Darien. But since Easterling's activities on the isthmus might put the Spaniards on the alert, he found it prudent to postpone the business. His fleet, consisting in those days of five stout ships, scattered and went a–roving without definite objective. This was at the beginning of April, and it was concerted that they should reassemble at Mosquito Keys, at the end of May, when the expedition to Darien could be considered anew.
The Arabella, going south by the Windward Passage, and then east along the southern coast of Hispaniola, came, some twenty miles beyond Cape Tiburon, upon an English merchantman in a foundering condition. She was kept precariously afloat so long as the sea was calm by the shifting of her guns and all other heavy gear to larboard, so as to keep above water the gaping wounds in her starboard quarter. Her broken spars and fractured mainmast told an eloquent tale, and Blood imagined that Spaniards had been at work. He discovered instead, when he went to her assistance, that she had yesterday been attacked and plundered by Easterling, who had put half her crew to the sword and brutally killed her captain for not having struck his colours when summoned to do so.
The Arabella towed her within ten miles of Port Royal, and daring to go no nearer, lest she should draw down upon herself the Jamaica Squadron, left her there to complete alone what little remained of the voyage to safety.
That done, however, the Arabella did not sail east again, but headed south for the Main. To Pitt, his shipmaster, Blood explained his motives.
«We'll be keeping an eye on this blackguard Easterling, so we will, Jerry, and maybe more than an eye.»
And south they sailed, since that was the way Easterling had gone. To the tale of his treasure, Blood, as we know, attached no faith. He regarded it as an invention to gull such credulous fellows as Pike into association. In this, however, he was presently to be proven wrong.
Creeping down the Mosquito Coast, he found a snug anchorage in a cove of one of the numerous islands in the Lagoon of Chiriqui. There for the moment he elected to lie concealed, and thence he watched the operations of Easterling, twenty miles away, through the eyes of friendly Mosquito Indians whom he employed as scouts. From these he learned that Easterling had cast anchor a little to westward of the mouth of the Chagres, that he had landed a force of three hundred and fifty men, and that he was penetrating with them into the isthmus. From his knowledge of Easterling's total strength, Blood computed that hardly more than a hundred men had been left behind to guard the waiting ships.
Whilst waiting in his turn, Blood took his ease. On a cane day–bed set under an improvised awning on the poop (for the weather was growing hot) the buccaneer found sufficient adventure for his spirit in the verse of Horace and the prose of Suetonius. When physical activity was desired, he would swim in the clear, jade–green waters of the lagoon, or, landing on the palm–fringed shore of that uninhabited island, he would take a hand with his men in the capture of turtle, or in the hewing of wood to provide the fuel for the boucan fires in which their succulent flesh was being cured.
Meanwhile his Indians brought him news, first of a skirmish between Easterling's men and a party of Spaniards who evidently had got wind of the presence on Darien of the buccaneers. Then came word that Easterling was marching back to the coast; a couple of days later he was informed of another encounter between Easterling and a Spanish force, in which the buccaneers had suffered severely, although in the end they had beaten off the attack. Lastly came news of yet a third engagement, and this was brought, together with other precious details, by one who had taken part in it.
He was one of Pike's men, a hard–bitten old adventurer, who had given up logwood–cutting to take to the sea. His name was Cunley, and he had been rendered helpless by a gunshot wound in the thigh and left by Easterling's retreating force to die where he had fallen. Overlooked by the Spaniards, he had dragged himself into the scrub for shelter and thus into the hands of the watchful Indians. They had handled him tenderly, so that he should survive to tell his tale to Captain Blood, and they had quieted his alarms with assertions in their broken Spanish that it was to Don Pedro Sangre that he was being conveyed.
Tenderly they hoisted the crippled fellow aboard the Arabella, where Blood's first care was to employ his surgeon's skill to dress the hideous festering wound. Thereafter, in the ward–room, converted for the moment into a sick bay, Cunley told in bitterness the tale of the adventure.
Morgan's treasure was real enough. The buccaneers were bearing it back to the waiting ships, and in value it exceeded all that Easterling had represented. But it was being dearly bought — most dearly by Pike's contingent, whence the bitt
erness investing Cunley's tale. Going and coming they had been harassed by Spaniards and once by a party of hostile Indians. Further, they had been reduced by fever and sickness on that difficult march through a miasmic country where mosquitoes had almost eaten them alive. Of the three hundred and fifty men who had left the ships, Cunley computed that after the last engagement, in which he had been wounded, not more than two hundred remained alive. But the ugly fact was that not more than twenty of these men were Pike's. Yet Pike had brought ashore by Easterling's orders the heaviest of the three contingents, landing a hundred and thirty men, and leaving a bare score to guard the Valiant, whilst fifty men at least had been left on each of the other ships.
Easterling had so contrived that Pike's contingent was ever in the van, so that it had borne the brunt of every attack the buccaneers had suffered. It was not to be supposed that Pike had submitted to this without remonstrances. Protests had grown increasingly bitter as the ill continued. But Easterling, backed by his earlier associate, Roger Galloway, who commanded the Hermes, had browbeaten Pike into submission, whilst the ruffianly followers of those two captains, by preponderance of numbers remaining at comparatively full strength, had easily imposed their will upon the dwindling force of the Valiant. If all her present survivors got back to the ship, the Valiant could now muster a crew of barely forty hands, whilst the other two combined a strength of nearly three hundred men.
«Ye see, Captain,» Cunley concluded grimly, «how this Easterling has used us. As the monkey used the cat. And now him and Galloway — them two black–hearted bastards — is in such strength that Crosby Pike dursn't say a word o' protest. It was a black day for all of us, Captain, when the Valiant left your fleet to join that blackguard Easterling's, treasure or no treasure.»
«Treasure or no treasure,» Captain Blood repeated. «And I'm thinking that for Captain Pike no treasure it will prove.»
He rose from his chair by the sick man's bed, tall, graceful and vigorous in his black small clothes, silver–broidered waistcoat and full white cambric sleeves. His coat of black and silver he had discarded before commencing his surgical ministrations. He waved away the white–clad negro who attended with bowl and lint and forceps, and, alone with Cunley, he paced to the wardroom ports and back. His long supple fingers toyed thoughtfully with the curls of his black periwig; his eyes, blue as sapphires, were now as hard.
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