Читать книгу The Privateer - Elizabeth Mackintosh - Страница 5

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Bartholomew's 'equipage' proved to be one small donkey with neither saddle nor bridle. A rope had been arranged not very expertly in place of the absent bridle; it looked like the work of someone who knew more about ropes than about bridles.

'This is Ananias,' said Bartholomew, and hoisted himself across the donkey's bare back.

'Why Ananias, poor brute?' asked Henry.

'Well, I did call it Anna, until I found out my mistake. So I just tacked a bit on.' He slung the sack of purchases in front of him. 'Now give me your bundle and I'll put it on top.' Then, to the donkey: 'Gee up!'

But the donkey stood still.

'He doesn't understand English,' Bartholomew explained. 'I don't know his nationality.'

'You don't need any parley-vous,' Henry said. 'Just dig your heels in his ribs.'

Bartholomew did as he was bid, with gratifying results.

'You know as much about horse-flesh as I know about sails,' he said, as they moved on their way out of town. 'Owned one of your own, perhaps.'

'Yes, I had one of my own.'

'What made you leave that nice home of yours? Seeking your fortune?'

'How do you know what kind of home I had?'

'It takes more than a few square yards of denim to cover up breeding, my boy. Found your Welsh valley too narrow?'

'That's about it.' He considered the mild-looking little man riding by his side, and said: 'I would never have said that you were a sailor.'

'Well, you see, by nature I'm not one for a wild life. But tar's the undoing of me.'

'Tar?'

The minute I smell tar I come unsettled like.' He looked back at the shipping in the harbour, and added: 'But wait till I get that cottage in the Mendips. They'll have to pulley-hauley me to get me back from there.'

They walked in a companionable silence along the dusty road.

'Think there's going to be a change at home?' Bartholomew asked presently.

'There was no sign of one when I left. Why do you ask?'

'That's the third time lately I've heard a remark about there being an end in sight to this new-fangled way of running the country.'

'The islands are always full of rumours. And what would they know about it, anyhow, four thousand miles away?'

'Ah, but that's just where you do get to know first about things like that. It's the chap who's standing outside that hears the note of the hive. The bees themselves are buzzing far too loud to pay any attention. Don't think that the Caribbean won't hear the change in the bees' buzzing when it comes!'

He rode on for a little, cogitating.

'Stands to reason it wouldn't last, anyhow,' he said. 'Folk don't want anyone just like themselves ruling them, do they?'

He was silent for another half-mile.

'You want more than a gift of the gab to rule England. No one ever loved a Parliament. It was bound not to last.'

'What do you think they'll do? If it comes to pieces, I mean.'

'Bring the boy over to take his father's place, I suppose.'

'How can they, if the Army is still the Protector's? It's the best army in the world, God blast it.'

'Huh!' said Bartholomew. 'Ten armies won't stop them if they've made up their minds about something.'

The high road turned inland and left them with only a track along the coast. But the track was shaded, and the rains that had come too late to save the cane and the cocoa made the undergrowth green and sweet-smelling. For another hour they followed the track, veering with the coast until all sight of Bridgetown had long disappeared and they had the world to themselves. Here and there a fence marked the limit of some planter's domain, and now and then a plank flung over a freshet showed that civilisation lurked in the background. But for the most part it was a virgin world, full of the evening chatter of birds and the flight of wild animals from their approach.

At a gate in a wood fence, Bartholomew dismounted and removed the sack of purchases from the donkey. Whereupon the beast, with relief in every line of him, made joyfully for the gate.

'Hey! Wait a minute! My rope!' said Bartholomew, and removed the bridle. Then, opening the gate, he smacked the animal on the rump and said: 'Good-bye, Ananias. Glad to have met you.'

'Isn't he yours?' asked Henry.

'Oh, no,' said Bartholomew, carefully fastening the gate. 'I just borrowed him.'

He humped the sack over his shoulder and went on up the path. And Henry, picking up his much smaller bundle, forbore to offer to carry the larger one. To be no longer young, with all the world in front of you, must be bad enough, without having it brought forcibly to your notice.

Now the forest came down to the water, and the going was less easy. He had begun to wonder how far it still was to that dinner of wild pig, when the silence was broken by the high, hostile yelling of a dog, and in a moment it appeared on the edge of the slope ahead of them, and stood there shrieking their approach to all creation.

'Shut up, Killick!' Bartholomew called.

A tall man with the face of an unfrocked priest came to the edge and watched them as they toiled upwards.

'Evening, Chris,' Bartholomew said, panting.

'Who's he?' asked the man, leaning his head at Henry.

'Friend of mine. Did me a good turn. Name's Harry Morgan. Here! Take this for me.' He slid the sack from his back and held it out, and the man took it meekly. Which surprised Henry a little.

They moved together over the crest, and Henry found that the edge on which the man and dog had stood was the lip of a wide saucer of clearing in the forest, and over the floor of the saucer was spread the evening activity of a hunting camp. A man was pegging out freshly-skinned hides to dry, another was jointing meat. On a clear fire just below, a meal was being cooked; and on a second smoky one on the other side of the clearing choice strips of meat were being dried into boucan. Two men were cleaning guns, and one was washing blood from his shirt.

By the cooking-fire a second dog was standing, uncertain. Chris walked up to it and began to kick it with a businesslike detachment. Henry knew why he was kicking it. Because it had not warned them, like the other, of approaching visitors.

'Let him be,' Bartholomew said; and, again surprisingly, the man obeyed. 'I think he's getting a little deaf, but he still has the best nose a hound ever had.'

The man picked up a wooden bucket and held it out to Henry. 'If you've come to supper, Harry Morgan, best make yourself useful. Water's beyond, there.' And he tilted his head to the farther rim of the clearing.

Henry took the bucket and walked through the camp, receiving nods or stares, according to a man's mood or inclination. He climbed the opposite lip of the saucer and found that it was the high bank of a stream; a bank so high and sudden that no sound of water came over it into the camp. Indeed, he found when he made his way down to the stream to fill the bucket that he was out of sight and sound of human activity. The camp on its high hollow shelf of land might not exist.

And then he saw the longboat.

It was drawn up from the beach under the sheltering branches.

So the men disjointing pig so busily up there did not belong to the island. That caused a great many new thoughts to race through his mind while he filled his bucket. Something the Dolphin's serving-man had said came back to him. Something he had not understood at the time. A play on the word conspiracy.

He walked the few yards down to the beach, but the sea was empty. Limpid and quiet in the evening light. They had come from some other island, not from any ship.

He hauled the water up the steep bank and brought it to the fire. Some of the flayed and disembowelled pig carcases laid out ready for transportation looked a little too large and fat for wild ones, but it was none of his business. If honest traders in meat did a little poaching as side-line to their hunting, that, in the Caribbean, was a very small iniquity.

The smell of the cooking pork made him faint with ecstasy, and for a share of it he would have looked with indulgence on more spectacular sins than cattle-stealing.

When the men gathered round for supper, each with his wooden porringer or pewter plate, Bartholomew distributed the articles they had commissioned him to buy. Except that he also distributed their change, or announced deficits, he might have been a benevolent uncle doling out gifts.

'Bluey, your jew's-harp. Tugnet, your pomade, and keep it for your girl's benefit; it smells like a brothel. Timsy, your candy, and you owe me two pence on it.'

When a man stretched forward to spear a piece of meat before his turn, Bartholomew smacked him sharply on the wrist and said: 'Manners!' like a nursery governess, and the man desisted.

It was difficult to know why they should obey him, and still more difficult, in the absoluteness of their freemasonry, to know who the actual leader was. There were eleven of them, Henry counted; and they were all white except for a mulatto and a man who looked like some sort of Indian from Campeche way.

'Know anything of sea business?' the man called Chris asked him as they ate.

'I came out from England before the mast,' Henry said.

'That's hardly a degree in seamanship.'

'Passed his entrance examination, though,' someone said, and they laughed a little and the atmosphere grew easier.

They argued in a desultory way among themselves where they should sell their meat. It would be easier to get to one place because the trades would blow them almost straight there, but they would get a better price in the second. The pig melted in the mouth, and they ate until there was nothing left but bones. The rum was heavy and crude and potent. One by one they lay back replete. The dogs, gorged on the offal, came to the fire and sank their muzzles on their paws. Bluey took out his jew's-harp and began to play softly. The mulatto sang the words to himself. It was all sufficiently Arcadian, and Henry was glad that he was going to sleep in the forest instead of on the office floor. He wondered if they would invite him to join them when they left in the morning. He had no idea whether he was going to say yes or no if they gave him the choice, but it did not matter. This was tonight, and tomorrow was another day. Tonight he was free, excellently fed, and beautifully rummed up; and he wouldn't call the King his cousin.

'Ssh!' said Chris of a sudden, sitting up and listening.

In the instant silence they all heard it. A familiar sound, it was. The long, smooth sound of an anchor cable rolling off the windlass.

The mulatto dived for the dogs before they could move, and hushed them.

'Stay!' he said to the obedient creatures, and joined the rush to the stream edge of the hollow. Lying there on the reverse slope they looked down the funnel of land to the sea. There was indeed a ship there. She had arrived, after the surprising manner of ships, from nowhere, and now stood large and immediate in the very middle of the picture. Already she had begun to lower a boat.

'Stopped for fresh water,' Chris said. 'They seem to know the coast very well!'

'Seen the flag?' someone said.

'Yes. Spanish.'

'I like their nerve, anyhow,' another said. 'They refuse us the courtesy of wood and water.'

'Ah, well, we won't have to hump that meat round the Caribbean, after all. Our customers have come to our doorstep.'

'Victual a Spaniard!' said Henry.

'Why not?' they said. 'A Spanish coin rings just as clear on a counter as any English one.'

'But that very ship may blow an unoffending English one out of the water six hours from now.'

'Not her,' they said. 'She's in too much of a hurry to get back to Spain, for one thing. And for another, six hours from now she'll be just where she is. When the wind drops like this of an evening, it won't come up again before dawn.'

'Becalmed?' said Henry. 'Then why don't we take her?'

'Take her?' they said. 'Have you had a good look at her?'

'Yes. Why?'

'Take a ten-gun ship with eleven men and some sporting guns?'

'Twelve men. And that is not the correct odds.'

'All right, we do have some muskets. How much does that shorten the odds?'

'The odds have nothing to do with muskets. It's a case of a dozen brains against let us say forty men who haven't even thought about the subject.'

'Brains!' they laughed, the only power they had ever used being force.

'How would you go about it, Brains?' asked one, spinning out the joke.

'I haven't thought about it—but I can tell you one way.' And he told them.

They listened in silence, their eyes turning from him to the ship's boat and back again until presently their eyes were on him alone.

'Even a small grapnel would make a noise like the crack of doom,' said one in a slow Dorset voice when he had finished.

'Pad it,' said Henry, noting with a lift of excitement in his chest that the questioning of a detail implied a respect for the plan itself.

'With what?'

'Moss. Creepers. Anything. You can pad it so much that it bounces like a baby's wool ball, but it will still stay a grapnel and do what it is meant to do.'

Their delight in contrivance, always acute in men who live precariously, snared them into interest.

'Yes, and Chakka can do the throwing,' someone said. Chakka was the Indian. 'Chakka can make a rope fall round a marline-spike stuck in the sand thirty yards away.'

'Are we going to lose our market just to have our throats cut on board?' asked a dissenter.

'As for marketing,' Henry said, 'I don't suppose she is going home to Spain empty.'

And at that reminder interest flared to something like eagerness. They knew the kind of cargo that ships carried from the mainland to Spain. And if she was bound home as far west as Barbados, then she almost certainly came from the South American coast. And South America meant gold, and silver, and pearls. South America was the fabled El Dorado.

Their interest went back to the boat that was being now rowed ashore, but they made no movement to go down to meet it. Instead they went over to the sea side of the camp and watched it come, through the tangle of creepers that screened them from the shore below. Through the still air they could hear the men in the boat laughing and talking as they rowed. They were glad to be setting foot on land for a little.

'I can't remember whether we are at war with Spain at the moment or not,' Bartholomew said meditatively, making his first contribution to the discussion.

'There is no peace beyond the Line,' supplied Chris, quoting a well-known tag.

'It's a holy war, anyhow,' said one. 'The Protector has said that who fights Spain fights the Inquisition and does God's work.'

'I've no mind to be strung up just to gratify Cromwell,' said the dissenter.

'A minute ago you were going to have your throat cut,' they said. 'Make up your mind!'

'I know a couple of ears that I'd like to hang pearls in,' said the man who had commissioned Bartholomew to buy the pomade.

'I know a couple of Spanish necks I'd like to screw,' said the Dorset man.

'Pipe down!' said Bartholomew as the boat grounded and the men leaped ashore.

They humped three empty casks on to the beach and rolled them up to the pools of fresh water in the gully. A youth dropped a small toy dog on to the sand and began to play with it. He had brought a ball, and he would throw it and then rush after it, accompanied by the dog, and they would roll together in the sand, each madder than the other with joy of living. The camp watched this pastime with mild contempt.

'Call that a dog!' said the mulatto, and went back to the fire where the two hunting dogs were standing in unwilling bondage to their training, whimpering with excitement and quivering all over. He soothed them and made them lie down with whispered promises and reassuring caresses, and then came back to watch what was happening below.

The Spaniards had discovered the longboat and had resolved themselves into a small doubtful cluster, looking up at the unrevealing density of the forest. One of them called something, and was hushed for his pains. They apparently decided that, whatever the longboat might be drawn up there for, it had no immediate significance. But they did not linger, as they had patently been prepared to do before finding the boat. The holiday air disappeared, and they worked quietly at filling their casks and gathering driftwood. The silly little dog, unprepared for the change in the atmosphere, got in their way and was cursed.

'Call that a dog!' said the mulatto again.

'See that there fellow with the black ringlets,' whispered the Dorset man. 'He were one of the crew of the Santa Marta that time I were aboard her after they sunk the Marie Galante off the Mosquito coast. Fresh water, indeed!' He watched the shining water being shot into the casks. 'No water at all they gave us, and no food neither, the bastards.'

Henry, lying silent, noticed that there was no further suggestion of trade. Even the dissenter was no longer vocal. They watched the ship's crew roll the barrels down the beach and up the planks into the boat, and made no motion either to stop them or to go down and do business with them. Indeed, their only personal reaction to the Spaniards' departure was to criticise their boat-work.

'What a lot of lubbers!' they said, watching the Spaniards' way with an oar. 'What a lot of tailors!'

When the boat had reached the ship's side and the water was being hauled on board they lost interest and remembered that there was still some rum. They drifted one by one back to the fire.

'If their nostrils hadn't been so bunged up with salt they'd have smelt us for sure,' Bluey said, sniffing the smoke from the boucan-drying as he turned away from the clean sea air.

Henry said nothing, waiting for his idea to ferment in their minds of its own accord. They discussed the ship in general terms at first: her tonnage, her rig, her probable cargo. Wood, they thought. Fine woods from the wet South American forests.

'Why couldn't Chakka just rope the man in the stern?' Tugnet said. 'Just rope him and pull his throat shut?'

'Too risky,' said Chris. 'If he failed we'd have them all on us.'

And with this contribution from Chris the subject passed from the academic to the practical. The proposition that they take the ship had been accepted.

'It'll have to be in the first watch, if we try it,' Bartholomew said. 'The moon comes up after midnight, and they'd spot us as soon as we left the shore.'

They lay round the fire as dusk closed in, discussing ways and means, and every now and then referring to Henry about a point. 'What do you think, Brains?' 'How does that look to you, Brains?' It had been his idea, and they were playing fair by him. He was no longer a cipher in the camp; he was, on the contrary, a potential leader. Bluey went down to the longboat and came back with a small grapnel, and the Indian gathered moss to pad it. They slung a canvas on the coast side of the fire so that no hint of a hostile presence should move the Spaniards to double a guard that night. Watching the faces as they bent to admire the Indian's handiwork on the grapnel, Henry considered his allies. They were not what he would have chosen, perhaps, but if the faces were unintelligent, in some cases stupid, in some cases callous, at least none of them was mean. There was a lack of calculation about them that saved them from being evil, or even bad. That same lack of calculation made them what they were, of course; hand-to-mouth spenders of all they made, world's vagabonds and permanent tramps. Only Bartholomew, of them all, had a kind of dignity. And he now knew why. He knew, too, why he was looked up to in this gathering of odds and ends. Bartholomew was a sail-maker. Bartholomew had a trade; he was an expert in one particular line; able to make a living and take his place anywhere. It was because of that fact that, even in the presence of a more probable leader like the man Chris, they deferred to Bartholomew Kindness.

When the dark came they pulled the longboat carefully down over the sand and floated her. An hour before midnight the tide would turn, and they would let the tide float them out to the ship as far as it served them. Then they came back to the camp and cleaned and primed their weapons until it was time.

'Brains has no pistol, Bart,' someone said. And there was a long discussion as to whose pistol he should take. Not because any one of them grudged parting with his own, but because they were determined that he should have the best.

'It doesn't matter much,' Henry said. 'I'm not planning to kill anyone.'

'If I had my way we'd kill the whole boiling of them,' Timsy said.

'Anyone can kill a man,' Henry said contemptuously. 'It needs only a little piece of lead and a thumb in working order.'

'Brains doesn't need to kill,' Chris said. 'He gets his own way without.'

'And the ransom besides,' Henry added.

'Ransom?' they said.

'For the men I've kept alive,' he said; and so cancelled the effect of Chris's half-sneer.

They went down to the beach when the time came with the idea firmly in their minds that there were cleverer ways to their ends than by killing. Which—as Brains had shown—was simple, and satisfying, but extravagant.

As they pushed off into the quiet water, Henry pulled off his shoes and left them in the bottom of the boat. He sat in the bows ready, and beside him was the Indian, Chakka, with the grapnel. They had tried the effect of the padding on a floor of planks collected from various parts of the camp, and had laughed to see how their cleverness was rewarded. The grapnel fell always head down, of course, and they padded the head with moss until it was resilient as a 'baby's wool ball', as Henry had promised.

The night hung round them like velvet, and the black water bore them gently out towards the invisible ship. She had swung with the tide and lay bows to shore, so that to reach her stern they had to pass her broadside on. She had no riding-lights, but when they came nearer they saw that a dim glow came up from an open hatch on deck, and a lantern hung at the entrance to the fo'c'sle. When they came so close that her bulk was silhouetted against the sky they could see that the guards the Spaniards had set at dusk were still there. One in the bows, one at the stern, and one at the ladder in the waist.

This was the crucial moment. One cough or sneeze, one incautious movement, and any one or all of these men would give tongue, and up from her bowels would come men by the dozen and the water would be jumping all round them in a hail of bullets.

But the slow, breathless moments passed, and now they were safe under her counter, and fending themselves off her rudder with their hands. One by one in the darkness they let out the pent breath that had suffocated them and relaxed. They sat there listening to the movements of the man above, and to the subdued sound of talk in the cabin somewhere. Forward of the cabin it was quiet, and it seemed that, glad of the knowledge that they would, for this night at least, not be disturbed in their rest to work ship, the fo'c'sle was asleep.

Henry stood up on his stocking soles in the bows, and pushed off until he was standing directly below the ship's rail, the Indian ready behind him.

'Now!' he whispered to Chris, and Chris flung the stone.

It dropped into the sea on the port quarter, and the man above moved away from his post to investigate. While the noise of his boots was still loud in the stillness, Chakka flung the grapnel. It fell on deck with a thud that stopped their hearts. To their heated imaginations it sounded like a meteor landing. But Henry had no time to consider the consequences. Chakka drew tight the rope, and the hook slid quietly from the deck and caught sweetly and silently in the rail. And Henry was swarming up the rope and stepping over the broad wooden rail before he had time to think. He crouched there in the darkness.

The man took a long time over his inspection. He walked forward and talked to the man in the waist, glad perhaps of an excuse to break the monotony of his watch. But presently he came back, humming to himself, and, still humming, came to stand a couple of yards from the waiting Henry. Henry could see him distinctly against the lightening sky. He was standing with his back to him.

His right hand with the kerchief wrapped round it went over the man's mouth and his left with the knife in it pressed into the man's back.

'Be quiet!' he said.

He felt his knife go through the man's leather coat, and a mad longing filled him to kill the man. Excitement boiled in him and sought an outlet; a climax.

It was something older than either law or Christianity that stopped him. Superstition. There must be no blood on this setting-out of his.

The man stopped his instinctive struggle as soon as he felt the knife-point against his skin. Henry dragged him back a step or two to the rail and tugged the rope where it hung from the grapnel; and in a moment Chris and Bluey joined him, materialising over the rail as darker shadows in the darkness. They bound and gagged the man that Henry was holding, and passed him to the custody of the next man up.

Henry walked boldly forward to the man at the waist, and cut short the man's greeting to a supposed comrade with a pistol shoved into his stomach. The man cried out instinctively, but it was a small bitten-off cry, and they bound and gagged him without hindrance.

The bored guard in the bows came strolling aft to find what had interested his comrade. Henry pushed the others into the darkness and waited alongside the silent and helpless Spaniard. As the newcomer stopped to gossip, Bluey, not waiting for Henry, flung an iron arm round the man's throat so that not even a bitten-off cry escaped from his outraged gullet. Henry shoved a rag into his gaping mouth, and Bluey drew his arms behind him and tied his hands to his ankles. The two captives were left in charge of the Dorset man, and Henry moved aft to that glow of light from the cabin.

The poop dropped to the deck in two shallow descents, and in the middle of the small half-deck was a partly-open hatch. As Henry bent his head to look down into the interior he felt a small sudden chill on the back of his neck, and thought at first that it was the result of his excitement. Then he realised that it was the first breath of an off-shore wind.

In the cabin five men were sitting round the table playing cards, and two more watched from seats at their side. A man in the forward corner was stringing a fiddle, and two were asleep in bunks. There might be more men asleep on bunks on the side that he could not see. The captain was a podgy man, and he played bad-temperedly. On his right sat a man of the same age, but elegant in dress and figure. He had the air of a guest; a passenger. On the passenger's right, lying on a velvet cushion, was a small bundle of silk that Henry recognised as the toy dog. Its head was buried under its paws and its nose in the cushion. All the prowlers in the world might be gathering within a few feet of it without disturbing by a heart-beat its silken slumbers. As the mulatto had remarked: 'Call that a dog!'

Judging by the volume of excited breathing behind him that the majority of his following were now on board, Henry pressed a hand on Chris's shoulder to make him stay where he was, and moved round to the cabin entrance, which was on the forward side and led down a few steps from the main deck. So rapt were the men in the cabin on their game, and so unsuspicious of this quiet midnight on a deserted coast, that Henry stood for a moment on the last step considering them at his leisure, before the captain, who was facing him, looked up and saw him.

The captain's eyes bulged.

'Keep still,' said Henry, standing with his pistol levelled. 'My friends above are watching you with interest.'

The captain understood him because he shot an agonised glance up at the faces in the reflected glow.

'Don't shoot, don't shoot!' he said in French. 'No one will move. Don't shoot!' his choice of tongue being an instinctive tribute to the French, who had made their island of Tortuga the headquarters of piracy in the Caribbean.

But his passenger was of different stuff. With a sideways glance at the shaking captain, he bowed to Henry and said: 'You have come too late for supper, but the madeira is good, monsieur Sansouliers.'

Even a conqueror does not feel at his best in his stocking soles; and Henry was a very young and new conqueror, and a Celt to boot. The flick stung him.

'You are no more effective than your dog, Señor,' he said in his island Spanish. The animal was now standing up on its cushion and uttering small shrill yelps, and it looked self-important and silly. And then, raising his voice a little, he said: 'Bluey! Come down here,' and Bluey detached himself from the gathering above and appeared beside him on the steps.

'This gentleman is going to lend me his shoes,' Henry said. 'Will you assist him to remove them?'

Bluey was delighted.

'With your honour's permission,' he said, bowing with a flourish, and having removed the shoes, brought them to Henry and held them for him with a burlesque of servitude.

'There you are, Harry boy!' he said. 'And the nicest pieces of shoe-leather I ever did see. Might as well have a pair for myself while I'm about it. What about yours, Cap'n?'

'Presently, presently,' said Henry. 'You can line them up in a row and choose at your ease when the ship's ours. Is Timsy there? Timsy, you stay with me and Bluey. Bart, you take the rest for'ard and deal with the crew.'

He had chosen Timsy to stay with him because if anyone in the gathering was likely to start a massacre it was Timsy.

Intoxicated at having the after-guard in their hands so easily, they discarded caution with a whoop. Bart snatched the lantern from where it hung and they went roaring into the fo'c'sle like a tidal wave.

'Rise and shine, my hearties, rise and shine!' shouted Chris, as if he were routing out his own crew; and tore along the narrow alley-way of the noisome catacomb, slapping rumps, tweaking toes, and pulling hair.

Some of the men packed in tiered layers on the filthy shelves were drunk; more were sodden with sleep and half-poisoned by their own exhalations. Only three were alert enough to combat an enemy on the threshold of waking. Two reached under their canvas-bag pillows for pistols; but one pistol misfired and the other disappeared under a one-man avalanche which was Tugnet. The third man to be quick-minded was the boy who had played with the dog on the beach. He came at Bart with a knife.

'No, son, no,' said Bart in his kind-uncle tones, hitting the boy's raised arm across the biceps with the side of his open palm. This is an exceedingly painful thing to have happen to one. The boy yelled, and the knife flew from his hand and grazed the mulatto's forehead. The mulatto dropped the club he was carrying and came at the boy with his open hands. The man whose pistol had misfired used the butt of it on the mulatto's head. And in another second the fo'c'sle was a writhing mass of fighting humanity.

Bart lost the lantern in the mêlée, and when he had recovered it and held it aloft to survey the result he found the boy sitting on the mulatto's head.

'Well, well,' he said, 'so you can take care of yourself, after all, son!' and he looked round to see how the others had fared. No one was dead, it seemed; not even one of the Spaniards, although several were looking the worse for wear. In the recovered light the invaders drew off and stood covering their captives.

'Tie them up, boys,' Bart said. 'And you,' he added to the boy, 'you get off that brown man. He's the best man with dogs this side of Cape Verde.'

'Dogs?' said the boy, getting up and looking with interest at the bleeding mulatto. 'Ah, pardon, pardon.'

'Speaks English like a native,' mocked Tugnet.

'Pretty smart altogether for a Spaniard,' Bart said, mopping the mulatto's head.

'I Portuguese,' said the boy.

'Well now! Practically an ally!' they laughed.

'I Manuelo Sequerra.'

'Maybe, Manny; but you're going to be tied up like the rest,' they said.

He submitted with good humour to their binding, and apologised to the mulatto for the 'accident' to his forehead.

'It was this gentleman that I try to kill,' he said, indicating Bart in explanation.

There were fewer men in the fo'c'sle than they had expected, and they were bound in matter-of-fact fashion in the persuasive presence of half a dozen pistols. Once trouble seemed to be on the point of breaking out again when one of the drunk Spaniards spat in the face of the man who was tying him up. But the man merely hit him across the face with the back of his hand and went on with his knots. Their triumph was so great that their good humour was invincible.

'She's ours!' exulted Bluey, as they met in the cabin again. 'She's ours!'

The ship's officers, together with their passenger, had been shut into the tiny after-cabin. This led out of the cabin proper, and was an ideal prison, in that its only windows were two small ones high up, overlooking the half-deck.

'Now we see what she is carrying,' they said, but Henry said no; first they must tidy up ashore. Fetch the fresh meat and the dogs. The off-shore wind would take them out now, without waiting for dawn.

There was some argument as to who should go, but they were still large with delight, and the impartial dice did the rest. They accepted Henry's ruling about using the wind. They had stopped calling him Brains from the moment when he had climbed that rope to the ship's stern.

Those who were left explored the ship as children rejoice in a new toy. They found that she was Dutch built; a fact which explained much that had puzzled them when they had discussed her round the fire. More especially her light, low poop, almost level with the waist, and her lack of burdening ornament. She had been built by a people whose harbours were small and shallow; and she had been built for trade, and therefore for speed in a competitive business. That she was Dutch built explained, too, the comparative smallness of her crew. The Dutch designed ships that could be sailed satisfactorily with two-thirds of the normal crew for the tonnage.

Whatever her original name had been, she was at the moment the Gloria, but Henry planned to change that at the earliest possible moment.

'Tomorrow we'll sling a man over the side, and we'll call her—Fortune.'

Gradually a new, less welcome, thought seeped into their exuberance. They had inspected her cargo (wood, as they had anticipated) and admired her armoury. They had even routed down below the water-line to reckon what gunpowder stores she had. But so far they had come on no strong-room. They mentioned the lack to each other, casually at first, and then urgently. When the longboat came back they were still searching for it.

'Bring the captain here,' Henry said, when they had ransacked the cabin without result.

They unlocked the after-cabin and dragged the captain out. But the captain had either been coached by his passenger or had recovered his nerve. He pretended not to know what they said.

Chris produced a knife and opened it with a flick of his wrist. He thrust it within an inch or two of the captain's throat, and moved it in half-turns so that the light from the hanging lantern glinted on it.

'I'll teach him English,' he said.

'You and your knives!' Henry said, contemptuously. 'Bluey, fetch the steward here. I never knew a steward yet that didn't know more about his master's business than the master knew himself.'

Bluey came back to say that the steward wasn't one of the men in the fo'c'sle. He slept in the galley, it seemed. But they had all seen the galley and there was no one there. When a terrified and half-suffocated steward was at last dragged from the flour-bin in the galley they greeted him with appreciative laughter and treated him as a hero. Who would have thought, they said, that the man to beat them would be a steward?

The unhappy wretch, finally unnerved by laughter that he did not understand, made no bones about telling them where the strong-room was. It was in the little dark after-cabin that the prisoners were occupying. He showed them where it was, and told them were the captain kept the key. And they all gathered round to learn what their fortune was.

There was neither gold nor silver. But there were pearls.

Rivers of pearls. Cascades of them.

The iron box was opened on the cabin table when the key had been turned again on the prisoners, and the share-out began. And went on, and on. Round and round went Bart's hand, dropping pearls one by one on the twelve small heaps; and the twelve small heaps ceased to be very small, and grew to be heaps of a size that made their eyes first shining and then blank with sheer incredulity.

'Eight odd,' said Bartholomew at last. 'Four of you's going to be unlucky.'

'Unlucky!' Bluey said, staring at his heap. 'What's an odd pearl! Give it to Chakka.'

'Throw mine overboard,' Tugnet said, running his fingers through his heap.

'If you're all satisfied,' Henry said, 'we'll free the middle watch and put them to the business of taking her out to sea.'

That led to a discussion as to where they should sail.

And by the time they had actually sailed it had led to something like open warfare. Henry wanted to sail the ship straight to port and have her declared a prize by an English Admiralty Court.

'Have her disallowed, you mean,' they said. 'And all of us flung into jail, as likely as not!'

'Even if they allow it,' they said, 'they'll want their percentage. By the time they've passed all their quirks and pretences on you, what is there for a poor seaman?'

Their distrust of the law was all-pervading.

This dismayed Henry; but what shook him to the soles of his new Spanish shoes was their plan for the future of the ship. They planned to sell her, if that proved easy; and if not, to sink her.

'Sink her!' said Henry, hardly believing his ears. 'But with a ship like this our fortune is made. We are set up for life.'

'What would we do with her?' they asked.

'Get letters-of-marque, and use her as a privateer. Or, failing that, trade with her. There are cargoes for the asking all over the Caribbean, and fortunes for the taking.'

'What! Work a ship in all weathers when we could be living like lords in Port Royal!' they said.

'Fortune! What's a fortune to us!' they said. 'We've got a fortune.'

'We're only living for the day when we can be done with ships!' they said. 'What would we want with a ship?'

And from that nothing Henry said could move them.

So at last he said: 'Very well. I'll trade you my share of the pearls for the ship.'

At first they thought he was joking. Then they thought he was mad. Then they remembered that he had once been called Brains, and began to wonder how they were being cheated.

'It's too big a share, the ship,' they grumbled, with a fine inconsequence.

Henry pointed out that they had been planning to sink her.

'No,' they said. 'We were going to sell her.'

'Very well. I'm offering you a fortune in pearls for her. Try to sell her—in Tortuga, I suppose—and you may find no bidders. There's my bid, there on the table.'

He emptied the little leather sack of pearls on to the table under their eyes; and, watching their faces, knew that he had a ship and was penniless.

But his heart was filled with glory.

He went on deck, and left them to their celebration. In less than an hour they were all roaring drunk.

Sometime before dawn, prowling round the deck and listening to the riot below, he came on Bartholomew sitting all alone on the fo'c'sle head polishing a pistol.

'Bartholomew! Can it be that someone is sober?'

'Ay, I'm sober.'

'I congratulate you.'

'You needn't. I'd like to be drunk as well as the next man, but my stomach won't let me. A real trial my stomach is to me.' And then, with sudden venom: 'And the way that bastard is handling the wheel takes my appetite away.'

'Can you sail her?'

'I would sail her between Silla and Caribbees and not as much as scrape her paint.'

'Get aft, then, and take the wheel.'

Henry stayed there for a little, listening to the rush and creak of a ship dipping to the sea and thinking of his future, but presently he went aft to join Bartholomew, and they stayed there together in unspoken communion above the rioting ship.

'Whose ears are you going to hang your pearls in, Bart?' he asked.

'Nobody's ears. I'd as soon push them down their throats. All the trouble in this world started when women came into it—bar my old woman, of course.' It was clear that Bartholomew was out of temper.

'For a man who has just come into a fortune, you would seem to have a jaundiced outlook on life,' Henry said, wondering whether that cottage in the Mendips was looking suddenly less desirable now that it was possible of realisation. 'Does nothing give you pleasure tonight?'

Yes,' said Bartholomew, indicating the spread of canvas above them in the night. 'That does.'

After a pause, Henry said: 'Will you sail with me, Bart?'

'I'll sail with you—Cap'n.'