# Forced Luck

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The Spanish Main—Buccaneering. ‘Lucky’ Bart, the captain matches his luck—a baroque pearl that had been tipped by some clever artificer with gold-work—against the “evil eye” of his gunner.
A Complete Novelette by J. Allan Dunn
Author of “No Man's Island,” “Barehanded Castaways,” etc.
THE flame of the fire leaped high, rocketing sparks into the air, fighting against the cold white moonlight. It checkered the brushwood in black and scarlet and painted the lower trunks of the palms that soared up from the heavy-scented bush. The moonlight frosted their plumy crowns and, beyond the fluctuating ring of firelight, changed the highlands of Tortuga del Mar into a mystery of ebony and silver. 'The narrow strait between Tortuga and Hispaniola and the broader scope of the Windward Channel showed like spilled mercury. On a rocky headland gleamed the orange lights of the fort where the governor, M. le Vasseur, held the island against the Spanish.
Over a second fire of charcoal, kept fierce by palm-leaf fans, the figures of the cooks attending to the broiling of two pigs that lay on wooden frames over the vermilion coals, were splashed by the same vivid hue as they passed to and fro. The gutted bellies of the pigs were kept open by sticks, the cavities stuffed with partridges, packed about with crushed pimientos and citrons, seasoned with salt and pepper. The savor of it broke down the fragrance of the bush, making the nostrils of the men who lounged away from the direct heat twitch with anticipation and their mouths water.
Half a hundred dogs, pendulous-eared and long-headed, part mastiff, part bloodhound, descendants of those imported by Columbus to hunt Indians, lay with their red tongues sliding eagerly back and forth over their white teeth, too well-trained to offer at a morsel uninvited, even though they had made the kill themselves.
The men were in three groups. The hunters, the actual boucaniers, kept apart from the engagés—their duly indentured apprentices—by right of caste and authority. The Indian guides stayed in the deep shadow between the boucans, the smoke-houses where the sun-dried meat was curing on wicker frames over fires of charcoal augmented by the fat, bones and skins of the cattle. Sphinx-faced, imperturbable, puffing at their pipes, they preferred to be alone.
The central fire was burning for light rather than heat. The tropic night was warm, and the buccaneers were almost as thinly clad as the Indians. They were all to leeward of the smudge that discouraged the attacks of mosquitoes. Some smoked, some drank as the bottles passed.
“The moon’s overhead and no sign of him. If he’s stayed to eat at the tavern, hang me if I don’t carve it out of him. My belly’s wedded to my ribs.” The voice was half-surly, half-jocular.
“The pork’ll give you an easy divorce. I’d be careful how I tackled ‘Lucky’ Bart. He’s a rare hand with knife and cutlas. As for pistols, he can split the lead on a knife-blade at ten paces. He’ll be here, and in good time, never fear. He sent the same word to all of us. He was boucanier before he became filibustier.
“What of it?”
“So he knows by instinct when the pigs will be done and he still likes porc boucanée better than any other meat. He’ll be coming up-wind, mind you, and he’ll march in on us just as the crackling is ripe. He’s a knack of arriving at the right minute, has Lucky Bart.”
“Aye, he’s been lucky enough, so far.”
“He’s not the only one. Did you hear what King Louis did to Pierre le Grand when he reached France with the galleon he took off Cape Beata? The word came last week by the captain of the Celestine.”
“Took the gold away from him, like enough. It would serve him right for not spending it on Tortuga. We were not good enough for him to drink with, it seems.”
“Peste! You are jealous as well as surly, Pierre. The king made a knight of him. Aye, and they rang the bells for him at Notre Dame de Bon Secours in Dieppe and held a high mass in honor of his victory over the Spaniards. Pierre is no outlaw. When he won from Spain he fought for France and the winnings were his. Bars of gold to the tune of a hundred thousand pistoles, to say naught of the value of the ship. But twenty-nine to divide it.
“There was a bold stroke for you, to sink his own boat and climb aboard the vice-admiral’s ship! Better than sweating in the bush and sweltering in the boucans for a few piece of eight. So Lucky Bart comes in from sea with his pockets so full of gold it rolls out on the floor when he sits down. The women will not look at a boucanier while Bart and his men are in port. They say he chases men while we hunt cattle.”
“There are getting mighty few cattle left to hunt of late. And it takes three years for a calf to grow to meat.”
A sudden clamor rose as every hound gave tongue, baying in bell notes, racing forward toward an opening in the bush and standing reluctant as their masters shouted at them.
A band of men came swaggering into the clearing. They were gaudily dressed with silken sashes beneath their broad leather belts, with silken kerchiefs binding their heads beneath the wide-brimmed, feather-decked hats. Each wore high boots of Spanish leather with the bucket-tops turned down to show hairy legs or silk hose beneath the wide, short breeches of striped patterns.
All carried pistols in belts and slings, all had cutlases, naked or in sheaths, according to the fancy of the owner. Earrings gleamed golden. Rings twinkled and a gem or two flashed in the firelight. They ignored the dogs which slunk back again, recognizing folk who understood them, if not actual friends.
“Am I late, bullies all? I trust, at least, the pigs are not overdone. I like to see my stomach well-filled, as well as my purse.”
A shout of laughing greeting went up from the buccaneers who crowded round the newcomers.
“There are two hampers of wine close behind us,” said Lucky Bart. “As an aid to digestion. Tell me, are the pigs cooked? They smell like a breath of heaven.”
“Done to a turn.”
The cook came up.
“A dozen partridges to each porker. The gravy has oozed through the skin and the crackling is crisp and sweet as a palm-cabbage.”
“Good! Here comes the wine. Let’s fall to before we talk.”
He was easily the dominant figure among his followers and the beef-smokers. Not over-tall but big without being clumsy. His gay raiment somehow became the man, though the others of his party looked like masquerading swashbucklers. Every gesture, every word, the flash of his black eyes and the gleam of his white teeth in his black beard, showed confidence, vitality, leadership. From nail-joints upward to where the stoutly supple wrists disappeared under lace ruffles, black hair curled crisply. His beard ran heavy down the strong throat to join the mat that showed on his chest where the wide-collared shirt lay open.
His skin was Indian red with exposure and the whites of his roving eyes gave emphasis to his glances as he called the buccaneers by name while they seated themselves ready for the feast. He had the nose of a hawk and his chin showed prominently for all its bushing. On one finger a great diamond shot iridescent rays. A golden neck-chain caught the light. Instead of cutlas he wore a rapier at the end of an elaborate belt hanger. There were pistols with carven butts ornamented with silver in his belt between silken scarf and leather, pistols in the silken sling across one shoulder.
THERE was little said for a time as the pig was carved at will by the ready knives while good wine went gurgling down brawny throats from bottle necks. Every little while Lucky Bart would roar a pledge across the fire to some one of the buccaneers, his jewel spraying fire as he raised his hand. Between the huts the Indians devoured their portion of the feast.
At last the dogs were fed, the last of the wine was drained and long crude cheroots of Trinidad tobacco lighted. In complaisant humor the men sat about the fire.
“A song!” cried Bart jovially. “Who’ll tip us a stave? What, no volunteers? Then here’s one for you. ’Tis good, for I made it myself.”
He roared if out in a lusty bass and the men who had come with him joined in the. refrain with a will, timing the lilt, beating out the rhythm with closed fists on their thighs or imitating the inhaul of ropes as they sat, like performers in a South Sea hula.
“The galleon’s hold was filled with gold: Oh-ho, let the wind blow! As she put out to sea, The breeze did stream athwart her beam,
Jamaica on her lee. Yo-ho! Jamaica on her lee.
“Yo-ho, let the wind blow! Let it blow high, let it blow low, But blow right steadily. North or south, or east or west, Any breeze that blows is best
For our good Company! Yo-ho! For our good Company!
“Her captain’s gay in silk array; Oh-ho, let the wind blow! A sparkling jewel he wears. But, oh, his face is turning gray As up the wind he stares. Yo-ho! As up the wind he stares.
“Yo-ho, aloft and below! Haul on the sheets, let the ship go. And man the battery. Prime your pistols, whet your steel; Fast we glide on tilted keel. Yo-ho the Company! Yo-ho! For our good Company!
“The scuppers’ wash is red with blood; Oh-ho, let the wind blow! The air is filled with groans. We fling the corpses in the flood And hoist the skull and bones. Yo-ho! And hoist the skull and bones!
“Yo-ho, let the wind blow! The galleon’s captain’s gone below To sup with Davy Jones. Gold galore to spend ashore, Then to sea to gain some more Beneath the skull and bones; Yo-ho! Beneath the skull and bones!”
Roars of approval greeted the song. Bart’s followers chanted over the last stanza and Bart, unfolding a bundle he had carried under his arm, displayed a sable flag on which was stitched the death emblems.
Some one brought a bamboo pole. In a trice the banner was fastened to the staff and the filibuster stood waving it. The moon silvered the device, the glow of the fire tinged it with sinister crimson. The final note found the whole company grouped about him, shouting in enthusiasm born of the feast, the wine, the song and the infection of Lucky Bart’s enthusiasm.
“That’s the flag to fight under,” he cried. “Death to our enemies! Death to all Spaniards unless they hand over the loot they have robbed from the Indians. We’ll let ’em off then, if they’re humble enough, but we’d rather cross blades. Eh, lads?
“There are three things to warm the blood—wine, women and a good fight! There are three things that smell sweet to a real man, the scent of a woman’s hair, the perfume of wine and the reek of burned powder! Three things that are good to hear, the laugh of a girl, the clink of gold and the clash of steel!
“Join in with Lucky Bart, my hearties, and we’ll give you all of them. Why, look you, a year since and I was toiling through the brush on Hispaniola with a collar of raw beef around my neck, lucky if I earned enough to stay overnight in a tavern once a month. Now—” he made the big diamond flash—“a don, a hidalgo of Spain made me a present of this ring. He had no further use for it.”
He grinned and the crowd guffawed.
“Another gave me this Toledo blade.”
He whipped out the supple blade of bright steel from its sheath, making a hissing circle before he took the point and curved the rapier until end touched end within the jeweled guard. As it swung back to true, quivering, sending off rays of dazzle reflected from moon and fire, it seemed like a sentient thing, live as an adder’s tongue.
“Booty, my lads! Spoils of war! Taxes on Spain! Yours for the collecting. Who’ll join? I’ve a stout ship though it’s small. I’ve four cannon. We’ve done well with them, but we must do better. We must fly at bigger game. We need men. We’ll be crowded for a few days until we find a ship big enough to hold us with comfort. We’ll take that as we’ve taken all the rest.
“Follow Barthelemy’s Luck, my men. Every cast wins. Luck’s a handsome jade, but she’ll pout and she’ll flout you if you do not read aright the look in her eyes. Run after her and she’ll leave you bogged, like a will-o’-the-wisp. But when she walks within your grasp, look you, seize her, woo her, flatter her and she’ll give you all she has, being a woman, to be wooed and won.”
“Aye, and the jade will fling you aside as she’d toss away a frayed ribbon, when she’s put you through all your tricks.”
There was a laugh at this and Bart twisted to see the owner of the voice, pushed forward by his comrades in jest.
“So, old growler, Luck jilted you, did she? In faith ’tis no wonder, with those swivel eyes.”
Lucky Bart swiftly traced the sign of the cross in the air, shrinking a little, for all his boldness and the knowledge that every one was observing him.
“Swivel-eyes or no,” retorted the other, a gray-bearded, bald-headed veteran in whose shrunken flesh the muscles still stood out efficiently; “they can sight carronade and culverin as well as any ordinary pair. Nay, they are rightly set for that same trick of sending a shot true to the mark. Every man squints when he sights along a barrel. I do it without effort.
“I fought against the Spaniards in ’24 when the French chased them out o’ the Valtelline. I fought ’em in the Netherlands in ’21. I’m not too old to fight ’em yet, give me the chance. I’ve no son of my own, let me adopt one of those four cannon of yours and I’ll warrant it’ll speak for me.”
The old man, half-drunken with the unaccustomed amount of wine he had drunk at Bart’s expense, was working himself up into a fury. Barthelemy, quick to recognize his quality as a recruiting-agent, let him talk.
“They got me once, in Madrid. I was there to—never mind that,” he muttered, “but the friars caught me for a Frenchman and a heretic. They tried to save my soul by squeezing my body. Look at those twisted arms.”
He tore off his tunic, exposing misshapen arms, distorted shoulders and scarred ribs.
“They gave me the rack and the boot; they took the nails from my fingers and toes in their sweet zeal. They made me walk in procession with yellow and red flames on my robe—pointing upwards, mark you. I was handed over to the seculars; I was to be burned to ashes.
“But I escaped their deviltry. There was a girl in the city. My eyes were straight then. Never mind that. Now the Bishop of Cuba is Inquisitor General with full power of fine and fetter, dungeon, torture and the stake. The Inquisition of the Galleys covers the friars aboard all Spanish ships of war. Give me a chance to aim your cannon against Spaniards, Lucky Bart, and I’ll call it the biggest luck that has come to me in twenty years.”
Bart clapped him on the back.
“I’ll give you your chance,” he said. “If there is ill fortune in your crossed sight, fire it at the Spaniards with your priming.”
The talk had been all in French, the common language of the buccaneers, though the crowd was a mixture of French and English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh and Dutch with Barthelemy himself a Portuguese and sworn enemy to Philip of Spain. A short, rotund man who had joined lustily in the singing, put the question to the newly appointed gunner:
“You’ve not said what crossed your eyes, Simon? Was it making love to two wenches at once?”
“No. It was trying to make a Welshman look me straight in the face.”
In the roar that went up the Welsh quizzer backed out of the front rank of the circle surrounding Bart. Simon reverted to the leader’s first sentence.
“’Tis true Luck jilted me at the end,” he growled out, emboldened by his acceptance as gunner. “So she will all. And when she’s tiring of you and seeking a new favorite, see that you force her not, Lucky Bart. That’s my word to you, and a wise one.”
“I’ve a charm to keep her favor, Simon. But for that, good gunner as you are, I’d not have risked the evil eye aboard my ship. I took this myself from the beard of an oyster that I brought up in fourteen fathoms. It has been with me ever since.
“There’s Bart’s luck for ye, come out of the sea as a sign from Neptune himself. Whiles that’s above my heart I have no fear of forcing my luck, nor need those who sail with me.”
He hauled up the gold chain about his neck and displayed its pendant in his broad, horny palm as they crowded in. The pendant was a baroque pearl that had been tipped by some clever artificer with gold-work. The same clever craftsman may have used his tiny chisels to emphasize the natural design. That was hard to determine, for the nacreous luster was perfect.
Baroques are freakish things, and this bit of pearl, thrown off by a sick shellfish, about the size of a man’s thumb-nail, showed plainly the modeling of a face with hooked nose above a grinning and wide mouth, with cavernous eyes suggested beneath beetling brows; the semblance of a satyr exquisitely wrought in miniature. Strangest touch of all were the horns that sprang from the temples. These may not have been matched, for they had been tipped with gold, accentuated perhaps until projected forward, curving slightly inwards above the sardonic face.
As they looked at it in superstitious awe, Bart, with the fore and little fingers of his left hand, made the sign to ward off evil that the Italian fishermen call jettatura, the gesture common to all the Mediterranean coast. Tiny branches of coral that suggest such horns are treasured and worn as charms. Many in that crowd had seen them, some possessed them, but never had they seen a charm like this, a veritable diabolus.
Swayed as they were by their common hatred against Spain, by the growing scarcity of cattle that had backed Bart’s arguments for freebooting, by the prospects of following the notable example of Pierre le Grand, nothing could have cemented them like this. It was incontrovertible, miraculous. They watched in strained silence as Bart put the baroque back into his hairy chest and nodded at them triumphantly.
SO TENSE was the momentary hush that even Bart started when every hound gave deep-throated warning in a sudden clamor that heralded a small party of men, advancing authoritatively into the clearing; belted, booted and armed with pistols and hangers, dressed with a certain uniformity. Bart wheeled to face them.
“Now what the deuce is this?” he demanded as the newcomers halted, standing close as if uncertain of their welcome, yet determined to maintain their mission. One of them stepped forward.
“We come by virtue of the warrant of the governor,” he said. “We seek certain buccaneers whose names are set forth in these warrants against the sums long overdue the French West Indian Company for goods and other provisions and supplies. Moreover we act under special authority from his Majesty Louis the Thirteenth, who graciously granted the charter to the said trading company, and by whose order we have come overseas to protect the traders in their lawful enterprise which hath been imperiled by the refusal of these buccaneers to take up payment of these accounts.”
He stopped for breath and to gather his resources, somewhat scattered by the attitude of these debtors of the French West Indian Company, by the presence of Bart and his men, whom he had not expected to find on this collecting expedition to the chief rendezvous of the beef-smokers. Bart stood with folded arms, but a hand grasped a pistol to right and left and the filibuster was grinning contemptuously.
“I will read the warrants—and the names,” said the officer. “In the name of the king——”
“Spare your breath, you may want it when you go down the mountain,” said Bart. “We’ll take it that most of us here are on the books where we are charged such prices as would bring a millionaire to beggary. I’ll venture mine is there. Mayhap you have heard of it? Lucky Bart, they call me, or Barthelemy Portuguese, of the Swan, sometime buccaneer, now turned freebooter. There is not one of us but has paid the company twice what their goods are worth at a high profit. How do you propose to collect your money, my man?”
The officer drew himself to his meager height. His voice shook with sudden rage as he answered the titter that echoed Bart’s speech while his men held off the suspicious hounds that snuffed at their calves.
“I have heard of you,” he said. “And for you and your pirate crew there is especial mention in the warrants. Unless these bills are met, not one of you nor any man whose name is written, shall leave the island under penalty of imprisonment in the fortress. So says the governor. The guns of the forts will back his words. None shall put to sea nor cross the channel. Attempt it without showing a receipt and the Swan, or any other craft, will be blown out of the water.”
“You hold a strong hand,” said Bart, and his tone had mellowed. “The company seems to have a friend at court as well as one at the fort. Yet how shall we pay unless we ply our trade? What we make we spend. We do not hoard our gold. It is gone. How shall we pay?”
“That is your concern.”
“Are you empowered to give such receipts? Will your signature satisfy the governor?”
“Without doubt. The company but wants its lawful rights.”
“Good. Prepare the receipts.”
“You said just now your gold was gone.” The uneasiness of the collector increased. It seemed to him he saw meaning looks passing between Bart and his crew.
“By the seven winds, do you think because my gold is spent I am a beggar? Can I not borrow from my friends? I have no desire to have the Swan blown out of the water. And Le Vasseur is a man of his word. My four three-pounders are popguns against his cannon. What I ask you, my friend, is this: Have you the authority to sign for these moneys? Have you the forms for receipt?”
Bart’s grin had lost its mockery, his voice had softened still deeper. The collector stiffened. After all, he had counted on the weight of the governor’s pronouncement. And there were fees attached to each bill.
“I have the forms and the authority to receipt and to collect,” he said. “It is all set down in the warrants.”
“Then read them to us,” said Bart. “My own memory is short. I may have forgotten certain items. It will suffice if you read off the totals against each man’s name. I warrant few of us are forgotten.”
“Then call off your dogs. Trompette, read the warrants.”
A few harsh commands sufficed to send the hounds back. The buccaneers formed a circle about the officer and his guard, listening attentively to Trompette reading his warrants and then the list of names with the debts set down against them.
Soon after Tortuga was won from the Spaniards by the buccaneers, a governor was sent over from St. Kitts, a fort built and some order established; the rumor flew overseas to certain canny French merchants, Gascons, many of them, that on this West Indian islet named after the sea turtle, Tortuga del Mar, the buccaneers thought no more of a doubloon than a sea-shell. Colonists were pouring in, men of doubtful character, women of whose character there could be no doubt at all. Tortuga was a place where there was a golden harvest for the shrewd storekeeper.
The buccaneers bought only the best, without asking the price. Boucan beef was in high demand with all ships. The cattle were wild and cost nothing for breed or feed. The buccaneers found money easy come and easy go. They had too much of it. More than was good for them. They had gold fever. A little judicious gold-letting would be as efficacious in diseases of this sort as blood-letting in fevers of the sanguine fluid. Peste! It would be a charity not to let this money flow too freely into the hands of keepers of brandy-shops and brothels.
So the French West Indian Company was formed under royal charter. Storehouses were built, trade shipped. Good wine, groceries, firearms and clothes—above all fine raiment—were provided. The prices were high, but seldom mentioned. The buccaneers stayed in the bush weeks at a time. They came out with physical and mental appetites stimulated to the nth degree by enforced abstinence. They reveled until those appetites were sated. When this happened they found themselves head over heels in debt to the company, little better than boundmen.
And for the credit they paid five prices. They were careless, but they were not entirely fools. They coined a name for the officials of the French West Indian Company—Les Sangsues—which may be translated either as leeches or bloodsuckers. The characteristic of man and animal was the same—once attached, they never let go until they had more than they could hold.
The buccaneers, lacking law and lawyers, hating both, proceeded to even matters according to their own judgment. They had paid five times too much for what they had already secure—therefore they would get four times as much on credit and for this they would refuse to pay, in gold, in hides or in boucaned beef.
Now the mercantile agency was in trouble. That was to be expected. The interference of their own governor, whose arrival from St. Kitts they had celebrated as proof that Tortuga was on the map—that was another thing. It complicated matters—matters that had come to a head.
Even Lucky Bart saw that; he was willing to knuckle down. Yet it was sure he had spent gold freely—unless he had a hoard stowed away. It must be close by or he would not have called for receipts. Perhaps he designed to pay the debts of all the buccaneers and so win them to his service. Still—
The officer pondered the pros and cons as the reading went on.
Bart was passing quietly round the circle, whispering in this man’s ear and that one, sliding an arm about another’s shoulders. The crowd gave out a distinctly jovial atmosphere as the long list of names was called. They cracked little jokes with each other. None murmured at the amounts, none disputed them.
“You have missed none of us,” said Bart as Trompette folded up his crackling warrants. “Eh, but they have good bookkeepers, have Messieurs les Sangsues!”
It was the first time the collector had heard the local epithet. He did not quite like it. Besides, there was no move toward the production of money.
“Now for the receipts,” said Bart. “Doubtless you have brought ink and pens. Sit you down and sign them. Bring him a log for table and another for chair, a torch to see by. Some sand, perhaps, to dry your writing?”
Bart’s tone had changed again. It was charged with derision. The collector looked about the circle. Every one of the buccaneers had somehow secured his musket and the officer had heard many tales of the marksmanship of the bull-hunters. These weapons, loaded and primed, had been brought to them through the shadows by their apprentices while Trompette read the roll. Barthelemy and his filibusters were palpably quick hands at fighting.
The collector felt sweat break out upon his brow underneath his hat as he fought against the emotion, calling up his own sense of importance, the protection of the governor, the royal sanction to the warrant. His will turned fear to bravery.
“I have yet to see the gold,” he said, facing Bart.
“Will no other metal suit you? There are three precious metals on Tortuga—gold, silver and lead. There are times when an ounce of lead, properly cast and carefully distributed, is worth a ton of gold. It seems to me this is one of them. Sign the receipts.”
The last sentence was a command. The mask was off. Bart’s knuckles had whitened to the grip on his weapons.
WITH an exclamation that was half-oath, half-prayer the collector snatched a pistol from his belt and fired at the freebooter. A feather fluttered from Barthelemy’s hat as the bullet clipped the clasp that held up the brim and secured the plume, and passed through the crown. Weapons were raised, the moon and fire shone on lifted barrels and blades; the circle became a threatening ring of death.
Bart’s great voice roared out with the full blast of his lungs, yelling an order not to fire, not to attack. He leaped to grasp the officer who drew his second pistol and snapped hammer on a spoiled priming, jumping back to draw his sword. Out came Bart’s rapier, licking swiftly about the other’s steel, wrenching it from his hand to send it into the fire, scattering red flakes.
“Yield!” shouted the freebooter. “Surrender, you fool; we’re three to one. Throw down your weapons if you want to keep your lives.”
It needed no order from the officer. The deputy collectors flung their pistols and hangers to the ground. Freebooters and buccaneers pressed in and quickly bound them, laying them on the ground in a long row like so many foot-roped calves.
Barthelemy himself secured the officer and held him until he could turn him over to two of his men who grasped each an arm and bore him back sputtering maledictions.
“Put them on the platforms in the boucans,” ordered Bart, pointing to a row of the curing huts.
“We surrendered,” protested the officer, his face white under the moon. “What manner of brutes are ye? Would you roast us alive? We but attempted our duty. I was the one who fired. If you must torture, ply your devilish trade on me and let the rest go.”
“There are no fires in those boucans—yet,” said Barthelemy. “Nor will there be if you sign those receipts. It is not convenient for us to make payments at present nor can we ever do so unless we put to sea. So, you see, we are between the deep and the devil, and we prefer the deep.
“If luck is with us we may pay those claims or such charges as may be adjudged legal. There are two sides to every question. Since you give us no choice with those wondrous warrants of yours we must ask for receipts rather than argue with the guns of the fort.
“Sign. You will find it very unpleasant in the boucans after the charcoal gets properly started and the ammonia comes from the burning bones and hides.”
The collector strove to read the freebooter’s mind, but could only decide that, whatever course it was set to, it was inflexible. His men, carried to the boucans, fully believing they were to be smoked to death, a credence strengthened by the coarse jests of the buccaneers, their cries drowned in laughter, appealed to him by name.
“If my second pistol had not missed fire,” he said desperately, “I would have settled your account in full—with a bullet.”
“Not you. Bart’s luck is not to be broken by a bill collector.”
The freebooter touched his neck-chain lightly to feel the charm move against his flesh.
“I like you none the less for crowing with the knife at your throat. You are a game cock. I take it you will sign?”
For full three minutes the doughty little officer cursed Bart with a tongue that never tripped, a facility of imagination that depicted the pirate’s ultimate end with precision and full detail, his temper lashed to eloquence by Barthelemy’s smile of open admiration. Then, his men within the huts, the buccaneers making a show of arranging the fires beneath the platforms on which they had been flung bound and helpless, he gave in and subscribed his name and titles to quittances against the trading company.
Bart called up the men and presented each with his receipt.
“’Twill serve as passport,” he told them. “Sooner or later our friends here will be missed. This will be one of the first places they look for them. Tortuga may not be healthy for any of us until we can return with plenty of golden salve to heal all offenses. The Swan will sail at sunrise. Who sails in her with me?”
The recruiting was absolute. Only the Indians had melted quietly into the bush, wilfully blind to all that had happened, stoic to the white man’s affairs, resolved to have naught to do with them.
“We will give you a boucan to yourself,” Bart said to the collector. “I do not think you will stay here long. We’ll leave the hounds on guard for a bit, so do not be too anxious to get free. For the receipts, we thank you. We go to sea. I should suggest you return to France. You will not find your calling popular on Tortuga. Yet you are too good a man to be smoked. To a more fortunate hour!”
THE sun was lifting behind the Caicos Islands and Turk’s Island Passage was a flood of golden splendor when the little Swan weighed anchor and stood out into the Windward Channel. The sunrise gun had been fired from the fort that loomed dark on its shadowed crags against the dawn. The water-front patrol challenged Barthelemy on the wharves, but the sight of the receipts removed all suspicions from its sergeant if he had any, the half-dozen doubloons pressed into his palm by the jovial Barthelemy—his last coins—dissipated them into thin air. It was not for him to think of forgeries in connection with so generous a freebooter. He had no special instructions, merely an addition to general orders that none should leave Tortuga without a clean bill of credit from the French West Indian Company.
There were thirty men all told besides Barthelemy aboard the Swan, and they overcrowded her space both above and below decks. The craft that Barthelemy proudly called his “ship” had been originally brought across from France and legitimately purchased by Bart when he decided to invest his small capital in freebootery under the black flag.
It was a bilandre type, of less than thirty tons, squaresail rigged on the mainmast with foresail and two topsails, with staysail, jib and flying-jib. Aft, there was a lateen sparred, triangular mizzen acting both as spanker and driver. A mizzentopmast stay allowed for a staysail when the breeze permitted. She was clinker-built and alongshore craft capable of work in deep or shoal, sailing fast with the wind a trifle aft the beam, able to point high. Barthelemy could handle her as if she were a racing yacht. Her three-pounders peered through rail ports, two to an insignificant broadside.
“She is small, is the Swan,” cried Bart, “but that is her only fault. She has served me well enough. You shall not be cramped for long. We’ll trade her for the first Spanish vessel big enough to suit us. There is a rare breeze coming with the sun; we’ll use the mizzen staysail and shoot through to the Caribbean in rare style. Bells of Doom, there’s the fort!”
A second flash had spurted from the dark walls, followed by the boom of the discharge. It was no salute powder-burning, there was grim earnest in the charge, as the solid shot skipping through the water perilously close to the Swan attested.
“Some one bungled a job of tying,” shouted Bart, his face purpling with rage. “Those plaguey collectors have got to the governor! Le Vasseur would pistol the devil if he roused him from sleep before mid-morning. He’ll try to sink us. Lively, lads, strain on those topsail-halyards. Curse that gunner, he’s too wide awake this morning.”
A second shot came ricocheting, breaking water within a biscuit toss of the Swan's taffrail. Bart’s own trained sailors jumped to their work, the buccaneers tailing on and lending main strength to the haul as they were directed by the mate and bosun. The wind blew strong and the bilandre heeled to the push and drive of it as the canvas went up and the sheets were belayed to Bart’s liking. He roared his orders from the tiller. His black rage had passed into more exultant mood as the Swan gathered way and went seething out of the harbor. The governor controlled no craft but a sailing-galley that could not hope to catch the Swan, even if its crew could be persuaded to cope with the pirate fighters.
“Bart’s luck!” he howled. “Good shooting for them, but better sailing for us. We’ll win clear.”
Flash after flash now came from the fort, alternating with the dull thunder of the guns. The sea geysered all about them. Once more the men jumped to his order and the Swan shot up into the wind and about on another tack as a cannon-ball split the waves where the handy vessel would have been targeted had it kept its course.
A short leg and he tacked again, zig-zagging out across the channel while the range grew too great for the fort’s artillery. Then he brought her up, heading on a long reach down the channel, careening to the light gale, dancing over the crisp blue waves that were creaming as they raced with the ship.
“Up with the skull!” shouted Bart, and the bosun bent the flag to a whip and hoisted it, flaring on the wind, the grim device plain on its sable ground.
“I would we had those cannon aboard, Old Swivel-Eyes,” he said to the new-recruited gunner. “We’d send ’em back an answer. We’d give ’em a receipt, eh, Simon? Couldst do as well as they did? They aimed well enough, but we outguessed them. What do you think of Bart’s luck now?”
“’Tis well enough if you do not force it. But I fancy there’ll be trouble if ever you put into Tortuga again.”
“Trouble?” laughed Bart, his strong hands on the bar of the tiller, lending his weight to keep his course, his eyes on the taut canvas, watching the flag for his wind. “There was never trouble that could not be cured by gold-grease. Le Vasseur is not in Tortuga for his health. He has an itching palm. We’ll treat with him easily enough. If not, there’s Jamaica with rarer fun than ever was shown on Tortuga for men with money to chink. Who knows? If the luck holds we’ll sail back to Europe. Philip of Spain reigns over Portugal now, but we’ll see the Duke of Braganza on the throne before long. There’s insurrection brewing in Lisbon now. We could join Braganza’s crowd. There’ll be honor and loot to be won. A bold man can go far these times.”
He stopped talking and gazed ahead, withdrawn into himself, brooding over his ambitions, seeing himself at the head of a resolute band, with money to aid the cause, allying himself with the duke’s fiery wife, Donna Luiza. Knighted perhaps, a power in the field, lording it in Lisbon.
Tortuga diminished, faded and was lost behind the headland of Saint Nicholas as they sailed due south-west. The breeze held through that day and all the night. Dawn found them pointed west, Jamaica looming up to port. At sunset of the second day the course was changed again to northwest, clawing into the wind, making for the channel between Cape Cruz on Cuba and the Cayman group. Noon of the fourth day found them cruising along the islands called the Gardens of the Queen—Jardines de la Reina—the wind yet with them, far enough out for sea-room, all eyes searching for a sail that might turn out worth capturing.
Nothing hove in sight but fishing-craft and Indian pirogues and they held on, heading up into the Cazones Gulf, out again to sea between Cayos Largo and Rosario, rounding the Isle of Pines.
On the seventh day, with nigh to eight hundred miles of sailing back of them, Cape Corrientes looming ahead, they saw a great galleon sailing south and east, a whale to their sardine, a sea castle that would carry twenty guns at the least and probably have close to a hundred men aboard.
Bart held to pirates’ rules. His men had a say in any venture and they gathered round the mast in consultation, discussing the stranger as she came on, her sails like a mass of pearly cloud, her hull crushing the waves, high-pooped and ponderous. They had not yet chosen their representative who would be given the run of the cabin and a right to speak with the captain at any time.
The fact that Barthelemy actually owned the Swan put matters on a footing somewhat different from the regular routine and scale of sharing of the Brethren of the Coast as the filibustering buccaneers were beginning to style themselves. His share of booty would be a quarter of the total taken, the remainder would be divided equally, a share to a man, with an extra share to the crew’s representative, with certain specified rewards for the man who first sighted a prize, the one who hauled down the enemy’s ensign, who uphauled the skull and bones on the captured vessel during the fight, the first boarder to cross the enemy’s rail; and fixed recompenses for wounds.
Simon the swivel-eyed, by virtue of his record as a fighting man and his ready tongue was, it was plain, likely to be made spokesman for the crew. It was he who came finally aft to the tiller, his black eyes apparently gazing at the tip of his long, blue-veined nose as he essayed to look Bart in the face. Simon was grinning; he trod the deck resolutely and showed that he had sea-legs and a sound stomach.
“Yon ship, they tell me—not being very sea-wise myself,” he said, “is not a warship of the fleet, but a merchantman. She is the more likely to be well lined, yet she is well provided for fighting. Twenty culverin show from her ports, ten to a broadside. There will be soldiers as well as mariners aboard, passengers as well as officers. One well-directed broadside would make splinters of us while we were trying to dent her sides—trying, I say, for she would sink us long before we could get into range.
“But we have sailed a week without other prospect. It began to look as if Bart’s luck had failed at last. Now that this galleon shows and we can smell the gold in her hold we would be willing to risk a fight save for the great odds of her guns. It stands this way. Unless you press the matter we will not attack.”
“It was you who gave the advice about the guns, I take it?” answered Bart. “Think you that all prizes are won by cannonfire? This will be a fight where you will have little to do as gunner, Simon. Down in Brazil, Simon, there are certain small fishes called piranhas, little longer than your hand. But they have jaws like bulldogs, their teeth are so sharp that the Indians use them for chisels to point their arrows. Once they taste blood they are merciless. They will tear to pieces man or beast within a few minutes. So—we are piranhas, the galleon yonder is a lumbering bull trying to cross the water. Call the men aft.”
THEY came with their eyes gleaming, shifting occasionally to the galleon, standing on, her big bulk and press of sail holding her to the water as if she was cargo-logged—so little did she lift or roll—compared with the quick motion of the Swan.
“Two thirds of you know naught as yet of filibuster ways,” said Bart. “You will know more before the sun sets, I’ll warrant. There was nothing ever won at any time, in any part of the world, without risk. Our cannon are small use, we will take her with hot lead and cold steel. We’ll grapple with her and board her and then, ’tis up to you to fight like devils from the pit.
“We must risk their first broadside. These merchantmen are not overly practiced in gunnery. It is big odds they will miss us entirely. Once draw their fire and we’ll board. Bart’s luck will bring you through. That’s all. Stand by to wear ship. Then to your weapons. And, remember this, you buccaneers, a sharp edge cuts quickest and deepest!”
They went about before the wind and hauled off for the galleon. The black flag flaunted impudently at the masthead, the Swan, like a tiny, impertinent terrier dancing up to a mastiff that could make one bite and swallow of it. The galleon kept serenely on as if disdainful of them. Bart could see many men moving on her poop with now and then the flash of a steel morion in the sun.
His mind was busier for the moment with the probable tactics of the Spanish commander than with his own. His seeming foolhardiness was calculated. He figured that the arrogant don would deem this a good opportunity to teach all pirates a lesson and would wait until he was within close range and then deliver a broadside. In Bart’s experience the Spaniards were good fighters but poor gunners; he thought the risk well offset by his luck. One or two of his men might be killed; the Swan might be sadly damaged; but even her sinking under them might work for the best. He remembered the glorious example of Pierre le Grand, who deliberately scuttled his boat to cut off his possible retreat.
Giving over the tiller to his mate, Bart took a hand-stone and whetted his rapier delicately to razor edge, plucking a hair from his beard to test it. So with his knives.
He fired the charges from his pistols and replaced them, carefully adjusting the priming in the pans.
Then he proceeded to make his fighting toilet. He took off his boots, he stripped himself to the waist, discarded his silk scarf of ornament and tightened his belt.
He bound a kerchief tightly over his curly poll with the ends hanging down like lop ears. He took the chain and its charm and tucked them into a flap pocket of the belt, carefully securing it. The scabbard of his rapier he tossed down the companionway into his cabin. His only actual article of clothing was a pair of short drawers, though, so dense was his hairiness, he seemed far less naked yet more terrible than any of his crew.
Simon, ordered away from the guns, sulked and predicted failure, but nevertheless ground smooth the edges of a double-headed ax, and there was a glint of warlight in his twisted glance. The men sat on the deck for the most part, stripped for action as was Barthelemy; the new recruits followed the example of the crew, all hands preparing weapons cutlases, knives, axes, pikes and pistols. The pin-rails bristled with them, the sun glanced from the new-ground blades with flecks of light that flitted over planks and canvas.
The Swan swam steadily on, Bart back at the helm with four pistols in his belt and two at the end of the sling over his shoulder—good for six lives, as he used them. They were weapons of his own design, and several of his crew had their duplicates.
Once fired, in the turmoil of a boarding or repelling rush, a pistol was little good, save as a possible missile to be flung into the face of a foeman. To use the butt meant shift of grip, and a knife or sword was better. A pistol was only an encumbrance. One had no time to reholster in a fire-and-slash affair with the press all about you. Pistols were deck gleanings for the victor.
But Barthelemy had a saw-blade attached to the support of the barrel, welded in one piece, an extension demi-bayonet that could hack through the mesh of a boarding-net, sever a cable or serve as a dagger. To balance the pistol he weighted the butt with lead. It was a touch of genius born of Bart’s concentrated joy in his profession.
The galleon held to her chosen course, a little south of east. The Swan, twice as swift, five times as agile, closed in on an intercepting angle that would bring the two together well out from land. Bart wanted sea-room for his maneuvers.
Slowly the details of the Spaniard’s richly carved and ornamented hull revealed themselves; curving, gilded scrolls, elaborate iron work in the railing of the poop-ladders and the stern and sprit lanterns. Her buff bows lifted now and then with a dazzling flash as she felt the ground swell of the Caribbean. For the most part she seemed to ride on an even keel, her canvas unfluttering, her ensign stiff in the wind, the culverin muzzles unwinking in their regard of the swaggering Swan coming on pot-valiantly into the jaws of death.
Poop and lower decks of the galleon were packed with crew and passengers, waiting for the spectacle that would show when the curtain of the broadside smoke had rolled up; the show of a pirate craft sinking, of pirates striking out feebly while their blood drained and stained the water with trails of paling crimson. A rare show—talk for the voyage—gossip to relate at the other end—a plume in the commander’s cap.
To the Spanish all Europeans in the West Indies other than themselves were foes and outlaws. The buccaneers were not all the riffraff of the Old World, despite their occupation of butchering cattle. Many were men of good family and education, cadets of fortune. There were British university men among them and Dutch spendthrifts, adventurers from Germany, Scotch exiles, Irish rovers and many emigrant officers from France, disgusted with the iron rule of Louis. Nor was Barthelemy the only revolutionary Portuguese.
Such men made good fighters and, now that they were beginning to graduate into filibustering and piracy, the Spanish deemed it a righteous and a necessary act to sweep from the seas these Brethren of the Coast. Here was a chance to use the broom. Aside from the sailors, the galleon carried a detail of marines, for she was a treasure-ship and had right to government protection.
The commander, Don Montalvo, was of noble blood; there were some wealthy, important merchants aboard, returning to Spain with their profits; there were friars; there were musicians. It was a varied and a gallant company in their contrasting robes and suits and uniforms. The gunners stood by their culverin, the slow matches handy but unlighted, the crews ready to haul and sponge and ram.
The passengers of higher degree joined the officers of the ship on the poop, the marines stood idly to arms, their light helmets flashing, their superiors smoking, listening to the music of fife and tambor, jesting at the audacity of the little square-rigger standing up to cross their bows.
The Swan’s speed served Barthelemy well. She had the weather gage of the galleon and she came up on a slant that kept her out of anything but the extreme range of the heavy culverin. These were not swiveled, they projected only a set distance beyond the ports, they were practically a fixed arm with their direction changed only when the galleon shifted. Bow-guns they did not have.
The Swan headed its course, stuck its nose into the wind and hung there, sliding slowly down as the galleon lumbered up. Bart held on as long as he dared; then, when collision was imminent, he bellowed orders for the jibs to be backed as he flung his weight against the tiller-arm. The Swan spun on its keel and caught the wind as the crew inhauled the sheets, shooting with a burst of speed toward the starboard side of the galleon under a rattle of small arms that made no damage beyond boring the sails. It was a bold maneuver, cleverly conceived and smartly carried out.
The astounded Spaniards looked over rail to see the Swan, blanketed out of wind by the bulk of the larger vessel, but with way still on, making for the side of the galleon, a score and a half of men, armed to the teeth, where they carried their spare knives, standing by the rail, ready to spring, while the thirty-first, black-bearded, hairy, of naked torso, gripped the tiller and howled defiance and encouragement. The top-hamper glided by with the streaming skull and bones flaunted in their very faces.
The broadside roared out with flame and billowing smoke; the ten balls went whistling through the reek of black-powder gases; the breeze piled back the vapors to fog the galleon’s middle deck. There was a splintering crash of the Swan’s topmast. The black flag toppled, disappeared. Then came the bump of the smaller ship, and out of the smoke shot grappling-hooks that caught in the galleon’s rigging and tied the craft together.
BART left the tiller with a prodigious leap, his men already scrambling up by the easy path of the galleon’s strakes, the carved port sills, the hot muzzles of the guns; silent, because of the steel they lipped, eager to slay, pouring over the rail, jumping down to tackle the swiftly formed resistance of the marines with their musketry, the baffled gunners with their rammers and the Spanish officers, springing into the fray with flashing swords.
Bart retrieved his flag and severed it from the whip, binding it about his left arm, roaring as he scrambled upward.
There was the crack of pistols and the bark of muskets, lunge of pike and grating of cutlas against sword in the sharp rally, muffled shouts and cries of desperate men fighting in the drift of smoke. Bart’s bosun fell from the rail, shot through the throat, toppling against Bart, who caught at a shroud to steady himself. Three of his men were asprawl on the deck. The rest had barely got their footing and were fighting with their backs to the high bulwarks, one against two.
Swiftly he discharged his pistols and saw his targets fall or go staggering back. His rapier gleamed as he poised himself for the jump to the deck, his last pistol still in his left hand. He saw a marine on one knee, aiming a musket at him pointblank, and he flung his weapon. The saw-edged knife caught the man fair in the throat and the blood spurted from the severed jugular as Bart joined his men, yelling the war-cry of the filibustering buccaneers—
“From the seas!”
The odds were too great, fight as they would. The musketry fire was too galling. Eight of the thirty were down in the first five minutes. The Spanish commander had established a firing-squad on the poop, aiming over the heads of their own men at the bunched pirates. Furious, reluctant, yet prudent, Bart’s great voice boomed out. ordering the retreat.
Overside they dropped, sheering off, Bart at the tiller again, the panting, bloodied crew cursing as they hauled. The Swan caught the wind, clawed off, got way and came about, before the starboard battery could be reloaded and order reestablished in the galleon.
Now Bart gave full vent to his wrath, his face convulsed, his lower lip bitten through, froth on his beard. More than a fourth of his little company lay on Spanish planks, dead or wounded. Repulse to him was like the sting of a banderilla to an Andalusian bull. His pounding, furious blood stimulated his brain to new tactics.
“Muskets, buccaneers!” he cried. “Now show those Spanish dogs how you can shoot. Pick off the gunners!”
The Swan remained within short range, a tempting target. Bart’s original crew handled her, and she frustrated every effort of the galleon’s crew to work their clumsy vessel for effectual shots. There was wind enough, and the Swan’s sailing qualities, with Bart’s seamanship, did the rest.
Wherever a Spaniard showed in porthole or rigging, or exposed on the poop, there sped a bullet from men expert in their arms, with skill gained in hunting the cattle or defending themselves against Spanish raids on the mainland. They crouched behind the rail and yelled whenever a shot found its mark. It was thrasher against whale.
The wallowing galleon, outmaneuvered, floundered in the seas while, like wasps, the stinging missiles sought out the harassed sailors. Again and again the broadsides roared harmlessly, and the pirates yelled in derision. Hour after hour the long-distance fight went on while Bart kept rough tally of the Spaniards put out of the fight.
He marked with satisfaction every time a sniper hit a man who exposed himself on the poop-deck. The passengers and all those not actually concerned with the working or fighting of the ship had gone to shelter. A man down on the poop meant an officer, an increasing demoralization of the galleon’s company. Two he had himself accounted for. Both wore corselets besides the morion helms, but this insufficient armor served as guide rather than hindrance to Bart’s sighting. One he shot in the face, the bullet ranging upward, the other in the armpit.
He served out food to his men, and, at intervals, measures of rum. Their blood was kept at battle fever by the concentration of their shots, the excitement of hit or miss. Sweating, begrimed, gory, many with minor superficial injuries, they egged each other on, realizing the wisdom of Barthelemy’s stratagem, waiting for the time when they could once more attack.
Bart gave the order in the middle of the afternoon. Pannikins of Jamaica rum were handed round and then the Swan, maneuvering at will, sailed up wind, paralleling the course of the galleon, forged ahead and drifted down again, repeating her first tactics. Out and up went the grappling-irons; again they swarmed the bulging sides, the skull and bones once more flying to the stump of the topmast.
A man fights at his best on the tide of victory or with defeat cornering him. This time the Spaniards were no longer triumphant but desperate and lacking leaders. There was not a buccaneer of Barthelemy’s crew who had not had to fight his own battles in the bush, often back to back with his apprentice, holding off a troop of Spanish horse who feared the accurate fire of their muskets.
They were accustomed to handle themselves as units. Boarding, after the first overside rush, was always an affair of every one for himself, and in this the freebooters were supreme.
Bart pistoled three men before he reached the deck, stabbed another and ran through the second in command. The Spaniards had massed and the pistols, fired from the rail, did fearful execution. The howling pirates, swinging their cutlases, herded the dons, broke them up and struck down man after man. They were not without their own losses, but their hardihood was the greater.
Over thirty Spaniards were dead or dying. Wounded crawled into the scuppers where the blood collected to the swing of the ship or trickled back on the opposite roll, making the planks slippery with the crimson fluid, clotting in the sun. Dead men lay with arms outflung and legs drawn up, blind eyes looking to the sky. Couples were locked together from the final struggle. Not a fighter on either side but bore some wound.
The buccaneers, more than half-naked, smeared with blood of both sides, appeared devils rather than men. Their ferocity was not to be withstood. The Spaniards retreated pell-mell to the poop, flinging down their arms and calling for quarter.
Bart headed off his own men and stood before them with outspread arms, forcing his hoarsened voice to dominance of the uproar.
“Back,” he shouted. “The ship is ours. Back, I say!”
He faced them with his face asnarl, his teeth showing white in his beard, red rapier in hand, threatening them as a hunter cracks whip over the heated pack, leaping for the kill. As they subsided unwillingly he picked out two and bade them stand guard over the huddled dons on the poop, ruefully surveying the bloody waist of the galleon where nearly fifty men lay helpless, gouting blood. Two more he told off to go through the lower decks, disarming all they met and at the same time relieving them of personal wealth. For this he picked his own men, choosing the cooler heads. The new recruits were the hardest to control. Simon stepped forward, panting hard, his right shoulder sliced, his calf torn with a pike, squinting horribly, like a Japanese devil-mask.
“Twenty of us joined,” he cried. “Twenty, I say. Twelve of us are gone, and you would give quarter. Down with them! Let them walk the plank. Where are the friars? Let them go first.”
He was mad with blood-lust and his own especial obsession against the priesthood. His cutlas had been shivered, and he held the jagged remnant of it in one hand, a stained knife in the other, crouching, ready to leap, like a savage beast that only half fears its trainer.
“I am no murderer,” replied Bart. “Drop those weapons, Simon, or I shall tickle your ribs with my point. Drop them, I say. Who is captain here? I give the orders, sirrah.”
He conjured up a fury that licked up that of Simon as a greater fire consumes the less.
“Blood enough has been spilled,” he challenged. “Now we look for gold!”
“GOLD!”
The word held them. The light in their eyes changed. In the rage of conflict they had lost sight of the prize. Bart saw the turn.
“Gold!” he repeated. “Gold and jewels and wine! Silks and satins! Loot! Spread through the ship, you landlubbers, while we sailors handle it. The man who conceals a trinket gets the lash and shall be driven from the crew. All booty is to be brought to foot of the mainmast and distributed by lot. He who injures a Spaniard I will deal with myself. Send them aft to me.”
Simon dropped his weapons, and, turning, followed the rest of the lately joined buccaneers, who ran whooping through the vessel, decking themselves extravagantly with snatched raiment, breadths of cloth and sashes, staining them, regardless of the drying gore on their flesh, breaking the necks of such bottles as came their way, cutting their lips in their haste, swallowing blood and wine together.
Bart’s sailors came back, herding trembling prisoners. Then they went to work methodically clearing the deck of bodies, flinging overboard the Spanish, laying aside their own for later burial, covering them with a sail. They knew that Bart would take care of the loot, that there would be wine enough for all, that there were things that must be done before the feast was commenced.
From the poop the affrighted survivors of the galleon watched the splash of the corpses, the feeble striking out of some who quickened when they struck the water. From the depths sharks, vultures of the ocean, came swarming, ravening, tearing at their meal.
Don Montalvo, one arm rudely bandaged and slung, his head bound up, stood at the break of the poop. When Barthelemy fronted him he did not lift his head, but gazed up at his conqueror from under his brows.
“Gather your wounded and all that is left of your company,” said Bart, “and go aboard my ship. I make you a present of it, or an exchange, as you will. She sails well, and I am loath to leave her. But we were somewhat overcrowded. I’ faith,” he went on a bit ruefully, “I take it that we shall be lost aboard this galleon, seeing I have lost half my company.”
“And I more than half mine, sir. But I thank you for your courtesy and your mercy.”
Bart grinned as he turned away and left Montalvo to salvage the forty left of all the complement. The pirate flag had been brought aboard and nailed to the truck by a freebooter, displacing the Spanish pennant. Now he gave orders to dismantle the rudder of the Swan.
“I would not have them make shore too easily,” he said to his bosun. “They’d have half the fleet after us before we get off the horizon. By the time they have fixed a jury rig we’ll be well away. We’re for Jamaica. If the gold is sufficient we’ll send enough of it to Le Vasseur to square those receipts and get a general discharge from him. Enough of it will stick to his palm to set him in good humor, I’ll warrant.”
THE disabled Swan drifted off; the galleon headed east, the loot piled up at the foot of the main with Barthelemy superintending the division, the, men casting dice for choice of lots as he apportioned them.
There were seventy-five thousand crowns in money and a cargo of cacao worth five thousand more, besides the trinkets, watches and personal cash taken from the dons. It was a goodly fortune. Twenty thousand crowns to Barthelemy, four thousand crowns apiece to each of the fifteen survivors of his crew.
They were drunk with their good fortune long before the wine they found affected them. Under a favoring wind they drifted on, carousing, shouting chanties, praising the luck of Barthelemy and toasting him again and again. The dead were forgotten; the wounds of the living, patched up in rude fashion, discounted in a golden dream. The galleon itself was worth a big sum, and Bart purposed to sell it to the best bidder and get himself a craft less cumbersome and with the speed his trade demanded.
He almost regretted the Swan; but he knew that the fame of this his latest exploit would bring him recruits by the score. He had his fortune, but his ambitions had swelled. His luck was with him; there would be other strokes like this, easier victories with an increased crew of picked rovers.
Simon was the only growler. The more liquor he consumed the greater became his grouch. The setting free of the friars was his main grievance.
“’Tis forcing the luck,” he declared. “No good will come of it. Had we lost they'd have racked us, taken us to Cuba, burned us. Now they have set a curse on us.”
“A murrain on their curses,” answered Bart. “Old Cross Eyes, next time you shall have a real battery to handle. My luck has but begun.”
He had dressed himself in clothes belonging to Montalvo, in waistcoat and breeches of rich crimson, a red feather in his hat, a diamond cross pinned to a lace cravat, a ruffled shirt, bucket-topped boots with silver buckles, making a figure more barbaric than gallant, but a striking one, not without dignity. Now he felt to find his pendant charm in place and touched it with his fingers beneath the ruffles.
“Time will show,” persisted Simon, gazing gloomily at his emptied bottle, reaching drunkenly for another.
He had thrown the dice with ill fortune and been forced to take the refusal of the mixed loot, his share of which was tucked between his legs as he sat on the deck—not yet cleansed of battle stain—his back against the rail. Some of the others cast black looks at him and began to mutter about Jonah.
“Let him alone,” said Bart good naturedly. “His disposition but mates his eyes.”
Before the laugh ended he started up a song and soon the chorus lifted to the stars as they surged slowly Jamaicaward.
The next day brought work of cleansing and restored discipline. Compared to the Swan the galleon sailed like a barge, and the winds that had served them hitherto so well, failed them. What breezes came to break the long calms headed them inevitably. Try as they would they could not make easting past the Isle of Pines. Every league of slow tacking into the wind, with the ship behaving like a tub when the yards were close-hauled, 'was more than lost by drifting in the offshore current that slowly bore them westward.
While the wine lasted few cared but Bart. Their unleashed appetites finished this at last, and with fevered heads they took to water. The galleon’s butts were half-filled, carelessness spilled more and they were down to the last gallons.
Bart made a forced landing on Cuba’s extreme western-point, at Cape Santo Antonio, anchoring in a little bay. There were wounds that needed close attention, fevers running high in blood inflamed by drink; and he decided reluctantly on a rest ashore. Often he walked apart from the rest, fingering his charm, fighting against a disposition to lose faith in his luck, now and then eying Simon doubtfully.
That croaker was in sorry case with the hole in his calf that would not heal. Bart could not quarrel with a man who was near death, as he fancied. He brought himself around to his normal confidence. The men were better for the laying up, eager to start back for Jamaica. One night the winds began to marshal and, as Bart paced the surf-edge, he resolved to sail the next morning.
They worked out of the deep indent north of the hook of the Cape and headed for the Caribbean and Jamaica. They had barely cleared the point when it seemed that every able man was at the rail, staring and pointing to where, coming fast down upon them, converging on three tacks, with towering canvas, three galleons came on.
For the first time Bart cursed his luck.
With only fifteen men, half of them weak and unable, he could not hope to work the ship with any speed or precision. To fight against such odds was worse than foolishness.
A HAIL came from the leading ship; flag signals were exchanged with the rest. Bart chewed his lips and gave the order to lie-to while a boat’s crew boarded him, an officer in the stern-sheets.
To lie was ridiculous. The great cabin showed plainly all the signs of nightly debauches. There was not a man among them who could speak Spanish without an accent. To a nautical, observing eye, traces of the fight were everywhere, aside from the bandages yet worn by the freebooters. More boats’ crews came aboard, and a muster was made from the three ships to man the recaptured galleon. Bart and his despondent men were taken aboard one of the ships, stripped of all they possessed except their drawers, flung into the lowest hold, foul with stinking bilge; slavery, torture, perhaps execution ahead of them. Stale crusts were flung down to them, a jar of impure water lowered and the hatch clamped down.
They sat in silence, pitching to the heave of the ship. A croak came out of the dark.
“Said I not so? You forced your luck when you set free the friars. Now——”
Simon squeaked as Bart gripped him by the windpipe.
“I’ll choke the voodoo out of you,” he said savagely. “That, or you keep silence. We’re not dead men yet.”
He fumbled with the band of his drawers. In the deep hem he had run his chain and charm when he knew capture certain. In the blackness he felt the outlines of the tiny face with its horns that held off evil, and felt comforted. While that remained his luck was with him. As to forcing it—peste, one must be the master of one’s fate!
The galleons, merchantmen all, it seemed by a chance word caught before they were thrown into the hold, were bound for San Francisco Campeachy. That lay to the north. In the hold they had no sense of direction, and on the second day a storm struck the flotilla. Bart and his men were tossed until they lay bruised and exhausted, caring for nothing. By some strange perversion Simon’s wound had ceased to suppurate and commenced a healing process that all the roughage did not check.
When, not so much from sympathy but in the desire to preserve his prisoners alive for judgment, the captain had them taken on deck after the storm subsided, Simon disguised his convalescence easily enough. None of them appeared to have much more than a spark of life left in him. They lay on the planks in the waist, gasping the fresh air like outhauled fishes, filthy, cramped, pounded to apathy.
The captain picked out Bart to be revived with wine. Quick to snatch at any straw, Bart bestirred himself, showing bravado enough and telling his tale with such a devil-may-care good humor that the captain gave him back his crimson clothes and took him into the cabin. Montalvo, it turned out, was no favorite of his. The daring of Bart and his little band roused in him a certain admiration.
“What they will do with you at Campeachy, I know not,” he- said. “My consorts have separated in the storm. If we arrive first, beshrew me if I do not claim you for myself.”
“I know not how to behave well as a slave,” said Bart.
“There are degrees of slavery. Any, I should think, are better than the rope or block. If you are ordered to Havana or Santiago, look you, there may be the Inquisition. You are a subject of Spain. That might or might not mend matters.”
“I spared all lives after the ship was captured,” said Bart, dodging the issue of citizenship.
“True. I wonder where Montalvo landed. There will be jests at his expense. He will pay us salvage on his gold and goods. Come, if I can compass it to keep you aboard, will you join my crew? I could use you and some of your men. Maybe all.”
Things looked a little brighter to Bart. Not much. He had not given his name, but he might well be recognized at Campeachy. Barthelemy the Portuguese was known, and not favorably, to many merchants. If he acquiesced there might be a chance to escape.
“We’ll wait till we reach Campeachy,” he said. “Let us find out if we have eggs before we plan an omelet.”
The captain nodded and then chilled hope.
“I will provide you better quarters,” he said. “But I must keep you under heavy guard. Take another glass of wine. I would give a butt of Xeres to have seen Montalvo’s face.”
Bart went out with his escort to the deck. Land was in sight. The next morning would see them off Campeachy. His pendant was still in the hem of his drawers, for he did not know when he would lose his fine clothes again. His men were on their feet, being driven forward. A figure lay prone in the scuppers, face downward.
“It is the cross-eyed one,” an under-officer said to the captain. “He is near death. Shall we throw him overboard?”
“See if he comes to later. If not, tie a round shot to his feet and launch him.”
The captain spoke carelessly, passing on, sealing the fate of Simon, but in a fashion he had not intended.
An hour after nightfall, when the watches were being changed, Simon the cross-eyed slipped over the rail. He could swim like a seal. The shore was less than a league away. Fear of the friars made fins of his legs and arms. One watch thought the other had thrown his corpse overside. He was not worth mentioning. Once Bart thought of him as he gnawed his nails in the foreroom underneath the butt of the sprit.
“That’s what he gets for croaking,” he told himself. “He’s no great loss, even to himself. I wonder if he crossed my luck, after all. We’ll find out at Campeachy.”
THEY made a peep-show of the captured pirates at San Francisco Campeachy. A cage of wild men from Borneo could not have attracted more attention, or a band of tattoed cannibals. Bart was placed with the rest under the forecastle head where the townsfolk peered timidly through the windows at the pirates and asked questions of the sentries.
There was one gleam of hope; the convoying galleons had not arrived. The galleon would sail in two days without waiting for them. They were not taking on cargo, but delivering.
At noon the ship was cleared of sightseers and Bart breathed easier. To make a part of the galleon’s crew was not so bad a fate. With luck they might mutiny and take the vessel. In the mean time they would be subservient.
A barge came alongside. The captain went to the gangway to receive a guest. Bart’s heart sank as he shrank back from the window. He knew this angry man. It was Montalvo.
Soon two men came for him, bound his arms behind him and took him aft into the great cabin where they stood him by the butt of the mizzen, remaining on guard. Barthelemy faced the angry don, mustering all his fortitude.
“I have pleaded with Montalvo,” said the captain of the galleon, “but so far with small use. In that he recovers his ship, his cargo; in that you are no Frenchman but a subject of King Philip and therefore an outlaw perhaps, but no foe; in that you gave him quarter, I thought he might be disposed to strike a bargain with me. I have even offered him a fair sum for your services.”
“The man is a renegade,” said Montalvo.
His arm was still slung; the scar of his head wound showed raw. And he manifested only a cold politeness toward his fellow captain.
“A revolting Portuguese. He has so declared himself. Mine was not the first ship he has plundered—nor the tenth. His wickedness is known through the West Indies; there is no more bloody and desperate pirate in the world. He is a scourge to our commerce, a villain who deserves only to be hung, and that speedily.”
“Yet you thanked me for my courtesy and mercy, if my memory serves,” said Bart quietly. “I should be glad to return that compliment. I held off my own men from hanging you at your own yard-arm or walking the plank, Don Montalvo. I furnished you a ship——”
“After you had killed half my crew, you butcher and traitor. I made no treaty with you.”
Bart shrugged his shoulders.
“I doubt whether you would have kept it in any event,” he said.
The swarthy Spaniard turned the color of a ripe olive, the scar on his brow swelled until it seemed it must reopen. He turned his back on Bart, addressing the captain.
“Either give him up to me or I go to th& governor,” he cried. “As for the vermin he commanded, keep them for galley-slaves an you will. This man deserves neither shrift nor trial. I hold you responsible.
The captain threw out his hands in a gesture of inutility. He had done his best.
“Take him away,” he ordered.
Bart was led back to the forecastle. He still had spirit enough left, to laugh at his men’s commiseration.
“When the rope is brought there is yet the noose to tie,” he said. “And the noose must tighten before one chokes.”
He tapped at his charm.
“I have seen a man lose all he had and all that he could borrow. I have known that man to go out into the street and pick up a battered piece of silver and so return and win every main. One thing is certain, luck never stays with a coward.”
MONTALVO did not return, but a guard came off from the governor, soldiers who hustled Bart into a barge and rowed him off to a great galleon that lay at anchor. They loaded him with irons so that he could barely walk. They thrust him down a ladder into a sort of lazaret and left him there. His crew they left on the merchant galleon. Before they clapped on the hatch the sergeant of his guard told him of his fate.
“There will be no trial for you, pirate and traitor!” said the man. “Cuba has had enough of pirates. They will make a glorious example out of you, renegade Portugese that you are. All Vuelta Abajo will be here in the morning. They are putting up the gallows in the public square. It is to be a holiday. You will tread air until sundown when they will take you down, dip you in tar and sling you in hoops of iron on the end of the mole.”
The sergeant held a lanthorn so that the light from the sputtery candle within sprayed through the holes punched in the tin and freckled the captive pirate’s face, hoping to read some sign of quailing. Bart looked at him composedly.
“The meanest cur barks loudest at the caged wolf,” he said.
“Cur, am I?”
The sergeant hung up the lanthorn on a hook driven into a deck-beam.
“Look you. There will be many to apply for the privilege of playing hangman to you, Bart the Unlucky. But I have seniority and a special claim. I shall put the noose about your neck. There is a good fat fee in it, besides much praise and satisfaction for a worthy act.
“Long after your throat tightens up, never again to suck in air or swallow wine, I shall be slaking my thirst with good liquor bought for me by those who are anxious to clink glass with the man who hanged Barthelemy. I shall make good money selling the rope, besides. A crown an inch.”
“You have a jovial way with you,” said Bart. “You go deep into details. You should have been a lawyer, my friend. Yet it is no news to me. I could have told that you were the executioner by your hang-dog look.”
The sergeant scowled.
“It remains with me whether you die swiftly or dance long, whether your neck is broken or you slowly choke to death,” he went on. “The people would rather see you dance with the ends of your toes just touching the planks as you swing. I have chosen a well-stretched halter for you. Your clothes are mine and all your valuables.”
“The most valuable thing I have about me is my life. An I lose that I care not for the rest. But I was not born to meet death at such hands as yours, my friend. Make no mistake of that. You filthy scum, a brave man to bait a bull through the bars! A wine-swiller and a swaggerer! I suppose you will boast in the wine-shops how you made me wince at your words. Liar!”
He wondered at the ferocity of the sergeant. While crowds would assemble to see a pirate swing, Bart knew that a subtle sympathy for the victim, a sneaking admiration of his defiance of the laws and his free life with its chances for riches or death, was predominant.
This man was not merely callous, he was a deliberate torturer. It was no fault of his if his taunts failed to affect Bart as he desired. Inwardly Bart was burning with anger, but he was helpless as a toad filled with lead shot. They had enough irons on him to hold an elephant.
“My brother was on Montalvo’s ship,” said the sergeant. “He was a corporal of the marines. You flung a knife at him and pierced his throat. That is why I applied for the hangman’s job tomorrow.”
“Then let it keep for tomorrow and do not kill me tonight. Your words are far more annoying than any noose. I am weak with hunger and thirst, and since I do not suppose you will relieve those conditions it might be well to leave me to gain some rest or I may give a sorry exhibition in the morning.
“As for your brother, he had his finger triggered to shoot me down. It was the fortune of war. Even you—an you had the courage to stand—may have killed in your time, though you prefer the rope to the musket, it seems. There is less risk.
“Your brother and I were enemies. Because Philip lords it over Spain that does not make me a Spaniard. Because Portugal is subjugated it does not follow that all Portuguese are slaves. Now leave me. You weary me. I would sleep.”
The sergeant drew off and looked at Bart, baffled. He could not understand this sort of man. His taunts were as useless as throwing mud against a stone wall to level it. More so, for the mud did not seem to stick.
Since he could find no epithets that would rankle he ascended the rough ladder and before he closed the hatchway spat down at Bart, who dodged philosophically. He sat in his clanking fetters and racked his brains. He felt confident of being able to get out of his irons. They were clumsy as well as cumbersome. Some were locked and some riveted. The first he could pick, the others open by main force.
His eyes, adjusting themselves to the dim light, made out a ring stoutly bolted to the floor. He could set foot on the ring and pull against the bolt-head on a fetter link. The lanthorn hook seemed secure. He could use that for leverage. He fancied he had talked the sergeant into forgetting the lanthorn. But he might come back.
The galleon was larger than Montalvo’s ship. Bart’s glance had told him she was laden, almost ready for sea, waiting perhaps for a full crew, a lengthy process of late with labor growing scarce. That was why the captain had been so anxious to retain Bart and his men. It was probable that only the guard was aboard, and an anchor watch.
The rub was that Bart could not swim a stroke. He held the old view-point of mariners that to be able to swim was only to prolong agony. That was for accidents at sea. This was different. He was only half a mile from shore. And he could see himself free as far as the rail. Then——
Bart clucked softly to himself. Among odds and ends of storage in this little room where they had stowed him he made out two large earthenware wine-jars in which liquor was exported from Spain. About each was a coarse net of cordage for convenience in handling. Bart knew such jars well, knew their buoyancy. If he had the luck to find some tarpaulin——
He felt the blood running more freely through his cramped limbs. Strength, reduced by the starvation of the trip up the coast, returned with new hope. Bart’s luck was still working. Now for the irons.
There came a gush of cooler air, and he glanced up to see the stars through the spars and rigging. Stars glittering in a sky of sapphire. Out there was freedom. He took a deep draft of the salty air, tonic to his resolve.
A soldier—not the sergeant—bore in a leather demi-bottle and a dish.
“Oh-ho! Bart’s luck was working well.”
The sergeant hangman had taken his hint that the star performer at the hanging might be but an indifferent actor without meat and drink. Or it might be orders. Bart did not care. His eager nose caught the savor of wine and cooked flesh.
“Eat hearty,” said the soldier. “’Twill be thy last meal. They are working tonight on the gallows. You can hear the strokes of ax and hammer across the water.”
“Thanks, friend. I am more interested in my supper.”
The hatch clamped down again and Bart fell to. The wine was fair; there was goat’s flesh, beans and corn pancakes. It was a feast. It was his freedom. With the steam drawn from this timely fuel he went at the irons. Some he twisted, some he forced apart; the locks he picked with a bent nail torn from a bulkhead. He had to work quietly, muffling the metal with his coat as soon as he could get that off. He heard the ship’s bell striking through the night. At two in the morning he was clear. There was toll of skin and blood on the metal; he was soaked in sweat and infinitely tired, but he was clear.
For the space of another bell he forced himself to rest, and when the five strokes sounded he started work on his jars. They were empty and they were sound, uncracked. He found the remnants of a hatch-cover and with the cords by which the jars were slung he drum-headed them, joined them together, making twin buoys. He finished the last of his stoup of wine and, then adjusted himself to the hardest task of all—to wait, dependent on the actions of another, not knowing whether such actions would favor him.
He counted on the revengeful disposition of the sergeant. When the man thought his prisoner had slept sufficiently he would be almost sure to visit him alone and try to harrow him.
Eight bells struck at last. Then one. Half after four. It was close to dawn. He heard a shuffle of feet, felt the fresh wind come down the open hatch. He lay groaning at the ladder’s foot, his irons gathered about him. The sergeant came half down the steps and sat on the tread.
“Dost repent, pirate? Would’st confess thy sins? I am the only priest will visit you. You are beyond the Church. Half-way to —— already.”
“It is not my soul, fool,” Bart gasped laboriously. “It is my stomach. I have been poisoned. The wine, or the food. I am dying!”
HE ROLLED over, careful not to displace his chains too much, breathing hoarsely, simulating a death-rattle. The sergeant, deceived, wondering if the prisoner had not poisoned himself to cheat the gallows, came down and stooped over him.
Bart promptly kicked him in the belly, driving him against the side and knocking all the wind out of him. Rising like a jaguar, straight into a spring, Bart leaped and brought down one of his fetters full upon the sergeant’s pate. The bone of the skull cracked dully and the man dropped.
With his jars Bart fled up the ladder. He had stripped himself down to shirt and drawers once more, shedding again the crimson suit that fate denied him. On deck he paused, glancing up and down. He heard voices forward, caught sight of the light of a lanthorn slung to a yard and half a dozen men beneath it, gossiping, their weapons set aside.
There was no time to lose. Light was gathering behind the hills, the stars were fading or so his nervous vision fancied. Like a shadow he made the rail, climbed upon it and with a jar under either armpit the connecting rope across his chest, leaped into the sea.
There was a resounding splash as he sank beneath the surface. The guards came running to the rail. Bart spat the water out of his mouth as he bobbed into the air once more. They were firing from the galleon; but now he was sure he was away, not to be captured. Not a bullet came near the jars. The other ships were not aroused.
The flood tide caught him and sped him landward, while he struck out with his legs for better speed. The east was gray when he crawled out upon the beach, patted the friendly jars farewell, felt for the charm in his waist-band and plunged into the thick jungle.
They would be after him—hotfoot. Spaniards and Indian trailers and the famous bloodhounds kept and trained to follow escaped slaves. If they once struck his trail that was the end of it. He plunged on through the woods, thanking his stars for the meal that gave him the energy. Striking a morass in the midst of the forest he waded through the water and at last roosted in a tree, draped with curtains of moss, satisfied he had baffled the! pursuit for the time at least.
Before noon he heard the baying of hounds on the edge of the swamps, the shouts of the trainers. He caught a glimpse of Indians gliding along the margins and lay quietly hidden in his tree.
To escape along the coast to Golfo Triste, more than half-way to Havana, some forty leagues of mangrove swamp, forest and jungle, through streams infested with caymans and crocodiles, through a wilderness where he must live on roots and shell-fish, unarmed against jaguars and the giant boa—that was his objective.
Golfo Triste was a pirate rendezvous. Sooner or later he would find kindred spirits there. Sooner or later he would get the revenge already forming in his brain—nothing less than the capture of the very ship from which he had just escaped. Give him time—a week, ten days—and he would do this before it made up its complement and sailed. He was certain it was a rich prize, richer even than Montalvo’s ship.
And it would be a rare revenge—to come back under their noses and take the galleon. It could be done—with luck. He was forcing that luck now, with a will that must stretch it to the limit. He realized that; but Fortune favored the brave, and the brave had to use means according to the occasion.
All day he heard the baying of the hounds. At night, perched in his tree-fork, hammocked with thick folds of moss, he saw torches flickering in the search.
So for three days and three nights. Bart was weak in the knees when he made his way out of the morass at daylight. Such water-roots as he could scrabble in constant fear of being sighted had proved scanty provender. They had been bitter and had given him dysentery. Insects had stung him and he was in a fever. Out of the trees he mounted a hill and looked back over the deserted crescent of the beach toward the sleeping town. The ships lay at anchor, mirrored in the calm water. No figures moved on the waterfront. In the public square, deserted, he saw the gallows that had been set up for him.
Bart shook his fist at it—good-humoredly enough, if ironical.
“If you wait for me as your fruit,” he said, “you’ll be a long time ripening. Adios!”
He had brought out from the morass a half-rotting gourd that he had found there, relic of some former fugitive. This he used for water-canteen, knowing well that he would often have to carry his supply. It was a wretched substitute. He had to balance its precious content as he fought through stiff jungle where he had to worm his way between twisted trunks, thorny undergrowth and lianas. Food, as he could obtain it, was scarce. There were doves and rabbits, but they mocked his efforts.
Stones had to be picked up and carried. In the muggy heat of the bush they were more than a nuisance. It is a hard thing to hit bird or beast with even a bullet in a primeval tangle.
Parrots, macaws and the yet more brilliant trogons flew through the glades, screaming at him. Humming-birds gleamed like jewels flung at random through the forest. At night the great fireflies with their greenish lamps seemed elfin spirits.
His main food was shell-fish; but often the mangroves, with their hooped roots curving out of deep mire, blocked his progress along the coast. Sometimes he found oysters clinging to the mangroves, but only at the edge of the sea and so infrequently as to make the tedious, tiring trip out of his direct path unprofitable.
The mangroves were his greatest trial, growing thick from the ooze that stank under the sun and offering no footing, save at low tide. Through their thick groves he had to swing from bough to bough ape-fashion, his calabash tucked into his rag of shirt. Here the mosquitoes attacked in clouds that forced him to brush them away almost continually to prevent blindness. Every step was a drain on his strength. He never found food nourishing enough to replace the loss.
He grew gaunt, his eyes sunken, ribs protruding, arms and legs mere bones set with muscles held there by sinews. His belly was a pit between ribs and hips. The fever never left him. He went on in semi-delirium, automatically. It was as if he had lashed the tiller of his will as the last selective act of consciousness, the course set for Golfo Triste—forty—thirty—twenty and—at last—ten leagues away.
He looked like a dead man staggering through the thickets, a dead man dug up and driven on by an uneasy soul. His hair and beard were matted, his eyes bloodshot, all his skin ripped with thorns or spotted with swollen stings. Scorpions bit him and made sloughing wounds, and he did not notice them. Jiggers got into his feet for all their horny soles, and he kept on.
Every mile or so he would come to a stream, dreading always to find one too deep to ford. At his approach caymans would slide into the water, lurking in their favorite nooks. The heavy air reeked of musk. Up and down stream Bart wearily plodded, seeking infrequent stones. He flung them into the water with rasping cries and then risked passage in the hope that he had scared the brutes away.
ON THE seventh day he came to a little headland and surveyed the coast ahead. As far as he could see, league upon league, stretched nothing but mangroves, running far inland. Bart groaned aloud, but never faltered. They had to be crossed. He had made some sort of meal with mussels and a fish caught in a rock-pool. Some sapodillas, a paw-paw and an overripe alligator pear—last of a lucky gathering—made his dessert.
The phrase of Simon the Swivel-Eyed had grafted securely in some convolution of his brain and with his fever it began to bear strange blossoms. This was forced luck, indeed—this defiance of all danger, of hunger, thirst, fever, wild beasts, this rape of the jungle.
He began to see his luck as a vision of a woman flitting on before him in a mirage that held by day and turned to dream by night, or whenever he essayed to rest. A luring woman who looked at him seductively with eyes and lips that beckoned but never promised.
She formed out of the swamp mists, stirred in the jungle depths, laughed up at him out of the water. A wayward minx who had given him much and now tested him to the uttermost. As he withstood, so would be the reward. She was a woman—therefore she loved a strong man. And he would show her he was strong. He would bend her, force her to his will. Simon—dead and drowned Simon—was a fool. Fortune favored the brave.
He declaimed such resolutions aloud in a cracked voice, then plunged on, croaking a chantey, a specter fighting on the borderland of life and death and winning back.
For four leagues through the mangrove swamp he barely set foot to ground. It was clutch and swing and clutch again. Now and then he drew himself up to a stout bough and rested before he made his weary way along. The palms of his hands were raw, deeply cracked, swollen, festering. But he kept going—famished, with a temperature at which a doctor would have thrown up the game of life—clutch and swing and clutch again—a human pendulum.
It took him two days to cross. The second sunset, flaring through the thinning trees, revealed the fearsome sight of a whitish body, half-covered with matted hair, with bent knees, aswing at the end of bony arms that had hooks instead of hands, jerking from one elastic branch to another—the travesty of a man, the caricature of an ape; jerking on with set face and staring eyes under the rustling canopy of glossy leaves until at last it swung itself out upon the grassy margin of a river and lay there insensible.
The current ran deeply to the sea. And the sea itself was far away. To keep direction in that swinging flight had been impossible. Bart slumbered heavily through night and forenoon before he stirred and looked at the river cutting through the jungle. It was a full quarter-mile across, a turbid flood that would surely swarm with caymans, that showed without testing that it was too deep for fording. A soggy tree came lunging down the center of it, swirling, sucked down now and again by undertows.
His sunken, somber eyes held no light now, only a dull gleam that showed there was still fire left. It almost died out at sight of the watery barrier. He gazed round dully at the trees he could not chop down, whose lesser limbs, green and elastic, he lacked strength to tear away. They would not have helped him. He was at an end.
He dug his thumbs into his waistband at the hips, felt the charm and took it out. For a moment reason was dethroned, and Bart gazed at the little fetish with the face of a maniac. He raised his arm and flung the thing from him, watching with glazed eyes to see it spurt the water.
The golden chain looped about his wrist in the clumsy aim of his shapeless hand; the amulet fell, to strike against his knee and hang suspended. Bart looked at it stupidly; but reaction was coming. He had swung off-course, but the lashed tiller of his will brought him slowly back again. His broken lips parted; his eyes widened between their swollen lids.
To him it seemed as if a miracle had happened, though the thing must have been there from the first—an old board, a plank two inches thick, some four feet long, floated from some region far up-river. In it bristled some heavy spikes and nails, rusty—but of iron, malleable; tools!
He lugged at the prize with sudden strength, and even as he dragged it up the bank made another discovery. This was a clump of a species of croton, its broken leaves and juice capable of stupefying fish. That this rolling river held many was sure. He had but to find a pool. Inside of an hour he had five big fish chosen from the shadows of his pool, carried there in the eddy and stupefied—three guayacon, two viajocos.
A nail struck sparks from a stone to moss-tinder. He had his fire, his belly full of cooked meat once more. It seemed as if the wheel of fortune, turning so long away from him, was coming his way again; as if the luck lady had relented. The river held no terrors now. He pounded at his nails with stones for hammer and anvil. He heated them and tempered them and made chisels out of the spikes, cutting-blades of the smaller nails.
He manufactured two efficient spears with hardwood shafts, spending the rest of the day in prodigious, inspired effort. To the plank he added branches that he hacked down and bound with withes, crossing on his raft triumphantly, poling, paddling himself over, his legs tucked under him for chance of caymans. That same night he speared a chameleon, then its mate, and feasted on their tender flesh with soursops for vegetable. He was coming through.
Vigor came back to him with better food and fortune—as a dried sponge sucks up water. He fought off the fever. The day—the fourteenth day—that he struck the open sea and saw the Golfo Triste gleaming in the sun, he cast off the subjective lashings and resumed full control of his mental tiller. There were no more mangroves, only grassy headlands for a while, with pleasant growths of timber that the sea-winds kept fairly cleared of brush, on the scant soil.
Sucking in great breaths that filled his capacious chest, Bart strode on to the cliffs’ margin and looked down on the rendezvous, the mouth of the Rio Triste. Its name belied itself in that moment. Here was no river of sadness, for a ship was careening, there were canvas shelters and palm arbors on the sand, figures with bright cloths about their heads moving here and there—Brethren of the Coast!
Bart let out a yell and began to run before he checked himself. He did not want to appear before his fellows like a frightened child running home out of the woods. He was still a leader. He wanted to impress some of these men into his service. He made a shrewd guess as to the ship that was laid up and, with it, the name of its buccaneer captain. They knew each other, had gamed together and drunk together; they respected each other’s prowess, though Bart, younger at the business, was the more famed.
He reached the higher reaches of the river—no need to cross it—and took stock of himself. There was little that he could mend; but he managed to comb out beard and hair, painfully enough, to suspend his chain and amulet about his neck, to wash away blood and dirt and to make the most of what rags were left. So with his chisels and his two spears he strolled toward the camp as carelessly as if he had merely left it for a walk in the forest.
The first who saw him was the buccaneer chief, superintending the scraping and calking of his ship from the beach. He hardly knew the distorted figure, at once shrunken and swollen. The altered voice held some link of recognition. Bart’s smile was wry, his bold eyes hidden by puffed lips and lids; but the amulet made the connection. It was Lucky Bart!
“They told me you were to be hanged at San Francisco Campeachy two weeks ago,” cried the other.
“I was never born to be hanged,” said Bart, “nor to be drowned either, me thinks, though I can not swim. In the name of fellowship give me some wine and meat. I stink like a fish and I am sick of chameleons.”
“You came by the coast—afoot?”
“By the coast, and, since I can neither fly nor swim, afoot; yet for a while I traveled through the air.”
Bart enjoyed their mystification as he swigged down the wine they brought him, cup after cup of it. He was his own man again. His prestige had returned. The freebooters quit work and crowded round him.
“How did you know I was to be hanged?” he asked. “You seem to have been here for two weeks at least.”
“We have one of your men here with us. He came in an Indian canoe, escaping from the galleon that took you off Cape Antonio.”
“A man of mine? He must have jumped overboard.”
“He did. Wounded though he was. An old veteran with eyes that seem to look only at the tip of his nose. Though he misses little.”
“Simon? My gunner? Swivel-Eyed Simon?”
“That is his name. A canoe picked him up. They knew of our being here. He came easier than you did.”
Bart’s jaw dropped. Simon, whom he thought dead and drowned, the more certainly since his own luck, so close to breaking utterly, had begun to mend. Then he laughed. His charm had been potent against Simon’s cross-fire optics.
“Where is he?” he asked.
SIMON came to answer the question, creeping out of a palm shelter, yawning, half-curious, half-annoyed at the general commotion.
“Ha, croaker!” called Bart, gobbling beef without regard to starvation precautions. “Hast some luck of your own, ’twould seem. And here I am, for all your voodoo talk. Luck is still with me. I have my grip on her wrist. She’s like any other woman—force her first and she’ll love you afterward.”
Simon looked at his leader as if half-dazed, shaking his head doubtfully.
“Who told you I was hanged,” demanded Bart, “since you rolled off deck before we reached Campeachy?”
“The Indians—they know everything that goes on. How, I know not. But they told me you were taken, that the gallows was building and that you were to be swung in iron hoops at the harbor-mouth.”
“Oh-ho! Racine, now you have fed me, will you go further? Will you put me in the way of recouping my own fortunes?”
“Surely. What I can do. Weapons, half the contents of my pocket, though that is not heavy-laden at present. First, some clothes.”
“Anything will do. For the present. There is a certain crimson suit that I fancy. It fits me fairly and it is my favorite color. I left it behind me at Campeachy in the cabin of the galleon where I escaped. It is in my mind to go back for that one.”
They looked at him in amazement, yet with admiration and a growing belief in the prowess of this man who had safely made a trip that none of them would have attempted and now sat in the sun, forgetful of sting and bruise, his fever overmastered by the joy of achievement, packing his paunch with solids and drinking heady wine like water.
“To go back and put your head into the mouth of the lion? Eh, that would be a simple trick,” said Racine.
“Simple enough. Are all these men of your own crew? They seem overmany for her size. As I remember.”
“The Falcon lies on the reef off Purgatory Point. She was my consort, and a cursed galleon swept her with a starboard broadside, killing Jean Vaurin, her captain, and eight others. The rest ran her ashore. We did not take the galleon; but we made her sheer off, for all her metal. I picked up what was left of Vaurin’s crew and came here to careen. I was dragging a fathom of weed on my keel.”
“Which are Vaurin’s men?”
Racine gave an order, and seventeen stepped out to one side. Bart surveyed them complacently. They were an average lot, but they would serve. Added to Racine’s complement all was well in time of plentiful provisions and no loot to divide; but if food were scarce or if a prize were captured the regular crew would with cause grumble at their lessened shares. Racine would be glad enough to get rid of them; they would sense their own position.
“What say you?” asked Bart. “Racine here will give us a long-boat, I make no doubt. ’Tis some fifty leagues by sea to Campeachy. You have your arms. We’ll lay off, send some one ashore to con the chances, and at the end of the night, ’tween gray and red, we’ll take the galleon and be outside and bowling for Jamaica before the lubbers are awake. They sleep like stuffed dogs at Campeachy. Listen, and I’ll tell you how readily I befooled them.”
If they had any hesitation they were lost the moment they began to listen. Bart was a born story-teller, and he had a great first-handed yarn to spin. With him they broke irons, struck down the taunting sergeant-hangman, floated ashore on the jars, lay in the swamp and struggled through cayman-haunted streams and mangrove thickets until at last they rafted across the final river. Bart was no boaster; neither did he hide his light under a bushel.
“That’s the kind of a man I am,” he ended. “That’s the way I hang on when luck seems indifferent. And when she smiles, her smiles are golden. Eighty thousand crowns and more was the value of Montalvo’s galleon. This one will be richer picking. We’ll put her to sea and go find Montalvo. I have a grudge against him that still aches. Are you with me, bullies?”
They gave him three cheers, and even Racine’s men seemed envious of the chances.
“How about the long-boat?” Bart asked. “I’ll pay you back her worth some day.”
“Choose for yourself and never mind the payment,” said Racine. “I may be asking you for return favors before the year is out. Our trade has its ups and downs.”
“So! Seventeen of you and myself. Pity ’tis not an even score.”
His eye lighted upon Simon. With a perversion carried by this swelling wave of fortune on which he was launched, he laughed at any suggestion that Simon’s awry glance could menace success. Half-jestingly he took the baroque pendant and held the tiny horns tipped toward Simon.
“Come on, Sour-Face! I’ll put you back of a battery yet. Here’s nineteen of us. Luck in odd numbers. It’s enough.”
Arms were always plentiful. The survivors of the Falcon had not left their wreck without them. The long-boat that Racine promised so readily had also come from the stranded ship. Racine contributed only some powder and ball, side-arms and muskets for Bart and Simon, wine and provisions. Without doubt he was glad to see them go.
He had his own reservations as to the probability of Bart’s venture. Bart had nothing to lose beyond his life, everything to gain. If he won he would hold generous feelings toward Racine. If he perished there was a strong rival out of the road.
Bart rested until evening, not that he felt the need of leisurely recuperation. He overhauled the long-boat, saw to its equipment. He was keyed up to tune. The emotions of revenge ruled his body, quickened it with vitality. A fair wind promised; the long-boat had a squaresail lug. He would make best speed with canvas or oar, timing the trip to make Campeachy after nightfall.
About midnight, he calculated, was the best time to loaf along, to send two men ashore to some wine-shop to find out about the threatened galleon—how soon she was to put to sea, the numbers of her complement, how many were ashore. What was her cargo? The possibility of her having put to sea never entered his mind. He was convinced that he had forced his luck to loving obedience and sympathy for all his plans, from now on.
His absolute faith communicated itself to his crew with the exception of Simon, who had little to say in the matter. Simon’s private belief in the vagaries of luck were somewhat shattered. The matter of the friars still stuck in his mind. To have let them off scot free, perhaps to practise inquisition rites upon unfortunate prisoners, seemed to him like deliberately throwing pebbles in the face of Fate. Fate might have been blinded temporarily, but when, it regained sight the smart of the flung grit would not be forgotten.
He allied himself to Bart in this new enterprise because he had small choice in the matter. The men at the rendezvous had made small secret of the opinion in which they held a cross-eyed man, wizard though he might be as a gunner. They spat across the back of their hands and crossed themselves whenever they fancied him looking at them—wrongly nine times out of ten. They openly referred to him as a mascot du diable, a left-handed blessing. In the long-boat they still looked askance at him as he sat in the stern with Bart, his calf-wound, though nicely healing, releasing him from the oars. He was glad of Bart’s protection, on the whole.
When they sighted Campeachy at last, it was after dark, the lights twinkling as they rowed softly on the tide and landed their two spies an hour before midnight with a gold piece to spend. They came back within two hours, smelling of strong liquors, rolling in their gait a little more than usual but coherent and full of prime news.
The galleon was to sail the next afternoon.
“I knew it. Bart’s luck!” exclaimed the leader.
The recruiting of the crew was practically completed. It had been hard to get men. The two spies had been made an offer. The marines, being government troops, were an easier matter. They had been aboard for several days. The sailors were enjoying shore-leave up to the last moment. They had spoken with several of them, drunk with them. Some of them had never been off to the vessel, and the marines—the sentries—were therefore unacquainted with them by sight. The cargo was reputed the richest kind of merchandise.
BART slapped his thigh as they floated in the blackness. All was falling out perfectly.
“What did you hear about me?” he asked.
There were a dozen stories. That he had been drowned trying to swim ashore—for they had discovered and recognized the jars—that he had starved in the swamp—that the devil had flown away with him. The governor had taken three of his men away from the friendly captain and hanged them to ease the Spaniards’ disappointment at losing the big offender. Bart exploded in great oaths at the news. That the sergeant he had felled with the irons had died did not console him.
At almost precisely the hour when Bart had jumped overboard from the galleon with his jars a long-boat arrived alongside that vessel, gliding gently in with oars tossed inboard. The rowers had made little noise, but there was no especial attempt at concealment. A sentry, holding out a lanthorn, peering down at the dim faces looking upward, challenged them.
“Hist!” Bart said softly. “There is no need to wake the ship, comrade. This is not a feast for officers. We have things in the boat that have paid no duty.”
“You belong to the crew?”
“Do you suppose we are making a present of ourselves and what we bring to a strange ship? Let us aboard, friend, we are late enough as it is, and we’ll sneak our stuff with us into quarters.”
The sentry had a fellow sympathy with smugglers. He had no suspicions, only a desire to graft.
“You will not forget me?” he asked as Bart swung up the rope-ladder that was accommodation for shore-going sailors.
“I have been thinking of you all the time,” Bart answered.
He caught the astounded sentry by the throat with one hand and fetched him a tremendous buffet with the other. The man suddenly went slack and pitched to the deck.
Up came the seventeen, with Simon tailing, because of his lamed leg. The deck-guard was smothered, three to one. With pistols clapped to their heads they were hustled under hatches for the time. Bart sped through the vessel from poop-cabins to forecastle, disarming, threatening, subduing. It was practically a bloodless victory. No shots were fired.
With all Spaniards temporarily secured, Bart swiftly set to sea, sailing out between the ships at anchor, rousing no suspicions, if any sleepy guard bothered about them. They were two leagues from land when the sun lifted over Cuba. Bart assembled the galleon’s crew and made them set full sail. He had found his crimson suit tucked away in the chest of an officer and had donned it, the golden chain and charm about his neck beneath a ruff, certain rings and trinkets that had taken his fancy adorning him, the captain’s rapier at his side.
The galleon’s officers stood shivering in the early morning in their underclothes, as they had been hurried out from sleep. The seamen were better clad, having turned in all standing. Sixty in all, counting marines. Inspection of the galleon’s papers had put Bart in high humor. Here, under foot, was not less than a hundred thousand crowns.
“Thirty to a boat,” he said. “Give them one of their own and the long-boat we came in. About two hours’ row, gentlemen, as the tide sets. ’Twill give you an appetite for breakfast. Give the compliments of Barthelemy Portuguese to the governor and tell him the next time I come to San Francisco Campeachy it will be with my own fleet. It is a sweet city and should pay a fine ransom. Tell him also to sleep in a halter nights to accustom himself to the feel of it. For when I come back I shall set up my own gallows. Over with you.”
His words were not all vainglorious. Bart was not through with his grudge against Campeachy. First Montalvo, then the governor. To sack the city would be a profitable achievement. Then at last back home to Portugal to muster his bullies under Braganza’s banner.
With folded arms he stood at the side and watched the chilled dignitaries get into the stern-sheets of the two boats while the crew and marines crowded on the rowing-thwarts. He had no especial grudge against them. He could be complacent in victory. The sergeant had deserved his fate. Montalvo and the governor were a different matter.
He turned to Simon.
“There is a battery for you, gunner,” he said. “Twenty-four guns. We are shorthanded for this vessel, but it is as well to be prepared to bite. We may be pursued. See to it, Simon. Is there a sailmaker among ye?”
A man stepped out.
“Hunt the stores and make us a proper flag,” ordered Bart. “Black—with the skull and bones.”
The flag was in place before sunset, with the galleon heading south toward Cape San Antonio, bound for Jamaica to recruit, bowling along at eight knots, undermanned but with all things in her favor. In the poop-cabin, masquerading in silk and velvet like so many peacocks, gaming, screaming out snatches of song, spilling wine as they swilled it, Bart’s buccaneers went wild.
Bart himself drank measure after measure without effect. He sang his share of songs, he stayed until, one by one, the rest succumbed, sprawling on transoms or the heavy rugs, sodden and fumed with liquor.
Bart went on deck to find the helmsman dead drunk. Shifting the helpless body with his feet, he took the tiller himself, elated but not intoxicated, master of a prize, master of a crew, master, he told himself, of his fate.
The wind hummed through the rigging, coming up behind, bellying out the sails that the defeated crew had set, a moon silvered the sea that broke into bright splinters under the galleon’s bows. Barthelemy Portuguese was his own man again. Luck was surely perched on his bowsprit.
HE WAS not quite so certain that Fortune was his figurehead after a day had passed. In some ways all went well. No sail appeared astern. If they had been followed, as seemed inevitable, they had shaken off their pursuers. Probably because they were carrying greater stress of canvas than was entirely wise, even for a man fleeing from the gallows.
But these seventeen men of the wrecked Falcon were not as his own crew of the Swan had been. In action Bart might have handled their forward inclinations; in comparative idleness they were hard to manage. Their late captain must have been somewhat slack in most things. Given time, Bart could have whipped them into line; but reaction had set in upon him. Strong as he was, his reserves had been burned up in the fearful trip to Golfo Triste. Excitement had offset the wine the first night, the liquor had given a fuel to his laboring engine that had produced a spurt of energy and, passing, left little but ashes.
A tremendous lassitude of body and mind took possession of him. The slightest movement, even to think, without action, was a strenuous matter. Nature, too far stretched, was inevitably relaxing. The supreme essence of the man, his spirit, had dwindled, the steam was low, the water low, the draft bad. He forced himself to eat a meal or so, and when that nauseated him took to wine.
All the crew were drunk—aggressively, humorously, sulkily drunk, according to their natures. Simon went round naming his twenty-four culverins, cuddling them, talking to them, polishing, swabbing, trying to make up guns’ crews, cursed out and buffeted By those he addressed, but persistent, half-crazed with liquor. As the men grew maudlin they lost control of their muscles. They could neither understand an order nor execute one.
Long observation and habit feebly asserted itself from time to time in Bart. The wine slowed him down, dulled his eye, broke up coordination, but he was conscious of increasing pressure of lowering temperature, mounting winds and clouds piling, piling up to windward until they seemed like the toppling walls of a mountain; of blue seas that turned gray and lost their buoyancy, chopping at the ship rather than lifting it.
To shorten sail with his eighteen, less than half of whom could be really termed sailors, would have been a slow but entirely possible process. Now they were tipsy beyond redemption, wallowing on deck or in the cabin, laughing inanely at him when he sought to enforce an order, or dead to the world in the scuppers.
Bart cursed the fancy he had conceived of making the Spaniards set full sail off Campeachy, though it had been the saving of them at that time, distancing pursuit. He had not spared them from sprits to mizzen. All told there were thirty sails with all their infinite detail of bowline and brace, clewlines, buntlines, tacks and sheets, as complicated to the sodden brains of the drunken men as cat’s cradle to a new-born babe.
Harder and harder blew the wind and heavier the seas as they rounded San Antonio and drove for the Isle of Pines. To go inside, to thread the archipelago between that and the mainland, while it might give them some lee, was impossible. Bart could not tack and navigate with drunken sailors, far too few at any time properly to handle the big galleon. He could only drive.
Before the wind they sped, with the canvas straining at clew and tack and sheet, blowing up to a hurricane. There was no one to take the helm but Bart, and he stayed on deck with the bottles and broken meats he brought up gradually littering the deck about him.
At times he slipped the tiller into a becket and dozed off. One by one the crew gave way to stupor, overcome by alcoholic fumes. They would sleep it off after a while and would begin to come slowly back with their poisoned blood making them feel as if they had been clubbed, nauseated, weak.
In the mean time hour after hour the breeze strengthened on to gale, the gale heightened to hurricane. The sea lost all aeration. The galleon labored in it as if struggling through slush. There was no color to the water, only an expanse of yeasty white, furiously whipped, the spindrift flying in level sheets. The sky, like teased gray wool, seemed close to the tops, scudding along.
They were on the line of twenty-one south latitude, thirty miles south of Cape Pepe on the Isle of Pines. The wind was due west, and they held before it. Two hundred miles of open water lay ahead of them before they should reach the Gardens of the Queen. There they must man the braces for a shift of yards, making a southerly course to clear Cape Cruz, lowest point of Cuba. And they would need leeway for the galleon, with wind abeam, battering the towering stern, sagged off like a molted duck’s feather in a pond.
All this, with his will fighting a losing battle against the all-encompassing weariness, Bart realized but could not help. He stood swaying at the helm, half-dead on his feet, the sleep-demons tugging to close his eyelids, his fine crimson raiment soaked through with flying spray, the galleon driving at ten knots toward the jagged reefs of Los Jardines de la Reina, Gardens of the Queen in all their beauty when the weather was fine, but veritable jaws of the devil when it was foul.
There was nothing he could do if he left the wheel. He might cut certain ropes and let the canvas tear loose to lighten ship; but the wind was doing that for him with reports like mighty guns as the sails disappeared in the smother or flapped to ribbons. The deck buckled as the masts bent and tugged at their restraining shrouds. Each shroud was fixed with a movable togglepin. Bart might have struck these out; but to risk having a mast go by the board and, still held by the lee rigging, drag and pound against the sides, was worse than to trust to the storm destroying the excess sails.
More than once he strove to bring his men back to some realization of their position, to some capability. Many of them were violently sick, retching until they brought blood. Two, in their tipsy helplessness, had struck their heads against some projection, and one of these had fractured his skull. One had been knifed in a quarrel, by whom none knew, not even the murderer. The corpse rolled about the waist of the ship, swashing in the lee scuppers, hurled against a living comrade who had no more senses than feebly to thrust off the body.
Night came, not with sunset, but early in the afternoon, the dusk piling up with the fury of the storm. Rain lashed at them; lightning seared the dark pall and showed the ghastly waves, lunging and leaping, roaring as they whipped on the galleon to its doom.
Toward five o’clock the blackness slowly diminished to gray. It narrowly revealed a raging sea that swirled under a lowering sky. Between waves and clouds the wind shrieked as if blown through a great chimney, flinging the galleon, stripped of sail, with cordage slackened or thrashing at loose ends, straight toward where masses of spouting, thundering foam announced the reefs of the Queen’s Gardens.
Wind and rain and spray had somewhat revived the crew. They groped for lines and dragged themselves to the rail, some crawling up the poop-ladder to where Bart stood, gray with salt, his eyes like those of a dead man, his skin wrinkled, rime on his beard, clutching the tiller with hands that had hooked about it.
They yelled their fears at him and he stood stolid, a contemptuous giant among pigmies. It was every man for himself. Simon was on the poop, his cross-eyes seeming to shrink from the sight of the leaping death all about them.
The sea shouldered and heaved beneath them. It appeared to be putting itself to one supreme effort as a man moves to toss down the heavy burden he has carried to the dump.
For a moment the ship seemed to be tossed free of the water, slung through the air. Then it crashed down, creaking, breaking, dissolving in the ravening pack of breakers.
Below the surface, swept irresistibly along, yet striking out by blind instinct, rolled by whirling currents, Bart fought for dear life. He had filled his great lungs before he leaped far out from the poop-rail. He had used every atom of that air, and a raging fire was burning inside his chest that seemed constricted with red-hot hoops of iron.
His flailing strokes brought his head above water in the hollow between two waves, a hollow filled with a scud of bubbles, aerated fragments of the crests. He gulped both air and water, shaking his head like a bull, scenting hope of salvation in his sniff of the gale.
Then a living bulk washed upon him. Frantic arms twined about his waist, fighting upward, legs twisting around his. He sank down, struggling to release that drowning grip, bludgeoning, trying to break loose the fingers that sank into his flesh like steel. One hand dug into his shoulder; another was at his throat; the legs were about waist and crotch.
Down they went, down, with streaks of light breaking before Bart’s starting eyeballs. Over and over they whirled and the light enveloped him in spiral flares. He was gone—done—shrouded in light—Mother of God!
BART discovered himself digging fingers and toes, elbows and knees, deep into sliding shingle, trying to stem the back-rush of a wave that plucked at him as if he were a stalk of uprooted seaweed. It grasped him, dragged him back, and a second billow tossed him again onward.
It was no effort of his own that won him to safety. He was flung there as if, the wanton sport over, Neptune had contemptuously thrown him aside.
The tide receded and left him lying on the sand that was formed of broken shells and coral grit, face down amid masses of uptorn weed. The hurricane went on its way, dragging its ragged mantle of clouds, revealing the blue field of the sky.
Out came the warming sun, mounted to zenith, slanted westward. With the ebb there came in fragments of the galleon, gilded sections of the carved poop, an empty wine-keg and five dead men, stranded at intervals down the placid beach on which the emerald water rippled. None of these looked less alive than Barthelemy.
Five others of his men had won ashore, sobered, battered and lamed. Two of these had gone exploring for food, for water and for signs of natives. They had stranded in a little cove apart from Bart's landing-place and the three less vigorous lay on the sands in the sunshine like basking seals. The man killed in the quarrel and the one whose skull had been fractured were missing with the remainder of the company.
Bart roused an hour before sunset and groaned as he raised himself on his elbows. He felt as if he had been beaten to a pulp. Blood was thick on his hair where he had struck a rock; sea-shells had deeply scored his body and torn to rags the faded glories of the crimson suit. His ruff was gone, the doublet open at the throat, his shirt torn away. His neck still ached from the clutch of the drowning man, and the hurt brought back full recollection of that struggle, up to the point where he lost consciousness.
His fingers, gingerly feeling his gullet, missed something familiar. The golden chain that had borne the pearl amulet was gone—the charm vanished. Frowning, Bart stripped himself and searched his clothing—the baroque had disappeared.
In vain he traced the beach to the sea and back again. On his once gay coat was still pinned a diamond brooch; there were some valuable rings deep sunk in his sodden fingers; there were a few crowns in his pockets; but what he prized more than anything on earth was lost. His luck had deserted him. The man who had clutched with him in the undertow must have wrenched the links of the chain, the sea washed out the amulet.
Moodily Bart got into his clothes again. He cast a casual glance at the bodies on the fringe of the tide, then turned to the hail of one of his men from a low cliff. The buccaneer came toward him, followed by his comrade, giving him news of the three survivors.
“We have found an Indian encampment,” said the man. “They have goat’s flesh, fresh water and fruit. And they have a large canoe which they will trade for a gold piece or two.”
A gleam of interest came into Barthelemy’s eyes.
“We can get from this accursed place then,” he said. “We can make Jamaica. Put me once ashore at Spanish Town and I’ll never leave it.”
The two stared at him.
“I’m through with the sea,” he said. “It gives with one hand and takes away with the other.”
“Yet if one has luck?”
Barthelemy turned upon the speaker with a visage so murderous that the other leaped back and half-drew his knife.
“Luck? Prate not to me of luck!”
Bart uttered a volley of blasphemy.
“Luck! A false-faced, treacherous jade! Woo her and she flouts you. Force her and she comes along beguiling—to leave you ditched. Luck was conceived and born in ——, bred in the ways of purgatory.
“Simon was wiser than I, after all. Old Swivel-Eyes could see more ways than one. Forced luck is luck departed. I——"
Walking toward the little cove where their companions rested, they had come upon the first of the five corpses thrown up by the sea. The two buccaneers turned the man over on his back, then hastily crossed themselves. The eyes, fixed and wide open, stared inward. It was the face of Simon the gunner, Simon the Cross-Eyed!
Something glittering caught the eye of Barthelemy. He stooped and forced open the contracted fingers. Looped about them, twisted across his horny, seamy palm, was a length of the chain that had held the baroque. It was Simon who had snatched loose the charm in his death-struggle. Somewhere, on the shifting sands of the lagoon or in the belly of some fish, attracted by the gleaming thing with its gold-tipped horns, lost irretrievably was the amulet, and with it the luck of Barthelemy Portuguese.
How can luck profit a man when he believes it gone forever?
Copyright, 1922, by the Ridgway Company in the United States and Great Britain. All rights reserved.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1941, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 83 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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