Bradley, with the negro clutching his arm, ran to the window. With the point of his own sword pressed against the back of his neck he repeated the message which Morgan had given him, which was received by the little squadron with shouts of approbation. He turned from the window, pale and trembling. Moistening his lips he whispered:

"I stopped them just in time."

"Well for you that you did," said Morgan grimly. "Come hither! Face that wall! Now stand there! Move but a hair's-breadth, turn your head the thousandth part of a degree, and I run you through," he added, baring his sword. "Rum for the men without, Carib," he added, "and then tell me when they are gone."

While the two were left alone in the room, Morgan amused himself by p.r.i.c.king the unfortunate officer with the point of the weapon, at the same time enforcing immobility and silence by the most ferocious threats of a speedy and cruel death. The men outside drank noisily and presently departed, and the half-breed came back.

"Bind this fool," Morgan commanded briefly. "Then bid the slaves keep close in their cabins on pain of my displeasure--they know what it is.

Then fetch the fastest horse in the stable to the front door. Get my riding-boots and cloak, and before you go hand me that little desk yonder. Be quick about it, too, for time presses, although I have more of it than these gentlemen would have allowed me."

As the maroon, after carefully lashing the officer with a seaman's expertness, rushed out to busy himself in carrying out these commands, Morgan opened the desk which he had handed to him and took from it several rouleaux of gold and a little bag filled with the rarest of precious stones; then he made a careful examination of the body on the floor.

"Not quite dead yet," he murmured, "but there is no use wasting shot or thrust upon him, he won't survive that blow. As for you, sir," looking at the paralyzed ensign, lying bound upon the floor, "you thought you could outwit the old buccaneer, eh? You shall see. I dealt with men when you were a babe in arms, and a babe in arms you are still. Ho! Ho!"

He laughed long and loudly, though there was neither mirth nor merriment in his sinister tones. The blood of the poor listener froze in his veins at the sound of it.

The brief preparations which Morgan had indicated as necessary for the journey were soon made.

[Ill.u.s.tration: With the point of his own sword pressed against the back of his neck, he repeated the message which Morgan had given him.] He was always promptly obeyed by his own people; the slaves fled his presence when they could as if he had been a pestilence. At a sign from his taciturn body-servant at the open door that the horse was ready, he rose to his feet.

"Shall I kill this one now?" asked the maroon.

Morgan looked at the young man reflectively. The tongue of the ensign clave to the roof of his mouth; the sweat stood out on his forehead; he could not utter a word from fright. He was bound and trussed so tightly that he could not make a move, either. His eyes, however, spoke volumes.

"Well," said Sir Henry deliberately, "it would be a pity to kill him--"

he paused; "in a hurry," he added.

"Dead men tell no tales."

"Eh, well, we can take care of that. Just lay him near his friend, lock the doors when I am gone and set the place on fire. The people are all out of the house. See they remain away. 'Twill make a hot, glorious blaze. You know the landing opposite Port Royal?"

The half-breed nodded.

"Meet me there as quick as you can. Lose no time."

"Aye, aye, sah," answered the Carib. "And Lady Morgan, sah?"

"Let her burn with the other two. She is so saintly she may like the fire, for I am afraid there will be none where she has gone. Good-by, Master Bradley. You allowed me ten minutes. I take it that this house will burn slowly at first, so perhaps you may count upon--let us say--half an hour. I'm generous, you see. Harry Morgan's way! 'Tis a pity you can't live to take my message to Lord Carlingford. The next time he sends any one for me let him send men, not fools and--cowards."

"You villain! You cursed, murdering villain!" gasped Bradley at last.

"To our next meeting, Mr. Bradley, and may it be in a cooler place than you will be in half an hour!"

CHAPTER II

HOW MASTER BENJAMIN HORNIGOLD, THE ONE-EYED, AGREED TO GO WITH HIS OLD CAPTAIN

Close under the towering walls of the old Spanish fort, now for a quarter of a century dominated by the English flag, as if seeking protection from its frowning battlements with their tiers of old-fashioned guns, stood the Blue Anchor tavern. It had been a famous resort for the bold spirits of the evil sort who had made Port Royal the base of their operations in many a desperate sea venture in piracy in the two decades that had just pa.s.sed; but times had changed, even if men had not changed in them.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The buccaneer had been banished from the Caribbean. Whereupon, with a circ.u.mspect prudence, he had extended his operations into the South Seas, where he was farther from civilization, consequently harder to get at, and, naturally, more difficult to control. Since the sack of Panama, twenty-five years before, his fortunes had been rapidly declining. One of the princ.i.p.al agents in promoting his downfall had been the most famous rover of them all. After robbing his companions of most of their legitimate proportion of the spoils of Panama, Sir Henry had bought his knighthood at the hands of the venal Charles, paying for it in treasure, into the origin of which, with his usual careless insouciance, his easy-going majesty had not inquired any too carefully. And the old pirate had settled down, if not to live cleanly at least to keep within the strict letter of the law. There was thereafter nothing he abhorred so thoroughly as buccaneering and the buccaneer--ostensibly, that is.

Like many a reformed rake this gentle child of h.e.l.l, when the opportunity came to him with the position of Vice-Governor, endeavored to show the sincerity of his reformation by his zealous persecution. He hanged without mercy such of his old companions in crime as fell into his clutches. They had already vowed vengeance upon him, these sometime brethren of the coast, for his betrayal of their confidence at Panama; they had further resented his honor of knighthood, his cloak of respectability, his a.s.sumption of gentility, and now that he hanged and punished right and left without mercy, their anger and animosity were raised to the point of fury, and many of them swore deeply with bitter oaths that if they ever caught him defenceless they would make him pay dearly in torture and torment for these various offences. He knew them well enough to realize their feelings toward him, and blind fate affording him the opportunity of the upper hand he made them rue more bitterly than ever their wild threats against him.

He had, moreover, so conducted himself in his official position that everybody, good, bad, and indifferent, on the island hated him. Why he had not been a.s.sa.s.sinated long since was a mystery. But he was a dangerous man to attack. Absolutely fearless, prompt, decisive, resourceful, and with the powers and privileges of the office he held besides, he had so far escaped all the dangers and difficulties of his situation. Charles had constantly befriended him and had refused to give ear either to the reiterated pleas of the islanders for his removal, or to the emphatic representations of the Spanish court, which, in bitter recollection of what he had done--and no more cruel or more successful pirate had ever swept the Caribbean and ravaged the Spanish Main--were persistently urged upon his notice. But with the accession of James the situation was immediately altered. The new monarch had at once acceded to the demand of the Spanish Amba.s.sador, presented anew at this opportune time, and a new Governor of Jamaica was despatched over the sea with orders to arrest Morgan and send him to England. Hawxherst, who, in common with all the officers of the insular army, hated the bloodstained villain whom fortune had placed over them, had solicited Lord Carlingford to allow him to execute the order, with what success we have seen.

The news of the long-wished-for downfall of the tyrant had been spread abroad and formed the one topic of conversation in Port Royal and the vicinity that day. Now the work of the day was over and, as usual, the Blue Anchor tavern was crowded with men from the frigate and other shipping in the harbor, mingling with others from the purlieus of the town. Fumes of rum and spirits pervaded the tobacco-smoked barroom which served as the main parlor of the inn. It was yet early in the evening, but the crowd, inflamed with liquor, was already in uproarious mood.

Over in the corner a young Englishman was singing in a rich, deep voice a new song by a famous poet of London town:

"Let us sing and be merry, dance, joke and rejoice, With claret and sherry, theorbo and voice!

The changeable world to our joy is unjust, All treasure's uncertain, Then down with your dust; In frolics dispose your pounds, shillings and pence, For we shall be nothing a hundred years hence.

We'll sport and be free, with Frank, Betty and Dolly, Have lobsters and oysters to cure melancholy; Fish dinners will make a man spring like a flea, Dame Venus, love's lady, Was born of the sea; With her and with Bacchus we'll tickle the sense.

For we shall be past it a hundred years hence."

It was a popular song, evidently, for the whole a.s.sembly joined in the chorus--

"In frolics dispose your pounds, shillings and pence, For we shall be nothing a hundred years hence."

They roared it out in the deep ba.s.s voices of the sea, marking the time by hammering in unison upon the oaken tables with their pewter mugs and flagons. The sentiment seemed to suit the company, if the zest with which they sang be any criterion. Care was taken to insure a sufficient pause, too, after the chorus between each of the verses, to permit the drinking, after all the essential part of the evening's entertainment, to be performed without hindrance.

There was one man, however, from the post of honor which he occupied at the head of the table evidently held in high consideration among the habitues of the inn, who did not join in the singing. He was a little man, who made up for his shortness of stature by breadth of shoulder and length of arm. There was an ugly black patch over his left eye; no one had ever seen him without that patch since the day of the a.s.sault on the fort at Chagres; an Indian arrow had pierced his eye on that eventful day. Men told how he had gone to the surgeon requesting him to pull it out, and when the young doctor, who had been but a short time with the buccaneers, shrank from jerking the barb out in view of the awful pain which would attend his action, had hesitated, reluctant, the wounded man had deliberately torn out the arrow, and with oaths and curses for the other's cowardice had bound up the wound himself with strips torn from his shirt and resumed the fighting. His courage there, and before and after, although he was an illiterate person and could neither read nor write, had caused him to be appointed boatswain of the ship that had carried Morgan's flag, and he had followed his leader for many years with a blind devotion that risked all and stuck at nothing to be of service to him.

It had been many years since Master Benjamin Hornigold, coming down from bleak New England because he found his natural bent of mind out of harmony with the habits and customs of his Puritan ancestors, had drifted into buccaneering under the flag of his chief. He was an old man now, but those who felt the force of his mighty arms were convinced that age had not withered him to any appreciable degree.

Aside from Morgan, Hornigold had loved but one human creature, his younger brother, a man of somewhat different stamp, who had been graduated from Harvard College but, impelled by some wild strain in his blood and by the example of his brother, had joined the buccaneers.

There were many men of gentle blood who were well acquainted with the polite learning of the day among these sea rovers from time to time, and it is related that on that same Panama excursion when "from the silent peak in Darien" they beheld for the first time after their tremendous march the glittering expanse of the South Seas, with white Panama in its green trees before them, the old cry of the famous Ten Thousand, "Thalatta! Thalatta! The sea! The sea!" had burst from many lips.

All his learning and refinement of manner had not prevented young Ebenezer Hornigold from being as bad at heart as his brother, which is saying a great deal, and because he was younger, more reckless, less prudent, than he of riper years, he had incautiously put himself in the power of Morgan and had been hanged with short shrift. Benjamin, standing upon the outskirts of the crowd jesting and roaring around the foot of the gibbet, with a grief and rage in his heart at his impotency, presently found himself hating his old captain with a fierceness proportioned to his devotion in the past. For he had appealed for mercy personally to Morgan by the memory of his former services and had been sternly repulsed and coldly dismissed with a warning that he should look to his own future conduct lest, following in the course of his brother, he should find himself with his neck in the noose.

Morgan, colossal in his conceit and careless in his courage, thought not to inquire, or, if he gave the subject any consideration at all, dismissed it from his mind as of little moment, as to what was the subsequent state of Hornigold's feelings. Hornigold could have killed Morgan on numberless occasions, but a consuming desire for a more adequate revenge than mere death had taken hold of him, and he deferred action until he could contrive some means by which to strike him in a way that he conceived would glut his obsession of inexpiable hatred.

Hornigold had reformed, outwardly that is, and was now engaged in the useful and innocent business of piloting ships into the harbor, also steering their crews, after the anchors were down, into the Blue Anchor tavern, in which place his voice and will were supreme. He had heard, for Lord Carlingford had made no secret of his orders, that his old master was to be arrested and sent back to England. The news which would have brought joy to a lesser villain, in that it meant punishment, filled him with dismay, for such was the peculiarity of his hatred that he wanted the punishment to come directly from him--through his agency, that is. He desired it to be of such character that it should be neither speedy nor easy, and he l.u.s.ted most of all that Morgan should know in his last hours--which Hornigold prayed Satan might be long ones--to whom he was indebted for it all.

And, strange as it may seem, there was still a certain loyalty of a distorted, perverted kind, in the man's breast. No matter what Morgan had done, no one else should punish him but himself. He would even have fought for his sometime chief, were it necessary, against the King or his law, if need be. He was therefore very much disturbed over what he heard. Had it been possible he would have warned Morgan immediately of his purposed arrest, but he had been detained on the frigate by necessary duties from which he could find no means of escape until too late. He had, however, a high sense of Sir Henry's courage and address.

He hoped and believed that he would not be taken by such men as Hawxherst and Bradley; but if he were, Hornigold made up his mind to rescue him.

There was a little islet in the Caribbean just below Hispaniola, in whose wooded interior still lurked some of the old-time buccaneers, proscribed men, who, from time to time, did pirating in a small way on their own account; just enough to keep their hands in. If the worst came, Hornigold, who with his little pinnace had kept in touch with them secretly, could a.s.semble them for the rescue of their old captain. Then the former Governor, in his power and in their possession, could be disposed of at their leisure and pleasure. All these things had busied the man during the evening, and he sat even now in the midst of the revelry about him, plunged in profound thought.

Un.o.bserved himself, he had taken account of every man who was present.

He knew all the habitues of the port, and enjoyed a wide acquaintance among the seamen whose vessels frequented the harbor. He decided there were then in that room perhaps twenty men upon whom he could depend, proper inducement being offered, for almost any sort of service. Among these were five or six superior spirits whom he knew to be tried and true. There was young Teach, the singer of the evening, a drunken, dissolute vagabond, who had been discharged from his last ship for insubordination and a quarrelsome attack upon one of his officers, for which he had narrowly escaped hanging as a mutineer. The man was as bold as a lion, though; he could be trusted. There, too, was Rock Braziliano, a Portuguese half-breed, and hobn.o.bbing with him was Raveneau de Lussan, a Frenchman--prime seamen and bold fellows both. Further down the table, the huge Dutchman, Velsers, was nodding stupidly over his rum.