Sitting close thereafter they talked in whispers for an hour or more, and all the while those dulled wits of Pitt’s were sharpening themselves anew upon this precious whetstone of hope. They would need to recruit others into their enterprise, a half-dozen at least, a half-score if possible, but no more than that. They must pick the best out of that score of survivors of the Monmouth men that Colonel Bishop had acquired. Men who understood the sea were desirable. But of these there were only two in that unfortunate gang, and their knowledge was none too full. They were Hagthorpe, a gentleman who had served in the Royal Navy, and Nicholas Dyke, who had been a petty officer in the late king’s time, and there was another who had been a gunner, a man named Ogle.
It was agreed before they parted that Pitt should begin with these three and then proceed to recruit some six or eight others. He was to move with the utmost caution, sounding his men very carefully before making anything in the nature of a disclosure, and even then avoid rendering that disclosure so full that its betrayal might frustrate the plans which as yet had to be worked out in detail. Labouring with them in the plantations, Pitt would not want for opportunities of broaching the matter to his fellow-slaves.
“Caution above everything,” was Blood’s last recommendation to him at parting. “Who goes slowly, goes safely, as the Italians have it. And remember that if you betray yourself, you ruin all, for you are the only navigator amongst us, and without you there is no escaping.”
Pitt reassured him, and slunk off back to his own hut and the straw that served him for a bed.
Coming next morning to the wharf, Blood found Dr. Whacker in a generous mood. Having slept on the matter, he was prepared to advance the convict any sum up to thirty pounds that would enable him to acquire a boat capable of taking him away from the settlement. Blood expressed his thanks becomingly, betraying no sign that he saw clearly into the true reason of the other’s munificence.
“It’s not money I’ll require,” said he, “but the boat itself. For who will be selling me a boat and incurring the penalties in Governor Steed’s proclamation? Ye’ll have read it, no doubt?”
Dr. Whacker’s heavy face grew overcast. Thoughtfully he rubbed his chin. “I’ve read it—yes. And I dare not procure the boat for you. It would be discovered. It must be. And the penalty is a fine of two hundred pounds besides imprisonment. It would ruin me. You’ll see that?”
The high hopes in Blood’s soul, began to shrink. And the shadow of his despair overcast his face.
“But then…” he faltered. “There is nothing to be done.”
“Nay, nay: things are not so desperate.” Dr. Whacker smiled a little with tight lips. “I’ve thought of it. You will see that the man who buys the boat must be one of those who goes with you—so that he is not here to answer questions afterwards.”
“But who is to go with me save men in my own case? What I cannot do, they cannot.”
“There are others detained on the island besides slaves. There are several who are here for debt, and would be glad enough to spread their wings. There’s a fellow Nuttall, now, who follows the trade of a shipwright, whom I happen to know would welcome such a chance as you might afford him.”
“But how should a debtor come with money to buy a boat? The question will be asked.”
“To be sure it will. But if you contrive shrewdly, you’ll all be gone before that happens.”
Blood nodded understanding, and the doctor, setting a hand upon his sleeve, unfolded the scheme he had conceived.
“You shall have the money from me at once. Having received it, you’ll forget that it was I who supplied it to you. You have friends in England—relatives, perhaps—who sent it out to you through the agency of one of your Bridgetown patients, whose name as a man of honour you will on no account divulge lest you bring trouble upon him. That is your tale if there are questions.”
He paused, looking hard at Blood. Blood nodded understanding and assent. Relieved, the doctor continued:
“But there should be no questions if you go carefully to work. You concert matters with Nuttall. You enlist him as one of your companions and a shipwright should be a very useful member of your crew. You engage him to discover a likely sloop whose owner is disposed to sell. Then let your preparations all be made before the purchase is effected, so that your escape may follow instantly upon it before the inevitable questions come to be asked. You take me?”
So well did Blood take him that within an hour he contrived to see Nuttall, and found the fellow as disposed to the business as Dr. Whacker had predicted. When he left the shipwright, it was agreed that Nuttall should seek the boat required, for which Blood would at once produce the money.
The quest took longer than was expected by Blood, who waited impatiently with the doctor’s gold concealed about his person. But at the end of some three weeks, Nuttall—whom he was now meeting daily—informed him that he had found a serviceable wherry, and that its owner was disposed to sell it for twenty-two pounds. That evening, on the beach, remote from all eyes, Peter Blood handed that sum to his new associate, and Nuttall went off with instructions to complete the purchase late on the following day. He was to bring the boat to the wharf, where under cover of night Blood and his fellow-convicts would join him and make off.
Everything was ready. In the shed, from which all the wounded men had now been removed and which had since remained untenanted, Nuttall had concealed the necessary stores: a hundredweight of bread, a quantity of cheese, a cask of water and some few bottles of Canary, a compass, quadrant, chart, half-hour glass, log and line, a tarpaulin, some carpenter’s tools, and a lantern and candles. And in the stockade, all was likewise in readiness. Hagthorpe, Dyke, and Ogle had agreed to join the venture, and eight others had been carefully recruited. In Pitt’s hut, which he shared with five other rebels-convict, all of whom were to join in this bid for liberty, a ladder had been constructed in secret during those nights of waiting. With this they were to surmount the stockade and gain the open. The risk of detection, so that they made little noise, was negligible. Beyond locking them all into that stockade at night, there was no great precaution taken. Where, after all, could any so foolish as to attempt escape hope to conceal himself in that island? The chief risk lay in discovery by those of their companions who were to be left behind. It was because of these that they must go cautiously and in silence.
The day that was to have been their last in Barbados was a day of hope and anxiety to the twelve associates in that enterprise, no less than to Nuttall in the town below.
Towards sunset, having seen Nuttall depart to purchase and fetch the sloop to the prearranged moorings at the wharf, Peter Blood came sauntering towards the stockade, just as the slaves were being driven in from the fields. He stood aside at the entrance to let them pass, and beyond the message of hope flashed by his eyes, he held no communication with them.
He entered the stockade in their wake, and as they broke their ranks to seek their various respective huts, he beheld Colonel Bishop in talk with Kent, the overseer. The pair were standing by the stocks, planted in the middle of that green space for the punishment of offending slaves.
As he advanced, Bishop turned to regard him, scowling. “Where have you been this while?” he bawled, and although a minatory note was normal to the Colonel’s voice, yet Blood felt his heart tightening apprehensively.
“I’ve been at my work in the town,” he answered. “Mrs. Patch has a fever and Mr. Dekker has sprained his ankle.”
“I sent for you to Dekker’s, and you were not there. You are given to idling, my fine fellow. We shall have to quicken you one of these days unless you cease from abusing the liberty you enjoy. D’ye forget that ye’re a rebel convict?”
“I am not given the chance,” said Blood, who never could learn to curb his tongue.
“By God! Will you be pert with me?”
Remembering all that was at stake, growing suddenly conscious that from the huts surrounding the enclosure anxious ears were listening, he instantly practised an unusual submission.
“Not pert, sir. I… I am sorry I should have been sought….”
“Aye, and you’ll be sorrier yet. There’s the Governor with an attack of gout, screaming like a wounded horse, and you nowhere to be found. Be off, man—away with you at speed to Government House! You’re awaited, I tell you. Best lend him a horse, Kent, or the lout’ll be all night getting there.”
They bustled him away, choking almost from a reluctance that he dared not show. The thing was unfortunate; but after all not beyond remedy. The escape was set for midnight, and he should easily be back by then. He mounted the horse that Kent procured him, intending to make all haste.
“How shall I reenter the stockade, sir?” he enquired at parting.
“You’ll not reenter it,” said Bishop. “When they’ve done with you at Government House, they may find a kennel for you there until morning.”
Peter Blood’s heart sank like a stone through water.
“But…” he began.
“Be off, I say. Will you stand there talking until dark? His excellency is waiting for you.” And with his cane Colonel Bishop slashed the horse’s quarters so brutally that the beast bounded forward all but unseating her rider.
Peter Blood went off in a state of mind bordering on despair. And there was occasion for it. A postponement of the escape at least until to-morrow night was necessary now, and postponement must mean the discovery of Nuttall’s transaction and the asking of questions it would be difficult to answer.
It was in his mind to slink back in the night, once his work at Government House were done, and from the outside of the stockade make known to Pitt and the others his presence, and so have them join him that their project might still be carried out. But in this he reckoned without the Governor, whom he found really in the thrall of a severe attack of gout, and almost as severe an attack of temper nourished by Blood’s delay.
The doctor was kept in constant attendance upon him until long after midnight, when at last he was able to ease the sufferer a little by a bleeding. Thereupon he would have withdrawn. But Steed would not hear of it. Blood must sleep in his own chamber to be at hand in case of need. It was as if Fate made sport of him. For that night at least the escape must be definitely abandoned.
Not until the early hours of the morning did Peter Blood succeed in making a temporary escape from Government House on the ground that he required certain medicaments which he must, himself, procure from the apothecary.
On that pretext, he made an excursion into the awakening town, and went straight to Nuttall, whom he found in a state of livid panic. The unfortunate debtor, who had sat up waiting through the night, conceived that all was discovered and that his own ruin would be involved. Peter Blood quieted his fears.
“It will be for to-night instead,” he said, with more assurance than he felt, “if I have to bleed the Governor to death. Be ready as last night.”
“But if there are questions meanwhile?” bleated Nuttall. He was a thin, pale, small-featured, man with weak eyes that now blinked desperately.
“Answer as best you can. Use your wits, man. I can stay no longer.” And Peter went off to the apothecary for his pretexted drugs.
Within an hour of his going came an officer of the Secretary’s to Nuttall’s miserable hovel. The seller of the boat had—as by law required since the coming of the rebels-convict—duly reported the sale at the Secretary’s office, so that he might obtain the reimbursement of the ten-pound surety into which every keeper of a small boat was compelled to enter. The Secretary’s office postponed this reimbursement until it should have obtained confirmation of the transaction.
“We are informed that you have bought a wherry from Mr. Robert Farrell,” said the officer.
“That is so,” said Nuttall, who conceived that for him this was the end of the world.
“You are in no haste, it seems, to declare the same at the Secretary’s office.” The emissary had a proper bureaucratic haughtiness.
Nuttall’s weak eyes blinked at a redoubled rate.
“To… to declare it?”
“Ye know it’s the law.”
“I… I didn’t, may it please you.”
“But it’s in the proclamation published last January.”
“I… I can’t read, sir. I… I didn’t know.”
“Faugh!” The messenger withered him with his disdain.
“Well, now you’re informed. See to it that you are at the Secretary’s office before noon with the ten pounds surety into which you are obliged to enter.”
The pompous officer departed, leaving Nuttall in a cold perspiration despite the heat of the morning. He was thankful that the fellow had not asked the question he most dreaded, which was how he, a debtor, should come by the money to buy a wherry. But this he knew was only a respite. The question would presently be asked of a certainty, and then hell would open for him. He cursed the hour in which he had been such a fool as to listen to Peter Blood’s chatter of escape. He thought it very likely that the whole plot would be discovered, and that he would probably be hanged, or at least branded and sold into slavery like those other damned rebels-convict, with whom he had been so mad as to associate himself. If only he had the ten pounds for this infernal surety, which until this moment had never entered into their calculations, it was possible that the thing might be done quickly and questions postponed until later. As the Secretary’s messenger had overlooked the fact that he was a debtor, so might the others at the Secretary’s office, at least for a day or two; and in that time he would, he hoped, be beyond the reach of their questions. But in the meantime what was to be done about this money? And it was to be found before noon!
Nuttall snatched up his hat, and went out in quest of Peter Blood. But where look for him? Wandering aimlessly up the irregular, unpaved street, he ventured to enquire of one or two if they had seen Dr. Blood that morning. He affected to be feeling none so well, and indeed his appearance bore out the deception. None could give him information; and since Blood had never told him of Whacker’s share in this business, he walked in his unhappy ignorance past the door of the one man in Barbados who would eagerly have saved him in this extremity.
Finally he determined to go up to Colonel Bishop’s plantation. Probably Blood would be there. If he were not, Nuttall would find Pitt, and leave a message with him. He was acquainted with Pitt and knew of Pitt’s share in this business. His pretext for seeking Blood must still be that he needed medical assistance.
And at the same time that he set out, insensitive in his anxiety to the broiling heat, to climb the heights to the north of the town, Blood was setting out from Government House at last, having so far eased the Governor’s condition as to be permitted to depart. Being mounted, he would, but for an unexpected delay, have reached the stockade ahead of Nuttall, in which case several unhappy events might have been averted. The unexpected delay was occasioned by Miss Arabella Bishop.
They met at the gate of the luxuriant garden of Government House, and Miss Bishop, herself mounted, stared to see Peter Blood on horseback. It happened that he was in good spirits. The fact that the Governor’s condition had so far improved as to restore him his freedom of movement had sufficed to remove the depression under which he had been labouring for the past twelve hours and more. In its rebound the mercury of his mood had shot higher far than present circumstances warranted. He was disposed to be optimistic. What had failed last night would certainly not fail again to-night. What was a day, after all? The Secretary’s office might be troublesome, but not really troublesome for another twenty-four hours at least; and by then they would be well away.
This joyous confidence of his was his first misfortune. The next was that his good spirits were also shared by Miss Bishop, and that she bore no rancour. The two things conjoined to make the delay that in its consequences was so deplorable.
“Good-morning, sir,” she hailed him pleasantly. “It’s close upon a month since last I saw you.”
“Twenty-one days to the hour,” said he. “I’ve counted them.”
“I vow I was beginning to believe you dead.”
“I have to thank you for the wreath.”
“The wreath?”
“To deck my grave,” he explained.
“Must you ever be rallying?” she wondered, and looked at him gravely, remembering that it was his rallying on the last occasion had driven her away in dudgeon.
“A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,” said he. “Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.”
“You may laugh at yourself all you will, sir. But sometimes I think you laugh at me, which is not civil.”
“Then, faith, you’re wrong. I laugh only at the comic, and you are not comic at all.”
“What am I, then?” she asked him, laughing.
A moment he pondered her, so fair and fresh to behold, so entirely maidenly and yet so entirely frank and unabashed.
“You are,” he said, “the niece of the man who owns me his slave.” But he spoke lightly. So lightly that she was encouraged to insistence.
“Nay, sir, that is an evasion. You shall answer me truthfully this morning.”
“Truthfully? To answer you at all is a labour. But to answer truthfully! Oh, well, now, I should say of you that he’ll be lucky who counts you his friend.” It was in his mind to add more. But he left it there.
“That’s mighty civil,” said she. “You’ve a nice taste in compliments, Mr. Blood. Another in your place….”
“Faith, now, don’t I know what another would have said? Don’t I know my fellow-man at all?”
“Sometimes I think you do, and sometimes I think you don’t. Anyway, you don’t know your fellow-woman. There was that affair of the Spaniards.”
“Will ye never forget it?”
“Never.”
“Bad cess to your memory. Is there no good in me at all that you could be dwelling on instead?”
“Oh, several things.”
“For instance, now?” He was almost eager.
“You speak excellent Spanish.”
“Is that all?” He sank back into dismay.
“Where did you learn it? Have you been in Spain?”
“That I have. I was two years in a Spanish prison.”
“In prison?” Her tone suggested apprehensions in which he had no desire to leave her.
“As a prisoner of war,” he explained. “I was taken fighting with the French—in French service, that is.”
“But you’re a doctor!” she cried.
“That’s merely a diversion, I think. By trade I am a soldier—at least, it’s a trade I followed for ten years. It brought me no great gear, but it served me better than medicine, which, as you may observe, has brought me into slavery. I’m thinking it’s more pleasing in the sight of Heaven to kill men than to heal them. Sure it must be.”
“But how came you to be a soldier, and to serve the French?”
“I am Irish, you see, and I studied medicine. Therefore—since it’s a perverse nation we are—…. Oh, but it’s a long story, and the Colonel will be expecting my return.” She was not in that way to be defrauded of her entertainment. If he would wait a moment they would ride back together. She had but come to enquire of the Governor’s health at her uncle’s request.
So he waited, and so they rode back together to Colonel Bishop’s house. They rode very slowly, at a walking pace, and some whom they passed marvelled to see the doctor-slave on such apparently intimate terms with his owner’s niece. One or two may have promised themselves that they would drop a hint to the Colonel. But the two rode oblivious of all others in the world that morning. He was telling her the story of his early turbulent days, and at the end of it he dwelt more fully than hitherto upon the manner of his arrest and trial.
The tale was barely done when they drew up at the Colonel’s door, and dismounted, Peter Blood surrendering his nag to one of the negro grooms, who informed them that the Colonel was from home at the moment.
Even then they lingered a moment, she detaining him.
“I am sorry, Mr. Blood, that I did not know before,” she said, and there was a suspicion of moisture in those clear hazel eyes. With a compelling friendliness she held out her hand to him.
“Why, what difference could it have made?” he asked.
“Some, I think. You have been very hardly used by Fate.”
“Och, now….” He paused. His keen sapphire eyes considered her steadily a moment from under his level black brows. “It might have been worse,” he said, with a significance which brought a tinge of colour to her cheeks and a flutter to her eyelids.
He stooped to kiss her hand before releasing it, and she did not deny him. Then he turned and strode off towards the stockade a half-mile away, and a vision of her face went with him, tinted with a rising blush and a sudden unusual shyness. He forgot in that little moment that he was a rebel-convict with ten years of slavery before him; he forgot that he had planned an escape, which was to be carried into effect that night; forgot even the peril of discovery which as a result of the Governor’s gout now overhung him.
CHAPTER VII. PIRATES
Mr. James Nuttall made all speed, regardless of the heat, in his journey from Bridgetown to Colonel Bishop’s plantation, and if ever man was built for speed in a hot climate that man was Mr. James Nuttall, with his short, thin body, and his long, fleshless legs. So withered was he that it was hard to believe there were any juices left in him, yet juices there must have been, for he was sweating violently by the time he reached the stockade.
At the entrance he almost ran into the overseer Kent, a squat, bow-legged animal with the arms of a Hercules and the jowl of a bulldog.
“I am seeking Doctor Blood,” he announced breathlessly.
“You are in a rare haste,” growled Kent. “What the devil is it? Twins?”
“Eh? Oh! Nay, nay. I’m not married, sir. It’s a cousin of mine, sir.”
“What is?”
“He is taken bad, sir,” Nuttall lied promptly upon the cue that Kent himself had afforded him. “Is the doctor here?”
“That’s his hut yonder.” Kent pointed carelessly. “If he’s not there, he’ll be somewhere else.” And he took himself off. He was a surly, ungracious beast at all times, readier with the lash of his whip than with his tongue.
Nuttall watched him go with satisfaction, and even noted the direction that he took. Then he plunged into the enclosure, to verify in mortification that Dr. Blood was not at home. A man of sense might have sat down and waited, judging that to be the quickest and surest way in the end. But Nuttall had no sense. He flung out of the stockade again, hesitated a moment as to which direction he should take, and finally decided to go any way but the way that Kent had gone. He sped across the parched savannah towards the sugar plantation which stood solid as a rampart and gleaming golden in the dazzling June sunshine. Avenues intersected the great blocks of ripening amber cane. In the distance down one of these he espied some slaves at work. Nuttall entered the avenue and advanced upon them. They eyed him dully, as he passed them. Pitt was not of their number, and he dared not ask for him. He continued his search for best part of an hour, up one of those lanes and then down another. Once an overseer challenged him, demanding to know his business. He was looking, he said, for Dr. Blood. His cousin was taken ill. The overseer bade him go to the devil, and get out of the plantation. Blood was not there. If he was anywhere he would be in his hut in the stockade.
Nuttall passed on, upon the understanding that he would go. But he went in the wrong direction; he went on towards the side of the plantation farthest from the stockade, towards the dense woods that fringed it there. The overseer was too contemptuous and perhaps too languid in the stifling heat of approaching noontide to correct his course.
Nuttall blundered to the end of the avenue, and round the corner of it, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon an irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out his dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have ten pounds from Blood that very morning or they were all undone. And all he got for his pains and his sweat was the condemnation of Jeremy Pitt.
“Damn you for a fool!” said the slave. “If it’s Blood you’re seeking, why are you wasting your time here?”
“I can’t find him,” bleated Nuttall. He was indignant at his reception. He forgot the jangled state of the other’s nerves after a night of anxious wakefulness ending in a dawn of despair. “I thought that you….”
“You thought that I could drop my spade and go and seek him for you? Is that what you thought? My God! that our lives should depend upon such a dummerhead. While you waste your time here, the hours are passing! And if an overseer should catch you talking to me? How’ll you explain it?”
For a moment Nuttall was bereft of speech by such ingratitude. Then he exploded.
“I would to Heaven I had never had no hand in this affair. I would so! I wish that….”
What else he wished was never known, for at that moment round the block of cane came a big man in biscuit-coloured taffetas followed by two negroes in cotton drawers who were armed with cutlasses. He was not ten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl had been unheard.
Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted like a rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and betraying thing that in the circumstances it was possible for him to do. Pitt groaned and stood still, leaning upon his spade.
“Hi, there! Stop!” bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and added horrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies.
But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head. It was his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have seen his face; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was quite sufficient to hang any man whom he thought would be better dead.
Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the two negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It was a bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations since a slave had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him a couple of years ago.
“After him, you black swine!” he roared at them. But as they started he checked them. “Wait! Get to heel, damn you!”
It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was not the need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him in that cursed wood. There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and Pitt should tell him the identity of his bashful friend, and also the subject of that close and secret talk he had disturbed. Pitt might, of course, be reluctant. So much the worse for Pitt. The ingenious Colonel Bishop knew a dozen ways—some of them quite diverting—of conquering stubbornness in these convict dogs.
He turned now upon the slave a countenance that was inflamed by heat internal and external, and a pair of heady eyes that were alight with cruel intelligence. He stepped forward swinging his light bamboo cane.
“Who was that runagate?” he asked with terrible suavity. Leaning over on his spade, Jeremy Pitt hung his head a little, and shifted uncomfortably on his bare feet. Vainly he groped for an answer in a mind that could do nothing but curse the idiocy of Mr. James Nuttall.
The planter’s bamboo cane fell on the lad’s naked shoulders with stinging force.
“Answer me, you dog! What’s his name?”
Jeremy looked at the burly planter out of sullen, almost defiant eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said, and in his voice there was a faint note at least of the defiance aroused in him by a blow which he dared not, for his life’s sake, return. His body had remained unyielding under it, but the spirit within writhed now in torment.
“You don’t know? Well, here’s to quicken your wits.” Again the cane descended. “Have you thought of his name yet?”
“I have not.”
“Stubborn, eh?” For a moment the Colonel leered. Then his passion mastered him. “’Swounds! You impudent dog! D’you trifle with me? D’you think I’m to be mocked?”
Pitt shrugged, shifted sideways on his feet again, and settled into dogged silence. Few things are more provocative; and Colonel Bishop’s temper was never one that required much provocation. Brute fury now awoke in him. Fiercely now he lashed those defenceless shoulders, accompanying each blow by blasphemy and foul abuse, until, stung beyond endurance, the lingering embers of his manhood fanned into momentary flame, Pitt sprang upon his tormentor.
But as he sprang, so also sprang the watchful blacks. Muscular bronze arms coiled crushingly about the frail white body, and in a moment the unfortunate slave stood powerless, his wrists pinioned behind him in a leathern thong.
Breathing hard, his face mottled, Bishop pondered him a moment. Then: “Fetch him along,” he said.
Down the long avenue between those golden walls of cane standing some eight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black captors in the Colonel’s wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his fellow-slaves at work there. Despair went with him. What torments might immediately await him he cared little, horrible though he knew they would be. The real source of his mental anguish lay in the conviction that the elaborately planned escape from this unutterable hell was frustrated now in the very moment of execution.
They came out upon the green plateau and headed for the stockade and the overseer’s white house. Pitt’s eyes looked out over Carlisle Bay, of which this plateau commanded a clear view from the fort on one side to the long sheds of the wharf on the other. Along this wharf a few shallow boats were moored, and Pitt caught himself wondering which of these was the wherry in which with a little luck they might have been now at sea. Out over that sea his glance ranged miserably.
In the roads, standing in for the shore before a gentle breeze that scarcely ruffled the sapphire surface of the Caribbean, came a stately red-hulled frigate, flying the English ensign.
Colonel Bishop halted to consider her, shading his eyes with his fleshly hand. Light as was the breeze, the vessel spread no canvas to it beyond that of her foresail. Furled was her every other sail, leaving a clear view of the majestic lines of her hull, from towering stern castle to gilded beakhead that was aflash in the dazzling sunshine.
So leisurely an advance argued a master indifferently acquainted with these waters, who preferred to creep forward cautiously, sounding his way. At her present rate of progress it would be an hour, perhaps, before she came to anchorage within the harbour. And whilst the Colonel viewed her, admiring, perhaps, the gracious beauty of her, Pitt was hurried forward into the stockade, and clapped into the stocks that stood there ready for slaves who required correction.
Colonel Bishop followed him presently, with leisurely, rolling gait.
“A mutinous cur that shows his fangs to his master must learn good manners at the cost of a striped hide,” was all he said before setting about his executioner’s job.
That with his own hands he should do that which most men of his station would, out of self-respect, have relegated to one of the negroes, gives you the measure of the man’s beastliness. It was almost as if with relish, as if gratifying some feral instinct of cruelty, that he now lashed his victim about head and shoulders. Soon his cane was reduced, to splinters by his violence. You know, perhaps, the sting of a flexible bamboo cane when it is whole. But do you realize its murderous quality when it has been split into several long lithe blades, each with an edge that is of the keenness of a knife?
When, at last, from very weariness, Colonel Bishop flung away the stump and thongs to which his cane had been reduced, the wretched slave’s back was bleeding pulp from neck to waist.
As long as full sensibility remained, Jeremy Pitt had made no sound. But in a measure as from pain his senses were mercifully dulled, he sank forward in the stocks, and hung there now in a huddled heap, faintly moaning.
Colonel Bishop set his foot upon the crossbar, and leaned over his victim, a cruel smile on his full, coarse face.
“Let that teach you a proper submission,” said he. “And now touching that shy friend of yours, you shall stay here without meat or drink—without meat or drink, d’ ye hear me?—until you please to tell me his name and business.” He took his foot from the bar. “When you’ve had enough of this, send me word, and we’ll have the branding-irons to you.”
On that he swung on his heel, and strode out of the stockade, his negroes following.
Pitt had heard him, as we hear things in our dreams. At the moment so spent was he by his cruel punishment, and so deep was the despair into which he had fallen, that he no longer cared whether he lived or died.
Soon, however, from the partial stupor which pain had mercifully induced, a new variety of pain aroused him. The stocks stood in the open under the full glare of the tropical sun, and its blistering rays streamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt as if flames of fire were searing it. And, soon, to this was added a torment still more unspeakable. Flies, the cruel flies of the Antilles, drawn by the scent of blood, descended in a cloud upon him.
Small wonder that the ingenious Colonel Bishop, who so well understood the art of loosening stubborn tongues, had not deemed it necessary to have recourse to other means of torture. Not all his fiendish cruelty could devise a torment more cruel, more unendurable than the torments Nature would here procure a man in Pitt’s condition.
The slave writhed in his stocks until he was in danger of breaking his limbs, and writhing, screamed in agony.
Thus was he found by Peter Blood, who seemed to his troubled vision to materialize suddenly before him. Mr. Blood carried a large palmetto leaf. Having whisked away with this the flies that were devouring Jeremy’s back, he slung it by a strip of fibre from the lad’s neck, so that it protected him from further attacks as well as from the rays of the sun. Next, sitting down beside him, he drew the sufferer’s head down on his own shoulder, and bathed his face from a pannikin of cold water. Pitt shuddered and moaned on a long, indrawn breath.
“Drink!” he gasped. “Drink, for the love of Christ!” The pannikin was held to his quivering lips. He drank greedily, noisily, nor ceased until he had drained the vessel. Cooled and revived by the draught, he attempted to sit up.
“My back!” he screamed.
There was an unusual glint in Mr. Blood’s eyes; his lips were compressed. But when he parted them to speak, his voice came cool and steady.
“Be easy, now. One thing at a time. Your back’s taking no harm at all for the present, since I’ve covered it up. I’m wanting to know what’s happened to you. D’ ye think we can do without a navigator that ye go and provoke that beast Bishop until he all but kills you?”
Pitt sat up and groaned again. But this time his anguish was mental rather than physical.
“I don’t think a navigator will be needed this time, Peter.”
“What’s that?” cried Mr. Blood.
Pitt explained the situation as briefly as he could, in a halting, gasping speech. “I’m to rot here until I tell him the identity of my visitor and his business.”
Mr. Blood got up, growling in his throat. “Bad cess to the filthy slaver!” said he. “But it must be contrived, nevertheless. To the devil with Nuttall! Whether he gives surety for the boat or not, whether he explains it or not, the boat remains, and we’re going, and you’re coming with us.”
“You’re dreaming, Peter,” said the prisoner. “We’re not going this time. The magistrates will confiscate the boat since the surety’s not paid, even if when they press him Nuttall does not confess the whole plan and get us all branded on the forehead.”
Mr. Blood turned away, and with agony in his eyes looked out to sea over the blue water by which he had so fondly hoped soon to be travelling back to freedom.
The great red ship had drawn considerably nearer shore by now. Slowly, majestically, she was entering the bay. Already one or two wherries were putting off from the wharf to board her. From where he stood, Mr. Blood could see the glinting of the brass cannons mounted on the prow above the curving beak-head, and he could make out the figure of a seaman in the forechains on her larboard side, leaning out to heave the lead.
An angry voice aroused him from his unhappy thoughts.
“What the devil are you doing here?”
The returning Colonel Bishop came striding into the stockade, his negroes following ever.
Mr. Blood turned to face him, and over that swarthy countenance—which, indeed, by now was tanned to the golden brown of a half-caste Indian—a mask descended.
“Doing?” said he blandly. “Why, the duties of my office.”
The Colonel, striding furiously forward, observed two things. The empty pannikin on the seat beside the prisoner, and the palmetto leaf protecting his back. “Have you dared to do this?” The veins on the planter’s forehead stood out like cords.
“Of course I have.” Mr. Blood’s tone was one of faint surprise.
“I said he was to have neither meat nor drink until I ordered it.”
“Sure, now, I never heard ye.”
“You never heard me? How should you have heard me when you weren’t here?”
“Then how did ye expect me to know what orders ye’d given?” Mr. Blood’s tone was positively aggrieved. “All that I knew was that one of your slaves was being murthered by the sun and the flies. And I says to myself, this is one of the Colonel’s slaves, and I’m the Colonel’s doctor, and sure it’s my duty to be looking after the Colonel’s property. So I just gave the fellow a spoonful of water and covered his back from the sun. And wasn’t I right now?”
“Right?” The Colonel was almost speechless.
“Be easy, now, be easy!” Mr. Blood implored him. “It’s an apoplexy ye’ll be contacting if ye give way to heat like this.”
The planter thrust him aside with an imprecation, and stepping forward tore the palmetto leaf from the prisoner’s back.
“In the name of humanity, now….” Mr. Blood was beginning.
The Colonel swung upon him furiously. “Out of this!” he commanded. “And don’t come near him again until I send for you, unless you want to be served in the same way.”
He was terrific in his menace, in his bulk, and in the power of him. But Mr. Blood never flinched. It came to the Colonel, as he found himself steadily regarded by those light-blue eyes that looked so arrestingly odd in that tawny face—like pale sapphires set in copper—that this rogue had for some time now been growing presumptuous. It was a matter that he must presently correct. Meanwhile Mr. Blood was speaking again, his tone quietly insistent.
“In the name of humanity,” he repeated, “ye’ll allow me to do what I can to ease his sufferings, or I swear to you that I’ll forsake at once the duties of a doctor, and that it’s devil another patient will I attend in this unhealthy island at all.”
For an instant the Colonel was too amazed to speak. Then—
“By God!” he roared. “D’ye dare take that tone with me, you dog? D’ye dare to make terms with me?”
“I do that.” The unflinching blue eyes looked squarely into the Colonel’s, and there was a devil peeping out of them, the devil of recklessness that is born of despair.
Colonel Bishop considered him for a long moment in silence. “I’ve been too soft with you,” he said at last. “But that’s to be mended.” And he tightened his lips. “I’ll have the rods to you, until there’s not an inch of skin left on your dirty back.”
“Will ye so? And what would Governor Steed do, then?”
“Ye’re not the only doctor on the island.”
Mr. Blood actually laughed. “And will ye tell that to his excellency, him with the gout in his foot so bad that he can’t stand? Ye know very well it’s devil another doctor will he tolerate, being an intelligent man that knows what’s good for him.”
But the Colonel’s brute passion thoroughly aroused was not so easily to be baulked. “If you’re alive when my blacks have done with you, perhaps you’ll come to your senses.”
He swung to his negroes to issue an order. But it was never issued. At that moment a terrific rolling thunderclap drowned his voice and shook the very air. Colonel Bishop jumped, his negroes jumped with him, and so even did the apparently imperturbable Mr. Blood. Then the four of them stared together seawards.
Down in the bay all that could be seen of the great ship, standing now within a cable’s-length of the fort, were her topmasts thrusting above a cloud of smoke in which she was enveloped. From the cliffs a flight of startled seabirds had risen to circle in the blue, giving tongue to their alarm, the plaintive curlew noisiest of all.
As those men stared from the eminence on which they stood, not yet understanding what had taken place, they saw the British Jack dip from the main truck and vanish into the rising cloud below. A moment more, and up through that cloud to replace the flag of England soared the gold and crimson banner of Castile. And then they understood.
“Pirates!” roared the Colonel, and again, “Pirates!”
Fear and incredulity were blent in his voice. He had paled under his tan until his face was the colour of clay, and there was a wild fury in his beady eyes. His negroes looked at him, grinning idiotically, all teeth and eyeballs.
CHAPTER VIII. SPANIARDS
The stately ship that had been allowed to sail so leisurely into Carlisle Bay under her false colours was a Spanish privateer, coming to pay off some of the heavy debt piled up by the predaceous Brethren of the Coast, and the recent defeat by the Pride of Devon of two treasure galleons bound for Cadiz. It happened that the galleon which escaped in a more or less crippled condition was commanded by Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez, who was own brother to the Spanish Admiral Don Miguel de Espinosa, and who was also a very hasty, proud, and hot-tempered gentleman.
Galled by his defeat, and choosing to forget that his own conduct had invited it, he had sworn to teach the English a sharp lesson which they should remember. He would take a leaf out of the book of Morgan and those other robbers of the sea, and make a punitive raid upon an English settlement. Unfortunately for himself and for many others, his brother the Admiral was not at hand to restrain him when for this purpose he fitted out the Cinco Llagas at San Juan de Porto Rico. He chose for his objective the island of Barbados, whose natural strength was apt to render her defenders careless. He chose it also because thither had the Pride of Devon been tracked by his scouts, and he desired a measure of poetic justice to invest his vengeance. And he chose a moment when there were no ships of war at anchor in Carlisle Bay.
He had succeeded so well in his intentions that he had aroused no suspicion until he saluted the fort at short range with a broadside of twenty guns.
And now the four gaping watchers in the stockade on the headland beheld the great ship creep forward under the rising cloud of smoke, her mainsail unfurled to increase her steering way, and go about close-hauled to bring her larboard guns to bear upon the unready fort.
With the crashing roar of that second broadside, Colonel Bishop awoke from stupefaction to a recollection of where his duty lay. In the town below drums were beating frantically, and a trumpet was bleating, as if the peril needed further advertising. As commander of the Barbados Militia, the place of Colonel Bishop was at the head of his scanty troops, in that fort which the Spanish guns were pounding into rubble.
Remembering it, he went off at the double, despite his bulk and the heat, his negroes trotting after him.
Mr. Blood turned to Jeremy Pitt. He laughed grimly. “Now that,” said he, “is what I call a timely interruption. Though what’ll come of it,” he added as an afterthought, “the devil himself knows.”
As a third broadside was thundering forth, he picked up the palmetto leaf and carefully replaced it on the back of his fellow-slave.
And then into the stockade, panting and sweating, came Kent followed by best part of a score of plantation workers, some of whom were black and all of whom were in a state of panic. He led them into the low white house, to bring them forth again, within a moment, as it seemed, armed now with muskets and hangers and some of them equipped with bandoleers.
By this time the rebels-convict were coming in, in twos and threes, having abandoned their work upon finding themselves unguarded and upon scenting the general dismay.
Kent paused a moment, as his hastily armed guard dashed forth, to fling an order to those slaves.
“To the woods!” he bade them. “Take to the woods, and lie close there, until this is over, and we’ve gutted these Spanish swine.”
On that he went off in haste after his men, who were to be added to those massing in the town, so as to oppose and overwhelm the Spanish landing parties.
The slaves would have obeyed him on the instant but for Mr. Blood.
“What need for haste, and in this heat?” quoth he. He was surprisingly cool, they thought. “Maybe there’ll be no need to take to the woods at all, and, anyway, it will be time enough to do so when the Spaniards are masters of the town.”
And so, joined now by the other stragglers, and numbering in all a round score—rebels-convict all—they stayed to watch from their vantage-ground the fortunes of the furious battle that was being waged below.
The landing was contested by the militia and by every islander capable of bearing arms with the fierce resoluteness of men who knew that no quarter was to be expected in defeat. The ruthlessness of Spanish soldiery was a byword, and not at his worst had Morgan or L’Ollonais ever perpetrated such horrors as those of which these Castilian gentlemen were capable.
But this Spanish commander knew his business, which was more than could truthfully be said for the Barbados Militia. Having gained the advantage of a surprise blow, which had put the fort out of action, he soon showed them that he was master of the situation. His guns turned now upon the open space behind the mole, where the incompetent Bishop had marshalled his men, tore the militia into bloody rags, and covered the landing parties which were making the shore in their own boats and in several of those which had rashly gone out to the great ship before her identity was revealed.
All through the scorching afternoon the battle went on, the rattle and crack of musketry penetrating ever deeper into the town to show that the defenders were being driven steadily back. By sunset two hundred and fifty Spaniards were masters of Bridgetown, the islanders were disarmed, and at Government House, Governor Steed—his gout forgotten in his panic—supported by Colonel Bishop and some lesser officers, was being informed by Don Diego, with an urbanity that was itself a mockery, of the sum that would be required in ransom.
For a hundred thousand pieces of eight and fifty head of cattle, Don Diego would forbear from reducing the place to ashes. And what time that suave and courtly commander was settling these details with the apoplectic British Governor, the Spaniards were smashing and looting, feasting, drinking, and ravaging after the hideous manner of their kind.
Mr. Blood, greatly daring, ventured down at dusk into the town. What he saw there is recorded by Jeremy Pitt to whom he subsequently related it—in that voluminous log from which the greater part of my narrative is derived. I have no intention of repeating any of it here. It is all too loathsome and nauseating, incredible, indeed, that men however abandoned could ever descend such an abyss of bestial cruelty and lust.
What he saw was fetching him in haste and white-faced out of that hell again, when in a narrow street a girl hurtled into him, wild-eyed, her unbound hair streaming behind her as she ran. After her, laughing and cursing in a breath, came a heavy-booted Spaniard. Almost he was upon her, when suddenly Mr. Blood got in his way. The doctor had taken a sword from a dead man’s side some little time before and armed himself with it against an emergency.
As the Spaniard checked in anger and surprise, he caught in the dusk the livid gleam of that sword which Mr. Blood had quickly unsheathed.
“Ah, perro ingles!” he shouted, and flung forward to his death.
“It’s hoping I am ye’re in a fit state to meet your Maker,” said Mr. Blood, and ran him through the body. He did the thing skilfully: with the combined skill of swordsman and surgeon. The man sank in a hideous heap without so much as a groan.
Mr. Blood swung to the girl, who leaned panting and sobbing against a wall. He caught her by the wrist.
“Come!” he said.
But she hung back, resisting him by her weight. “Who are you?” she demanded wildly.
“Will ye wait to see my credentials?” he snapped. Steps were clattering towards them from beyond the corner round which she had fled from that Spanish ruffian. “Come,” he urged again. And this time, reassured perhaps by his clear English speech, she went without further questions.
They sped down an alley and then up another, by great good fortune meeting no one, for already they were on the outskirts of the town. They won out of it, and white-faced, physically sick, Mr. Blood dragged her almost at a run up the hill towards Colonel Bishop’s house. He told her briefly who and what he was, and thereafter there was no conversation between them until they reached the big white house. It was all in darkness, which at least was reassuring. If the Spaniards had reached it, there would be lights. He knocked, but had to knock again and yet again before he was answered. Then it was by a voice from a window above.
“Who is there?” The voice was Miss Bishop’s, a little tremulous, but unmistakably her own.
Mr. Blood almost fainted in relief. He had been imagining the unimaginable. He had pictured her down in that hell out of which he had just come. He had conceived that she might have followed her uncle into Bridgetown, or committed some other imprudence, and he turned cold from head to foot at the mere thought of what might have happened to her.
“It is I—Peter Blood,” he gasped.
“What do you want?”
It is doubtful whether she would have come down to open. For at such a time as this it was no more than likely that the wretched plantation slaves might be in revolt and prove as great a danger as the Spaniards. But at the sound of her voice, the girl Mr. Blood had rescued peered up through the gloom.