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‘No, sir, I regret much to say, sir,’ was the black sailor’s answer. ‘I signed on, sir, as a sailor to Captain Trefethen, but I didn’t sign on for no suicide, and I can’t see my way to rowin’ you over, sir, to certain death. Best thing we can do is to get out of this hot place that’s certainly and without peradventure of a doubt goin’ to get hotter for us if we remain, sir.’
In huge disgust and scorn Francis pocketed his automatic, turned his back on the sacking-clad savages, and walked away through the palms. Where a great boulder of coral rock had been upthrust by some ancient restlessness of the earth, he came down to the beach. On the shore of the Calf, across the narrow channel, he made out a dinghy drawn up. Drawn up on his own side was a crank-looking and manifestly leaky dug-out canoe. As he tilted the water out of it, he noticed that the turtle – catchers had followed and were peering at him from the edge of the coconuts, though his weak-hearted sailor was not in sight.
To paddle across the channel was a matter of moments, but scarcely was he on the beach of the Calf when further inhospitality greeted him on the part of a tall, barefooted young man, who stepped from behind a palm, automatic pistol in hand, and shouted:
‘Vamos! Get out! Scut![14 - Scut! – Придурок!]’
‘Ye gods and little fishes!’ Francis grinned, half-humorously, half-seriously. ‘A fellow can’t move in these parts without having a gun shoved in his face. And everybody says get out pronto.’
‘Nobody invited you,’ the stranger retorted. ‘You’re intruding. Get off my island. I’ll give you half a minute.’
‘I’m getting sore, friend,’ Francis assured him truthfully, at the same time, out of the corner of his eye, measuring the distance to the nearest palm-trunk. ‘Everybody I meet around here is crazy and discourteous, and peevishly anxious to be rid of my presence, and they’ve just got me feeling that way myself. Besides, just because you tell me it’s your island is no proof.’
The swift rush he made to the shelter of the palm left his sentence unfinished. His arrival behind the trunk was simultaneous with the arrival of a bullet that thudded into the other side of it.
‘Now, just for that!’ he called out, as he centered a bullet into the trunk of the other man’s palm.
The next few minutes they blazed away, or waited for calculated shots, and when Francis’ eighth and last had been fired, he was unpleasantly certain that he had counted only seven shots for the stranger. He cautiously exposed part of his sun-helmet, held in his hand, and had it perforated.
‘What gun are you using?’ he asked with cool politeness.
‘Colt’s,’ came the answer.
Francis stepped boldly into the open, saying: ‘Then you’re all out. I counted ’em. Eight. Now we can talk.’
The stranger stepped out, and Francis could not help admiring the fine figure of him, despite the fact that a dirty pair of canvas pants, a cotton undershirt, and a floppy sombrero constituted his garmenting. Further, it seemed he had previously known him, though it did not enter his mind that he was looking at a replica of himself.
‘Talk!’ the stranger sneered, throwing down his pistol and drawing a knife. ‘Now we’ll just cut off your ears, and maybe scalp you.’
‘Gee! You’re sweet-natured and gentle animals in this neck of the woods,’ Francis retorted, his anger and disgust increasing. He drew his own hunting knife, brand new from the shop and shining. ‘Say, let’s wrestle, and cut out this ten-twenty-and-thirty knife stuff.’
‘I want your ears,’ the stranger answered pleasantly, as he slowly advanced.
‘Sure. First down, and the man who wins the fall gets the other fellow’s ears.’
‘Agreed.’ The young man in the canvas trousers sheathed his knife.
‘Too bad there isn’t a moving picture camera to film this,’ Francis girded, sheathing his own knife. ‘I’m sore as a boil. I feel like a heap bad Injun.[15 - Injun – уничижительное прозвище индейцев.] Watch out! I’m coming in a rush! Anyway and everyway for the first fall!’
Action and word went together, and his glorious rush ended ignorainiously, for the stronger, apparently braced for the shock, yielded the instant their bodies met and fell over on his back, at the same time planting his foot in Francis’ abdomen and, from the back purchase on the ground, transforming Francis’ rush into a wild forward somersault.
The fall on the sand knocked most of Francis’ breath out of him, and the flying body of his foe, impacting on him, managed to do for what little breath was left him. As he lay speechless on his back, he observed the man on top of him gazing down at him with sudden curiosity.
‘What d’ you want to wear a mustache for?’ the stranger muttered.
‘Go on and cut ’em off,’ Francis gasped, with the first of his returning breath. ‘The ears are yours, but the mustache is mine. It is not in the bond. Besides, that fall was straight jiu jiutsu.’
‘You said ‘anyway and everyway for the first fall,’ the other quoted laughingly. ‘As for your ears, keep them. I never intended to cut them off, and now that I look at them closely the less I want them. Get up and get out of here. I’ve licked you. Vamos! And don’t come sneaking around here again! Git![16 - Git – дурак (сленг)] Scut!’
In greater disgust than ever, to which was added the humiliation of defeat, Francis turned down to the beach toward his canoe.
‘Say, Little Stranger, do you mind leaving your card?’ the victor called after him.
‘Visiting cards and cut-throating don’t go together,’ Francis shot back across his shoulder, as he squatted in the canoe and dipped his paddle. ‘My name’s Morgan.’
Surprise and startlement were the stranger’s portion, as he opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind and murmured to himself, ‘Same stock – no wonder we look alike.’
Still in the throes of disgust, Francis regained the shore of the Butt, sat down on the edge of the dugout, filled and lighted his pipe, and gloomily meditated. ‘Crazy, everybody,’ was the run of his thought. ‘Nobody acts with reason. I’d like to see old Regan try to do business with these people. They’d get his ears.’
Could he have seen, at that moment, the young man of the canvas pants and of familiar appearance, he would have been certain that naught but lunacy resided in Latin America; for the young man in question, inside a grass thatched hut in the heart of his island, grinning to himself as he uttered aloud, ‘I guess I put the fear of God into that particular member of the Morgan family,’ had just begun to stare at a photographic reproduction of an oil painting on the wall of the original Sir Henry Morgan.
‘Well, Old Pirate,’ he continued grinning, ‘two of your latest descendants came pretty close to getting each other with automatics that would make your antediluvian horse pistols look like thirty cents.’
He bent to a battered and worm-eaten sea-chest, lifted the lid that was monogramed with an ‘M,’ and again addressed the portrait:
‘Well, old pirate Welshman of an ancestor, all you’ve left me is the old duds and a face that looks like yours. And I guess, if I was really fired up, I could play your Port-au-Prince stunt about as well as you played it yourself.’
A moment later, beginning to dress himself in the age worn and moth-eaten garments of the chest, he added:
‘Well, here’s the old duds on my back. Come, Mister Ancestor, down out of your frame, and dare to tell me a point of looks in which we differ.’
Clad in Sir Henry Morgan’s ancient habiliments, a cutlass strapped on around the middle and two flint-lock pistols of huge and ponderous design thrust into his waist-scarf, the resemblance between the living man and the pictured semblance of the old buccaneer who had been long since resolved to dust, was striking.
‘Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew…’
As the young man, picking the strings of a guitar, began to sing the old buccaneer rouse, it seemed to him that the picture of his forebear faded into another picture and that he saw:
The old forebear himself, back to a mainmast, cutlass out and flashing, facing a semi-circle of fantastically clad sailor cutthroats, while behind him, on the opposite side of the mast, another similarly garbed and accoutered man, with cutlass flashing, faced the other semi-circle of cutthroats that completed the ring about the mast.
The vivid vision of his fancy was broken by the breaking of a guitar-string which he had thrummed too passionately. And in the sharp pause of silence, it seemed that a fresh vision of old Sir Henry came to him, down out of. the frame and beside him, real in all seeming, plucking at his sleeve to lead him out of the hut and whispering a ghostly repetition of:
‘Back to back against the mainmast
Held at bay the entire crew.’
The young man obeyed his shadowy guide, or some prompting of his own profound of intuition, and went out the door and down to the beach, where, gazing across the narrow channel, on the beach of the Bull, he saw his late antagonist, backed up against the great boulder of coral rock, standing off an attack of sack-clouted, machete wielding Indians with wide sweeping strokes of a driftwood timber.
And Francis, in extremity, swaying dizzily from the blow of a rock on his head, saw the apparition, that almost convinced him he was already dead and in the realm of the shades, of Sir Henry Morgan himself, cutlass in hand, rushing up the beach to his rescue. Further, the apparition, brandishing the cutlass and laying out Indians right and left, was bellowing:
‘Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.’
As Francis’ knees gave under him and he slowly crumpled and sank down, he saw the Indians scatter and flee before the onslaught of the weird pirate figure and heard their cries of:
‘Heaven help us!’ ‘The Virgin protect us!’ ‘It’s the ghost of old Morgan!’
Francis next opened his eyes inside the grass hut in the midmost center of the Calf. First, in the glimmering sight of returning consciousness, he beheld the pictured lineaments of Sir Henry Morgan staring down at him from the wall. Next, it was a younger edition of the same, in three dimensions of living, moving flesh, who thrust a mug of brandy to his lips and bade him drink. Francis was on his feet ere he touched lips to the mug; and both he and the stranger man, moved by a common impulse, looked squarely into each other’s eyes, glanced at the picture on the wall find touched mugs in a salute to the picture and to each other ere they drank.
‘You told me you were a Morgan,’ the stranger said. ‘I am a Morgan. That man on the wall fathered my breed. Your breed?’
‘The old buccaneer’s,’ Francis returned. ‘My first name is Francis. And yours?’
‘Henry straight from the original. We must be remote cousins or something or other. I’m after the foxy old niggardly old Welshman’s loot.’
‘So’m I,’ said Francis, extending his hand. ‘But to hell with sharing.’
‘The old blood talks in you,’ Henry smiled approbation. ‘For him to have who finds. I’ve turned most of this island upside down in the last six months, and all I’ve found are these old duds. I’m with you to beat you if I can, but to put my back against the mainmast with you any time the needed call goes out.’
‘That song’s a wonder,’ Francis urged. ‘I want to learn it. Lift the stave again.’
And together, clanking their mugs, they sang:
‘Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew…’
Chapter III
But a splitting headache put a stop to Francis’ singing and made him glad to be swung’ in a cool hammock by Henry, who rowed off to the Angelique with orders from his visitor to the skipper to stay at anchor but not to permit any of his sailors to land on the Calf. Not until late in the morning of the following day, after hours of heavy sleep, did Francis get on his feet and announce that his head was clear again.
‘I know what it is got bucked off a horse once,’ his strange relative sympathized, as he poured him a huge cup of fragrant black coffee. ‘Drink that down. It will make a new man of you. Can’t offer you much for breakfast except bacon, sea biscuit, and some scrambled turtle eggs. They’re fresh. I guarantee that, for I dug them out this morning while you slept.’
‘That coffee is a meal in itself,’ Francis praised, meanwhile studying his kinsman and ever and anon glancing at the portrait of their relative.
‘You’re just like him, and in more than mere looks,’ Henry laughed, catching him in his scrutiny. ‘When you refused to share yesterday, it was old Sir Henry to the fife. He had a deep-seated antipathy against sharing, even with his own crews. It’s what caused most of his troubles. And he’s certainly never shared a penny of his treasure with any of his descendants. Now I’m different. Not only will I share the Calf with you; but I’ll present you with my half as well, lock, stock, and barrel,[17 - Lock, stock, and barrel – выражение из обихода торговцев, означает «целиком, без остатка».] this grass hut, all these nice furnishings, tenements, hereditaments, and everything, and what’s left of the turtle eggs. When do you want to move in?’
‘You mean…?’ Francis asked.
‘Just that. There’s nothing here. I’ve just about dug the island upside down and all I found was the chest there full of old clothes.’
‘It must have encouraged you.’
‘Mightily. I thought I had a hammerlock on it. At any rate, it showed I’m on the right track.’
‘What’s the matter with trying the Bull?’ Francis queried.
‘That’s my idea right now,’ was the answer, ‘though I’ve got another clue for over on the mainland. Those old-timers had a way of noting down their latitude and longitude whole degrees out of the way.’
‘Ten North and Ninety East on the chart might mean Twelve North and Ninety-two East,’ Francis concurred. ‘Then again it might mean Eight North and Eighty-eight East. They carried the correction in their heads, and if they died unexpectedly, which was their custom, it seems, the secret died with them.’
‘I’ve half a notion to go over to the Bull and chase those turtle-catchers back to the mainland,’ Henry went on. ‘And then again I’d almost like to tackle the mainland clue first. I suppose you’ve got a stock of clues, too?’
‘Sure thing,’ Francis nodded. ‘But say, I’d like to take back what I said about not sharing.’
‘Say the word,’ the other encouraged.
‘Then I do say it.’
Their hands extended and gripped in ratification.
‘Morgan and Morgan strictly limited,’ chortled Francis.
‘Assets, the whole Caribbean Sea, the Spanish Main, most of Central America, one chest full of perfectly no good old clothes, and a lot of holes in the ground,’ Henry joined in the other’s humor. ‘Liabilities, snake-bite, thieving Indians, malaria, yellow fever—’
‘And pretty girls with a habit of kissing total strangers one moment, and of sticking up said total strangers with shiny silver revolvers the next moment,’ Francis cut in. ‘Let me tell you about it. Day before yesterday, I rowed ashore over on the mainland. The moment I landed, the prettiest girl in the world pounced out upon me and dragged me away into the jungle. Thought she was going to eat me or marry me. I didn’t know which. And before I could find out, what’s the pretty damsel do but pass uncomplimentary remarks on my mustache and chase me back to the boat with a revolver. Told me to beat it and never come back, or words to that effect.’
‘Whereabouts on the mainland was this?’ Henry demanded, with a tenseness which Francis, chuckling his reminiscence of the misadventure, did not notice.
‘Down’ toward the other end of Chiriqui Lagoon,’ he replied. ‘It was the stamping ground of the Solano family, I learned; and they are a red peppery family, as I found out. But I haven’t told you all. Listen. First she dragged me into the vegetation and insulted my mustache; next she chased me to the boat with a drawn revolver; and then she wanted to know why I didn’t kiss her. Can you beat that?’
‘And did you?’ Henry demanded, his hand unconsciously clinching by his side.
‘What could a poor stranger in a strange land do? It was some armful of pretty girl—’
The next fraction of a second Francis had sprung to his feet and blocked before his jaw a crushing blow of Henry’s fist.
‘I… I beg your pardon,’ Henry mumbled, and slumped down on the ancient sea chest. I’m a fool, I know, but I’ll be hanged if I can stand for—’
‘There you go again,’ Francis interrupted resentfully. ‘As crazy as everybody else in this crazy country. One moment you bandage up my cracked head, and the next moment you want to knock that same head clean of me. As bad as the girl taking turns at kissing me and shoving a gun into my midriff.’
‘That’s right, fire away, I deserve it,’ Henry admitted ruefully, but involuntarily began to fire up as he continued with: ‘Confound you, that was Leoncia.’
‘What if it was Leoncia? Or Mercedes? Or Dolores? Can’t a fellow kiss a pretty girl at a revolver’s point without having his head knocked off by the next ruffian he meets in dirty canvas pants on a notorious sand-heap of an island?’
‘When the pretty girl is engaged to marry the ruffian in the dirty canvas pants.’
‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ the other broke in excitedly.
‘It isn’t particularly amusing to said ruffian to be told that his sweetheart has been kissing a ruffian she never saw before from off a disreputable Jamaica nigger’s schooner,’ Henry completed his sentence.
‘And she took me for you,’ Francis mused, glimpsing the situation. ‘I don’t blame you for losing your temper, though you must admit it’s a nasty one. Wanted to cut off my ears yesterday, didn’t you?’
‘Yours is just as nasty, Francis, my boy. The way you insisted that I cut them off when I had you down ha! ha!’ Both young men laughed in hearty amity.
‘It’s the old Morgan temper,’ Henry said. ‘He was by all the accounts a peppery old cuss.’
‘No more peppery than those Solanos you’re marrying into. Why, most of the family came down on the beach and peppered me with rifles on my departing way. And your Leoncia pulled her little popgun on a long-bearded old fellow who might have been her father and gave him to understand she’d shoot him full of holes if he didn’t stop plugging away at me.’
‘It was her father, I’ll wager, old Enrico himself,’ Henry exclaimed. ‘And the other chaps were her brothers.’
‘Lovely lizards!’ ejaculated Francis. ‘Say, don’t you think life is liable to become a trifle monotonous when you’re married into such a peaceful, dove-like family as that!’ He broke off, struck by a new idea. ‘By the way, Henry, since they all thought it was you, and not I, why in thunderation did they want to kill you? Some more of your crusty Morgan temper that peeved your prospective wife’s relatives?’
Henry looked at him a moment, as if debating with himself, and then answered.
‘I don’t mind telling you. It is a nasty mess, and I suppose my temper was to blame. I quarreled with her uncle. He was her father’s youngest brother.’
