Captain Crossbones. Donald Barr Chidsey
Rounsivel fetched a deep breath.
He went upstairs.
There was a narrow door, light beneath it. He knocked.
“Come in,” said a voice.
He opened the door and went in.
CHAPTER II
THE ROOM was large, the ceiling high. The windows to right and left were real windows, not musket-slits. Floor and walls were bare. On a table was a branch of candles, and by the side of this an unpowdered wig and a sword-and-sword-belt.
Behind the table, asprawl in an X-chair, was Woodes Rogers.
The governor was alone. Since he received a felon this implied either high courage, not to say foolhardiness, or else a naiveté not likely to be found in the man who had held Guayaquil for ransom and captured the Acapulco treasure galleon. He lounged. His coat was open, the waistcoat unbuttoned, and it was patent that he carried no pistol. The sword he had tossed upon the table was not even near his hand. It was no seaman’s cutlass but long and thin, a “court” sword.
Bristling with defensiveness, George gave a bow.
“Ave, Caesar! Moriturus saluto!”
“There’s no call to be caustic,” said Woodes Rogers. “Sit down.”
A large man, he had a high, curiously effeminate voice. He seemed indeed to speak with difficulty, as though the words hurt his mouth. George remembered that this man had had a good part of his upper jaw carried away by a Spanish ball.
George glanced at the indicated stool, and shook his head. In the first place, he was nervous. In the second place, the thing had the look of a penitent’s chair in some puritan church, or the sort of stool you’d find in the prisoner’s dock in court, and George wished to avoid all hint of guilt.
“I’ll not crawl before you,” he declared.
“I didn’t ask you to crawl. I asked you to sit down.”
Still George stood. He was angry.
“I can’t tell your Excellency more than I told the court, for that was the truth,” he blurted. “I was a passenger in the brig Barkus out of Philadelphia bound for Jamaica, but I was to be put off here. Somewhere south of Hatteras we were beset by as mangy a pack of rats as ever prowled around a garbage dump—my so-called ‘associates’ downstairs. They stripped us of everything, as they stripped the brig itself. But when they learned that I was a lawyer they insisted that I go with them. And when I say they insisted I mean they pointed pistols at me. So of course I went.”
“Of course.”
George looked sharply at him. Was this meant to be ironic? The captain-general, however, waved for him to go on.
“The Barkus had no extra canvas or line left then, so she put back for Philadelphia. They took everything, those scavengers. Everything! Deck fastenings, belaying pins, lanterns, even the skipper’s small square of rug from his cabin.
“The skipper wouldn’t risk coming down here in that condition, right in the middle of the hurricane season. And those damned pirates, your excellency, treated me like a pig in a sty—”
Here Governor Rogers held up a hand. Though amazed and seemingly somewhat amused by George’s presumption in breaking into speech before he’d been granted leave, Rogers had listened to the first part with a wry smile; now he called a halt.
“That will do. A vice admiralty court has heard you and has found you guilty, and there’s enough for me.”
“Then why in the name of the Devil are you having me up here?”
“I am not doing it in the name of the Devil, my impious friend. I’m doing it in the name of self-defense. I need help.”
“Eh?”
‘Your sentence stands. There is nothing I can do about it. But there are a few facts that I’d have you know—”
“Damn any facts you’d have me know! You’re cat-and-mousing, and I won’t stand it!”
Then he did a very foolish thing. Augur, Cunningham, Lewis, and the others had thought of George Rounsivel as a man without emotion. They were mistaken. He had seethed inside. And tonight, the unexpected summons after those hours of waiting, the talk with Delicia Rogers, the abrupt dismissal of the plea he had forced himself to start—these were too much for him. Something snapped. He sprang.
To snatch the sword and lug it out was the work of an instant.
Had the governor tried to cover himself it might have been his last living movement. But the governor only smiled.
“Captain Robinson,” he called.
The door was flung open. George whirled around.
Thomas Robinson was no ordinary member of that tatterdemalion company of foot the governor had brought from Bristol. He may have come along for adventure or simply to escape his creditors Whatever the reason, he was young and elegant. His shirt was silk, his manner silken. His wig hung almost to his waist, a notably narrow one. He wore blue velvet garters just below the knees, caught up at the side with gold buckles. The heels of his shoes were scarlet. Yet though he was a dandy it was evident at once that he was no coward. He smiled. He drew.
“Stand aside,” cried George, shifting toward him, meaning to spring past him to the door.
For answer Robinson swept into a long exquisite lunge. George’s parry, a left counter, was instinctive; it was barely in time.
Robinson, who had recovered with the speed of a cobra, attacked again.
Again George, though he did manage to parry, by reason of the other’s phenomenal speed could not get in a riposte. Choking with humiliation, he crouched low and began to move forward, his point going in small tight circles.
Robinson still was smiling, though not so much.
“That will do,” called the governor. He had not stirred, but his voice cut the air like a whip. “Captain Robinson, retire, please. Rounsivel, put my blade back where you found it.”
He was obeyed. Eyeing one another warily, the swordsmen stepped back, each lowering his guard. Then Robinson gave a creditable bow, and sheathed, and departed.
“He’s no fool,” panted George Rounsivel.
“That’s more than I can say of you. Don’t you realize, man, that with one shout I could have had this place thronging with guards?”
Miserably, “Yes.”
Rogers made for the window on the shore side, moving with a limp, for his left heel had been shot away in another Pacific encounter. Despite this, he was lithe, and though thin certainly strong. George, a runner, a swimmer, a fencer, could appreciate this. Woodes Rogers had been well assembled, and was all of one piece, brain and organs, muscles and nerve-ends working exquisitely together. Though mild in his manner, he was possessed of a tremendous impatience, a power that it cost him all his strength to control. When he crossed a room he resented the strides necessary, the pieces of furniture to be circumvented; he wished to be there, instantaneously.
“Lookee, Rounsivel. You can see it from here.”
Fascinated, George went to the window.
His first sight of the tropics will stun any man. The magic is quick to strike. The polychromatic unreality of the scene refuses to vanish when the eyes are blinked. The breath is caught up, never to be wholly released again, no matter how long the onlooker lives in those parts.
George Rounsivel was seven weeks out of Philadelphia, but much of this time had been spent at sea. The pounce of the pirates under Augur had come almost as a relief after that monotony. They had, however, cooped George in a bilge-fragrant hold, where they kept him while they tried to decide what it was they wanted him to write—they never did make up their minds.