Captain Crossbones. Donald Barr Chidsey
incongruously, was a Cupid’s bow. But the eyes were ice.
“Well, he did do it!”
“Yes,” said George.
He was enthralled by the sight of the crowd moving away. Gulls wheeled low over those bodies.
“But he did do it. And so I guess I’ll go and look for some goods that maybe are assigned to me.”
George chafed his temples.
“You mean,” he asked, “that you’re going on the account?”
“There’s other ways of putting it.”
“Whom?”
“Eh? Well, damn me, stranger, I don’t know you from Adam.”
“Vane?”
“Um-m. Charlie Vane has always been square in his dealing. Leastways as far as I’ve had anything to do with him.”
“And where do you find him now? How do you get there?”
The little fat man was glaring at him, but George still looked at the bodies.
It had happened. There had been no riot, no assault. Woodes Rogers ruled here, and his niece, that girl with the small dark head, still lived.
A great victory had been won, without huzzas.
Yet the threat remained. Nassau was a powder keg to which anybody might apply a match. Those ragged men down there, who, having looked their fill, were slowly moving away from the fort; they were sullen, unconvinced, quiet but not yet cowed.
“I’m not sure I like your face, stranger. But I’ve got a periagua over on the far shore that’s not big but it’s strong.”
“Vane?”
“Yes. Charles Vane. I know him well.”
George sighed, and sat down for a while.
“You know about this business?” the man asked suddenly.
“Enough.”
“Well, come along then. Look—” He gestured imperiously. “That’s what we’ll get if we wait, mister.”
“Yes.”
The cutlass glistered in the sunlight. Past it, the way it pointed, those bodies never would move again. John Augur . . . Will Cunningham . . . laughing Dennis Macarty . . .
“So’re you coming?”
“Yes,” said George Rounsivel. “Yes, I’m coming.”
CHAPTER IV
CAYO JOROBADO—or, as the English had Englished it, Hunchback Key—might have been built by sea robbers. It stood alone. All of its beaches had a gentle slope, ideal for careening. In addition, on the north side there was a small bay, the pass to which was narrow, and probably, George Rounsivel reflected as he paddled through it, too shoal for a warship yet deep enough to permit the passage of a sloop. Pirates, understandably, favored shallow-draft vessels.
The island, lush, would have wood and water, probably also plantains and coconuts, and the bay would furnish fish. Upthrust at the center, it even provided its own lookout tower in the form of the knob of shards that had given it its name. On this mound, or hump, starfished in all directions, had been mounted half a dozen brass cannons. In the midst of these, on a wooden platform, a glass across his knees, sat a sentinel who could see for many miles south in the direction of Cuba, west toward Andros Island, east toward Eleuthera, and to the north the channels that led on one side to the open Atlantic, on the other to the Florida Passage.
In a failing light the cannons gleamed like bosses on some great shield. Blue-purple shadows slipped out across the bay. Beyond a half-circle of sand the dark banana fronds, nasturtiumed at the edges where sunset smeared them, moved with a lazy languor like great tired birds that fuss themselves to rest. Despite the human beings, here was a scene calculated to stir the soul of any artist.
George Rounsivel was not an artist, and he was so tired that he could hardly hold up his head. He didn’t care how lovely the place was. All he cared about was sleep.
The plump man was named Monk Evans. For all his flabby flesh he was hard. For all the red round mouth and gooseberry eyes he was mean, suspicious. He seemed to have taken an actual dislike to George, whom he placed in the bow of the periagua, a tippy narrow craft. Evans himself did little paddling, but he did guide the boat with an uncanny skill, having no sort of navigating instrument. He must have been one of those men who could find their way among the islands unstumblingly, moving not by instinct so much as by sure familiarity, as a man might walk about among the articles of furniture in his own pitch-dark bedroom. Evans was a dirty-mouthed little man, who cursed George each time George paused to rest on his paddle, and threatened him with that cutlass; but George was so tired that he couldn’t care, and ignored the fat man now and then to slump forward on the thwarts for a short stunned sleep.
These cat naps, if they could be called that, might have done more harm than good. For the sun was terrible through all that long day, and it seemed to hit him the hardest when he did not stir. The blistered hands, and the ache of shoulder and back muscles, together with the agony of cramped legs—for he scarcely dared to stir for fear of upsetting their small frail craft—these he might have endured. But he feared that he was about to succumb to the sun. He giggled, light-headed. What remained of his shirt helped somewhat to protect his shoulders and even a part of his neck, but his head, having no hat or wig, at first began to itch, and then to sting, as though literally on fire. The dizziness was as bad as the pain itself, so that George swayed where he sat.
It was Evans who saved him by passing forward a flimsy raffia hat not unlike the one he himself wore, albeit even dirtier. Much of the damage had been done before Evans produced this garment, but George, under it, was able to survive.
George was never to forget that trip, a paddle through hell, his first prolonged exposure to the sun of the Caribbees.
They were not challenged when they beached the canoe. At this spot George would have collapsed, but Monk Evans seized him by the arm and marched him to the center of the camp.
“Got to report. They’d only wake you up anyway.”
“Yes.”
It made sense. Even in such a sloppy place it was unthinkable that two strangers could be accepted at sunset without being called upon to give an account of themselves. Only half awake, George lurched along.
The camp churned. There showed no sort of plan to it. Fires were being lighted, but these were as irregularly spaced as the men who tended them. Most of those men were drunk; it seemed to be an accustomed condition. There were no fights, true, and there was a certain amount of singing; but for the most part the camp at Jorobado, if raucous, was not gay. Neither was it solid. There was not about it even the air of semipermanence that Nassau could show. Even the cooking arrangements were primitive, temporary. Indeed the one splash of human ingenuity in this out-of-the-way place was provided by the sloop that they’d hauled up on the beach for careening. She was a slim craft named Agnes. Her masts had been drawn, her deck and hold stripped of everything movable. In this condition, and by means of a series of windlasses anchored deep in the sand, she had been tipped to her side, where she looked singularly helpless, like a fish out of water, one that has ceased to flop and simply lies there with gaping mouth and pop-out eyes. The exposed side of her, the larboard side, already had been scraped, and men even now were stuffing the seams with a mixture of sulphur, tallow, and tar, the tangy smell of which mingled with the more humdrum odors in the air of Jorobado—rum, rotting fish heads, molasses, urine, sweat.
“I’d climb, I’d fight,
“To pray all night,
“To be my manhood back-o!”
In the middle of this, seated on a stump, in his fist a mug of bumboo, was Charles Vane, a course giant, drably dressed, without jewels. The features of his face were bulbous, bloated,