Pirates' Hope

"How am I to keep an eye on him?" I asked.

"When you're eatin' with the folks, you keep 'em from talkin' about things that yaller boy hadn't ought to hear," he bit out, and with that he left me.

Here was a little mystery on our first day at sea. What was it, in particular, that the mulatto serving boy shouldn't hear? My mind went back to the talk of the previous evening, across the table in the dining-room of the New Orleans hotel. Now that I came to analyze it, I realized that it had been only cursorily explanatory on Van Dyck's part. While he seemed at the time to be perfectly frank with me, it occurred to me now that I had all along been conscious of certain reservations. A winter cruise in the Caribbean; for the ship's company a gathering of people whom he had threatened to know better before the cruise ended; these were about the only definite objects he had set forth.

But two things were pretty plainly evident. Goff was deeper in Van Dyck's confidence than I was; and, beyond this, the sailing-master was making the mistake of thinking that I knew as much as he did. It was no great matter, I thought. If the mulatto under-steward needed watching, I'd watch him, trusting to the future to reveal the reason – if any there were – why he should be watched.

Making my way to the awning-sheltered after-deck lounge, which was still untenanted, I picked out the easiest of the wicker chairs and sat down to fill my pipe for an after-breakfast smoke. Before the pipe had burned out, Ingerson put in his appearance, lighting a black cigar as he came up the cabin stair. If I had been free to select, he was the last man in our curious assortment whom I should have chosen as a tobacco companion, but short of a pointed retreat to some other part of the ship, there was no escape.

"Hello, Preble," he grunted, casting his gross body into a chair. "Monopolizing the view, are you? Seen anything of Madeleine?"

"Miss Barclay hadn't appeared when I breakfasted," I returned; and if I bore down a bit hard on the courtesy prefix it was because I hated to hear Madeleine's Christian name come so glibly off his tongue.

"How many days of this are we in for?" was his next attempt.

"That, I suppose, will be left to the wishes of the ship's company."

"All right," he grinned; "I guess I can stand it as long as Van Dyck can."

I stole a glance aside at his heavy featured, half-bestial face. It was the face of a man prematurely aged, or aging, by the simple process of giving free rein to his passions and appetites. Though he couldn't have been more than thirty-two or three, the telltale pouches were already forming under the bibulous eyes. Though I suppose he was fresh from his morning bath, I fancied I could detect the aroma of many and prolonged midnight carousals about him. Van Dyck's intimation that there was even a possibility of Madeleine Barclay's throwing herself away upon this gross piece of flesh came back to me with a tingling shock of repugnance. Surely she would never do such a thing of her own free will.

We had been sitting in uncomradely silence for maybe five minutes when Mrs. Van Tromp, mother of marriageable, and as yet unmarried, daughters came waddling aft to join us. How far she might go in letting Ingerson's wealth atone for his many sins, I neither knew nor cared, but that the wealth had its due and proper weight with her was proved by the alacrity with which she relieved me of the necessity of taking any part in a three-cornered talk. So, when I got up to empty my pipe ashes over the rail, I kept on going, quite willingly abandoning the field to inherited money and its avid worshiper.

With such an unfruitful beginning, one might predicate an introductory day little less than stupefying. But later on there were ameliorations. After luncheon, which, like the breakfast, was a straggling meal with only three or four of us at table at the same time, I found myself lounging on the port promenade with Beatrice, the middle member of the Van Tromp trio, a fair-haired, self-contained young woman with a slant toward bookish things which set her well apart from her athletic older sister and tomboyish younger.

"'Westward Ho!'?" I said, glancing at the title of the book lying in her lap.

"Yes; I've been trying to get the atmosphere. But Kingsley takes too much time with his introductions. Whereabouts are we now?"

I marked the slow rise and fall of the ship as it swung along making its leisurely southing. As in the early morning, the Andromeda was logging only loafing speed.

"We are still a long way from the scene of Sir Francis Drake's more or less piratical exploits," I told her. "Do you take Kingsley at his face value?"

"He calls it war, but it seems to me more like legalized buccaneering," she rejoined. Then: "How much of it do you suppose is true?"

I laughed.

"Have you already learned to distrust history, at your tender age?" I mocked. "Isn't it all set down in the books?"

She turned large and disparaging eyes upon me.

"Of course you know well enough that all history is distorted; especially war history where the victors are the only source of information. The other people can't tell their side of it."

"True enough," I admitted. "I fancy old Sir Francis was a good bit more than half a pirate, if all the facts were known. That story about his burning of the Spanish galleon at Pirates' Hope, for example."

"I haven't heard it. Tell it to me," she urged.

I gave her the story as Van Dyck had given it to me, omitting – for no good reason that I could have offered – all mention of my own unnerving experiences on the island of the legend.

"Left those poor wretches to starve because they wouldn't buy their lives off him?" she commented, with a belated horror in her voice.

"It is only a legend, you must remember," I hastened to say. "Most likely there isn't a word of truth in it."

Her gaze was upon the distant merging line of sea and sky, and there was a dreamy look in her eyes.

"I should like to see that island," she said. "I wonder if we shall go anywhere near it?"

If I smiled it was only at the hold the ancient tale had apparently taken upon her.

"Bonteck will doubtless make it a port of call, if you ask him to. But it is hundreds of miles from here."

"What does it look like?"

"Very much like any or all of the coral islands you may have seen pictured in your school geographies, only it is long and narrow instead of being circular, like the Pacific atolls. But it is a true coral island, for all that; a strip of land possibly a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long, densely wooded – jungled, you might say – with tropical vegetation; a beach of white sand running all the way around; beyond the beach, a lagoon; and enclosing the lagoon, and with only a few passages through it here and there, the usual coral reef. The lagoon is shallow for the greater part of it, but outside of the reef the bottom goes down like the side of a mountain."

"Why, you must have seen the island!" she said.

"I have," I answered, rather grimly.

"Did you land on it when you were there? – but of course you must have, to be able to describe it so well."

"Oh, yes; I landed upon it," I admitted.

Again she let her gaze go adrift to leeward. She was evidently reveling in something that seemed to her more tangible than Kingsley's famous story of Amyas Leigh and his voyagings.

"You say it is called Pirates' Hope. Was that on account of Sir Francis Drake's battle with the Spanish galleon?"

"Oh, no; I imagine it got its name at a much later date; in the time of the bold buccaneers. There are two little bays, one on the north and another on the south. Either would be a good place in which to careen the little cockleshell ships of our ancestors and scrape their bottoms. Possibly Morgan or some of the others put in there for that purpose and thus gave the island its name."

"Did you find any relics when you were there?"

It didn't seem necessary to tell this open-minded young woman about the bones, so I turned her question aside.

"The last of the buccaneers was permanently hanged some time in the closing decade of the seventeenth century, if I remember rightly. You'd scarcely expect to find any traces of them or their works now."

"No; that's so," she conceded.

Into the pause that followed I thrust a query of my own.

"Where has Conetta been keeping herself all day?"

"She is with her aunt. It seems that Miss Gilmore isn't a very good sailor."

I laughed because I couldn't help it. If the dragoness was upset by the easy swinging of the Andromeda over a sea that was more like a gently undulating mirror than anything else, what would happen to her if we should encounter a gale, or even half a gale?

"You needn't laugh," Beatrice put in reproachfully. "There is nothing funny about seasickness."

"I was laughing at the idea of anybody's being seasick in weather like the present," I explained. "But I fancy it is the old story in the case of Miss Mehitable. If she had nothing worse than a toothache, Conetta would have to play the part of a nurse."