CHAPTER VII. PIRATES
Mr. James Nuttall made all speed, regardless of the heat, in his journeyfrom Bridgetown to Colonel Bishop's plantation, and if ever man wasbuilt for speed in a hot climate that man was Mr. James Nuttall, withhis short, thin body, and his long, fleshless legs. So withered washe that it was hard to believe there were any juices left in him, yetjuices there must have been, for he was sweating violently by the timehe 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 Kenthimself 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 thanwith his tongue.
Nuttall watched him go with satisfaction, and even noted the directionthat he took. Then he plunged into the enclosure, to verify inmortification that Dr. Blood was not at home. A man of sense might havesat down and waited, judging that to be the quickest and surest way inthe end. But Nuttall had no sense. He flung out of the stockade again,hesitated a moment as to which direction he should take, and finallydecided to go any way but the way that Kent had gone. He sped acrossthe parched savannah towards the sugar plantation which stood solid asa rampart and gleaming golden in the dazzling June sunshine. Avenuesintersected the great blocks of ripening amber cane. In the distancedown one of these he espied some slaves at work. Nuttall entered theavenue 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 continuedhis search for best part of an hour, up one of those lanes and thendown another. Once an overseer challenged him, demanding to know hisbusiness. He was looking, he said, for Dr. Blood. His cousin wastaken ill. The overseer bade him go to the devil, and get out of theplantation. Blood was not there. If he was anywhere he would be in hishut in the stockade.
Nuttall passed on, upon the understanding that he would go. But he wentin the wrong direction; he went on towards the side of the plantationfarthest from the stockade, towards the dense woods that fringed itthere. The overseer was too contemptuous and perhaps too languid in thestifling heat of approaching noontide to correct his course.
Nuttall blundered to the end of the avenue, and round the corner ofit, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon anirrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothedhim from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broadhat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from therays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloudto his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out hisdismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have tenpounds from Blood that very morning or they were all undone. And all hegot 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 ofanxious wakefulness ending in a dawn of despair. "I thought thatyou...."
"You thought that I could drop my spade and go and seek him for you? Isthat what you thought? My God! that our lives should depend upon such adummerhead. While you waste your time here, the hours are passing! Andif 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 heexploded.
"I would to Heaven I had never had no hand in this affair. I would so! Iwish that...."
What else he wished was never known, for at that moment round the blockof cane came a big man in biscuit-coloured taffetas followed by twonegroes in cotton drawers who were armed with cutlasses. He was notten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl had beenunheard.
Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted likea rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and betraying thingthat in the circumstances it was possible for him to do. Pitt groanedand stood still, leaning upon his spade.
"Hi, there! Stop!" bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and addedhorrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies.
But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head. Itwas his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have seen hisface; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was quite sufficientto hang any man whom he thought would be better dead.
Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the plantersufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the twonegroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It was abodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations since a slavehad made an attack upon him and all but strangled him a couple of yearsago.
"After him, you black swine!" he roared at them. But as they started hechecked them. "Wait! Get to heel, damn you!"
It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was notthe need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him in thatcursed wood. There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and Pitt should tellhim the identity of his bashful friend, and also the subject of thatclose and secret talk he had disturbed. Pitt might, of course, bereluctant. So much the worse for Pitt. The ingenious Colonel Bishop knewa dozen ways--some of them quite diverting--of conquering stubbornnessin these convict dogs.
He turned now upon the slave a countenance that was inflamed by heatinternal and external, and a pair of heady eyes that were alight withcruel intelligence. He stepped forward swinging his light bamboo cane.
"Who was that runagate?" he asked with terrible suavity. Leaning over onhis spade, Jeremy Pitt hung his head a little, and shifted uncomfortablyon his bare feet. Vainly he groped for an answer in a mind that could donothing but curse the idiocy of Mr. James Nuttall.
The planter's bamboo cane fell on the lad's naked shoulders withstinging 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 atleast of the defiance aroused in him by a blow which he dared not, forhis life's sake, return. His body had remained unyielding under it, butthe spirit within writhed now in torment.
"You don't know? Well, here's to quicken your wits." Again the canedescended. "Have you thought of his name yet?"
"I have not."
"Stubborn, eh?" For a moment the Colonel leered. Then his passionmastered him. "'Swounds! You impudent dog! D'you trifle with me? D'youthink I'm to be mocked?"
Pitt shrugged, shifted sideways on his feet again, and settled intodogged silence. Few things are more provocative; and Colonel Bishop'stemper was never one that required much provocation. Brute fury nowawoke in him. Fiercely now he lashed those defenceless shoulders,accompanying each blow by blasphemy and foul abuse, until, stung beyondendurance, the lingering embers of his manhood fanned into momentaryflame, Pitt sprang upon his tormentor.
But as he sprang, so also sprang the watchful blacks. Muscular bronzearms coiled crushingly about the frail white body, and in a moment theunfortunate slave stood powerless, his wrists pinioned behind him in aleathern 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 someeight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black captors inthe Colonel's wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his fellow-slaves atwork there. D
espair went with him. What torments might immediately awaithim he cared little, horrible though he knew they would be. The realsource of his mental anguish lay in the conviction that the elaboratelyplanned escape from this unutterable hell was frustrated now in the verymoment of execution.
They came out upon the green plateau and headed for the stockade andthe overseer's white house. Pitt's eyes looked out over Carlisle Bay, ofwhich this plateau commanded a clear view from the fort on one side tothe long sheds of the wharf on the other. Along this wharf a few shallowboats were moored, and Pitt caught himself wondering which of these wasthe 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 thatscarcely ruffled the sapphire surface of the Caribbean, came a statelyred-hulled frigate, flying the English ensign.
Colonel Bishop halted to consider her, shading his eyes with his fleshlyhand. Light as was the breeze, the vessel spread no canvas to it beyondthat of her foresail. Furled was her every other sail, leaving a clearview of the majestic lines of her hull, from towering stern castle togilded beakhead that was aflash in the dazzling sunshine.
So leisurely an advance argued a master indifferently acquainted withthese waters, who preferred to creep forward cautiously, sounding hisway. At her present rate of progress it would be an hour, perhaps,before she came to anchorage within the harbour. And whilst the Colonelviewed her, admiring, perhaps, the gracious beauty of her, Pitt washurried forward into the stockade, and clapped into the stocks thatstood 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 goodmanners at the cost of a striped hide," was all he said before settingabout his executioner's job.
That with his own hands he should do that which most men of his stationwould, out of self-respect, have relegated to one of the negroes, givesyou the measure of the man's beastliness. It was almost as if withrelish, as if gratifying some feral instinct of cruelty, that he nowlashed his victim about head and shoulders. Soon his cane was reduced,to splinters by his violence. You know, perhaps, the sting of a flexiblebamboo cane when it is whole. But do you realize its murderous qualitywhen it has been split into several long lithe blades, each with an edgethat is of the keenness of a knife?
When, at last, from very weariness, Colonel Bishop flung away the stumpand thongs to which his cane had been reduced, the wretched slave's backwas 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 sankforward in the stocks, and hung there now in a huddled heap, faintlymoaning.
Colonel Bishop set his foot upon the crossbar, and leaned over hisvictim, a cruel smile on his full, coarse face.
"Let that teach you a proper submission," said he. "And now touchingthat shy friend of yours, you shall stay here without meat ordrink--without meat or drink, d' ye hear me?--until you please to tellme his name and business." He took his foot from the bar. "When you'vehad enough of this, send me word, and we'll have the branding-irons toyou."
On that he swung on his heel, and strode out of the stockade, hisnegroes following.
Pitt had heard him, as we hear things in our dreams. At the moment sospent was he by his cruel punishment, and so deep was the despair intowhich he had fallen, that he no longer cared whether he lived or died.
Soon, however, from the partial stupor which pain had mercifullyinduced, a new variety of pain aroused him. The stocks stood in theopen under the full glare of the tropical sun, and its blistering raysstreamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt as ifflames of fire were searing it. And, soon, to this was added a tormentstill more unspeakable. Flies, the cruel flies of the Antilles, drawn bythe scent of blood, descended in a cloud upon him.
Small wonder that the ingenious Colonel Bishop, who so well understoodthe art of loosening stubborn tongues, had not deemed it necessary tohave recourse to other means of torture. Not all his fiendish crueltycould devise a torment more cruel, more unendurable than the tormentsNature would here procure a man in Pitt's condition.
The slave writhed in his stocks until he was in danger of breaking hislimbs, and writhing, screamed in agony.
Thus was he found by Peter Blood, who seemed to his troubled visionto materialize suddenly before him. Mr. Blood carried a large palmettoleaf. Having whisked away with this the flies that were devouringJeremy's back, he slung it by a strip of fibre from the lad's neck, sothat it protected him from further attacks as well as from the rays ofthe sun. Next, sitting down beside him, he drew the sufferer's head downon 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 washeld to his quivering lips. He drank greedily, noisily, nor ceaseduntil he had drained the vessel. Cooled and revived by the draught, heattempted to sit up.
"My back!" he screamed.
There was an unusual glint in Mr. Blood's eyes; his lips werecompressed. But when he parted them to speak, his voice came cool andsteady.
"Be easy, now. One thing at a time. Your back's taking no harm at allfor the present, since I've covered it up. I'm wanting to know what'shappened to you. D' ye think we can do without a navigator that ye goand provoke that beast Bishop until he all but kills you?"
Pitt sat up and groaned again. But this time his anguish was mentalrather 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 myvisitor and his business."
Mr. Blood got up, growling in his throat. "Bad cess to the filthyslaver!" said he. "But it must be contrived, nevertheless. To the devilwith Nuttall! Whether he gives surety for the boat or not, whether heexplains it or not, the boat remains, and we're going, and you're comingwith 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 andget us all branded on the forehead."
Mr. Blood turned away, and with agony in his eyes looked out to sea overthe blue water by which he had so fondly hoped soon to be travellingback 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 wereputting off from the wharf to board her. From where he stood, Mr. Bloodcould see the glinting of the brass cannons mounted on the prow abovethe curving beak-head, and he could make out the figure of a seaman inthe 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, hisnegroes 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--amask descended.
"Doing?" said he blandly. "Why, the duties of my office."
The Colonel, striding furiously forward, observed two things. Theempty pannikin on the seat beside the prisoner, and the palmetto leafprotecting his back. "Have you dared to do this?" The veins on theplanter'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'there?"
"Then how did ye expect me to know what orders ye'd given?" Mr. Blood'stone was positively
aggrieved. "All that I knew was that one of yourslaves was being murthered by the sun and the flies. And I says tomyself, this is one of the Colonel's slaves, and I'm the Colonel'sdoctor, and sure it's my duty to be looking after the Colonel'sproperty. So I just gave the fellow a spoonful of water and covered hisback 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'llbe contacting if ye give way to heat like this."
The planter thrust him aside with an imprecation, and stepping forwardtore 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. "Anddon't come near him again until I send for you, unless you want to beserved in the same way."
He was terrific in his menace, in his bulk, and in the power of him. ButMr. Blood never flinched. It came to the Colonel, as he found himselfsteadily regarded by those light-blue eyes that looked so arrestinglyodd in that tawny face--like pale sapphires set in copper--that thisrogue had for some time now been growing presumptuous. It was a matterthat 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 canto ease his sufferings, or I swear to you that I'll forsake at once theduties of a doctor, and that it's devil another patient will I attend inthis 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'yedare to make terms with me?"
"I do that." The unflinching blue eyes looked squarely into theColonel's, and there was a devil peeping out of them, the devil ofrecklessness that is born of despair.
Colonel Bishop considered him for a long moment in silence. "I've beentoo soft with you," he said at last. "But that's to be mended." And hetightened his lips. "I'll have the rods to you, until there's not aninch 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 verywell it's devil another doctor will he tolerate, being an intelligentman that knows what's good for him."
But the Colonel's brute passion thoroughly aroused was not so easily tobe baulked. "If you're alive when my blacks have done with you, perhapsyou'll come to your senses."
He swung to his negroes to issue an order. But it was never issued. Atthat moment a terrific rolling thunderclap drowned his voice and shookthe very air. Colonel Bishop jumped, his negroes jumped with him, and soeven did the apparently imperturbable Mr. Blood. Then the four of themstared together seawards.
Down in the bay all that could be seen of the great ship, standing nowwithin a cable's-length of the fort, were her topmasts thrusting abovea cloud of smoke in which she was enveloped. From the cliffs a flightof startled seabirds had risen to circle in the blue, giving tongue totheir alarm, the plaintive curlew noisiest of all.
As those men stared from the eminence on which they stood, not yetunderstanding what had taken place, they saw the British Jack dip fromthe 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 goldand 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 tanuntil his face was the colour of clay, and there was a wild fury in hisbeady eyes. His negroes looked at him, grinning idiotically, all teethand eyeballs.