‘Fill away and get out of this, skipper!’ Henry broke in angrily.
‘Sir, assuring you of your gratification of pardon, it is my unpleasant task to inform you of two things. Neither are you my charterer; nor are you the noble King George to whom I give ambitious allegiance.’
‘Well, I’m your charterer, skipper,’ Francis said pleasantly, for he had learned to humor the man of mixed words and parentage. ‘So just kindly put up your helm and sail us out of this Chiriqui Lagoon as fast as God and this failing wind will let you.’
‘It is not in the charter, sir, that my Angelique shall break the laws of Panama and King George.’
‘I’ll pay you well,’ Francis retorted, beginning to lose his temper. ‘Get busy.’
‘You will then recharter, sir, at three times the present charter?’
Francis nodded shortly.
‘Then wait, sir, I entreat. I must procure pen and paper from the cabin and make out the document.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ Francis groaned. ‘Square away and get a move on first. We can make out the paper just as easily while we are running as standing still. Look! They are beginning to fire.’
The half-breed captain heard the report, and, searching his spread canvas, discovered the hole of the bullet high up near the peak of the mainsail.
‘Very well, sir,’ he conceded. ‘You are a gentleman and an honorable man. I trust you to affix your signature to the document at your early convenience Hey, you nigger! Put up your wheel! Hard up! Jump, you black rascals, and slack away mainsheet. Take a hand there, you, Percival, on the boom-tackle!’
All obeyed, as did Percival, a grinning shambling Kingston negro who was as black as his name was white, and as did another, addressed more respectfully as Juan, who was more Spanish and Indian than negro, as his light yellow skin attested, and whose fingers, slacking the foresheet, were as slim and delicate as a girl’s.
‘Knock the nigger on the head if he keeps up this freshness,’ Henry growled in an undertone to Francis. ‘For two cents I’ll do it right now.’
But Francis shook his head.
‘He’s all right, but he’s a Jamaica nigger, and you know what they are. And he’s Indian as well. We might as well humor him, since it’s the nature of the beast. He means all right, but he wants the money, he’s risking his schooner against confiscation, and he’s afflicted with vocabularies. He just must get those long words out of his system or else bust.’
Here Enrico Solano, with quivering nostrils and fingers restless on his rifle as with half an eye he kept track of the wild shots being fired from the beach, approached Henry and held out his hand.
‘I have been guilty of a grave mistake, Señor Morgan,’ he said. ‘In the first hurt of my affliction at the death of my beloved brother, Alfaro, I was guilty of thinking you guilty of his murder.’ Here old Enrico’s eyes flashed with anger consuming but inconsumable. ‘For murder it was, dastardly and cowardly, a thrust in the dark in the back. I should have known better. But I was overwhelmed, and the evidence was all against you. I did not take pause of thought to consider that my dearly beloved and only daughter was betrothed to you; to remember that all I had known of you was straightness and man-likeness and courage such as never stabs from behind the shield of the dark. I regret. I am sorry. And I am proud once again to welcome you into my family as the husband-to-be of my Leoncia.’
And while this whole-hearted restoration of Henry Morgan into the Solano family went on, Leoncia was irritated because her father, in Latin-American fashion, must use so many fine words and phrases, when a single phrase, a handgrip, and a square look in the eyes were all that was called for and was certainly all that either Henry or Francis would have vouchsafed had the situation been reversed. Why, why, she asked of herself, must her Spanish stock, in such extravagance of diction, seem to emulate the similar extravagance of the Jamaica negro?
While this reiteration of the betrothal of Henry and Leoncia was taking place, Francis, striving to appear uninterested, could not help taking note of the pale-yellow sailor called Juan, conferring forward with others of the crew, shrugging his shoulders significantly, gesticulating passionately with his hands.
Chapter VII
‘And now we’ve lost both the Gringo pigs,’ Alvarez Torres lamented on the beach as, with a slight freshening of the breeze and with booms winged out to port and starboard, the Angelique passed out of range of their rifles.
‘Almost would I give three bells to the cathedral,’ Mariano Vercara e Hijos proclaimed, ‘to have them within a hundred yards of this rifle. And if I had will of all Gringos they would depart so fast that the devil in hell would be compelled to study English.’
Alvarez Torres beat the saddle pommel with his hand in sheer impotence of rage and disappointment.
‘The Queen of my Dreams!’ he almost wept. ‘She is gone and away, of! with the two Morgans. I saw her climb up the side of the schooner. And there is the New York Regan. Once out of Chiriqui Lagoon, the schooner may sail directly to New York. And the Francis pig will not have been delayed a month, and the Señor Regan will remit no money.’
‘They will not get out of Chiriqui Lagoon,’ the Jefe said solemnly. ‘I am no animal without reason. I am a man. I know they will not get out. Have I not sworn eternal vengeance? The sun is setting, and the promise is for a night of little wind. The sky tells it to one with half an eye. Behold those trailing wisps of clouds. What wind may be, and little enough of that, will come from the north-east. It will be a head beat to the Chorrera Passage. They will not attempt it. That nigger captain knows the lagoon like a book. He will try to make the long tack and go out past Bocas del Toro, or through the Cartago Passage. Even so, we will outwit him. I have brains, reason. Reason. Listen. It is a long ride. We will make it straight down the coast to Las Palmas. Captain Rosaro is there with the Dolores-’
‘The second-hand old tugboat? that cannot get out of her own way?’ Torres queried.
‘But this night of calm and morrow of calm she will capture the Angelique,’ the Jefe replied. ‘On, comrades! We will ride! Captain Rosaro is my friend. Any favor is but mine to ask.’
At daylight, the worn-out men, on beaten horses, straggled through the decaying village of Las Palmas and down to the decaying pier, where a very decayed-looking tugboat, sadly in need of paint, welcomed their eyes. Smoke rising from the stack advertised that steam was up, and the Jefe was wearily elated.
‘A happy morning, Señor Capitan Rosaro, and well met,’ he greeted the hard-bitten Spanish skipper, who was reclined on a coil of rope and who sipped black coffee from a mug that rattled against his teeth.
‘It would be a happier morning if the cursed fever had not laid its chill upon me,’ Captain Rosaro grunted sourly, ‘the hand that held the mug, the arm, and all his body shivering so violently as to spill the hot liquid down his chin and into the black-and-gray thatch of hair that covered his half-exposed chest. ‘Take that, you animal of hell!’ he cried, flinging mug and contents at a splinter of a half-breed boy, evidently his servant, who had been unable to repress his glee.
But the sun will rise and the fever will work its will and shortly depart,’ said the Jefe, politely ignoring the display of spleen. ‘And you are finished here, and you are bound for Bocas del Toro, and we shall go with you, all of us, on a rare adventure. We will pick up the schooner Angelique, calm-bound all last night in the lagoon, and I shall make many arrests, and all Panama will so ring with your courage and ability, Capitan, that you will forget that the fever ever whispered in you.’
‘How much?’ Capitan Rosaro demanded bluntly.
Much?’ the Jefe countered in surprise. ‘This is an affair of government, good friend. And it is right on