Captain Blood - The Original Classic Edition. Sabatini Rafael

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, his negroes 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--a mask descended.

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       "Doing?" said he blandly. "Why, the duties of my office."

       The Colonel, striding furiously forward, observed two things. The empty pannikin on the seat beside the prisoner, and the palmetto leaf protecting his back. "Have you dared to do this?" The veins on the planter'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't here?"

       "Then how did ye expect me to know what orders ye'd given?" Mr. Blood's tone was positively aggrieved. "All that I knew was that one of your slaves was being murthered by the sun and the flies. And I says to myself, this is one of the Colonel's slaves, and I'm the Colonel's doctor, and sure it's my duty to be looking after the Colonel's property. So I just gave the fellow a spoonful of water and covered his back 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'll be contacting if ye give way to heat like this." The planter thrust him aside with an imprecation, and stepping forward tore 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. "And don't come near him again until I send for you, unless you want to be served in the same way."

       He was terrific in his menace, in his bulk, and in the power of him. But Mr. Blood never flinched. It came to the Colonel, as he found himself steadily regarded by those light-blue eyes that looked so arrestingly odd in that tawny face--like pale sapphires set in copper--that this rogue had for some time now been growing presumptuous. It was a matter that 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 can to ease his sufferings, or I swear to you that I'll forsake at once the duties of a doctor, and that it's devil another patient will I attend in this 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'ye dare to make terms with me?"

       "I do that." The unflinching blue eyes looked squarely into the Colonel's, and there was a devil peeping out of them, the devil of

       recklessness that is born of despair.

       Colonel Bishop considered him for a long moment in silence. "I've been too soft with you," he said at last. "But that's to be mend-ed." And he tightened his lips. "I'll have the rods to you, until there's not an inch 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 very well it's devil another doctor will he tolerate, being an intelligent man that knows what's good for him."

       But the Colonel's brute passion thoroughly aroused was not so easily to be baulked. "If you're alive when my blacks have done with you, perhaps you'll come to your senses."