"Yes," said Black, observing my surprise, and passing me the liquor which he compelled me to drink; "my boy was your height, and your build, and he had your eyes. What's more, he had your grit, and there was no cooler hand living. Not that he owed much to me, for I was mad drunk half his life; and, when sober, I lived as often as not in prison for what I had done in liquor. It was when he was nearly twenty that the change came; for he began to bring home money, do you see? and what with his work and the way he talked to me, I set myself to get the craving under; and I was a new man in one year, and in two my brain came back to me, and I made the discovery that I was not born a fool. You may reckon I worshipped the lad! God knows, he and his mother did for me more than man or woman ever did for a breathing body. And when my wits came back to me, and I thought what I might have done, and what I had done, and that my boy had borne it all only to drag me to my reason at last, I could have ended it there and then. Maybe I should have done it if a new turn hadn't come in my life's road. It was when I was at my lowest, and we were sore put to it to get food in New York, that I was taken up by a man who was going to Michigan seeking copper. My lad was then working with a Mike Leveston in the city—a land-agent for the up-country work, and the owner of a line of small brigs running between Boston and the Bahamas; but times had gone bad with him, and the boy, who had been getting good money, found himself with no more than enough to keep him, let alone his mother. Well, I thought the thing out, and, as my partner had some capital and agreed to let me have ten dollars a week any way, I made an agreement with Leveston that he should allow the wife and the boy enough to live on for six months, and I set out for the State where the copper find was beginning to attract notice, and in a year I was a made man. We found the ore as thick as clay, and, under the excitement of it, I kept my head, and the drink craze never touched me. When the money came in, I made Leveston my New York agent, and sent him enough to set up the woman who'd stood by me all through in more luxury than she'd known since she married me. For awhile her letters told me of her new life, and I kept them under my shirt as I would have kept leaves of gold. In the spring, I sent the agent twenty thousand dollars for her; and I got his acknowledgment, saying she'd gone down to Charleston to see about the boy's work there, and I should hear from her on her return.
"I think this was about eighteen months after I left New York, and from that time my wife ceased to write to me, and I heard nothing more from the lad. We'd been doing such work in the mine that we had enough money to pay our way for life, and we hoped to make an almighty pile before many years had gone; but I couldn't bear not hearing from them as I worked for, and in the fall of the year I went back to New York—under protest from my partner, who could do nothing without me—and I never rested until I reached my house in Fifty-Fourth Street. I found it shut up, the furniture gone, not a sign of living being in it; and when I went to make inquiries amongst my neighbours, they told me what came to this. My wife had died of starvation—nothing less, boy, for the devil I'd sent the money to had doled out to her and the lad a few dollars for the first year, but had cut and run when the big sums reached him; and he took the boy with him on the pretence of a job in the Southern city. My son, you see, had turned naturally to architect's work, and was induced by this long-toothed vulture to quit New York, because they heard from the mine that I was dead—that I died, as Leveston had told them, of small-pox—and left not a shilling for them. God! if only I could bring him to life to clutch his cursed throat again!"
"But what became of your son?" I asked, as he ceased speaking, and we lay riding gently over the long rollers, with a great flood of sunlight making the sea as a sheet of beaten gold, touched with diamond points where the spray broke. Then he went on with it; but you could see some awful emotion moving him, and he kept plying himself with drink, which made his words the fiercer.
"What became of the boy?" he repeated after me. "Why, he went south in the hope of sending money to his mother; and directly he reached Charleston, Leveston shipped him on a brig, knowing that I must hear of his doings in a month or more. He sent the lad to Panama, and there he died, one of the first to be stricken in the fever land. They buried him in the country, as the Lord is my witness. Then I came home—rich, my trunks stuffed with notes, able, if I cared, to buy up half the land-agents in New York City; and the money I'd got seemed to turn black in my hands when I found that those it was made for needed it no more. Not as I knew then of the lad's death—that I was to hear of later; but, free from the drink, I had loved the woman who was gone; and I was a madman for days and weeks. When I got my head again I changed as I don't believe any man ever changed before; there was something in my mind which I could not cope with. I can't lay it down any clearer than this: it was a hatred of all men that took possession of me—a fierce desire to make mankind pay for the wrongs I had suffered. I gave myself up to the drink again, but not as I did when they named me a drunkard. This time I was the master of it; I used it for my purpose; I fed my thoughts of vengeance on it; and, while my partner was sending me more than a thousand pounds a week from Michigan, I remained in New York with the double purpose in my head—to get my boy back to me, and to crush the life out of the man who had left my wife to die.
"All the news I could get at that time was this: the boy had left Charleston, ostensibly for the Bahamas, three months before I reached New York City; but nothing more had been heard of him or the ship. I put the best detectives in the city on Leveston's trail, raining the money into their pockets to keep them to the work; and they got it out of some of Leveston's seamen in Savannah that he had gone a long cruise in one of his barques to Rio, and even farther south. This news was like red-hot iron to my head. I knew that I couldn't touch the man by law, except for the robbery of the bit of money, and that I didn't care a brass button about. What I meant to have was his life, and I swore that no man should take it but me. Then I went into every low haunt in New York. I searched the drinking dens of the Bowery; I made friends with all the thieves, picked up the loafers, and the starving. The parson who's gone I found running a gambling hell in New Jersey; the man 'Four-Eyes' I took from a crimp at Boston; John we got later on at Rio, where we bought him from the police. I had as fine a crew of scoundrels in a month as ever cursed in a fo'castle; and I shipped them all on the screw-steamer, Rossa, which I bought for six thousand pounds from the Rossa Company. She was just on six hundred tons, an iron boat built for the meat trade; but we knocked her about quick enough, setting three machine-guns for'ard, and fifty Winchester rifles among her stores. We put out from Sandy Hook, it must be nearly six years ago; and we steamed straight ahead for Rio, where we got tidings of Leveston's barque. She had sailed for Buenos Ayres, but they looked for her return within the month, and we left again next day, cruising near shore as far as Desterro, where luck was with us.
"I remember that morning as if it was yesterday. We had struck eight-bells, and the men were going down to dinner, when the mate sighted a ship on the port-bow. We put straight out to sea at the hail, and within half-an-hour we stood alongside her; and the man who answered my call was Mike Leveston. When he saw me hailing him from the poop of a steamer, he turned green as the sea about him; and he yelled to me to stand off if I didn't want a bullet in me. The sight of him maddened me; I turned the machine-gun on his decks, and swept them clear as a grass field, but he lay flat on his face by the taffrail, and he bellowed for mercy like a woman. And he got it. I ran the steamer alongside him, smashing in his quarter, and when we had gripped, I got aboard. Then he grovelled at my feet, and, as I held my pistol at his head, he gabbled out the news that my son was dead—told me that he died at Panama, and he screamed for mercy like a hog at the block. But I cut his throat from ear to ear with my own knife, and I threw his body to the sharks limb by limb as you would throw a dead sheep to the dogs. God knows, I was mad then, as I have been often since, and am now. My poor son!"
"The man told you the truth, then?"
"Yes. When I had made chips of his ship I went back to Panama, and there got news of the boy. They had buried him at Porto Bello, and I stopped there long enough to make his grave decent, and then returned up the coast to New York. Coming back, the vermin