"You white-livered cub," he would roar, and upon that another oath and a new threat of what he would do presently. But I was quite unafraid of him, and thrusting him aside with my foot, I called to Jack to look out for himself.
"Mark the Dane!" I cried; and he answered me by lifting a great club of iron and felling Kanokoff as though he were an ox.
"Put that in your coffee-pot," he bellowed; and then, threatening him as he tried to rise, "stand clear of me, will you?" And I think that he struck the Dane a second time, while I shot haphazard at Red Roger, and saw him duck as though a stone had been thrown. Immediately there was a roar of fury which no words could tell. Men, reeling in drink, picked up what weapons they could, and came at us headlong. I saw faces leering into my own through the smoke and mist; raucous voices cried out in pain or exultation; there were the swish of blows and the heavier sound of bodies that were struck. And all the time I cried to Jack to have at them, and heard his cheery "Aye, aye, sir," as music in the melee.
God alone knows how we came out of that affair as we did. That there would have been a sorry story to tell but for the Frenchman I have no manner of doubt. Two to five as we were, and they hulking fellows who, when sober, had been a match for twenty, even Black's pistol might have proved a poor argument but for a new turn which instantly directed all their fury in another quarter, and saved our lives, as I must believe.
This befell at the very height of the fray, when Jack had closed with Dingo, the engineer, and bent him backward until his bones cracked; while I played a boy's game about the cavern with the brute Red Roger. Then might you have said that we were done for and as good as dead men already; but this was the very moment when some one—I think it would have been Jerry Carr—cried out that the Frenchman was off, and instantly a truce fell, and every man regarded his neighbour aghast. Here was a turnabout which even their drunken ferocity might not pass by. It held them in a grip of wonder and dismay.
Now, the grotto was murky with smoke and the arc lights none too bright—for we had made a rare mess of the electricity since the "Leopard" was dis-rated—and so it happened that I did not understand immediately what the outcry was about. When I perceived the truth, it was Jack himself who pointed it out to me, indicating a spot high up on the wall of the cavern, where the Frenchman crouched like a wildcat and spat his defiance upon his enemies.
Stripped of the best part of his clothes, his white flesh shone out against the black rock as a painting upon a wall in monotone; and I could see his grinning face and protruding teeth with a distinctness which revolted me. Another moment and I heard Jack cry to me to shoot him, for God's sake, or every man would hang.
"Shoot, sir, shoot!" he roared. "Would ye have us swing, every man Jack? Shoot, for God's sake, sir——" And the others took it up, howling and stamping like devils, while the pistol hung idly from my fingers, and I looked from one to the other as though I did not hear aright.
How could I shoot the man? What had he done to me or to these pirates? My honour bade me stand by Black where honour was not an offence against my fellows; but that it should dictate such a bloody crime as this was not to be believed. And so I told them, the while they stormed and swore and vowed to have the life out of me.
"Let any man take a step this way, and that's his last!" I cried back to them. Their rejoinder was another howl of rage; and upon that they flung themselves at the rock and began to climb it, maladroitly and with feet trained to no such task.
"Up, boys, up with you!" they roared; and one by one, Jack-o'-Lantern leading them, they followed after the "Leopard," whose words stung them as whips. But a hand's-breadth now and they would take him; and yet what a gap beween them and fortune! For who would have imagined the thing as it befell and as these eyes witnessed it in the grotto of Vares? Not I, for a truth, nor any who may read this narrative.
The wall was steep and the holding none too good. Of the pirates, the giant Red Roger made nothing of the job at all, and, losing his foothold at the start, he slipped back to the quay with a bellow.
More cunning at the task, I saw that Jack-o'-Lantern climbed the treacherous slope with a seaman's foot and the instinct of a born mountaineer. He was up and within an arm's length of his enemy before the others had hardly begun to climb at all, and, coming to a gap between two spurs of the rock, he sat there to reason with the "Leopard." As well might be have addressed the surging water beneath him. Laughing like a grown child, the Frenchman bandied words with them all and defied them to come on.
"Assassins, have you the fear? Why do you not come up here for me? Shall you be afraid? I tell you I go to the police this night to tell them you are here. Ha, ha! do you like that, mes enfants? I go to the police, and they shall be arrived to visit your ship. Cochons, do you not hear me? Then I have pleasures to wait until you shall come to me."
His irony, carried to far greater lengths than my memory of it, and vastly coarser, moved the pirates to a fine fury. Sambo, the nigger, had now climbed to Jack's side, and, stung by the deft shafts of a mocking wit, he, of a sudden, tried to leap across the gap at the Frenchman. But he missed his foot-hold, and being struck full in the face as he came, he fell headlong into the black pool below, and diverted every eye from the grinning French monkey on his rocky perch. Every one liked Sambo, the nigger, and certainly I had no wish to see him drown. Running to the bank of the pool, I caught the black's outstretched hand as he rose to the surface. But he was still but half out of the water when a loud shout from above caused me to let go of him, and, looking up, I saw the "Leopard" poised upon the rock like a diver for the plunge. A moment later and he dropped with unimaginable grace straight as an arrow to the very centre of the basin.
It was done now; yet who could say that it was done?
The man had gone to his death—aye, but had he? Was it possible that this daring fellow, a splendid swimmer as his mates avowed, was it possible that he had dived clean under the tunnel to the outer sea, and was already at the foot of the headland? It might be so. But, even if it were, what then? Could he swim so far along the impregnable shore that he would find a cave or inlet, or must he perish at the cavern's gate? All this, I say, passed through my head like a flash while I watched the circling ripples and waited at a tension to see if he would rise. When the eddies died away at last, I knew the truth. The "Leopard" had escaped; his fate was on the knees of the gods.
Well, you never saw whiter faces than those of the men, who now grouped themselves at the quay-side and stared like wondering children at the mirror of the water. All the fight was out of them by this time, and the truce had brought some of the serving Spaniards to the cavern. These joined us to gaze into the pool; and there we all stood, hardly exchanging a word, and full of our fears. Would the man come up, or would he not? Answer at last began to press upon question, and then the truth to emerge. The thing was done and the "Leopard" gone. A thousand eyes staring into the pool could not have made it otherwise.
"He be gone, surely," said Jack at last; and then he asked, "What will the Captain say to that, lads?"
"Aye, what will the Captain say?" echoed Red Roger. "It's mighty fine news for the Captain, d——n me. Clean gone, like a fish horf of a 'ook. And where's he a makin' for, mates? Ask yourselves that, principally."
The nigger joined in, pleased to be a pessimist. "He gone right dam to the fishes, that's where he'm gone, massa. Don't you worry about lickle French gentleman. He no come back, sure and sartin."
"I reckon if he haf, we tam well do hang," said the Dane; and here he was joined by the wounded Jerry Carr, who lay huddled on the quay, quite indifferent to his hurt.
"Bully for us and the skipper, too," the fellow said, hugging his side to quench the flow of blood. I turned to him and offered my help, but he spurned me with an oath.
"Wait