"Have you already learned to distrust history, at your tender age?" I
mocked. "Isn't it all set down in the books?"
She turned large and disparaging eyes upon me.
"Of course you know well enough that all history is distorted;
especially war history where the victors are the only source of
information. The other people can't tell their side of it."
"True enough," I admitted. "I fancy old Sir Francis was a good bit
more than half a pirate, if all the facts were known. That story about
his burning of the Spanish galleon at Pirates' Hope, for example."
"I haven't heard it. Tell it to me," she urged.
I gave her the story as Van Dyck had given it to me, omitting--for no
good reason that I could have offered--all mention of my own unnerving
experiences on the island of the legend.
"Left those poor wretches to starve because they wouldn't buy their
lives off him?" she commented, with a belated horror in her voice.
"It is only a legend, you must remember," I hastened to say. "Most
likely there isn't a word of truth in it."
Her gaze was upon the distant merging line of sea and sky, and there
was a dreamy look in her eyes.
"I should like to see that island," she said. "I wonder if we shall go
anywhere near it?"
If I smiled it was only at the hold the ancient tale had apparently
taken upon her.
"Bonteck will doubtless make it a port of call, if you ask him to. But
it is hundreds of miles from here."
"What does it look like?"
"Very much like any or all of the coral islands you may have seen
pictured in your school geographies, only it is long and narrow instead
of being circular, like the Pacific atolls. But it is a true coral
island, for all that; a strip of land possibly a quarter of a mile wide
and a mile long, densely wooded--jungled, you might say--with tropical
vegetation; a beach of white sand running all the way around; beyond
the beach, a lagoon; and enclosing the lagoon, and with only a few
passages through it here and there, the usual coral reef. The lagoon is
shallow for the greater part of it, but outside of the reef the bottom
goes down like the side of a mountain."
"Why, you must have seen the island!" she said.
"I have," I answered, rather grimly.
"Did you land on it when you were there?--but of course you must have,
to be able to describe it so well."
"Oh, yes; I landed upon it," I admitted.
Again she let her gaze go adrift to leeward. She was evidently reveling
in something that seemed to her more tangible than Kingsley's famous
story of Amyas Leigh and his voyagings.
"You say it is called Pirates' Hope. Was that on account of Sir Francis
Drake's battle with the Spanish galleon?"
"Oh, no; I imagine it got its name at a much later date; in the time of
the bold buccaneers. There are two little bays, one on the north and
another on the south. Either would be a good place in which to careen
the little cockleshell ships of our ancestors and scrape their bottoms.
Possibly Morgan or some of the others put in there for that purpose and
thus gave the island its name."
"Did you find any relics when you were there?"
It didn't seem necessary to tell this open-minded young woman about the
bones, so I turned her question aside.
"The last of the buccaneers was permanently hanged some time in the
closing decade of the seventeenth century, if I remember rightly. You'd
scarcely expect to find any traces of them or their works now."
"No; that's so," she conceded.
Into the pause that followed I thrust a query of my own.
"Where has Conetta been keeping herself all day?"
"She is with her aunt. It seems that Miss Gilmore isn't a very good
sailor."
I laughed because I couldn't help it. If the dragoness was upset by the
easy swinging of the _Andromeda_ over a sea that was more like a gently
undulating mirror than anything else, what would happen to her if we
should encounter a gale, or even half a gale?
"You needn't laugh," Beatrice put in reproachfully. "There is nothing
funny about seasickness."
"I was laughing at the idea of anybody's being seasick in weather like
the present," I explained. "But I fancy it is the old story in the case
of Miss Mehitable. If she had nothing worse than a toothache, Conetta
would have to play the part of a nurse."
"My-oh!" said my pretty lounging-companion; "it is perfectly easy to
see that there is no love lost between you and Miss Mehitable."
"There isn't," I replied shortly; and there that matter rested.
Still later in the day--just at sunset, to be strictly accurate as
to the time--there was another compensation for a day which had been
hanging rather heavily on my hands. I had gone alone into the yacht's
fore-peak, and was wondering if I should have time to smoke another
pipe before the dinner call should sound, when a mocking voice behind
me said: "Isn't it about time we were quarreling some more?"