Mr. James Nuttall made all speed, regardless of the heat, in his journey
from Bridgetown to Colonel Bishop's plantation, and if ever man was
built for speed in a hot climate that man was Mr. James Nuttall, with
his short, thin body, and his long, fleshless legs. So withered was
he that it was hard to believe there were any juices left in him, yet
juices there must have been, for he was sweating violently by the time
he reached the stockade.
At the entrance he almost ran into the overseer Kent, a squat,
bow-legged animal with the arms of a Hercules and the jowl of a bulldog.
“I am seeking Doctor Blood,” he announced breathlessly.
“You are in a rare haste,” growled Kent. “What the devil is it? Twins?”
“Eh? Oh! Nay, nay. I'm not married, sir. It's a cousin of mine, sir.”
“What is?”
“He is taken bad, sir,” Nuttall lied promptly upon the cue that Kent
himself had afforded him. “Is the doctor here?”
“That's his hut yonder.” Kent pointed carelessly. “If he's not there,
he'll be somewhere else.” And he took himself off. He was a surly,
ungracious beast at all times, readier with the lash of his whip than
with his tongue.
Nuttall watched him go with satisfaction, and even noted the direction
that he took. Then he plunged into the enclosure, to verify in
mortification that Dr. Blood was not at home. A man of sense might have
sat down and waited, judging that to be the quickest and surest way in
the end. But Nuttall had no sense. He flung out of the stockade again,
hesitated a moment as to which direction he should take, and finally
decided to go any way but the way that Kent had gone. He sped across
the parched savannah towards the sugar plantation which stood solid as
a rampart and gleaming golden in the dazzling June sunshine. Avenues
intersected the great blocks of ripening amber cane. In the distance
down one of these he espied some slaves at work. Nuttall entered the
avenue and advanced upon them. They eyed him dully, as he passed them.
Pitt was not of their number, and he dared not ask for him. He continued
his search for best part of an hour, up one of those lanes and then
down another. Once an overseer challenged him, demanding to know his
business. He was looking, he said, for Dr. Blood. His cousin was
taken ill. The overseer bade him go to the devil, and get out of the
plantation. Blood was not there. If he was anywhere he would be in his
hut in the stockade.
Nuttall passed on, upon the understanding that he would go. But he went
in the wrong direction; he went on towards the side of the plantation
farthest from the stockade, towards the dense woods that fringed it
there. The overseer was too contemptuous and perhaps too languid in the
stifling heat of approaching noontide to correct his course.
Nuttall blundered to the end of the avenue, and round the corner of
it, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon an
irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed
him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad
hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the
rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud
to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out his
dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have ten
pounds from Blood that very morning or they were all undone. And all he
got for his pains and his sweat was the condemnation of Jeremy Pitt.
“Damn you for a fool!” said the slave. “If it's Blood you're seeking,
why are you wasting your time here?”
“I can't find him,” bleated Nuttall. He was indignant at his reception.
He forgot the jangled state of the other's nerves after a night of
anxious wakefulness ending in a dawn of despair. “I thought that
you....”
“You thought that I could drop my spade and go and seek him for you? Is
that what you thought? My God! that our lives should depend upon such a
dummerhead. While you waste your time here, the hours are passing! And
if an overseer should catch you talking to me? How'll you explain it?”
For a moment Nuttall was bereft of speech by such ingratitude. Then he
exploded.
“I would to Heaven I had never had no hand in this affair. I would so! I
wish that....”
What else he wished was never known, for at that moment round the block
of cane came a big man in biscuit-coloured taffetas followed by two
negroes in cotton drawers who were armed with cutlasses. He was not
ten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl had been
unheard.
Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted like
a rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and betraying thing
that in the circumstances it was possible for him to do. Pitt groaned
and stood still, leaning upon his spade.
“Hi, there! Stop!” bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and added
horrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies.
But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head. It
was his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have seen his
face; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was quite sufficient
to hang any man whom he thought would be better dead.
Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter
sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the two
negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It was a
bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations since a slave
had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him a couple of years
ago.
“After him, you black swine!” he roared at them. But as they started he
checked them. “Wait! Get to heel, damn you!”
It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was not
the need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him in that
cursed wood. There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and Pitt should tell
him the identity of his bashful friend, and also the subject of that
close and secret talk he had disturbed. Pitt might, of course, be
reluctant. So much the worse for Pitt. The ingenious Colonel Bishop knew
a dozen ways--some of them quite diverting--of conquering stubbornness
in these convict dogs.
He turned now upon the slave a countenance that was inflamed by heat
internal and external, and a pair of heady eyes that were alight with
cruel intelligence. He stepped forward swinging his light bamboo cane.
“Who was that runagate?” he asked with terrible suavity. Leaning over on
his spade, Jeremy Pitt hung his head a little, and shifted uncomfortably
on his bare feet. Vainly he groped for an answer in a mind that could do
nothing but curse the idiocy of Mr. James Nuttall.
The planter's bamboo cane fell on the lad's naked shoulders with
stinging force.
“Answer me, you dog! What's his name?”
Jeremy looked at the burly planter out of sullen, almost defiant eyes.
“I don't know,” he said, and in his voice there was a faint note at
least of the defiance aroused in him by a blow which he dared not, for
his life's sake, return. His body had remained unyielding under it, but
the spirit within writhed now in torment.
“You don't know? Well, here's to quicken your wits.” Again the cane
descended. “Have you thought of his name yet?”
“I have not.”
“Stubborn, eh?” For a moment the Colonel leered. Then his passion
mastered him. “'Swounds! You impudent dog! D'you trifle with me? D'you
think I'm to be mocked?”
Pitt shrugged, shifted sideways on his feet again, and settled into
dogged silence. Few things are more provocative; and Colonel Bishop's
temper was never one that required much provocation. Brute fury now
awoke in him. Fiercely now he lashed those defenceless shoulders,
accompanying each blow by blasphemy and foul abuse, until, stung beyond
endurance, the lingering embers of his manhood fanned into momentary
flame, Pitt sprang upon his tormentor.
But as he sprang, so also sprang the watchful blacks. Muscular bronze
arms coiled crushingly about the frail white body, and in a moment the
unfortunate slave stood powerless, his wrists pinioned behind him in a
leathern thong.
Breathing hard, his face mottled, Bishop pondered him a moment. Then:
“Fetch him along,” he said.
Down the long avenue between those golden walls of cane standing some
eight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black captors in
the Colonel's wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his fellow-slaves at
work there. Despair went with him. What torments might immediately await
him he cared little, horrible though he knew they would be. The real
source of his mental anguish lay in the conviction that the elaborately
planned escape from this unutterable hell was frustrated now in the very
moment of execution.
They came out upon the green plateau and headed for the stockade and
the overseer's white house. Pitt's eyes looked out over Carlisle Bay, of
which this plateau commanded a clear view from the fort on one side to
the long sheds of the wharf on the other. Along this wharf a few shallow
boats were moored, and Pitt caught himself wondering which of these was
the wherry in which with a little luck they might have been now at sea.
Out over that sea his glance ranged miserably.
In the roads, standing in for the shore before a gentle breeze that
scarcely ruffled the sapphire surface of the Caribbean, came a stately
red-hulled frigate, flying the English ensign.
Colonel Bishop halted to consider her, shading his eyes with his fleshly
hand. Light as was the breeze, the vessel spread no canvas to it beyond
that of her foresail. Furled was her every other sail, leaving a clear
view of the majestic lines of her hull, from towering stern castle to
gilded beakhead that was aflash in the dazzling sunshine.
So leisurely an advance argued a master indifferently acquainted with
these waters, who preferred to creep forward cautiously, sounding his
way. At her present rate of progress it would be an hour, perhaps,
before she came to anchorage within the harbour. And whilst the Colonel
viewed her, admiring, perhaps, the gracious beauty of her, Pitt was
hurried forward into the stockade, and clapped into the stocks that
stood there ready for slaves who required correction.
Colonel Bishop followed him presently, with leisurely, rolling gait.
“A mutinous cur that shows his fangs to his master must learn good
manners at the cost of a striped hide,” was all he said before setting
about his executioner's job.
That with his own hands he should do that which most men of his station
would, out of self-respect, have relegated to one of the negroes, gives
you the measure of the man's beastliness. It was almost as if with
relish, as if gratifying some feral instinct of cruelty, that he now
lashed his victim about head and shoulders. Soon his cane was reduced,
to splinters by his violence. You know, perhaps, the sting of a flexible
bamboo cane when it is whole. But do you realize its murderous quality
when it has been split into several long lithe blades, each with an edge
that is of the keenness of a knife?
When, at last, from very weariness, Colonel Bishop flung away the stump
and thongs to which his cane had been reduced, the wretched slave's back
was bleeding pulp from neck to waist.
As long as full sensibility remained, Jeremy Pitt had made no sound.
But in a measure as from pain his senses were mercifully dulled, he sank
forward in the stocks, and hung there now in a huddled heap, faintly
moaning.
Colonel Bishop set his foot upon the crossbar, and leaned over his
victim, a cruel smile on his full, coarse face.
“Let that teach you a proper submission,” said he. “And now touching
that shy friend of yours, you shall stay here without meat or
drink--without meat or drink, d' ye hear me?--until you please to tell
me his name and business.” He took his foot from the bar. “When you've
had enough of this, send me word, and we'll have the branding-irons to
you.”
On that he swung on his heel, and strode out of the stockade, his
negroes following.
Pitt had heard him, as we hear things in our dreams. At the moment so
spent was he by his cruel punishment, and so deep was the despair into
which he had fallen, that he no longer cared whether he lived or died.
Soon, however, from the partial stupor which pain had mercifully
induced, a new variety of pain aroused him. The stocks stood in the
open under the full glare of the tropical sun, and its blistering rays
streamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt as if
flames of fire were searing it. And, soon, to this was added a torment
still more unspeakable. Flies, the cruel flies of the Antilles, drawn by
the scent of blood, descended in a cloud upon him.
Small wonder that the ingenious Colonel Bishop, who so well understood
the art of loosening stubborn tongues, had not deemed it necessary to
have recourse to other means of torture. Not all his fiendish cruelty
could devise a torment more cruel, more unendurable than the torments
Nature would here procure a man in Pitt's condition.
The slave writhed in his stocks until he was in danger of breaking his
limbs, and writhing, screamed in agony.
Thus was he found by Peter Blood, who seemed to his troubled vision
to materialize suddenly before him. Mr. Blood carried a large palmetto
leaf. Having whisked away with this the flies that were devouring
Jeremy's back, he slung it by a strip of fibre from the lad's neck, so
that it protected him from further attacks as well as from the rays of
the sun. Next, sitting down beside him, he drew the sufferer's head down
on his own shoulder, and bathed his face from a pannikin of cold water.
Pitt shuddered and moaned on a long, indrawn breath.
“Drink!” he gasped. “Drink, for the love of Christ!” The pannikin was
held to his quivering lips. He drank greedily, noisily, nor ceased
until he had drained the vessel. Cooled and revived by the draught, he
attempted to sit up.
“My back!” he screamed.
There was an unusual glint in Mr. Blood's eyes; his lips were
compressed. But when he parted them to speak, his voice came cool and
steady.
“Be easy, now. One thing at a time. Your back's taking no harm at all
for the present, since I've covered it up. I'm wanting to know what's
happened to you. D' ye think we can do without a navigator that ye go
and provoke that beast Bishop until he all but kills you?”
Pitt sat up and groaned again. But this time his anguish was mental
rather than physical.
“I don't think a navigator will be needed this time, Peter.”
“What's that?” cried Mr. Blood.
Pitt explained the situation as briefly as he could, in a halting,
gasping speech. “I'm to rot here until I tell him the identity of my
visitor and his business.”
Mr. Blood got up, growling in his throat. “Bad cess to the filthy
slaver!” said he. “But it must be contrived, nevertheless. To the devil
with Nuttall! Whether he gives surety for the boat or not, whether he
explains it or not, the boat remains, and we're going, and you're coming
with us.”
“You're dreaming, Peter,” said the prisoner. “We're not going this time.
The magistrates will confiscate the boat since the surety's not paid,
even if when they press him Nuttall does not confess the whole plan and
get us all branded on the forehead.”
Mr. Blood turned away, and with agony in his eyes looked out to sea over
the blue water by which he had so fondly hoped soon to be travelling
back to freedom.
The great red ship had drawn considerably nearer shore by now. Slowly,
majestically, she was entering the bay. Already one or two wherries were
putting off from the wharf to board her. From where he stood, Mr. Blood
could see the glinting of the brass cannons mounted on the prow above
the curving beak-head, and he could make out the figure of a seaman in
the forechains on her larboard side, leaning out to heave the lead.
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.
“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 mended.” 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.”
He swung to his negroes to issue an order. But it was never issued. At
that moment a terrific rolling thunderclap drowned his voice and shook
the very air. Colonel Bishop jumped, his negroes jumped with him, and so
even did the apparently imperturbable Mr. Blood. Then the four of them
stared together seawards.
Down in the bay all that could be seen of the great ship, standing now
within a cable's-length of the fort, were her topmasts thrusting above
a cloud of smoke in which she was enveloped. From the cliffs a flight
of startled seabirds had risen to circle in the blue, giving tongue to
their alarm, the plaintive curlew noisiest of all.
As those men stared from the eminence on which they stood, not yet
understanding what had taken place, they saw the British Jack dip from
the main truck and vanish into the rising cloud below. A moment more,
and up through that cloud to replace the flag of England soared the gold
and crimson banner of Castile. And then they understood.
“Pirates!” roared the Colonel, and again, “Pirates!”
Fear and incredulity were blent in his voice. He had paled under his tan
until his face was the colour of clay, and there was a wild fury in his
beady eyes. His negroes looked at him, grinning idiotically, all teeth
and eyeballs.