not consider such a sum excessive as the price of his son’s liberty and to provide a dowry for his daughter. Indeed, if anything, I am too modest, pardi! M. d’Ogeron is reputed a wealthy man.”
M. d’Ogeron the younger raised his head and looked the Captain boldly in the face.
“I refuse—utterly and absolutely, do you understand? So do your worst, and be damned for a filthy pirate without decency and without honour.”
“But what words!” laughed Levasseur. “What heat and what foolishness! You have not considered the alternative. When you do, you will not persist in your refusal. You will not do that in any case. We have spurs for the reluctant. And I warn you against giving me your parole under stress, and afterwards playing me false. I shall know how to find and punish you. Meanwhile, remember your sister’s honour is in pawn to me. Should you forget to return with the dowry, you will not consider it unreasonable that I forget to marry her.”
Levasseur’s smiling eyes, intent upon the young man’s face, saw the horror that crept into his glance. M. d’Ogeron cast a wild glance at mademoiselle, and observed the grey despair that had almost stamped the beauty from her face. Disgust and fury swept across his countenance.
Then he braced himself and answered resolutely:
“No, you dog! A thousand times, no!”
“You are foolish to persist.” Levasseur spoke without anger, with a coldly mocking regret. His fingers had been busy tying knots in a length of whipcord. He held it up. “You know this? It is a rosary of pain that has wrought the conversion of many a stubborn heretic. It is capable of screwing the eyes out of a man’s head by way of helping him to see reason. As you please.”
He flung the length of knotted cord to one of the negroes, who in an instant made it fast about the prisoner’s brows. Then between cord and cranium the black inserted a short length of metal, round and slender as a pipe-stem. That done he rolled his eyes towards Levasseur, awaiting the Captain’s signal.
Levasseur considered his victim, and beheld him tense and braced, his haggard face of a leaden hue, beads of perspiration glinting on his pallid brow just beneath the whipcord.
Mademoiselle cried out, and would have risen: but her guards restrained her, and she sank down again, moaning.
“I beg that you will spare yourself and your sister,” said the Captain, “by being reasonable. What, after all, is the sum I have named? To your wealthy father a bagatelle. I repeat, I have been too modest. But since I have said twenty thousand pieces of eight, twenty thousand pieces it shall be.”
“And for what, if you please, have you said twenty thousand pieces of eight?”
In execrable French, but in a voice that was crisp and pleasant, seeming to echo some of the mockery that had invested Levasseur’s, that question floated over their heads.
Startled, Levasseur and his officers looked up and round. On the crest of the dunes behind them, in sharp silhouette against the deep cobalt of the sky, they beheld a tall, lean figure scrupulously dressed in black with silver lace, a crimson ostrich plume curled about the broad brim of his hat affording the only touch of colour. Under that hat was the tawny face of Captain Blood.
Levasseur gathered himself up with an oath of amazement. He had conceived Captain Blood by now well below the horizon, on his way to Tortuga, assuming him to have been so fortunate as to have weathered last night’s storm.
Launching himself upon the yielding sand, into which he sank to the level of the calves of his fine boots of Spanish leather, Captain Blood came sliding erect to the beach. He was followed by Wolverstone, and a dozen others. As he came to a standstill, he doffed his hat, with a flourish, to the lady. Then he turned to Levasseur.
“Good-morning, my Captain,” said he, and proceeded to explain his presence. “It was last night’s hurricane compelled our return. We had no choice but to ride before it with stripped poles, and it drove us back the way we had gone. Moreover—as the devil would have it!—the Santiago sprang her mainmast; and so I was glad to put into a cove on the west of the island a couple of miles away, and we’ve walked across to stretch our legs, and to give you good-day. But who are these?” And he designated the man and the woman.
Cahusac shrugged his shoulders, and tossed his long arms to heaven.
“Voila!” said he, pregnantly, to the firmament.
Levasseur gnawed his lip, and changed colour. But he controlled himself to answer civilly:
“As you see, two prisoners.”
“Ah! Washed ashore in last night’s gale, eh?”
“Not so.” Levasseur contained himself with difficulty before that irony. “They were in the Dutch brig.”
“I don’t remember that you mentioned them before.”
“I did not. They are prisoners of my own—a personal matter. They are French.”
“French!” Captain Blood’s light eyes stabbed at Levasseur, then at the prisoners.
M. d’Ogeron stood tense and braced as before, but the grey horror had left his face. Hope had leapt within him at this interruption, obviously as little expected by his tormentor as by himself. His sister, moved by a similar intuition, was leaning forward with parted lips and gaping eyes.
Captain Blood fingered his lip, and frowned thoughtfully upon Levasseur.
“Yesterday you surprised me by making war upon the friendly Dutch. But now it seems that not even your own countrymen are safe from you.”
“Have I not said that these... that this is a matter personal to me?”
“Ah! And their names?”
Captain Blood’s crisp, authoritative, faintly disdainful manner stirred Levasseur’s quick anger. The blood crept slowly back into his blenched face, and his glance grew in insolence, almost in menace. Meanwhile the prisoner answered for him.
“I am Henri d’Ogeron, and this is my sister.”
“D’Ogeron?” Captain Blood stared. “Are you related by chance to my good friend the Governor of Tortuga?”
“He is my father.”
Levasseur swung aside with an imprecation. In Captain Blood, amazement for the moment quenched every other emotion.
“The saints preserve us now! Are you quite mad, Levasseur? First you molest the Dutch, who are our friends; next you take prisoners two persons that are French, your own countrymen; and now, faith, they’re no less than the children of the Governor of Tortuga, which is the one safe place of shelter that we enjoy in these islands....”
Levasseur broke in angrily:
“Must I tell you again that it is a matter personal to me? I make myself alone responsible to the Governor of Tortuga.”
“And the twenty thousand pieces of eight? Is that also a matter personal to you?”
“It is.”
“Now I don’t agree with you at all.” Captain Blood sat down on the cask that Levasseur had lately occupied, and looked up blandly. “I may inform you, to save time, that I heard the entire proposal that you made to this lady and this gentleman, and I’ll also remind you that we sail under articles that admit no ambiguities. You have fixed their ransom at twenty thousand pieces of eight. That sum then belongs to your crews and mine in the proportions by the articles established. You’ll hardly wish to dispute it. But what is far more grave is that you have concealed from me this part of the prizes taken on your last cruise, and for such an offence as that the articles provide certain penalties that are something severe in character.”
“Ho, ho!” laughed Levasseur unpleasantly. Then added: “If you dislike my conduct we can dissolve the association.”
“That is my intention. But we’ll dissolve it when and in the manner that I choose, and that