Colonel Bishop mastered himself, and rose. A
merciless despot, who had never known the need for
restraint in all these years, he was doomed by ironic
fate to practise restraint in the very moment when
his feelings had reached their most violent intensity.
Peter Blood gave an order. A plank was run out
over the gunwale, and lashed down.
“If you please, Colonel,” said he, with
a graceful flourish of invitation.
The Colonel looked at him, and there was hell in his
glance. Then, taking his resolve, and putting
the best face upon it, since no other could help him
here, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his fine
coat of biscuit-coloured taffetas, and climbed upon
the plank.
A moment he paused, steadied by a hand that clutched
the ratlines, looking down in terror at the green
water rushing past some five-and-twenty feet below.
“Just take a little walk, Colonel, darling,”
said a smooth, mocking voice behind him.
Still clinging, Colonel Bishop looked round in hesitation,
and saw the bulwarks lined with swarthy faces —
the faces of men that as lately as yesterday would
have turned pale under his frown, faces that were
now all wickedly agrin.
For a moment rage stamped out his fear. He cursed
them aloud venomously and incoherently, then loosed
his hold and stepped out upon the plank. Three
steps he took before he lost his balance and went
tumbling into the green depths below.
When he came to the surface again, gasping for air,
the Cinco Llagas was already some furlongs to leeward.
But the roaring cheer of mocking valediction from
the rebels-convict reached him across the water, to
drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul.
DON DIEGO
Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez awoke, and with languid
eyes in aching head, he looked round the cabin, which
was flooded with sunlight from the square windows
astern. Then he uttered a moan, and closed his
eyes again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache
in his head. Lying thus, he attempted to think,
to locate himself in time and space. But between
the pain in his head and the confusion in his mind,
he found coherent thought impossible.
An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to open his
eyes again, and once more to consider his surroundings.
There could be no doubt that he lay in the great cabin
of his own ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his vague
disquiet must be, surely, ill-founded. And yet,
stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance of
reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that
here something was not as it should be. The low
position of the sun, flooding the cabin with golden
light from those square ports astern, suggested to
him at first that it was early morning, on the assumption
that the vessel was headed westward. Then the
alternative occurred to him. They might be sailing
eastward, in which case the time of day would be late
afternoon. That they were sailing he could feel
from the gentle forward heave of the vessel under
him. But how did they come to be sailing, and
he, the master, not to know whether their course lay
east or west, not to be able to recollect whither
they were bound?
