ok of horror.

What caused our brave captain to reel and stagger as he plunged with a
bound out into the matted cactus, without his tattered hat, like a wolf
flying from the hounds? Had he trodden on a snake, or seen his compadre,
or had that white finger waved him away? Yes, all three. But the
interview with his one-eyed compadre had shocked him most.

On he came, driving the hot, wet sand before him, toward the Padre
Ricardo's chapel. There he paused for breath, though it was only by a
spasmodic effort that he could unclose his sheet-white lips, where his
sharp teeth had met upon them, and held his mouth together as if he had
the lockjaw, while he snorted through his nostrils.

"Ho!" he gasped, "the spying old traitor has sacked the cavern, and the
gold must have gone in that launch I saw the night I came over the reef.
Ho! the traitor has found the torture I promised him; but I would like
to have killed him a little slower."

Here Captain Brand, having regained some few faculties and energy, moved
on beyond the church, till he came to the white coral headstone, where
he stood still.

It was his last walk on deck or sand! Shading his still horror-stricken
eyes by both hands, he glared to seaward.

"Ho, ho! there you are, my Yankee commodore, with that old brig under
convoy, and that pretty schooner! Reminds me of my old 'Centipede.'
_Bueno!_ there are other 'Centipedes,' and I must begin the world anew.
I am not old; here is my strong right arm yet; and who can stop me?"

Captain Brand made these remarks in a loud tone, as if he wanted the
whole world to hear him; and as if he had failed in early life, and come
to a strong resolution to retrieve his past errors.

As he waved his strong right arm aloft, while, in imagination, blood
rained from the blade of his cutlass after cleaving the skull by a blow
dealt behind the back of an unsuspecting skipper or mate, suddenly he
paused, and the arm fell powerless at his side, where it hung dangling
loose like a pirate from a gibbet on a windy night.

He caught sight of the old broken cocoa-nut trunk to which he had
hitched the green silk rope, with its noose around his victim's neck,
and he endeavored to prevent himself falling to the sand.

"Ho!" he choked out, his jaws rattling like dry bones, "I see it all
now. The column was snapped just where the rope was hitched, and the
trestle must have been torn to pieces by the hurricane. Ho, ho! That's
the way my man esca