it was all to no use, he never
spoke a word."

"I heard of him; that was a nigger called Crick," cried another.

As for me, I heard no more. The sound of that name, which brought up the
memory of my night at Anticosti and all its terrors, filled my heart,
besides, with a strange swelling of hope, vague and ill-defined, it is
true, but which somehow opened a vision of future wealth and greatness
before me. The name, coupled with the place, Guajuaqualla, left no doubt
upon my mind that they were talking of no other than the Black Boatswain
himself. If I burned to ask a hundred questions about him, a prudent
forbearance held me back. I knew that of all men living, none are so
much given to suspicion and mistrust as the Gambusinos. The frauds and
deceits eternally in practice among them, the constant concealments of
treasure, the affected desertion of rich "Placers," in order to return
to them later and alone,--these and many like artifices suggest a
universal want of confidence which is ever at work to trace motives or
attribute intentions for every chance word or accidental expression. I
retained my curiosity therefore; but from that hour forward, the negro
and his hidden gold were ever before me. It mattered not where I was, in
what companionship, or how engaged. One figure occupied the foreground
of every picture. If my waking thoughts represented him exactly as I saw
him at Anticosti, my sleeping fancies filled up a whole history of his
life. I pictured him a slave in the "Barracoons" of his native land,
heavily ironed and chained. I saw him on board the slaver, with
bent-down head and crippled limbs, crouching between the decks. I
followed him to the slave-market and the sugar plantation. I witnessed
his sufferings, his sorrows, and his vengeance. I tracked him as he fled
to the woods, with the deep-mouthed bloodhounds behind him; and I
stood breathless while they struggled in deadly conflict, till, pale,
bleeding, and mangled, the slave laid them dead at his feet, and
tottered onward to stanch his wounds with the red gum of the liana.
Then came an indistinct interval; and when I saw him next, it was as a
gold-washer in the dark stream of the "Rio Nero," his distorted limbs
and mangled flesh showing through what sufferings he had passed.

Broken, incoherent incidents of crime and misery, of tortured agonies
and hellish vengeance, would cross my sleeping imagination, amidst
which one picture ever recurred,--it was of