ful kind of English, which
the shipmaster, however, makes little attempt to reproduce. His dress
was as discordant as his speech. It was of a kind to advertise his
trade, and ludicrously in contrast with the sober garb of Hagthorpe
and the almost foppish daintiness of Jeremy Pitt. His soiled and
blood-stained shirt of blue cotton was open in front, to cool his hairy
breast, and the girdle about the waist of his leather breeches carried
an arsenal of pistols and a knife, whilst a cutlass hung from a leather
baldrick loosely slung about his body; above his countenance, broad and
flat as a Mongolian's, a red scarf was swathed, turban-wise, about his
head.

"Is it that I have not warned you from the beginning that all was too
easy?" he demanded between plaintiveness and fury. "I am no fool, my
friends. I have eyes, me. And I see. I see an abandoned fort at the
entrance of the lake, and nobody there to fire a gun at us when we came
in. Then I suspect the trap. Who would not that had eyes and brain? Bah!
we come on. What do we find? A city, abandoned like the fort; a city out
of which the people have taken all things of value. Again I warn Captain
Blood. It is a trap, I say. We are to come on; always to come on,
without opposition, until we find that it is too late to go to sea
again, that we cannot go back at all. But no one will listen to me. You
all know so much more. Name of God! Captain Blood, he will go on, and we
go on. We go to Gibraltar. True that at last, after long time, we catch
the Deputy-Governor; true, we make him pay big ransom for Gibraltar;
true between that ransom and the loot we return here with some two
thousand pieces of eight. But what is it, in reality, will you tell me?
Or shall I tell you? It is a piece of cheese--a piece of cheese in a
mousetrap, and we are the little mice. Goddam! And the cats--oh, the
cats they wait for us! The cats are those four Spanish ships of war that
have come meantime. And they wait for us outside the bottle-neck of this
lagoon. Mort de Dieu! That is what comes of the damned obstinacy of your
fine Captain Blood."

Wolverstone laughed. Cahusac exploded in fury.

"Ah, sangdieu! Tu ris, animal? You laugh! Tell me this: How do we get
out again unless we accept the terms of Monsieur the Admiral of Spain?"

From the buccaneers at the foot of the steps came an angry rumble of
approval. The single eye of the gigantic Wolverstone rolled terribly,
and he clenched his great fists