“What do you want?” he asked harshly.
The Spaniard struggled with his fright.
“It—it is my wish and the wish of my padrone to have speech with one Captain Morgan, if he will have the goodness. I am a messenger, Señor—not a spy, as these—these gentlemen suggest.”
“What is your message?” Henry’s voice had become weary.
The messenger took reassurance from his changed tone. “I come from one man very rich, Señor. You have his wife.”
“I have his wife?”
“She was taken in the city, Señor.”
“Her name?”
“She is the Doña Ysobel Espinoza, Valdez y los Gabilanes, Señor. The simple people of the city have called her La Santa Roja.”
Henry Morgan regarded him for a long time. “Yes, I have her,” he said finally. “She is in a cell. What does her husband wish?”
“He offers ransom, Señor. He has reason to wish his wife with him again.”
“What ransom does he offer?”
“What would Your Excellency suggest?”
“Twenty thousand pieces of eight,” Henry said quickly. The messenger was staggered. “Twenty thous—viente mil—” He translated fully to comprehend the enormity of the amount. “I perceive that Your Excellency also wants the woman.”
Henry Morgan looked at the body of Coeur de Gris. “No,” he said; “I want the money.”
Now the messenger was relieved. He had been prepared to think this great man a great idiot. “I will do what may be done, Señor. I will come back to you in four days.”
“In three!”
“But if I do not arrive, Señor?”
“If you do not arrive, I shall take the Red Saint away with me and sell her in the slave docks.”
“I shall strive, Señor.”
“Give him courtesy!” the captain commanded. “Do not mistreat him in any way. He is to bring us gold.”
As they were leaving, one man turned back and let his eyes lovingly caress the treasure.
“When is the division to be, sir?”
“In Chagres, fool! Do you think I would divide it now?”
“But, sir, we would like to be having a bit of it in our hands—for the feel of it, sir. We have fought hard, sir.”
“Get out! You’ll have none of it in your hands until we come to the ships again. Do you think I want to have you throwing it to the women here? Let the Goaves women get it from you.”
The men went out of the Hall of Audience grumbling a little.
VI
The buccaneers were rioting in Panama. Barrels of wine had been rolled to a large warehouse. The floor had been cleared of its clutter of merchandise, and now a wild dance was in progress. Numbers of women were there, women who had gone over to the pirates. They danced and flung about to the shrieking of flutes as though their feet did not sound on the grave of Panama at all. They, dear economists, were gaining back some of the lost treasure, using a weapon more slow, but no less sure, than the sword.
In a corner of the warehouse sat The Burgundian and his one-armed protector.
“See, Emil! That one there—Consider to yourself her hips now!”
“I see her, ’Toine, and it is good of you. Do not think I do not appreciate your trouble for my pleasure. But I am silly enough to have an ideal, even in copulation. This proves to me that I am still an artist, if not a gentleman.”
“But see, Emil. Notice for a moment the fullness of her bosom.”
“No, ’Toine; I see nothing that endangers my rose pearl. I will keep it by me a while yet.”
“But really, my friend, I think you lose your sense of beauty. Where is that careful eye we used to fear so on our canvases?”
“The eye is here, ’Toine. It is still here. It is your own little eye which makes nymphs of brown mares.”
“Then—Then, Emil, since you persist in your blindness, perhaps you would condescend to loan me your rose pearl. There—I thank you. I shall return it presently.”
Grippo was seated in the middle of the floor, sullenly counting the buttons on his sleeve.
“—eight, nine—There were ten. Some bastard has stolen my button. Ah, this world of thieves! It is too much. I would kill for that button. It was my favorite button. One, two, three—Why there are ten. One, two, three, four—” About him the dancers rocked and the air was reeking with the shrill cries of the flutes.
Captain Sawkins glowered at the dancers. He firmly believed that to dance was to go to hell by a short route. Beside him, Captain Zeigler sadly watched the flow of liquor. This Zeigler was called the Tavern Keeper of the Sea. It was his practice, after a raid, to keep the men at sea until they had spent their plunder buying the rum which he supplied. Once he had a mutiny, it is said, because for three months he sailed around and around one island. He could not help it. The men still had money and he still had rum. This night he was saddened by these barrels of liquor which were being drunk without any obbligato of coins ringing on the counter. It was unnatural to him and mischievous.
Henry Morgan was sitting alone in the Hall of Audience. He could barely hear the crying music of the dance. Throughout the day little bands of men had come in, bearing bits of belated treasure dug from the earth or drawn with iron hooks from the cisterns. One old woman had swallowed a diamond to save it, but the searchers dug for that, too, and found it.
Now a gray twilight was in the Hall of Audience. All through the day Henry Morgan had been sitting in his tall chair, and the day had changed him. His eyes, those peering eyes which had looked out over a living horizon, were turned inward. He had been looking at himself, looking perplexedly at Henry Morgan. In the years of his life and of his adventuring, he had believed so completely in his purpose, whatever it may have been at the moment, that he
