“Being dead makes no difference, lad, the dead are the only folk who are living as they walk before us,” said Bilbao, in a soft, earnest, almost religious voice!
“Well, you of all men on earth!” thought Clensy, as he stared at the gun-runner’s flushed face and the large, grey, expressive eyes.
And as Samuel Bilbao spoke on, his voice became as tender as a girl’s, a troubled something wrinkling his fine brow. Then he laid his hand on Clensy’s shoulder, and said: “Lad, the girl I loved has been dead fifteen years, and it was only the other night she stood beside me. ‘Don’t drink that,’ she said, as she knocked the goblet full of rum from my hand, smashing it to atoms at my feet! And all the traders and shellbacks in the grog-shanty at Murrumbee Creek stared like blasted lunatics as I took her hand and laid my head on her shoulders and then looked into the eyes—of nothing! So the blind fools said!”
As Bilbao ceased, Clensy gazed in wonder on the expressive face before him. He hardly recognised the great blustering, boisterous Samuel Bilbao in the face of that superstitious, yet intellectual looking sunburnt man of the seas.
“Yes, lad, dead women don’t forget,” said Bilbao softly, as he sat there in Royal Clensy’s room in Honolulu, and the stars crept over the blue skies to the east of Mount Pepé.
Years afterwards every word Bilbao had uttered that night came back and lingered in Clensy’s memory, coming like echoes from the songs of the long dead nightingales that had once sung in the mahogany forests by the presidential palace in Hayti when he was a boy.
PART II
CHAPTER I
WHEN Sestrina, on the morning after the Catholot had sailed from Port-au-Prince, awoke and found that she was far out at sea, she felt greatly depressed. She could hardly believe her own ears when she heard the muffled thumping of the steamer’s screw and the pounding of the engine’s pistons. She immediately ran from her cabin and sought the skipper. He was a Yankee, and a kind-hearted man.