Then, speaking more to himself than to Jean and me, his lips curled with a hard scorn.
"The Happy Return!" says he. "Pardieu! 'tis a happy return to beat devils and then have all your own little lies come roosting home like imps that filch the victory! They don't trust me because I won by trickery! Egad! is a slaughter better than a game? An a man wins, who a devil gives a rush for the winnings? 'Tis the fight and the game—pah!—not the thing won! Storm and cold, man and beast, powers o' darkness and devil, knaves and fools and his own sins—aye, that's the scratch!—The man and the beast and the dark and the devil, he can breast 'em all with a bold front! But knaves and fools and his own sins, pah!—death grubs!—hatching and nesting in a man's bosom till they wake to sting him! Flesh-worms—vampires—blood-suckers—spun out o' a man's own tissue to sap his life!"
He rapped his pistol impatiently against the deck-rail, stalked past us, then turned.
"Lads," says he, "if you don't want gall in your wine and a grub in your victory, a' God's name keep your own counsel and play the game fair and square and aboveboard."
And though his speech worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant's head, Jean and I thought we read some sense in his mixed metaphors.
On all that voyage home he never once crossed words with the English officers, but took his share of hardship with the French prisoners.
"I mayn't go back to France. They think they have me cornered and in their power," he would say, gnawing at his finger-ends and gazing into space.
Once, after long reverie, he sprang up from a gun-waist where he had been sitting and uttered a scornful laugh.
"Cornered? Hah! We shall see! I snap my fingers in their faces."
Thereafter his mood brightened perceptibly, and he was the first to put foot ashore when we came to anchor in British port. There were yet four hours before the post-chaise left for London, and the English crew made the most of the time by flocking to the ale-houses. M. Radisson drew Jean and me apart.