“A hole! But why a hole? In the ground of the noble house! Ah, no! By no means!”
Monson roared again, to the fright of Pedronez and Lucina, who flattened herself against the wall. He went out and brought in the spade, and the bags. I guarded the door, and Monson dug where I pointed in the hard trodden earth of the floor. Pedronez and Lucina backed into corners and chattered crazy. They seemed to think the hole was for them, and Monson meant to bury them in it, which had as reasonable a look as anything.
Clyde's money was there still, lying no more than two feet from where Pedronez and Lucina had walked over it eighteen months, grubbing out a poor living. The brown bags were all rotted away and the coin was sticky with clay. I laid a handful on the table, and told Pedronez to buy the tobacco of the others in the morning, but I didn't suppose he would. It seemed a hard sort of joke played by luck on the little Windward Islander, Clyde's money lying there so long, twenty-four inches from the soles of his feet. I remember how Pedronez clutched his throat and shrieked after us into the night. He had shiny black eyes and skin wrinkled about the mouth, and Lucina was draggled-looking. When we were out of the inlet we could hear him yelling, and I had an idea he and Lucina took to fighting to ease up their minds.
We came under the dark of the ship's side. One of the negroes leaned over above us, and Monson told him to turn in, so short that he scuttled away with a grunt. We heaved the stuff aboard, and took it below, and stowed the whole four meal bags under my bunk. We got up sail before daybreak and slipped away while the stars were still shining.
Now, I took Monson to be a simple man, though sudden in action, and a man with an open mind, and sure to blow up with anything it was charged with, and in that way safe, as not having the gifts to deceive. I don't say the estimate was all gone wrong, but I'd say a man may act so simple as to take in a cleverer man than me. He came to me the next day and took me down below, acting mysterious, and he put on an expression that was like a full moon trying to look like a horse trader, which wasn't a success. Then he jerked his beard, and looked embarrassed.
“Why,” he says, “it's this way. I think I'll have half that pile, don't you see?”
I says: “What?”
I felt like an empty meal bag with surprise. Then I says, “Of course I was meaning to make you a present, Captain.”
“No,” he says. “That's not it. It's this way. The niggers is so tricky, they'd drop you overboard, tied to a chunk of iron, if I told 'em they might, don't you see? And if I don't tell them they might, seems as if I ought to have half. Because,” he says, “they'd love to do it, because they're that way, those niggers, and it seems that way, as if I'd ought to have half, don't it?”
“Why don't you take it all?” I says, sarcastic and mad.