She was wholly trustful with Peter and me from then on and spent most of her time with us. Her father, when he was not drinking, was engaged in conferences with Murray. They worked for hours at a time with quill and paper, figuring the strength of clans, costs of muskets and powder and lead and the number of field-cannon to be stowed in a ship's hold, as also the individual requirements of chiefs and nobles and the amounts for which several persons would "sell out." And as they worked my great-uncle's confidence increased, and Colonel O'Donnell's long, horsey face took on a flush over the cheekbones that was not alone the result of four bottles of madeira at a sitting.
On the seventh morning after the action with the Santissima Trinidad we raised a low, sandy islet, densely choked with low trees and bush growth, bare of any characteristic that invited human habitation. Its only distinguishing feature was its roughly oblong shape, which might, by a stretch of imagination, enable it to be likened to a sailor's chest. Murray approached it with caution, a man in the chains dipping the lead continually, and we came to anchor under its lee and a mile or more offshore.
In the mean time Martin and a party of some fifty men had been passing up treasure from the wine-cellar or lazaret, the mate checking the amounts withdrawn upon the list I had prepared, the pirates muttering amongst themselves in a way not at all to my fancy as they gaged anew the size of the fortune they had won, without, so far, any benefit or reward. Martin was a competent officer, and he kept them at work, for all their grumbling and discontent, until the anchor cable ran out and Murray issued an order to lower all the small boats. The next thing we knew the fifty had hurled the mate into the scuppers and were swarming up the starboard poop ladder, a giant North-countryman at their head.
Murray, who had been talking with O'Donnell, leaped to meet them, as unperturbed as if the incident were a part of the ship's routine.
"Get back there, men," he ordered quietly.
The leaders halted, sullenly irresolute, cowed at once by the red glare in his tawny eyes, the cold power that radiated from his white face.
"We'm on'y seekin' a bit goold," said the first man hoarsely.
My great-uncle calmly produced a small, double-barreled French pistolet from an inner pocket, shot the fellow in the head, leaned forward and pushed his body off the ladder.
"Master Martin," he called, "be so good as to have that carrion cast overboard. Go about your work, men, or I'll flog the lot of you at the triangles."
They tumbled down the ladder and disintegrated like a pack of sheep, and not one raised a hand when Martin came at them, cursing grotesquely in his gentle voice and striking right and left with knotted fists. Two of them obeyed his order to throw the dead man's body over the rail, and they went straight to the boat-falls without another mutinous word or act.