Tony thereupon ordered the women to sit down on the ground in the shade and not move under penalty of "gettin' a wing clipped." We obeyed in silence and looked on while the pirates with wolfish voracity devoured the meal which had been meant for us. They had pocket-flasks with them, and as they attacked them with frequency the talk grew louder and wilder. By degrees it was possible to comprehend the extraordinary disaster which had befallen us, at least in a sketchy outline of which the detail was filled in later. Tony, it appeared, was the master of a small power-schooner which had been fitting out in San Francisco for a filibustering trip to the Mexican coast. His three companions were the crew. None was of the old hearty breed of sailors, but wharf-rats pure and simple, city-dregs whom chance had led to follow the sea. Tony, in whom one detected a certain rough force and ability, was an Italian, an outlaw specimen of the breed which mans the fishing fleet putting forth from the harbor of San Francisco. When and where he and Magnus had been friends I do not know. But no sooner had the wisdom of Miss Browne imparted the great secret to her chance acquaintance of the New York wharves, than he had communicated with his old pal Tony. The power-schooner with her unlawful cargo stole out through the gate, made her delivery in the Mexican port, took on fresh supplies, and stood away for Leeward Island. The western anchorage had received and snugly hidden her. Captain Magnus, meanwhile, by means of a mirror flashed from Lookout, had maintained communication with his friends, and even visited them under cover of the supposed shooting expedition. And now, while we had been striving to overcome the recalcitrancy of Mr. Tubbs, Captain Magnus had taken a short cut to the same end. You felt that the secret of Mr. Tubbs would be extracted, if need be, by no delicate methods.
But Mr. Tubbs's character possessed none of that unreasonable obstinacy which would make harsh measures necessary under such conditions. His countenance, as the illuminating conversation of the pirates had proceeded, lost the speckled appearance which had characterized it at the height of his terrors. Something like his normal hue returned. He sat up straighter, moistened his dry lips, and looked around upon us, yes, even upon Aunt Jane and Miss Higglesby-Browne, with whom he had been so lately and so tenderly reconciled, with a sidelong, calculating glance. After the pirates had eaten, the prisoners on the log were covered with a rifle and their hands untied, while Cookie, in a lugubrious silence made eloquent by his rolling eyes, passed around among us the remnants of the food. No one can be said to have eaten with appetite except Mr. Tubbs, who received his portion with wordy gratitude and devoured it with seeming gusto. The pirates, full-fed, with pipes in mouths, were inclined to be affable and jocular. "Feeding the animals," as Slinker called it, seemed to afford them much agreeable diversion. Even Magnus had lost in a degree his usual sullenness, and was wreathed in simian smiles. The intense terror and revulsion which he inspired in me kept my unwilling eyes constantly wandering in his direction. Yet under all the terror was a bedrock confidence that there was, there must be somehow in the essence of things, an eternal rightness which would keep me safe from Captain Magnus. And as I looked across at Dugald Shaw and met for an instant his steady watchful eyes, I managed a swift little smile—a rather wan smile, I dare say, but still a smile.
Cuthbert Vane caught, so to speak, the tail of it, and was electrified. I saw his lips form at Mr. Shaw's ear the words, Wonderful little sport, by jove! For some time after our capture by the pirates Cuthbert's state had been one of settled incredulity. Even when they tied his hands he had continued to contemplate the invaders as illusions. It was, this remarkable episode, altogether a thing without precedent—and what was that but another name for the impossible? And then slowly, by painful degrees—you saw them reflected in his candid face—it grew upon him that it was precisely the impossible, the unprecedented, that was happening.
A curious stiffening came over Cuthbert Vane. For the first time in my knowledge of him he showed the consciousness—instead of only the sub-consciousness—of the difference between Norman blood and the ordinary sanguine fluid. His shoulders squared; he lost his habitual easy lounge and sat erect and tall. Something stern and aquiline showed through the smooth beauty of his face, so that you thought of effigies of crusading knights stretched on their ancient tombs in High Staunton church. He was their true descendant after all, this slow, calm, gentle-mannered Cuthbert. It was a young lion that I had been playing with, and the claws were there, strong and terrible in their velvet sheath.
Captain Tony, having finished his pipe, knocked the ashes out against the heel of his boot and put the pipe in his pocket.
"Well," he said, stretching, "I'd ruther have a nap, but business is business, so let's get down to it. Which o' them guys has the line on the stuff, Magnus?"
"Old Baldy, here," returned Magnus, with a nod at Mr. Tubbs. "Old
Washtubs I call him generally, ha, ha!"
"Then looky here, Washtubs," said Tony, addressing Mr. Tubbs with sudden sternness, "maybe you could bluff these here soft guys, but we're a different breed o' cats, we are. Whatever you know, you'll come through with it and come quick, or it'll be the worse for your hide, see?"
Mr. Tubbs rose from the log with promptness.
"Captain," he said earnestly, "from long experience in the financial centers of the country, I have got to be a man what understands human nature. The minute I looked at you, I seen it in your eye that there wasn't no use in tryin' to bluff you. What's more, I don't want to. Once he gets with a congenial crowd, there ain't a feller anywheres that will do more in the cause o' friendship than old Hamilton H. Tubbs. And you are a congenial crowd, you boys—gosh, but you do look good to me after the bunch o' stiffs I been playin' up to here! All I ask is, to let me in on it with you, and I'll be glad to put you wise to the best tricks of a sly old fox who ain't ever been caught yet without two holes to his burrow. I won't ask no half, nor no quarter, either, though I jest signed up for that amount with the old girl here. But give me freedom, and a bunch o' live wires like you boys! I've near froze into a plaster figure o' Virtue, what with talkin' like a Sunday-school class, and sparkin' one old maid, and makin' out like I wouldn't melt butter with the other. So H. H. will ship along of you, mates, and we'll off to the China coast somewheres where the spendin' is good and the police not too nosy, and try how far a trunkful of doubloons will go!"