He was silent for a moment, and sat looking at the open wound in his leg.
"I never saw any one more angry," he continued, "and I have served in my day under many men of the same stamp as James Dagg, if not so bad as he. All that night I lay awake, dead sure that Baverstock would murder Bannister, if on the following morning he still refused to speak."
"And you were camped in this ravine?" I asked.
"In this same place," said Rushby; "for I have not moved since a hundred yards."
"And where are the others?" I asked.
"Listen!" said the boatswain. "I can do no more than spin a yarn from the beginning. I am coming to what you want to know. Baverstock, his threats having failed with Bannister, played his trump-card upon me, and won the trick. Leaving Bannister still weak from fever, bound hand and foot, he came to me by night and talked in whispers. He told me that he held you a prisoner, and, like a fool, I believed him. He said that if he did not learn the truth in regard to the exact position of the Big Fish he would put not only Bannister and myself to death, but also you, whose life he had purposely preserved throughout all these months."
"He lied!" I interrupted.
"I know he did," said Rushby. "But I swallowed all those lies as a shark takes a baited hook. I was neither strong nor wise like Bannister. For my own life I cared not greatly, but I was loth to behold John Bannister put to death, and I knew how much he cared for you, and how he would grieve if you were to die through any fault of mine. And thus it was that I told Amos Baverstock the truth. I told him that we had brought with us from Sussex your little fragment of the map; and I told him that I had hidden it within the helmet in the Tomb of the Spanish soldier.
"He said no more to me that night, but posted Vasco, the Spaniard, as a sentry, with orders to see that Bannister and I did not communicate. And at daybreak the next morning, in the utmost haste, he and his three companions went back into the Wood to find the map in the Spaniard's Tomb, and thence to discover the Red Fish itself, where the gold of Peru is hidden."
When I heard that, I burst into loud laughter. Rushby looked at me, surprised, and asked me why I laughed.