"Plenty. In the locker in the cuddy."
"Good! Come, Carib. Until to-morrow night, then!"
"Ay, ay, sir," said Hornigold, leaning over the pier and watching the boat fade into a black blur on the water as it drew away toward the pinnace.
"He's mine, by heaven, he's mine!" he whispered under his breath as he turned and walked slowly up to the house.
Yet Master Hornigold meant to keep faith with his old captain. He was sick and tired of assumed respectability, of honest piloting of ships to the harbor, of drinking with worthy merchantmen or the King's sailors. The itch for the old buccaneering game was hard upon him. To hear the fire crackle and roar through a doomed ship, to lord it over shiploads of terrified men and screaming women, to be sated with carnage and drunk with liquor, to dress in satins and velvets and laces, to let the broad pieces of eight run through his grimy fingers, to throw off restraint and be a free sailor, a gentleman rover, to return to the habits of his earlier days and revel in crime and sin—it was for all this that his soul lusted again.
He would betray Morgan, yet a flash of his old admiration for the man came into his mind as he licked his lips like a wolf and thought of the days of rapine. There never was such a leader. He had indeed been the terror of the seas. Under no one else would there be such prospects for successful piracy. Yes, he would do all for him faithfully, up to the point of revenge. Morgan's plan was simple and practicable. De Lussan, Teach, Velsers and the rest would fall in with it gladly. There would be enough rakehelly, degraded specimens of humanity, hungry and thirsty, lustful and covetous, in Port Royal—which was the wickedest and most flourishing city on the American hemisphere at the time—to accompany them and insure success, provided only there would be reward in women and liquor and treasure. He would do it. They would all go a-cruising once more, and then—they would see.
He stayed a long time on the wharf, looking out over the water, arranging the details of the scheme outlined by Morgan so brilliantly, and it was late when he returned to the parlor of the Blue Anchor Inn. Half the company were drunk on the floor under the tables. The rest were singing, or shouting, or cursing, in accordance with their several moods. Above the confusion Hornigold could hear Teach's giant voice still roaring out his reckless refrain; bitter commentary on their indifference it was, too—
"Though life now is pleasant and sweet to the sense,
We'll be damnably moldy a hundred years hence."
"Ay," thought the old buccaneer, pausing in the entrance, for the appositeness of the verses impressed even his unreflective soul, "it will be all the same in a hundred years, but we'll have one more good cruise before we are piped down for the long watch in."
He chuckled softly and hideously to himself at the fatalistic idea.