“Then—we’ll give you one gold brick, just one. That’ll help you to some sort of boat, and you can come back again for the rest.”
“Will you express it to me at Cairo from the first port you touch?” enquired Sevier, eagerly.
“Yes, we’ll do that, too. But understand, this isn’t a share, nor yet blackmail. It’s simply charity—it’s alms.”
“Confound it, don’t bully him, Henninger,” muttered Elliott, as the Alabaman flushed darkly.
“Oh, I can stand it,” said Sevier, containing himself with an obvious effort. “I’ll take the alms, and say thank you. I’ll look for it at Cairo.”
He bowed with an exaggerated flourish, purple with rage and humiliation, and descended into his boat without another word. The boat put back toward the steamer, but before it reached her the dhow was a mile to the southward, on a wide tack toward her home port.
CHAPTER XX. THE RAINBOW ROAD
“What’s your plan for getting home with all this gold, Henninger?” asked Elliott “I hardly dared to think of that till we’d got away from the island.”
It was almost eleven o’clock at night, and the moonlight broke intermittently from a cloudy sky. The dhow was beating in long tacks down the Mozambique Channel, with a fresh, warm wind blowing from the southeast. Elliott was on guard duty at the after-hatch, sitting on an inverted bucket with a Mauser across his knees; Henninger and Bennett were lingering about the quarter-deck before turning in, and Hawke stood sentinel over the door of the strong-room and talked up the companionway. Day and night two men were always on duty over the treasure; it had been so ever since the gold had come aboard, and the system would not be relaxed while the voyage lasted. This would not be much longer, however, for they were already six days from the latitude of the battle and wreck, where Sullivan lay in deep water, with three firebars sewn up in his canvas coffin.
“We can’t sail this craft to England, let alone to America,” Bennett remarked.