“Take him,” he said. “Shoot him on the steps outside.”
Donovan struck a fresh match and lit his cigar. He puffed at it slowly.
“It pains me some,” he said, “to go contrary to my life-long principles. I’m a humanitarian by conviction and I’m opposed to capital punishment. It seems to me that the taking of human life is not justified, and that the advance of civilization, especially in the great republic of which I am a citizen——”
“He is a spy,” said von Moll, “and he dies.”
“You’re hasty, Captain,” said Donovan. “I don’t blame you, but you’re hasty and you haven’t quite tumbled to my meaning. When I spoke of my humanitarian principles I wasn’t thinking of what would happen to Smith. You may shoot him, Captain, and I shall deplore it. But that won’t outrage my convictions any. For I shan’t be responsible, that execution being your affair and not mine. What I was thinking of was how I’d feel when I saw you and every damned one of your pirates hanging at the end of ropes over the edges of the various fancy balconies and other trimmings which adorn this palace. It will be going clean against my principles to arrange that kind of obituary dangle for you, Captain. I may have some trouble soothing my conscience afterwards. But I expect that can be managed. You may call me inconsistent and you may be right. But I’m not a hide-bound doctrinnaire. There are circumstances under which the loftier emanations of humanitarian principle kind of flicker out. The shooting of Smith is a circumstance of that sort. Your treatment of the American flag is another.”
Gorman tells me that he suspected Donovan of attempting a gigantic bluff. He admired the way he did it, but he did not think he could possibly succeed. Donovan did not, so far as Gorman could see, hold in his hand a single card worth putting down on the table. Smith stood, cool and apparently uninterested, between the two sailors who had arrested him. Konrad Karl was lighting and throwing away cigarette after cigarette. The Queen had grown pale at the mention of the shooting of Smith; but she kept her eyes fixed on her father. She did not understand what he was doing, but she had great confidence in him. Von Moll stared at Donovan with an insolent sneer.
“You threaten,” he said, “you think that your American Republic——Pah! what is America? You have no army. Your navy is no good. What can you do?”
“You’re taking me up wrong again,” said Donovan. “I’m not reckoning on America just now. The hanging will be done by the crew of the English ship that I’m expecting to see in this harbour. Not to-day, maybe, or to-morrow, but some time before the end of this darned war.”
King Konrad Karl threw away another cigarette.
“Alas and damn!” he said, “by this time there are no longer any English ships.”