Captain Reeves sat for a short time holding the bowl of that great meerschaum in his hand, and blowing a cloud which quite hid the upper part of his body. Seeing his feet and his legs up as far as the knees, we came to the conclusion, from a process of analogical reasoning, that he was behind that cloud somewhere; and presently we knew we were right, for an arm appeared, and the pipe was laid down. Then the fog cleared away, and there was Reeves smiling.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said; “I always think best when smoking.”
The captain was a most temperate man, and now what he called his “brew” was a very small allowance indeed of the wine of Green Caledonia. He sipped it slowly.
Then he arose, and soon returned to the table with the weather-stained old piratical log itself. Considering that it was fully two hundred years of age, it was certainly very well preserved indeed.
“I am only,” he said, “going to read a few snatches more of Morgan’s fearful life. I consider it is too horrible for any young man to listen to. However, there is a ring of truthfulness in every line penned by our ancient ancestor, Captain Bassanto; and when he comes down to the hiding of the treasure, he gives very definite instructions indeed. The only wonder is that no one has ever found it before now.”
“Can you be sure,” I asked, “that this is not the case?”
“Quite certain, my friend Gordon; because this log had been lost for more than a hundred years, and there is ample evidence to show that it has never been tampered with or even read.”
“Well, I shall epitomize,” he continued. “I have myself carefully read the horrors described with no unmasterly hand over and over again, till they interfered even with my sleep at night, and I have then had to hide the log even from myself, and try to banish its awful story from my mind by working hard in the garden or climbing the mountains that rise high on every side of this glen.
“Bassanto says: ‘I sent much of my own gold home, and I knew it was safe. Fain would I have gone home myself to end my days in peace, and only the thought that by remaining under Morgan’s command I might be able to save the lives of some of my countrymen now and then prevented me from retiring.
“‘The wrath of Heaven,’ continues my ancestor, ‘seemed to be opened at last against those inhuman wretches. Pestilence broke out, and many died in the most awful agonies. Still the torture of the people in order to get them to reveal the hiding-places of their treasure was continued, and it is terrible to think of the sufferings endured by the poor wretches. Death to me personally would at times have been welcomed, and more than once have I clutched my dagger to plunge into the black and hardened heart of my friend Morgan himself. No shark of the ocean, no panther of the jungle, could have been more callous than he; while his pirate crews regarded the sufferings and the struggles of the men or maidens under torture as calmly and heartlessly as the fisherman beholds the worm that wriggles on his hook.