Without a word, like a man who fears to hesitate in his formation of a good but novel whim, lest he revokes its realisation to remain consistent with his daily and worse nature, Pepillo, without wiping the fatal knife, severed the leather thongs around Gladsden.
"One good turn," said he, sententiously, as becomes a Spaniard, but prudently setting his foot on the gun of which the captive was despoiled.
"Yes, he meant to split your skull, that's all," remarked the latter, sitting up and chafing his limbs to restore the circulation. "He was a pirate; and you have only anticipated his suspension at a yardarm."
Pepillo paid no attention to him. He had picked up the Indian's hatchet, and seemed to be regarding with an antiquarian zeal the design traced in an idle moment or two, now and then, with the hunting knife. Then, contracting his brow more in terror than in pain, and turning pale in the same increasing dread rather than from loss of blood, he ejaculated:
"The villain! The assassin! It is a copper bronze hatchet! I am poisoned! I shall die of lockjaw!" Then, noting the incredulous expression of the bystander, who had, however, been sufficiently sympathetic as to rise to his throbbing feet and lean towards the sufferer, "I tell you, Pagan, that the Indian was one of the Apaches Emponzoñadores—the sect of the Poison Hatchets, and I am—the Lord and my patron saint forgive me—a dead man!"
Gladsden looked at the tomahawk, and, after the man's utterance, thought the metal head gave out a sinister gleam. Then, recalling all he ever knew of copper poisoning, he said:
"Let me attend to the cut," in a tone which made the sufferer see that he was taken as the victim of terror rather more than mortal pain.
Still, as the gash was beyond his simple remedy, the Indian cataplasm which should have allayed the fiery feeling which even augmented from the first, Pepillo yielded to his late enemy like a child, with that compliance of the Latin races under mortal injury.
A seafarer knows much about cuts, and so, at the first glance after removing the herb poultice, Gladsden recognised that the cut, clean in infliction, was aggravated shockingly.
"You see!" cried the Mexican, triumphantly, as far as the victory over the other's disbelief was concerned, but with acute agony at his certainty being confirmed; "Am I not a lost man?"