Don Ignaçio Sanchez was likewise a moneyed man, and came provided with a long pouch of solid gold, which he made into little piles before him of the exact size of those of the captain. The doctor, however, declined to play, and sat an indifferent spectator of the game.
“Let us begin, señores!” exclaimed the Don, as he rapidly shuffled the cards, and his keen, black spark of fire lit up with animation at the rich prospect before him. “We are losing precious time. I’ll be banquero! Vamanos!”
So they began. The cards were dealt, and the betting went on. The padre forgot breviary and beads in his excitement, and as his little pointings were swept away, he forgot, too, the sacred ejaculations he was wont to lard his discourse with, and he became positively profane. The captain won largely in the beginning, and jeered his compadre with great zest and enjoyment; but that one-eyed, rapacious old Spanish rascal was not in the least disturbed, and bided his time. At first the conversation was light and jovial, Captain Brand insisting upon the doctor describing minutely how he had hacked his friend Gibbs’s leg off with a hand-saw, laughing hugely thereat, and wiping the icy tears from his cold blue eyes with his delicate cambric handkerchief. Then the fascinating game began to fluctuate, and the luck set back with a steady run into the piles of the banker. Captain Brand liked as little to lose his money as any 148 other gambler in cards, stocks, or dice, and he was somewhat chafed in spirit; but what especially irritated him was losing it to that wrinkle-faced, one-eyed, greedy old scoundrel, with no possible hope of ever seeing a dollar of it again. As for the padre, he was dead broke; and since his friends would not lend him a real, and the banker did not play upon credit, he sat moodily by, and gloated over the winnings of the Tuerto, cursing his own luck and that of his companions likewise.
“Ho!” growled Captain Brand, “maldito a la sota! I have lost my last stake!”
Even while he spoke the poor little boy murmured in a sobbing voice, “Mamma, chère mamma!” and turned uneasily in his little nest from his fitful slumber.
“That crying imp again!” said the now angry pirate, as he hurled the padre’s half empty gin jug in the direction of the couch, which crashed against the wall, and fell in a shower of glass splinters over the little sleeper.
The child gave one terrified shriek, and, starting from the bed in his little night-dress, now soiled and torn, he ran and threw himself on his knees before the doctor. Another bottle was raised aloft by the long muscular arm of the pirate; but, before you could wink, that arm was arrested, and the missile twisted from his grasp.
“For shame, you coward! Don’t harm the boy. He will die soon enough in this awful den without having his brains dashed out.”
“Ho, Monsieur le Docteur!” muttered the villain, looking as if he would like to taste the heart’s-blood of the resolute man who stood before him, as he pushed a hand into his waistcoat pocket, “do you presume to call names and oppose my will?”
But, controlling his passion with a violent contortion of face that would have made one’s blood run cold to see it, he changed his tone and said,