“Bueno, my man! give me the glass. You can go on board the brigantine. I’ll take a last look myself.”
While the signal-man scrambled down the crag, Captain Brand rested the spy-glass on the trunk of the single cocoa-nut-tree, whose skeleton-like fingers of leaves rattled above his head like a gibbeted pirate in chains, and then he searched steadily along the hazy horizon. 155 As he was about, however, to withdraw his eye from the tube, something––a mere dim speck––arrested his attention. Quickly dropping the glass, and as rapidly rubbing the large lens and carefully adjusting the joints, he raised it again, as a backwoodsman does his rifle with an Indian for a mark. For full five minutes the pirate stood as motionless as the crag beneath him, intently glaring through the tube at the speck in the distance. At last he let the glass fall at his side, and pulling out his watch with a jerk, he muttered to himself,
“It is a large and lofty ship; but, should she be a cruiser after me, she will find the bird flown and the nest empty. Ho, now for action!”
Springing down the precipitous declivity as he spoke, he paused a moment at a loophole of the vault beneath his dwelling, and puffing his cigar into a bright coal, he carefully twitched the match-rope which led to the train, opened the loose strands, and placed the fire to it. Waiting an instant till he saw the nitre sparkle as it ignited, he moved away with long, swinging strides toward the sheds. There, glancing through the now deserted halls the crew had occupied, where quantities of fagots, and kindling-wood, and barrels of pitch were standing, he continued on till he came to the quarters of the doctor. The doctor was standing at the open door on the thatched piazza, looking quietly at the brigantine, whose sails were loosed, and the vessel hanging by a sternfast, with her head just abreast the Tiger’s Trap.
“Ah! Monsieur le Docteur, I have merely called to bid you a final adieu before I go on board; and as I have a few moments left, and a few words to say, suppose you walk with me toward the chapel. Allons! there is a suspicious sail off there,” waving his glass in the direction, “and I wish to take a good look at her.”
“Doctor,” continued Captain Brand, as they reached the little esplanade facing the graves and church, “you will have no one left here on our island save our dumb Babette, and the chances are rather remote for your getting away, without, perhaps, some of the West India fleet should happen to drop in here, which I do not think probable. I rely, however, upon your keeping your oath, even if they do come, and not betraying the secrets you are acquainted with.”
The pirate said this in an off-hand, friendly way, as he had his glass leveled toward the sail he saw in the offing.
“Captain Brand,” replied the doctor, “I was deceived in coming here, as you well know; but I shall religiously keep my oath for the twenty years, as I swore to do. After that, if we both live so long, my tongue and arm shall speak and strike.”
The pirate stepped back a little as he shut up the joints of the spy-glass with a crash, and, with a scowl of hate and vengeance combined, 156 he said, in a loud voice, while his cold eyes gleamed like a ray of sunlight on an iceberg,
“And I, too, keep my oaths; and, without waiting twenty years, I strike now!”