“Well, well, neither of those old friends are here yet, and before another sun sets I shall bequeath the old den to them both! Ho, ho! with those solid bags of clinking metal, I shall leave them as much sand and rocks as they choose to walk over. What a sly devil I was to stow that treasure away for a rainy day! Never told a living being! Poisoned the fellow, too, who made the lock! Capital joke, ’pon my soul!”
This was the very last of the very few jokes that Captain Brand ever enjoyed.
“And, now I think of it, I wonder if my thirsty old mate’s bones are yet lying there in the vault. What was his name? such a bad memory I have! Oh! Gibbs––Bill Gibbs––with one leg! Ho, ho!”
Here Captain Brand drained some more aguardiente out of a cracked earthen pot, and slapped his fine legs with rapture.
“And those dear girls who married me! Lucia, too!”
The dirty wretch started as the wing of a sea-bird swooped down over the pure inlet; and he thought he saw a white fore finger beckoning him on to his doom.
“Pshaw!” said he, smoothing down his filthy tattered shirt with the finger of his mutilated left hand, “how nervous I am! But what a bungle Pedillo made of that marriage! And my good Ricardo, too! What a feast the sharks must have had on his oily, well-fed carcass! Misericordia! Ho, ho! I believe I’ll bid my friends good-night.”
Captain Brand stretched himself out at full length on the shelly strand, his boat secured by a clove-hitch round his right leg, which rode calmly in the little inlet; his bald head, with the few dry gray hairs on his temples, resting on Miguel’s sennit hat, and the thin scum of frosty eyelids drawn over his frozen eyes––cracking their covering at times––until at last the pirate, aided by fiery aguardiente, slept.
A few late cormorants and sea-birds sailed over him in his fitful slumber, and uttered a cold cry, as if their pecking-time had not come yet, but would shortly, as they sought their silent retreats on the wall of rocks opposite.