“Ho!” he gasped, “the spying old traitor has sacked the cavern, and the gold must have gone in that launch I saw the night I came over the reef. Ho! the traitor has found the torture I promised him; but I would like to have killed him a little slower.”
Here Captain Brand, having regained some few faculties and energy, moved on beyond the church, till he came to the white coral headstone, where he stood still.
It was his last walk on deck or sand! Shading his still horror-stricken eyes by both hands, he glared to seaward.
“Ho, ho! there you are, my Yankee commodore, with that old brig under convoy, and that pretty schooner! Reminds me of my old ‘Centipede.’ Bueno! there are other ‘Centipedes,’ and I must begin the world anew. I am not old; here is my strong right arm yet; and who can stop me?”
Captain Brand made these remarks in a loud tone, as if he wanted the whole world to hear him; and as if he had failed in early life, and come to a strong resolution to retrieve his past errors.
As he waved his strong right arm aloft, while, in imagination, blood rained from the blade of his cutlass after cleaving the skull by a blow dealt behind the back of an unsuspecting skipper or mate, suddenly he paused, and the arm fell powerless at his side, where it hung dangling loose like a pirate from a gibbet on a windy night.
He caught sight of the old broken cocoa-nut trunk to which he had 293 hitched the green silk rope, with its noose around his victim’s neck, and he endeavored to prevent himself falling to the sand.
“Ho!” he choked out, his jaws rattling like dry bones, “I see it all now. The column was snapped just where the rope was hitched, and the trestle must have been torn to pieces by the hurricane. Ho, ho! That’s the way my man escaped, to dog me all over the world. Ho! I have no time to lose; he may be here at any moment.”
This was the last connected speech that Captain Brand ever made in this world, or in the world to come, perhaps, for at the last word Paul Darcantel rose in all his revengeful majesty before him. With folded arms he bent his dark, stern eyes upon the pirate, wherein the revenge of twenty years was gleaming with a concentrated power.
“You palsied villain! the oath I took to you, and for which I have been accursed, expired yesterday! I took another myself, when we stood here last together, and I am come to fulfill that oath, and––strike!”