Big Banou went to work now, and presently his job was done––coral rocks, and loose head-stones of pirates, well packed down with sand, made the sides of the living tomb. Then the black pall was drawn over the body, and they left the pirate to his inevitable doom.
Soon the three executioners reached the Tiger’s Trap.
“Banou, take this locket and chain––ah! you know it well––to your young master. Brown, the two thousand dollars will be placed in your and Greenfield’s hands for distribution among the schooner’s crew; make a good use of it! Tell the commodore that I shall take an old woman we have found here away with me in a stolen fisherman’s boat to Manzanillo, and within the year I shall be at home! There! shove off, my lads!”
As the gig skimmed through the Tiger’s Trap, Paul Darcantel, with the widow of Ignaçio, sailed out by the Alligator’s Mouth, and as they crossed that roaring ledge, the sun sank in its unclouded glory in the west, and the young moon, with its thin pearly crescent, looked timidly down upon the island.
And the night passed, and the next and the next, with scorching days and blazing suns between them; while the mangrove, the palm, the cocoa-nut, and the cactus––ah! that luxuriant plant throve apace––shooting up its steel-pointed bayonets two inches of a night in thorny needles as thick as pins in a paper, growing clean through the hide of ox or man like blood, till their hard-edged leaves met resistance, when, turning flat side up, they put forth a score for one of the needle bayonets! No escape from them. From shoulder to heel one long, hopeless agony. The fierce sun flaming down, absorbed by the black pall of death! The moon glimmering in pale white rays of splendor through the moth-eaten holes upon the finger and the white tomb-stone! All the day and all the night!
Was it a dream, Captain Brand? No, a frightful reality! Don’t you feel a fresh thorn at every slow pulse of the heart they are aiming at? And don’t you hear those dread croakings of gulls and cormorants flapping in the air, who have left their prey on the reef to join the vultures in their feast on the shore? You may almost catch the grating sounds of the rasping jaws of the sharks as they crowd into the inlet, and rest their cold noses on the shelly cove where you slept!
Flesh and blood, and pinions and beaks can endure it no longer. 299 A cloud of carnivorous birds swoop down at last, snap the black pall in their talons and bills, and fly fighting and screaming away with it. Another cloud, darker than the rest, light upon the body, and while the needle-points pierce the palpitating heart, and the breath flutters on the still clenched lips and nostrils, the eyes are picked out, and the flesh is torn piecemeal, hide strands and all, till nothing is left but a hideous white skeleton, with the long bony finger pointing to the letter L.
The lizards wheetled on the rocks, the alligators lashed the lagoon amid the steaming mist of the mangrove roots; the sharks and birds returned to the reefs, the cocoa-nuts waved their tufted tops, the palms crackled in the shower and gale, and the pure inlet murmured musically on the shelly shore for years and years over and around the deserted key, until the whitened bones crumbled into dust, and were borne away by the four winds of heaven.
The hemp has been tarred and spread, the strands twisted, and the rope laid up. The knots have been turned in between good sailors and bad––between pirates and men-of-war’s-men––and here Harry Gringo hauls down his pennant until his reading crew care again to take a cruise with him in blue water.