The doctor nodded.
“Apropos, docteur, suppose we have a little game of monté afterward at your quarters. I never permit gaming in mine, you know. The padre will not object; and I am confident our compadre, the Tuerto, will be delighted.”
“As you please, captain,” replied the medico, with a cold, indifferent air and averted face. “I will join you in the promenade, and I shall be ready to receive you in the evening.”
“Hasta huego, amigo!” said Captain Brand, as he again stuck his cigar between his teeth, waved his hand in adieu, and walked to his boat.
“You don’t love me, doctor,” thought the pirate. “I don’t fear you, captain,” thought the doctor.
It was a touch of high art the way this notorious pirate pitched the bag of gold toward his coxswain, crying, “Catch that, Pedillo!” and then the almost girlish manner in which he pattered about the beach and held up his trowsers, so that he might not even get his slippers damp. Had that salt water been red blood, he would not have cared if his feet had been soaked in it. And then, too, the little exclamation of joy when he finally stepped into the stern-sheets, and sat down beneath the awning, while he stretched his smooth brown linen legs out on the cushions. Oh, it was certainly a touch of high piratical art!
“The old ‘Centipede’ is looking a little rusty after her late cruise, Pedillo!” throwing his head back to evade a curl of smoke, and casting his cold eyes like a rattle of icy hail at the coxswain. “But I am glad Pedro took your place”––puff, puff––“that knife-stab prevented you, of course”––puff––“and we shall have her all tight and trig again in a day or two.”
“Si, señor!” said Pedillo, respectfully; “and how goes Señor Gibbs, capitano?”
The capitano rolled his icy eyes again at the coxswain, and replied, carelessly, “Why, Pedillo, our friend Gibbs came to see me when the ‘Centipede’ anchored, but almost before”––puff––“he had given me an account of his unfortunate cruise he fell down in a fit. The fact is, however”––puff, puff––“that, what with hard drinking and inflammation which set in on the stump of his lost leg, he has been in a very bad way”––puff––“quite in a dangerous condition indeed, requiring all my old Babette’s care and attention”––puff––“but this morning the good padre went to see him, and he told me a while ago that he left him without fever, and altogether tranquil.”