“Well,” said Jude, “let’s get the mudhook up and put out right away. They won’t have the face to chase us.”
“Yes,” said Satan, “and leave them to hunt the island and find the cache! They’d lift the stuff to the last tin of beef. They’ve seen us ashore among the bushes. You shouldn’t have gone ashore.”
“I went to see we hadn’t left no traces.”
“Traces be damned! Cark wants no traces. Once he starts to hunt, he’ll turn the durned island upside down and shake it. He’ll say to himself, ‘What were they doin’ here, anyway; what were they pokin’ about them bushes for?’ No, we’ve got to sit here till he goes, and that’ll be this time next year, maybe.”
“What’s the name of his schooner?” asked Ratcliffe.
“The Juan Bango,” replied Satan, “named after the tobacco company people. Look, they’re gettin’ a boat off. That’s Sellers, and he’s comin’ aboard.”
Then he collapsed, squatting under the bulwarks. “Guy them,” said he to Jude. “Tell them I’m down with smallpox: that’ll make them shove.”
“Leave ’em to me,” said Jude.
It was Matt Sellers right enough, a big wheezy man suggestive of Tammany Hall, but a sure-enough sailor in practice. “The biggest blackguard on the coast” was his subsidiary title. He was the henchman of Carquinez. His career was not without interest and romance of a sort. It was he who had bought, with the money of Carquinez, the bones of the Isidore, wrecked against the sheer cliffs by the black strand of Martinique. Ten thousand dollars in gold coin she had on board her, and he salved them. That was a straight job, and a wonderful bit of work, taking it all together. It was a curiosity, too, because it was straight.
The crooked jobs of Matt Sellers would have filled a book.