“It is Simon Serpente.”
“Who was he?”
“What! you have never heard of Simon Serpente—ah, but I forgot, you are, no doubt, fresh to the West Indies. Well, monsieur, Simon Serpente was a devil—He was a man all the same—”
Here Sagesse nodded as though he knew all about Simon Serpente.
“But,” continued Jaques, “he was all the same a devil. We have had a good many devils in these parts in the old days, but Simon out-Heroded them all. He was one of the last of the pirates and the worst. Kidd, Horne, Singleton were not so bad as him. What do you say, Monsieur le Capitaine?”
“O, from all accounts he was a tough man,” said Sagesse. “I’ve never held with these cut-throat scoundrels, if they’d lived in my day I’d have rooted them out if I’d been in power. The government could have done it then, only they were bribed. Don’t tell me, the governors in those days grew fat on pirates.”
“That is true,” said Jaques, “and Serpente kept his head out of the noose more than once by gilding it, all the same, Serpente was feared for himself, they said he was not a man, they said that no one could kill him and that when he departed this life he would have to die by his own hand, people imagined that he brought bad luck to anyone who crossed his path or at whom he looked crookedly.”
“All that is women’s talk,” said Sagesse, “there is no such thing as bad luck—or devil for the matter of that—go on.”
“Well,” said Jaques, “if there is no such thing as bad luck, at all events, Serpente did not bring good luck and he got such a name for being the Devil himself that he made men frightened of him, even the fellows of his own stamp.
“He’d been pirating for years and he’d made a very large fortune, no one knew where he had hidden it, wind got about that he had an island of his own somewhere in the Caribbean but no one ever tried to find it, for, I tell you quite plainly, that had his treasure been lying on the beach down there, people would have let it lie—”