“Fools,” said Sagesse.
“Perhaps so, but, all the same, I doubt if I would have cared to meddle with it myself. People said it was the Devil’s treasure and that it was well-guarded—I am not so sure that they were fools either. I know Monsieur le Capitaine, you are sceptical on these points, but I have seen bad effects following upon money got by force and blood and inherited. Anyhow, the money of Simon Serpente I would not have touched. Dieu! the things that man was credited with I would not speak of, even before you, and so he went through life till all at once he gave up pirating. It was a most extraordinary ending to his piracy too, for he fell foul of Laropé off Matanzas. Laropé, you must know, was a brother pirate, his ship was the Golden-Shell, Serpente’s ship was the Puerto Mexico, both ships had been chasing a brigantine when Serpente signalled Laropé to haul off, that the prize was his, as he had sighted it first; Laropé refused, and the next thing he knew, was that his maintop mast had been shot away.
“Then, forgetting the brigantine, the two pirates closed. It was off Matanzas and the shore was crowded with people watching, they said that the guns could be heard at Havana, the wind being from the east. The upshot was that Serpente laid the Puerto Mexico alongside the Golden-Shell, boarded her, put every man to death and hanged Laropé from his own main yard for a pirate.
“Then Serpente, leaving the Golden-Shell to float derelict, sailed away in the direction of Cape Sable. He never hoisted the black flag again and the next thing we hear about him is that he turned his ship into a slaver. Turned respectable, so to speak.
“Men no longer feared him so much now. They said that if he was really a devil he would not have turned over a new leaf. They began to remember his crimes and a movement was set on foot against him.
“He heard this, but he did not seem to mind, putting it down most likely, to idle talk, till one day definite news came to him as he was leaving the American coast with a cargo of slaves that a corvette was out against him and that when he was caught he would be hanged.
“Surely enough, two days out from port, he sighted a corvette and she chased him. The Puerto Mexico could give heels to anything in those waters, and by sundown the corvette was only showing her topsails above the horizon and by next dawn she was gone; but Serpente knew that all was over with him in these seas. The Devil had branded him with such a face and form that he could not hope to hide himself, so he perhaps made sail for that island of his where he had placed his treasure—at all events he was never seen again.”
“Ah, Mon Dieu!” suddenly cried Gaspard. He rose to his feet and went over to the picture on the wall.
Of a sudden it had flashed upon him where he had seen the frame-work of that face, that contorted form—the hideous skull on the island, the bones, could they have been the remains of Simon Serpente?
The thing seemed madly improbable, till across his mind flashed the vision of the pouch and belt, with the initials S. S. on the buckle.