With no further preface, Andy repeated the disjointed tale Ba, the colored man, had gradually revealed: how the Herculean negro had escaped from the jail in Nassau, how he had been carried away to Nassau practically a prisoner by Captain Bassett, how he and Nickolas and Thomas had been sent to steal the great pink pearl from King Cajou, how Ba had actually seen the jewel and was lashed so cruelly, and the unsolved mystery of what came after in Ba’s escape and the disappearance of the other conspirators.
When he had finished, there was no immediate response from the man who presumably had sent two men to their death at the hands of an African cannibal—no denial. But Captain Bassett’s cigar had gone out. The Englishman at last drew a match on the arm of his chair. As it flared up at the end of his cigar, the observant boy thought he could make out a smile on the strong face of the accused man. Then it was dark and silent again.
“This nigger, Cajou,” came at last through the half dark night from Captain Bassett’s chair—and in a voice devoid of either guilt or innocence—“is more than you have been told. So far as I know, I am the only white man who has visited his island and come away again. He is a king, in a way. He is also the best type of the pure blood African as he exists in our island world. How he came to be on Timbado, no one knows. Nor how he made about himself a settlement of others of his kind. You can find bits of old savagery in similar people on some of the other ‘out islands.’ But on Timbado, in Cajou’s realm (if you can call it that), there no doubt exist practices that you can find nowhere else but on the Congo.”
“Cannibals?” interrupted Andy, drawing his chair forward.
“Among other things,” replied the speaker, “but, of course, only by report. We can imagine the rest. Also, by report, they are wreckers and pirates in a small way. By my own experience, I know they are thieves—Cajou an artful one.”
“Six years ago,” went on Captain Bassett, “in an expedition such as I have made here, I visited the southern reefs of the Smaller Bank, north of Cajou’s island. As I told you, I am a fruit and sisal hemp grower on Andros. But, like everyone in the Bahamas, in the off season, I utilize my men sponging. And, as you will soon learn, sponging means possible pearls. Like the gold prospector in other lands, we Bahamans love to seek the unknown waters where always there is the possibility that we never quite realize—the Koh-i-noor of pearls; the perfect pink pearl that is to make us fortune and fame.”
“I understand,” assented the boy.
“As you can see,” continued the Englishman, “it isn’t an unideal fancy. Even here, in this beautiful cove, there is such a chance—” and the boy could almost see a smile. “But six years ago, idling as now in about the same kind of a sleepy place, I got my first sight of Cajou. In a leaky old ‘sponger,’ crowded with a cargo of half-naked subjects, he did us the honor of calling on us.”
“What’d he look like?” broke in the entranced lad.
“Anything but a king,” went on the Englishman. “He was certainly eighty years old, gray haired and thin, but not bent. He was stripped to the waist, his skin was oiled, and around his bony neck was a necklace of bits of pink conch shell. He also carried a spear that must have come from Africa.”