“He is the pirate of whom you were speaking last night,” I answered sharply, for I suspected that he was about to attempt further deception with me.
“I must have been drunk indeed to talk about a man of whom I have never heard,” he exclaimed, with a hollow pretence at a laugh.
“Do you mean to tell me that you do not know Morillo, or anything about him?” I demanded angrily. “Now, take time to consider your answer. I want the truth, and the truth I am determined to have by one means or another. You have attempted to deceive me once, beware how you make such an attempt a second time. Now, what do you know of Morillo the pirate?”
“Nothing!” the fellow answered sullenly. But there was a shrinking of himself together, and a sudden grey pallor of the lips, that told how severe a tax upon his courage it was—under the circumstances—to utter the lie.
“Think again!” I said, pulling out my watch. “I will give you five minutes in which to overhaul your memory. If by the end of that time you fail I must endeavour to find means to refresh it.”
“What will you do?” demanded the fellow, with a scowl that entirely failed to conceal the trepidation which my remark had caused him.
I made no reply whatever, but rose, walked to the binnacle, took a squint at the compass, and then a long look aloft as I turned over in my mind the idea that had suggested itself to me, asking myself whether I should be justified in carrying it into action. I believed I now pretty well understood the kind of man I had to deal with; I took him to be a treacherous, unscrupulous, lying scoundrel, and a coward withal,—as indeed such people generally are,—and it was his cowardice that I proposed to play upon in order to extort from him the information I desired to obtain. In a word, my plan was to seize him up and threaten to flog him if he refused to speak. My only difficulty arose from a doubt as to how I ought to proceed in the event of my threat failing to effect the desired result. Should I be justified in actually carrying my threat into execution? For, after all, the fellow really might not know anything about Morillo; his remarks to Black Peter on the previous night might be nothing more than boastful lies. And if they were, all the flogging I might give him could not make him tell that of which he had no knowledge. But somehow I had a conviction that he could tell me a great deal that I should be glad to know, if he only chose; so I finally decided that if he continued contumacious I would risk giving him a stroke or two, being guided in my after conduct by his behaviour under the lash.
By the time that I had fully arrived at this resolution the five minutes’ grace had expired, and I returned to where the fellow still stood, guarded by a Jack with drawn cutlass.
“Well,” I demanded, “which is it to be? Will you speak freely, or must I compel you?”
“I have nothing to say; and I demand to know by what authority I have been kidnapped and brought aboard this accursed schooner?” was the reply.