Previous to reaching the villa there occurred an incident which, though it seemed almost trivial at that time, was connected with some very important events.
The heat of the morning was oppressive; repeatedly I fanned my face with my forage-cap or the leaves of the large plants that grew by the highway. The cool umbrageous foliage of a thicket lured me to halt, to fling off my shoulder-belt and sword, and to lie for a time under the shadow of its intertwisted branches. This thicket clothed the steep sides of a gully, at the bottom of which rippled a long inlet, or arm of the sea. It was a lonely spot, haunted only by monkeys that leaped from tree to tree, and by tortoises that crawled upon the shelves of weedy rocks far down below me. The steep and volcanic rifts were covered by wild gourd-vines and those Spanish lemon-trees which usually grow among rocks and stone. Arching over this watery avenue, the depth of which made it seem of inky hue, for the leaves excluded the sky, were the giant date-trees, with their fruit in spiral clusters, the pale-green cedar, the golden orange, and the calibash-tree, with its enormous gourds of the brightest yellow.
I had not been many minutes in this sequestered and luxuriant place before the sounds of voices and of oars fell upon my ear, and then a long, low, half-decked boat, built like an Indian piragua, with her mast, yard, and sail laid flat, shot into the mangrove creek. Three men who were in her laid their oars on board, and by their hands urged their craft along under the luxuriant foliage and mangroves which almost concealed the water whereon they floated, and the long, giant, and wonderful plants that grew upward from the oozy bottom, and were brushed by the keel as it cleft their wavy masses. As these three men passed below me, I could perceive that one was an old negro, the other was attired like a French priest, in a long black coat and shovel hat. The third, who was well armed with pistols and cutlass, notwithstanding a black beard, and the addition of a pair of rings in his ears, I could recognize by his villanous face, his brawny, bull-shaped neck, and his strange oaths, which stirred a terrible cord in memory, to be Dick Knuckleduster.
The Indian suddenly gave the piragua a lurch that nearly capsized it.
"Halloo, Quashi, Snowball, or whatever you call yourself!" bellowed Dick, "d——n your stupid optics! do you mean to send us all to kingdom-come in this stinking hole, all bilge and green leaves?"
"Tonnerre de Ciel!" added the priest fiercely; "mind what you are about, Monsieur Benoit le Noir, or I'll break every bone in your black skin!"
The priest I had no doubt was a French emigrant, but his language made me as doubtful of his sanctity as of his object, which was evidently a secret one, or why all this studious concealment?
"I do right, massa," urged the old negro.
"How should you know whether you do right or not?" growled the Frenchman; "what the devil are you?"
"Me your slave, massa," was the submissive and then common reply.