"Yes," replied the ruffian, grinding his fanglike teeth, "and may every danger dog them in this world with damnation in that to come—if so be, as the parsons say, there is another."
"A charitable wish!" said Haystone; "if this spirit animates you, we may perhaps arrive at the truth."
"Perhaps," sneered the ruffian.
"Then who were they?"
"Well, I suppose I may as well make a clean breast of it. They were Frenchmen from Martinique."
"And you served them?"
"Poor devils must do queer things sometimes."
"You—a deserter?" continued Haystone furiously.
"I defy you or any man to prove that I deserted," said the fellow sullenly. "I was lying out on the foreyard-arm of the admiral's ship, in a night when it was blowing a stiff breeze, and we were ordered to reef topsails. I fell away to leeward and dropped into the sea, when we were close to St. Lucia. The ship never lay-to, but the lieutenant of the watch tossed a hen-coop over to me, and with its aid I got ashore and was made prisoner by the Johnnie Crapauds, as you might have been had the misfortune been yours. But I was a pressed man, and no doubt may be marked as having run on the purser's books. I was sent in irons to Martinique. There a French officer, whose wife was a prisoner here, stated that he wished to set her free, though, as I have since thought, it was to punish her, as an enemy of the Republic and a spy of the British Government, for I had heard she had become both."
"The Colonel de Rouvigny?" said I.