"Yes, that is his name. He promised to pay me handsomely, if I, with a few others, would work a little schooner, Les Droits de l'Homme, from St. Pierre to Barbadoes. I hoped to make my escape and volunteered to serve him. She was a queer craft we manned; low in the water, with raking masts, a fast sailer; painted white on one side and black on the other, for she had been fitted out by some of the pirates on the Spanish main. Howsoever, it seemed better to be aboard o' her, than to work like a slave among French niggers at the new batteries of St. Pierre. We reached Barbadoes. The schooner, with American colours flying, came to an anchor in a lonely bight about six miles off; but kept close in shore among the weeds and dwarf mangroves; and then we—that is, Monsieur Rouvigny, three negroes, and I—came off here, in a kind of punt, they call a piragua.
"Three negroes," said I; "there was but one with you—-old Benoit le Noir."
"The others were squatted under the plaintains at the mouth of the gulley."
"Well—proceed."
"If the colonel got clear off with his pretty wife, I was to get a hundred francs and my liberty; but I got mightily disgusted with his French lingo—his parleyvooing and his hat-off nonsense, which we Englishmen never like——"
"We—speak for yourself Mr. Knuckleduster," said Haystone.
"I wish to tell you all about it, just as it happened."
"How delightfully disengenuous!" said Haystone, with contempt; "though we cannot place over-much reliance on what a scoundrel so thorough-bred may tell, fire-away."
I was on thorns as it were, until the fellow with provoking slowness continued his story. With all his ignorance and brutality of disposition, he was sufficiently acute to perceive how his narrative wrung my heart. He smiled and grimaced as he resumed, and this, in the meantime, was his revenge on me for twice capturing him.
"For two or three days we hung about the villa, hiding in the shrubberies and among the sugar-canes, without finding a good opportunity for nabbing the lady, as she always kept close inside, or if she did come out, was always attended by an old Coromantee nigger, or by our friend the sergeant here—"