“But it is not true!” Don Audre Ruiz cried, his face lighting. He whirled to confront the other caballeros. “Friends, promise me this last request—have your people make up a purse and ransom this soldier,” he said. “He has been the friend of Don Diego Vega for years. We used to smile at that peculiar friendship, but now I can understand. The sergeant, also, is a man of parts, and Don Diego realized it while we were blind. A last handshake, and then—”
They surged toward him, and Barbados and his men stepped back to the door and waited. There was an evil grin on the face of the pirate chief again. The gods of chance were working in his favor, he felt, when they had delivered this caballero into his hands for his evil purposes.
“Come, señor!” he ordered. “It is not gentlemanly to keep my men waiting long for their fun.”
Don Audre Ruiz shook the hands of his friends for the last time and turned away. They led him out and closed and barred the door again. They conducted him through the front room and into the open, first binding his hands behind his back.
“If you are a human being, let me see Fray Felipe,” Don Audre said.
“I’ll have him beside the stake,” Barbados promised. “He can mumble over you all he likes.”
Some of the pirates were shouting the news of what was to occur. Men came running from every direction, shouting and laughing and waving bottles, determined to see how a caballero could die. Women and children hurried from their huts.
The stake was ready, for it often had been used before, both for prisoners and pirates. It was a favorite method Barbados had of punishing traitors and those he deemed guilty of breaking some of the many laws he laid down. It stood near the sea, a long metal bar upright in the soil, the débris of many fires scattered around it and half buried in the shifting sand.
Already some of the men were hurrying toward the stake with fuel. The women and children were shrieking insults at the condemned man. But Don Audre Ruiz held his head proudly, and his lips were curled in scorn. Only the unusual pallor in his face told that there was a tumult of emotions within his breast.
They lashed him to the stake and made his body fast there with ropes and leather thongs. One chain they wrapped around him to hold him fast after the ropes had been burned away. Women spat at him, children hurled at him small stones and scoops of sand. The pirates danced around him like savages, waving wine bottles and brandishing their cutlasses.