“Cesar stole the belt?” I stammered out, bewildered.
“And who else? Canallia! He must have been spying on you for days. And he did the whole thing. Absent all day in Barcelona. Traditore! Sold his jacket—to hire a horse. Ha! ha! A good affair! I tell you it was he who set him at us. . . .”
Dominic pointed at the sea, where the guardacosta was a mere dark speck. His chin dropped on his breast.
“. . . On information,” he murmured, in a gloomy voice. “A Cervoni! Oh! my poor brother! . . .”
“And you drowned him,” I said feebly.
“I struck once, and the wretch went down like a stone—with the gold. Yes. But he had time to read in my eyes that nothing could save him while I was alive. And had I not the right—I, Dominic Cervoni, Padrone, who brought him aboard your fellucca—my nephew, a traitor?”
He pulled the oar out of the ground and helped me carefully down the slope. All the time he never once looked me in the face. He punted us over, then shouldered the oar again and waited till our men were at some distance before he offered me his arm. After we had gone a little way, the fishing hamlet we were making for came into view. Dominic stopped.
“Do you think you can make your way as far as the houses by yourself?” he asked me quietly.
“Yes, I think so. But why? Where are you going, Dominic?”
“Anywhere. What a question! Signorino, you are but little more than a boy to ask such a question of a man having this tale in his family. Ah! Traditore! What made me ever own that spawn of a hungry devil for our own blood! Thief, cheat, coward, liar—other men can deal with that. But I was his uncle, and so . . . I wish he had poisoned me—charogne! But this: that I, a confidential man and a Corsican, should have to ask your pardon for bringing on board your vessel, of which I was Padrone, a Cervoni, who has betrayed you—a traitor!—that is too much. It is too much. Well, I beg your pardon; and you may spit in Dominic’s face because a traitor of our blood taints us all. A theft may be made good between men, a lie may be set right, a death avenged, but what can one do to atone for a treachery like this? . . . Nothing.”