“Oh yes! Your officer. What was he up to? What trouble did you people come to make here, anyhow?”
“Do you think they tell a boat’s crew? Go and ask our officer. He went up the gully and our coxswain got the jumps. He says to me: ‘You are lightfooted, Sam,’ says he; ‘you just creep round the head of the cove and see if our boat can be seen across from the other side.’ Well, I couldn’t see anything. That was all right. But I thought I would climb a little higher amongst the rocks....”
He paused drowsily.
“That was a silly thing to do,” remarked Peyrol in an encouraging voice.
“I would’ve sooner expected to see an elephant inland than a craft lying in a pool that seemed no bigger than my hand. Could not understand how she got there. Couldn’t help going down to find out—and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back with my head tied up, in a bunk in this kennel of a cabin here. Why couldn’t you have given me a hail and engaged me properly, yardarm to yardarm? You would have got me all the same, because all I had in the way of weapons was the clasp-knife which you have looted off me.”
“Up on the shelf there,” said Peyrol, looking round. “No, my friend, I wasn’t going to take the risk of seeing you spread your wings and fly.”
“You need not have been afraid for your tartane. Our boat was after no tartane. We wouldn’t have taken your tartane for a gift. Why, we see them by dozens every day—those tartanes.”
Peyrol filled the two mugs again. “Ah,” he said, “I dare say you see many tartanes, but this one is not like the others. You a sailor—and you couldn’t see that she was something extraordinary.”
“Hellfire and gunpowder!” cried the other. “How can you expect me to have seen anything. I just noticed that her sails were bent before your club hit me on the head.” He raised his hands to his head and groaned. “Oh lord, I feel as though I had been drunk for a month.”
Peyrol’s prisoner did look somewhat as though he had got his head broken in a drunken brawl. But to Peyrol his appearance was not repulsive. The rover preserved a tender memory of his freebooter’s life with its lawless spirit and its spacious scene of action, before the change in the state of affairs in the Indian Ocean, the astounding rumours from the outer world, made him reflect on its precarious character. It was true that he had deserted the French flag when quite a youngster; but at that time that flag was white; and now it was a flag of three colours. He had known the practice of liberty, equality and fraternity as understood in the haunts, open or secret, of the Brotherhood of the Coast. So the change, if one could believe what people talked about, could not be very great. The rover had also his own positive notions as to what these three words were worth. Liberty—to hold your own in the world if you could. Equality—yes! But no body of men ever accomplished anything without a chief. All this was worth what it was worth. He regarded fraternity somewhat differently. Of course brothers would quarrel amongst themselves; it was during a fierce quarrel that flamed up suddenly in a company of Brothers that he had received the most dangerous wound of his life. But for that Peyrol nursed no grudge against anybody. In his view the claim of the Brotherhood was a claim for help against the outside world. And here he was sitting opposite a Brother whose head he had broken on sufficient grounds. There he was across the table looking dishevelled and dazed, uncomprehending and aggrieved, and that head of his proved as hard as ages ago when the nickname of Testa Dura had been given to him by a Brother of Italian origin on some occasion or other, some butting match no doubt; just as he, Peyrol himself, was known for a time on both sides of the Mozambique Channel as Poigne-de-Fer, after an incident when in the presence of the Brothers he played at arm’s length with the windpipe of an obstreperous negro sorcerer with an enormous girth of chest. The villagers brought out food with alacrity, and the sorcerer was never the same man again. It had been a great display.