She laid hands on Brandon in her haste and fear, urging him into the house. “What’s all this?” said he, holding back. “Why should I go? I’m not afraid of Murch.”
Morgan pulled at his sleeve, the tears running down her face.
“Why, very well,” said Brandon, hastily, “let be, I’ll go. Good-bye.”
He looked at her as he spoke, but I think he never read the glance she gave him. The next moment we were retreating through the house. One of the Wheel of Fortune’s crew stood sentry on a little door opening from the back of the garden; seeing who we were, he let us pass, and we went down towards the sea. The inhabitants, black, white, and brown, were tumbling out of their houses, for fear of the pirates. They passed us, singly and in groups, laden with cooking-pots and bundles, all going to camp in the woods, the children running and crying at their heels. All through the town it was the same; and all the while the bells were hammering in the steeples and the big guns were booming in the castle, and never a sign of a pirate to be seen until we came to the quays; and there was the Wheel of Fortune wreathed in smoke, the great black flag flying at the main. She was firing at the moored ships about her, a dozen or more merchant bottoms, and three or four were firing in return, while puffs of smoke kept breaking from the walls of the stone forts at the harbour mouth. A sea-fight is a confused business—masts and sails appearing and disappearing in thickening volumes of smoke, tongued with red flashes, to an intermittent roar of cannon and crash of splintering wood—and the spectator can make but little of it. But, it would appear that Mr Murch, in his bargain with the Governor, had omitted to include the shipping in the harbour. Here was no mock engagement. We could hear the shot strike and see the splinters fly, and here and there a top-mast shut down sideways.
A convenient pile of timber made a shelter against the balls which came ashore now and again, and there we had a little leisure to consider the posture of affairs.
“I don’t understand this girl—this Morgan Leroux,” said Pomfrett.
“Why should you?”
“The girl worries me. Why should she want to come with us—when was it? only yesterday, so it was—and then here she is at Porto-Bello; and now she’ll get us a ship, by her way of it. But I don’t believe she can.”
“Dux femina fecit,” I said.
“Yes, but I don’t like it. Besides, the girl’s a pirate, and the daughter of a pirate. Why is it we can never be rid of pirates, whatever we do? All I want is to sail a straight course in the owners’ interests, and it can’t be done for this mess of pirates,” complained the agent. “All we do is to purvey ships for them.”