“What made you join the Brotherhood, Mr Dawkins?”
“It’s plain to see you’ve never sailed in a merchant bottom, nor yet in the Royal Navy,” replied the buccaneer, with great meaning, “or you wouldn’t ask the question. No, by the bones of the deep, you wouldn’t! What’s the merchant service? Worms in the pork, weevils in the biscuit, no wages, and what there is you’re robbed of. Set a litter of pigs afloat in a coffin, and they’d make better weather of it. Ah, my David, they would so! And talk of the Queen’s Navy—why, there,” said Mr Dawkins, pausing to spit on the floor, “that’s what I think o’ that degraded mess o’ swabs. Lord save you, Cap’n Morgan, you are but young, and the world’s changed since my time; but when I was your age there was but one way of going to sea, any sense, and that was the way of Brotherhood of the Sea, as they called it. Now your namesake, good old Harry Morgan—there was a man!”
“Oh, you sailed under Morgan, did you?”
“Here’s his health, and may you grow to his likeness,” cried Dawkins, filling his glass to the brim and spilling a good deal as he raised it to his lips. “Ah, I sailed under Morgan, and Captain Hansel and Captain Bartholomew Sharp afterwards. Why, I was with Morgan when he took and burned Panama, and that’s a thing not many has lived to brag of—not many, no, no, not many, shipmate.”
Mr Dawkins had reached that stage of intoxication when the patient keeps smiling to himself and repeating the same words over and over.
“Yes,” continued Dawkins, “I was with Cap’n Henry Morgan at the taking of Panama. Ah, the cap’n had all the luck there was on that v’yage, by all accounts.”
“I’ve heard,” said Morgan Leroux, “that Captain Morgan was accused of embezzling the plunder.”
“I never see the end of the exp’dition,” Dawkins answered, shortly. “So I can’t say as to that, you see.” And Brandon nudged me.
“You don’t know, then, what became of the bar silver?” said Morgan. “The cache of bar silver, eh, Mr Dawkins?”
Dawkins stared at the speaker with an expression of amazement that changed to suspicion. His shaggy, rusty brows shut down over his little eyes, his nostrils dilated, he glanced swiftly to left and right, and back again to Morgan’s placid countenance. She was not even looking at him, but was gazing at the lighted candle that stood between them on the table. So they rested a minute or more, the little yellow flame of the candle swaying gently back and forth with the motion of the vessel, lighting Morgan’s high-coloured, straight-browed face of abstraction, and the hairy, lined, mahogany visage, with the little glinting eyes, opposite. Dawkins was labouring with his muddled intelligence, trying hard to think.