"Now have them hanged. Tell them to string up the corpses! Fire away, comrades! I want to see them dancing at the end of their ropes when I come back from my wife. The queen awaits me! Here's her health, comrades!"
They touched glasses noisily, singing until they had escorted him to the ladder; then they returned and immediately set to work upon the loathsome business which Rolleston had judged necessary to terrorize the distant crowd of marauders. Their jeers and exclamations enabled Simon to follow the sickening incidents of their labours. The dead were hanged, with head or feet downwards alternately, from everything that projected from the ship's deck or its surroundings; and flagstaffs were stuck between their arms, with a blood-soaked rag floating from each.
Simon's turn was approaching. A few dead bodies at most divided him from the executioners, whose hoarse breathing he could hear. This time nothing could save him. Whether he was hanged, or stabbed the moment they saw that he was still alive, the issue was inevitable.
He would have made no attempt to escape, if the thought of Isabel and Rolleston's threats had not exasperated him. He reflected that at that moment Rolleston, the drunkard and maniac, was with the girl who for years had been the object of his desire. What could she do against him? Captive and bound, she was a prey vanquished beforehand.
Simon growled with rage. He contracted his muscles in the impossible hope of bursting his bonds. The period of waiting suddenly became intolerable; and he preferred to draw upon himself the anger of all those brutes and to risk a fight which might at least give him a chance of safety. And would not his safety mean Isabel's release?
Something unexpected, the sensation of a touch that was not brutal but, on the contrary, furtive and cautious, gently persuaded him to silence. A hand behind his back was untying his hands and removing the ropes which held him bound against the mast, while an almost inaudible voice whispered in his ear:
"Not a movement! . . . Not a word! . . ."
The cloth around his head was slowly withdrawn. The voice continued:
"Behave as if you were one of the gang. . . . No one is thinking about you. . . . Do as they do. . . . And, above all, no hesitation!"
Simon obeyed without turning round. Two executioners, not far away, were picking up a corpse. Sustained by the thought that nothing must disgust him if he meant to rescue Isabel, he joined them and helped them to carry their burden and hang it from one of the iron davits.