“Si, si!” exclaimed the young Spaniard, as if comprehending what was going on—“Somos contentos—todos, todos!” and he looked round, like a prince, on his fellow—culprits. A low murmuring, “Si, si—contento, contento!” passed amongst the group.
“The accused, please your honours, are willing to trust to my correctness.”
“Pray, Mr Cringle, don’t make yourself the advocate of these men, mind that,” said the—, lawyer sans wig.
“I don’t intend it, sir,” I said, slightly stung; “but if you had suffered what I have done at their hands, peradventure such a caution to you would have been unnecessary.”
The sarcasm told, I was glad to see; but remembering where I was, I hauled but of action with the man of words, simply giving the last shot “I am sure no English gentleman would willingly throw any difficulty in the way of the poor fellows being made aware of what is given in evidence against them, bad as they may be.”
He was about rejoining, for a lawyer would as soon let you have the last word as a sweep or a baker the wall, when the officer of court approached and swore me in, and the trial proceeded.
The whole party were proved by fifty witnesses to have been taken in arms on board of the schooners in the Cove; and farther, it was proved that no commission or authority to cruise whatsoever was found on board any of them, a strong proof that they were pirates.
“Que dice, que dice?” enquired the young Spaniard already mentioned.
I said that the court seemed to infer, and were pressing it on the jury, that the absence of any commission or letter of marque from a superior officer, or from any of the Spanish authorities, was strong evidence that they were marauders—in fact pirates.
“Ah!” he exclaimed; “gracias, gracias!” Then, with an agitated hand, he drew from his bosom a parchment, folded like the manifest of a merchant ship, and at the same moment the gruff fierce-looking elderly man did the same, with another similar instrument from his own breast.