The planter waved the matter aside. Almost it seemed to offend him.
“Tush! Tush! After this splendid deed of yours, do you suppose I can be thinking of such things?”
“I'm glad ye feel like that about it. But I'm thinking it's mighty lucky for me the Spaniards didn't come to-day instead of yesterday, or it's in the same plight as Jeremy Pitt I'd be this minute. And in that case where was the genius that would have turned the tables on these rascally Spaniards?”
“Why speak of it now?”
Mr. Blood resumed: “ye'll please to understand that I must, Colonel, darling. Ye've worked a deal of wickedness and cruelty in your time, and I want this to be a lesson to you, a lesson that ye'll remember—for the sake of others who may come after us. There's Jeremy up there in the round-house with a back that's every colour of the rainbow; and the poor lad'll not be himself again for a month. And if it hadn't been for the Spaniards maybe it's dead he'd be by now, and maybe myself with him.”
Hagthorpe lounged forward. He was a fairly tall, vigorous man with a clear-cut, attractive face which in itself announced his breeding.
“Why will you be wasting words on the hog?” wondered that sometime officer in the Royal Navy. “Fling him overboard and have done with him.”
The Colonel's eyes bulged in his head. “What the devil do you mean?” he blustered.
“It's the lucky man ye are entirely, Colonel, though ye don't guess the source of your good fortune.”
And now another intervened—the brawny, one-eyed Wolverstone, less mercifully disposed than his more gentlemanly fellow-convict.