‘Agreed! You shall have a draft on my Sydney agents, Towns and Co., to-night; I can find an endorser here, before we leave, for the second payment, which I shall have great pleasure in making.’
‘That’s the way I like to do business,’ said Hayston, ‘but if you’ll give me the pleasure of your company to dinner this evening, on board the Leonora, we can talk everything fully over, and fix up the best way to carry this matter out.’
‘The arrangement will suit me very well. We shall be quite private, I know; and there is much to be said and settled before the start.’
After making the round of the chief places of business in the town, and posting letters of more or less importance, Carteret walked down to the beach with Hayston, and was pulled out to the [188] ]Leonora, graceful craft that she was! They were received at the gangway in true man-o’-war fashion, and as the Captain glanced round, with the quick, trained eye of the seaman born to command, Carteret noted that every man was at his place, and the vessel, generally, in exquisite order. The crew, with few exceptions, were islanders, some were half-castes, a few negroes, but all a muscular, daring, resolute lot—the discipline had evidently been strict and unrelaxing.
Going below, the stewards—one a light mulatto, the other a Japanese dressed in his native costume—were apparently just preparing to bring in the dinner. Carteret and the Captain entered a smaller cabin, under a heavy gold-embroidered curtain. This cabin was used as a smoke-room and private audience-chamber. The ornaments and curios suggested many climes and not less desperate adventures. Pistols with silver hilts—Malay krises—swords and daggers—evil-looking spears—South Sea dresses were in evidence, in number almost sufficient to cover the sides of the cabin.
‘I suppose,’ said Carteret, ‘there are stories about some of these weapons, Captain Hayston?’
‘Well! Yes! indeed—about nearly all of them,’ replied Hayston. ‘That krise was nearly making an end of me. I was looking at another man, when the devil of a Malay got close up in the mêlée—it was a pirate junk affair—I was in the Navy of the United States then—(here he sighed). The Malay had just killed a midshipman, poor boy! and was fighting like ten devils, as all Malays do [189] ]when they’re “amok,” when a quartermaster cut him down, and the krise grazed my side.
‘That old silver casket with two handles was full of Spanish doubloons when I first came across it. It belonged to the captain of a slaver—a fellow that had eluded us and the smartest frigates of the British Navy. I was a youngster at the time, and thought the affair great fun. The slaver captain was a Spaniard, accused of enormous cruelties—throwing sick men overboard and all kinds of devilry. We found prisoners chained in the hold, officers and passengers from a merchant ship.’
[190]
]CHAPTER VIII
‘Their last prize,’ continued Hayston, ‘was a dreadful sight! Pah! I can hardly bear to think of it now.’ As he spoke, his face darkened, and a look of rage, concentrated, lurid, pitiless, passed over his features, transforming their whole expression into that of a demon—an avenging Azrael; his whole countenance suddenly passed from a state of smiling, even fascinating courtesy, to that of murderous wrath—deadly, implacable, consuming.