«I give you best,» he said to Hagthorpe and Yberville. «And the least I can do, by way of amends for having suffered myself to be so utterly fooled, is to forgo my share of the booty.» And then, on a graver note: «What did you do with Don Domingo?»
«I would have shot him for his perfidy!» said Hagthorpe fiercely. «But Yberville here — Yberville, of all men — turned mawkish, and besought me to let him go.»
Shamefacedly the young Frenchman hung his head, avoiding the Captain's glance of questioning surprise.
«Oh, but after all,» he flung out, defiant almost in self–defence, «what would you? There was a lady in the case — his little Indian wife.»
«Faith, now, it was of her that I was thinking,» said Blood. «And for her sake and his — oh, and also for our own — it will be best to tell Brazo Largo that Don Domingo and his wife were slain in the fight for the gold. The sight of the recovered water–casks will amply confirm the story. Thus there should be peace for all concerned, himself included.»
And so, although they brought back that rich booty from Santa Maria, Blood's part in that transaction was rated as one of his few failures. Not so, however, did he himself account it.
VII — THE LOVE STORY OF JEREMY PITT
The love–story of Jeremy Pitt, the young Somerset–shire shipmaster, whose fate had been linked with Peter Blood's since the disastrous night of Sedgemoor, belongs to the later days of Blood's career as a buccaneer, to the great days when he commanded a fleet of five ships and over a thousand men of mixed nationality, held in a discipline to which his skill and good fortune made them willing to submit.
He had lately returned from a very successful raid upon the Spanish pearling fleet in the Rio de la Hache. He had come back to Tortuga to refit, and this not before it was necessary. There were several other buccaneer vessels in the harbour of Cayona at the time, and the little town was boisterous with their revelry. Its taverns and rum–shops throve, whilst the taverners and the women, white and half–castes, as mixed in origin and nationality as the buccaneers themselves, eased the rovers of a good deal of the plunder of which they had eased the Spaniards, who, again, were seldom better than robbers.
Usually these were unquiet times for Monsieur d'Ogeron, the agent of the French West India Company and Governor of Tortuga.