'It's an outrage.'
Captain Blood shrugged. 'You may call it that. I call it holding hostages.'
Don Clemente glared at him with increasing malice. 'I must protest. Under constraint…'
'There's no constraint at all. You'll give me your word, or I'll put you in irons. Ye've a free choice. Where's the constraint?'
Then Don Ilario cut in. 'Come, sir, come! This wrangling is monstrously ungracious. You'll pledge your word, sir, or take the consequences.'
And so, for all his bitterness, Don Clemente suffered the reluctant pledge to be wrung from him.
After that, in contrast with his furious departure was Don Ilario's gracious leave–taking when they were about to lower his day–bed in slings to the waiting barge. He and Captain Blood parted with mutual compliments and expressions of goodwill, which it was perfectly understood should nowise hinder the active hostility imposed by duty upon Don Ilario once the armistice were at an end.
Blood smiled as he watched the red barge with its trailing flag ploughing with flash of oars across the harbour towards the mole. Some of the lesser boats went with it. Others, laden with fruit and vegetables, fresh meat and fish, remained on the flank of the San Felipe, little caring, in their anxiety to trade their wares, that she might be a pirate.
Wolverstone, the one–eyed giant who had shared Blood's escape from Barbados and had since been one of his closest associates, leaned beside him on the bulwarks. 'Ye'll not be trusting overmuch, I hope, to the word of that flabby, blue–faced Governor?'
'It's hateful, so it is, to be by nature suspicious, Ned. Hasn't he pledged himself, and would ye do him the wrong to suspect his bona fides? I cry shame on you, Ned; but all the same we'll be removing temptation from him, so we will, by fortifying ourselves on the island here.'