“But they are not to come back.”
Mr. Vancouver was silent, and his impatience grew. “You will send them into a trap?” I persisted. Again his suspicious scrutiny. “Does the king want them to come back?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But he wants your plan.”
“If they don’t come back,” Mr. Vancouver explained, “Captain Mason will be blamed for not knowing they were to go. Then his power will be gone. The colony will break up.”
The ghastly perfection of the scheme overcame me for a moment, but I must learn what benefits Mr. Vancouver expected from this wholesale sacrifice.
“What do you want of the king?”
“I and my daughter and a young man named Rawley are to be taken care of, and——”
“You mean not killed?”
He writhed and reddened under the question, and under my sullen insistence.
Instead of answering, he hurried on: “I will show the king how to work the gold, silver, copper, diamond, and other mines, and how to make much money out of them. I will make treaties with other countries, and build forts, and make him a strong army. All this has to be done sooner or later, or the island will be taken.”