"Ha!" he exclaimed, whilst his little eyes twinkled with cunning, "now you speak sensibly. What do I propose? This, my friend. We must navigate the schooner to an island and bury the treasure; then head for the shipping highways, and obtain help from any friendly merchantmen we may fall in with. Home with us means the Tortugas. There we shall find the company we need to recover for us what we shall have hidden. We shall come by our own then. But to sail with this treasure on board—without a crew to defend the vessel—by this hand! the first cruiser that sighted us would make a clean sweep, and then, ho, for the hangman, Mr. Rodney!"
How much I relished this scheme you will imagine; but to reason with him would have been mere madness. I knitted my brows and seemed to reflect, and then said, "Well, there is a great deal of plain, good sense in what you say. I certainly see the wisdom of your advice in recommending that we should bury the treasure. Nor must we leave anything on board to convict the ship of her true character."
His greedy eyes sparkled with self-complacency. He tapped his forehead and cried, "Trust to this. There is mind behind this surface. Your plan for releasing the schooner is great; mine for preserving the treasure is great too. You are the sailor, I the strategist; by combining our genius, we shall oppose an invulnerable front to adversity, and must end our days as Princes. Your hand, Paul!"
I laughed and gave him my hand, which he squeezed with many contortions of face and figure; but though I laughed I don't know that I ever so much disliked and distrusted and feared the old leering rogue as at that moment.
"Come!" cried I, jumping up, "let's get about our work." And with that I pulled open a bag of matches, and fell to testing them. They burnt well. The fire ate into them as smoothly as if they had been prepared the day before. They were all of one thickness. I cut them to equal lengths, and fired them and waited watch in hand; one was burnt out two minutes before the other, and each length took about ten minutes to consume. This was good enough to base my calculations upon.
CHAPTER XXI.
WE EXPLODE THE MINES.
I don't design to weary you with a close account of our proceedings. How we opened the main-deck hatch, rigged up tackles, clapping purchases on to the falls, as the capstan was hard frozen and immovable; how we hoisted the powder-barrels on deck and then, by tackles on the foreyard, lowered them over the side; how we filled a number of bags which we found in the forecastle with powder; how we measured the cracks in the ice and sawed a couple of spare studding-sail booms into lengths to serve as beams whereby to poise the barrels and bags; would make but sailor's talk, half of which would be unintelligible and the rest wearisome.
The Frenchman worked hard, and we snatched only half an hour for our dinner. The split that had happened in the ice during the night showed by daylight as a gulf betwixt eight and ten feet wide at the seawards end, thinning to a width of three feet, never less, to where it ended, ahead of the ship, in a hundred cracks in the ice that showed as if a thunderbolt had fallen just there. I looked into this rent, but it was as black as a well past a certain depth, and there was no gleam of water. When we went over the side to roll our first barrel of powder to the spot where we meant to lower it, the Frenchman marched up to the figure of Trentanove, and with no more reverence than a boy would show in throwing a stone at a jackass, tumbled him into the chasm. He then stepped up to the body of the Portuguese boatswain, dragged him to the same fissure, and rolled him into it.