But Staunton stood unmoved.
“Madman, would you thus repay me for the life I saved?” he asked, calmly.
“A curse on you for having saved it,” answered the pirate, fiercely, returning his sword, which he had half drawn from its scabbard. “My hand, however, shall not do the deed. Here, Antonio Diogo, here are the spies who wish to interfere in our trade, and would send us all to prison, or to the gallows, if they could catch us.”
“The end of a rope and a dance on nothing for the officer, say I,” answered the mulatto mate. “See what his followers will do; speak to them in their own lingo, captain, and ask them whether they choose to walk overboard or join us.”
While he was speaking, some of the crew brought aft the two British seamen, with their hands lashed behind them. Others, headed by Antonio, immediately seized Captain Staunton, and led him to the gangway, one of the men running aloft to reeve a rope through the studding-sail sheet-block on the main-yard. Staunton well knew what the preparations meant, but he trembled not; his whole anxiety was for the boats’ crews he had led in the expedition which had ended so unfortunately, and for the two poor fellows whose lives, he feared, were about also to be sacrificed by the miscreants.
The British seamen watched what was going forward, and by the convulsive workings of their features, and the exertions they were making to free their arms, were evidently longing to strike a blow to rescue him. Daggerfeldt was better able to confront them than he had been to face Staunton.
“You are seamen belonging to a man-of-war outside this river, and you came here to interfere with our affairs?”
“You’ve hit it to an affigraphy, my bo’,” answered one of the men, glad, at all events, to get the use of his tongue. “We belongs to her Majesty’s brig ‘Sylph,’ and we came into this here cursed hole to take you or any other slaver we could fall in with; and now you knows what I am, I’ll just tell you what you are—a runaway scoundrel of a piccarooning villain, whom no honest man would consort with, or even speak to, for that matter, except to give him a bit of his mind; and if you’re not drowned, or blown up sky high, you’ll be hung, as you deserve, as sure as you’re as big a rascal as ever breathed. Now, put that in your pipe, my bo’, and smoke it.”
While he was thus running on, to the evident satisfaction of his shipmate, who, indifferent to their danger, seemed mightily to enjoy the joke, Daggerfeldt in vain endeavoured to stop him.
“Silence!” he shouted, “or you go overboard this moment!”