Pitt had heard him, as we hear things in our dreams. At the moment so spent was he by his cruel punishment, and so deep was the despair into which he had fallen, that he no longer cared whether he lived or died.
Soon, however, from the partial stupor which pain had mercifully induced, a new variety of pain aroused him. The stocks stood in the open under the full glare of the tropical sun, and its blistering rays streamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt as if flames of fire were searing it. And, soon, to this was added a torment still more unspeakable. Flies, the cruel flies of the Antilles, drawn by the scent of blood, descended in a cloud upon him.
Small wonder that the ingenious Colonel Bishop, who so well understood the art of loosening stubborn tongues, had not deemed it necessary to have recourse to other means of torture. Not all his fiendish cruelty could devise a torment more cruel, more unendurable than the torments Nature would here procure a man in Pitt’s condition.
The slave writhed in his stocks until he was in danger of breaking his limbs, and writhing, screamed in agony.
Thus was he found by Peter Blood, who seemed to his troubled vision to materialize suddenly before him. Mr. Blood carried a large palmetto leaf. Having whisked away with this the flies that were devouring Jeremy’s back, he slung it by a strip of fibre from the lad’s neck, so that it protected him from further attacks as well as from the rays of the sun. Next, sitting down beside him, he drew the sufferer’s head down on his own shoulder, and bathed his face from a pannikin of cold water. Pitt shuddered and moaned on a long, indrawn breath.
“Drink!” he gasped. “Drink, for the love of Christ!” The pannikin was held to his quivering lips. He drank greedily, noisily, nor ceased until he had drained the vessel. Cooled and revived by the draught, he attempted to sit up.
“My back!” he screamed.
There was an unusual glint in Mr. Blood’s eyes; his lips were compressed. But when he parted them to speak, his voice came cool and steady.
“Be easy, now. One thing at a time. Your back’s taking no harm at all for the present, since I’ve covered it up. I’m wanting to know what’s happened to you. D’ ye think we can do without a navigator that ye go and provoke that beast Bishop until he all but kills you?”
Pitt sat up and groaned again. But this time his anguish was mental rather than physical.
“I don’t think a navigator will be needed this time, Peter.”
“What’s that?” cried Mr. Blood.
Pitt explained the situation as briefly as he could, in a halting, gasping speech. “I’m to rot here until I tell him the identity of my visitor and his business.”
Mr. Blood got up, growling in his throat. “Bad cess to the filthy slaver!” said he. “But it must be contrived, nevertheless. To the devil with Nuttall! Whether he gives surety for the boat or not, whether he explains it or not, the boat remains, and we’re going, and you’re coming with us.”
“You’re dreaming, Peter,” said the prisoner. “We’re not going this time. The magistrates will confiscate the boat since the surety’s not paid, even if when they press him Nuttall does not confess the whole plan and get us all branded on the forehead.”
Mr. Blood turned away, and with agony in his eyes looked out to sea over the blue water by which he had so fondly hoped soon to be travelling back to freedom.
The great red ship had drawn considerably nearer shore by now. Slowly, majestically, she was entering the bay. Already one or two wherries were putting off from the wharf to board her. From where he stood, Mr. Blood could see the glinting of the brass cannons mounted on the prow above the curving beak-head, and he could make out the figure of a seaman in the forechains on her larboard side, leaning out to heave the lead.
An angry voice aroused him from his unhappy thoughts.
“What the devil are you doing here?”
The returning Colonel Bishop came striding into the stockade, his negroes following ever.
Mr. Blood turned to face him, and over that swarthy countenance – which, indeed, by now was tanned to the golden brown of a half-caste Indian – a mask descended.
“Doing?” said he blandly. “Why, the duties of my office.”
The Colonel, striding furiously forward, observed two things. The empty pannikin on the seat beside the prisoner, and the palmetto leaf protecting his back. “Have you dared to do this?” The veins on the planter’s forehead stood out like cords.
“Of course I have.” Mr. Blood’s tone was one of faint surprise.
“I said he was to have neither meat nor drink until I ordered it.”
“Sure, now, I never heard ye.”
“You never heard me? How should you have heard me when you weren’t here?”
“Then how did ye expect me to know what orders ye’d given?” Mr. Blood’s tone was positively aggrieved. “All that I knew was that one of your slaves was being murthered by the sun and the flies. And I says to myself, this is one of the Colonel’s slaves, and I’m the Colonel’s doctor, and sure it’s my duty to be looking after the Colonel’s property. So I just gave the fellow a spoonful of water and covered his back from the sun. And wasn’t I right now?”
“Right?” The Colonel was almost speechless.
“Be easy, now, be easy!” Mr. Blood implored him. “It’s an apoplexy ye’ll be contacting if ye give way to heat like this.”
The planter thrust him aside with an imprecation, and stepping forward tore the palmetto leaf from the prisoner’s back.
“In the name of humanity, now….” Mr. Blood was beginning.
The Colonel swung upon him furiously. “Out of this!” he commanded. “And don’t come near him again until I send for you, unless you want to be served in the same way.”
He was terrific in his menace, in his bulk, and in the power of him. But Mr. Blood never flinched. It came to the Colonel, as he found himself steadily regarded by those light-blue eyes that looked so arrestingly odd in that tawny face – like pale sapphires set in copper – that this rogue had for some time now been growing presumptuous. It was a matter that he must presently correct. Meanwhile Mr. Blood was speaking again, his tone quietly insistent.
“In the name of humanity,” he repeated, “ye’ll allow me to do what I can to ease his sufferings, or I swear to you that I’ll forsake at once the duties of a doctor, and that it’s devil another patient will I attend in this unhealthy island at all.”
For an instant the Colonel was too amazed to speak. Then –
“By God!” he roared. “D’ye dare take that tone with me, you dog? D’ye dare to make terms with me?”
“I do that.” The unflinching blue eyes looked squarely into the Colonel’s, and there was a devil peeping out of them, the devil of recklessness that is born of despair.
Colonel Bishop considered him for a long moment in silence. “I’ve been too soft with you,” he said at last. “But that’s to be mended.” And he tightened his lips. “I’ll have the rods to you, until there’s not an inch of skin left on your dirty back.”
“Will ye so? And what would Governor Steed do, then?”
“Ye’re not the only doctor on the island.”
Mr. Blood actually laughed. “And will ye tell that to his excellency, him with the gout in his foot so bad that he can’t stand? Ye know very well it’s devil another doctor will he tolerate, being an intelligent man that knows what’s good for him.”
But the Colonel’s brute passion thoroughly aroused was not so easily to be baulked. “If you’re alive when my blacks have done with you, perhaps you’ll come to your senses.”
He swung to his negroes to issue an order. But it was never issued. At that moment a terrific rolling thunderclap drowned his voice and shook the very air. Colonel Bishop jumped, his negroes jumped with him, and so even did the apparently imperturbable Mr. Blood. Then the four of them stared together seawards.
Down in the bay all that could be seen of the great ship, standing now within a cable’s-length of the fort, were her topmasts thrusting above a cloud of smoke in which she was enveloped. From the cliffs a flight of startled seabirds had risen to circle in the blue, giving tongue to their alarm, the plaintive curlew noisiest of all.
As those men stared from the eminence on which they stood, not yet understanding what had taken place, they saw the British Jack dip from the main truck and vanish into the rising cloud below. A moment more, and up through that cloud to replace the flag of England soared the gold and crimson banner of Castile. And then they understood.