letter L.

Captain Brand meanwhile came on, picking his way through the dense cactus, which lacerated his legs, and sadly tore the remains of his loose canvas. The rain came down in torrents, the thunder growled and crashed as the tropical storm burst over the island; and just as a vivid sheet of forked lightning seemed to stride the crag, and the awful peal that followed shook it to its base, Captain Brand crept for shelter within the cleft of the rock, and sat down to prepare for a more extended research.

He may have been gone twenty minutes; but when he again emerged the rain had ceased, the clouds were breaking away, and the gentle sea-breeze blowing, while Captain Brand looked a thousand years older. He seemed to have borrowed all the million of wrinkles from his compadre, in addition to those he already possessed. The thin lids of his frozen green--now quite solid--eyes had apparently exhaled by intense cold, and left nothing but a stony look of horror.

What caused our brave captain to reel and stagger as he plunged with a bound out into the matted cactus, without his tattered hat, like a wolf flying from the hounds? Had he trodden on a snake, or seen his compadre, or had that white finger waved him away? Yes, all three. But the interview with his one-eyed compadre had shocked him most.

On he came, driving the hot, wet sand before him, toward the Padre Ricardo's chapel. There he paused for breath, though it was only by a spasmodic effort that he could unclose his sheet-white lips, where his sharp teeth had met upon them, and held his mouth together as if he had the lockjaw, while he snorted through his nostrils.

"Ho!" he gasped, "the spying old traitor has sacked the cavern, and the gold must have gone in that launch I saw the night I came over the reef. Ho! the traitor has found the torture I promised him; but I would like to have killed him a little slower."

Here Captain Brand, having regained some few faculties and energy, moved on beyond the church, till he came to the white coral headstone, where he stood still.

It was his last walk on deck or sand! Shading his still horror-stricken eyes by both hands, he glared to seaward.

"Ho, ho! there you are, my Yankee commodore, with that old brig under convoy, and that pretty schooner! Reminds me of my old 'Centipede.' _Bueno!_ there are other 'Centipedes,' and I must begin the world anew. I am not old; here is my strong right arm yet; and who can stop me?"

Captain Brand made these remarks in a loud tone, as if he wanted the whole world to hear him; and as if he had failed in early life, and come to a strong resolution to retrieve his past errors.

As he waved his strong right arm aloft, while, in imagination, blood rained from the blade of his cutlass after cleaving the skull by a blow dealt behind the back of an unsuspecting skipper or mate, suddenly he paused, and the arm fell powerless at his side, where it hung dangling loose like a pirate from a gibbet on a windy night.

He caught sight of the old broken cocoa-nut trunk to which he had hitched the green silk rope, with its noose around his victim's neck, and he endeavored to prevent himself falling to the sand.

"Ho!" he choked out, his jaws rattling like dry bones, "I see it all now. The column was snapped just where the rope was hitched, and the trestle must have been torn to pieces by the hurricane. Ho, ho! That's the way my man escaped, to dog me all over the world. Ho! I have no time to lose; he may be here at any moment."

This was the last connected speech that Captain Brand ever made in this world, or in the world to come, perhaps, for at the last word Paul Darcantel rose in all his revengeful majesty before him. With folded arms he bent his dark, stern eyes upon the pirate, wherein the revenge of twenty years was gleaming with a concentrated power.

"You palsied villain! the oath I took to you, and for which I have been accursed, expired yesterday! I took another myself, when we stood here last together, and I am come to fulfill that oath, and--strike!"

His terrible voice and words came back in an echo from the crag, and they seemed with their intense energy to pierce and shrivel the man before him into sleet. And the pirate would have fallen had not two huge, black, lignum-vitæ paws grappled him about the body, pinioning his arms to his sides as if they had been bolted through and through, while at the same moment another pair of tough, sea-weed flippers wound a lashing round his straight legs, and they laid him gently down on the sandy esplanade.

"The trestle, Banou. And you, Ben, bring the hide strands, the faded old cord, and that black altar-cloth!"

The pirate lay on his back, his eyes wide open--for he could not shut them, since the lids had gone in frost--but the solid balls, light green now in the light, rolled from side to side. He recognized the old apparatus too, though it was in different hands than those of Pedillo and his confederate; and he saw, also, that, though the pale green rope was rotten, yet his knowledge of nautical matters taught him that it yet might bear a taut strain, and that those coils of hide thongs never gave way by any amount of tugging, and he saw as well that they had been recently dipped in grease.

But what was to be done with that rotten, moth-eaten old cloth, which the men used to play monté on on Saturday nights in the sheds, and on which the good padre played _his_ cards likewise in the chapel? It was not to keep the cold air away from him, or shield his half-naked body from the poisonous insects. Then what could it be for?

"Lift him up, men, and when you lash him down, leave only that little finger free!"

Ben Brown squatted himself on a stone beside the bier, and with his cutlass unbuckled and laid on the sand, and sleeves rolled up, began his work as if he had a chafing-mat to make for the dead-eyes of the frigate's lower shrouds, and, though in a hurry, still intended to make a neat job of it. He had a small and rather sharp-pointed marline-spike, too, which he wore habitually, like a talisman, round his neck, and which stood him in hand in the intricate parts of his task.

Taking in at a glance the exact amount of hide stuff he required, he middled the coils, and passing each strand fair and square, his old bronzed arms went backward and forward, under and over--sometimes pricking a little hole by accident in the pirate's own thin hide as he passed the strips by the aid of his marline-spike, but always apologizing in his bluff, rough way, though without squirting tobacco-juice into his victim's face, as did Mr. Gibbs to Jacob Blunt.

"Beg pardon, ye infarnal pirate! but that stick will do ye no harm. It'll heal much sooner than the iron spike one of yer crew drove through both cheeks of my watch-mate when you gagged him on board the brig.

"I say, old nigger, hand us a little more of that slush, will ye? this 'ere strand won't lie flat. Thankee, old darkey! Kitch hold on that lower end, will ye? and draw it square up between his pins, and straighten out that 'ere knee-joint a bit--so fashion.

"I wouldn't hurt ye, you ugly villain, for a chaw of tobaccy.

"Warm work, shipmate! suppose you just toddle down to the boat for that 'ere grafted bottle lyin' in the starn sheets, and bring a tin pot of fresh water with you; the gentleman might be thirsty, you know. _I am_--Benjamin Brown, of Sandy Pint, seaman."

So Benjamin plaited Captain Brand, late of the "Centipede," down on his bier; not a thong too little, or one in the wrong place. A strand between each of his toes, and the big ones turned up in quite an ornamental way, and worked around with a Turk's-head knot.

"Breathin' works all reg'lar, too, no bit of hide bearin' an onequal strain over his bread-basket. Throat and jaw-tackle in fair talkin' order, little finger free; and there, Capting Brand, jist let old Ben reward ye, good for evil, ye child-murdering scoundrel, for the lick your mate gave him with the pistol on the head, by placing this soft pillow of green silk rope under your bare skull. There! a little this side, so as ye can look at your finger, while I pass this broad piece of stuff over your ear. Don't ye look at me, ye infarnal scoundrel, or I'll let this 'ere copper spike slip into one of yer junk-bottle glims!

"Now," continued Ben, "I'll take a spell till the doctor and the old nigger come back."

Ay, the job was done, and the mat over the dead-eyes of the shrouds!

During this neat and seamanlike operation Paul Darcantel wandered away on the tracks of the flying wolf till he came to the cleft in the rock. There he picked up and lighted the torch and stalked on. Presently he came to the stones before the low cavern, and pushed his way in with the blazing torch before him. Had Paul Darcantel had nerves, they would have shaken at what he saw; but having none to shake, he calmly fixed his eyes upon the sight.

There lay the head of the ancient Ignaçio, caught, as he tried to creep out of the treasure-chamber, by the falling of the stone slab. It must have been sudden, for the stump of a paper cigar was still seized in his wrinkled lips, while the snakelike curls twined about his ears, and his wary eye looked out with its usual suspicious intensity, and seemed to throw out a spark of fire in the reflection of the torch. Rising from a coil in a slimy bed of sand before the head was a venomous serpent, with his graceful neck curved into the broad flat head, all like an ebony cane, straight, motionless, and elegant to the curved top--fascinated by that single living orb of the dead man.

The human intruder left this well-matched pair to their own venomous devices, and winding his way on, he soon came to the open door to the vaults. A powerful kick smashed in the door of the dungeon, and while the rusty bolts were still ringing on the stone pavement, Paul Darcantel entered the loathsome chamber.

He saw nothing at first save a few fragments of broken crockery and a rusty metal pot--not even a rat. But flaring the torch down upon the mouldy floor something sparkled in the light. This he snatched, and it was the long-lost locket and chain which had last rested around the baby-boy's neck.

When the doctor strode back to the esplanade of the chapel he found Benjamin Brown and Banou taking a friendly sip out of the tin pot.

"Well, sir," said Ben, as he got on his pins and strapped on his cutlass, "there he is, sir! and as neat a piece of cross-lashing as ever I did. He looks as if he growed there, jist like a hawk-bill turtle a-bilin' in the ship's coppers, only he can't paddle about.

"I did it marciful, too, sir, and tried to convarse with him, in case he had any presents to make to his friends.

"Why, sir, and would you believe it? I offered to pour a drop of grog--mixed or raw--down his tight mouth, but he never had the perliteness to thank me or ax me a question, but only looked wicked at me. Consarn him! if he had only winked, I wouldn't mind it!" said Ben, with much indignation; "but, howsever, I don't b'lieve he's any think to leave or any friends left!"

But Captain Brand, though speechless without being tongue-tied, and unable to wink, still thought. And what did the doctor propose to do with him in case he was not to be stung to death by insects, sand-flies, musquitoes, and what not?

"Lift the trestle for the last time, men, and stand it here over this thick bed of cactus, so as the little finger may touch the letter on this white tomb-stone."

Now Captain Brand's doubts were relieved, and he knew what was coming. Oh ho! ho!

"There! that is right! Now collect stones and rocks, and wall this trestle up solid to the edge of the frame, so that a hurricane can't loosen it."

Big Banou went to work now, and presently his job was done--coral rocks, and loose head-stones of pirates, well packed down with sand, made the sides of the living tomb. Then the black pall was drawn over the body, and they left the pirate to his inevitable doom.

Soon the three executioners reached the Tiger's Trap.

"Banou, take this locket and chain--ah! you know it well--to your young master. Brown, the two thousand dollars will be placed in your and Greenfield's hands for distribution among the schooner's crew; make a good use of it! Tell the commodore that I shall take an old woman we have found here away with me in a stolen fisherman's boat to Manzanillo, and within the year I shall be at home! There! shove off, my lads!"

As the gig skimmed through the Tiger's Trap, Paul Darcantel, with the widow of Ignaçio, sailed out by the Alligator's Mouth, and as they crossed that roaring ledge, the sun sank in its unclouded glory in the west, and the young moon, with its thin pearly crescent, looked timidly down upon the island.

And the night passed, and the next and the next, with scorching days and blazing suns between them; while the mangrove, the palm, the cocoa-nut, and the cactus--ah! that luxuriant plant throve apace--shooting up its steel-pointed bayonets two inches of a night in thorny needles as thick as pins in a paper, growing clean through the hide of ox or man like blood, till their hard-edged leaves met resistance, when, turning flat side up, they put forth a score for one of the needle bayonets! No escape from them. From shoulder to heel one long, hopeless agony. The fierce sun flaming down, absorbed by the black pall of death! The moon glimmering in pale white rays of splendor through the moth-eaten holes upon the finger and the white tomb-stone! All the day and all the night!

Was it a dream, Captain Brand? No, a frightful reality! Don't you feel a fresh thorn at every slow pulse of the heart they are aiming at? And don't you hear those dread croakings of gulls and cormorants flapping in the air, who have left their prey on the reef to join the vultures in their feast on the shore? You may almost catch the grating sounds of the rasping jaws of the sharks as they crowd into the inlet, and rest their cold noses on the shelly cove where you slept!

Flesh and blood, and pinions and beaks can endure it no longer. A cloud of carnivorous birds swoop down at last, snap the black pall in their talons and bills, and fly fighting and screaming away with it. Another cloud, darker than the rest, light upon the body, and while the needle-points pierce the palpitating heart, and the breath flutters on the still clenched lips and nostrils, the eyes are picked out, and the flesh is torn piecemeal, hide strands and all, till nothing is left but a hideous white skeleton, with the long bony finger pointing to the