Chapter 52

ON A BED OF THORNS.

"An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye!"

"O Heaven! to think of their white souls, And mine so black and grim!"

"Ho, ho!" said Captain Brand, as he stretched out his straight legs in their canvas casings on the sand of the little cove, "safe and sound, and not a soul to share this nice supper of that good old man Miguel!

"Ho, ho!" continued he; "here at last! No Babette to cook for me--no 'Centipede'--nothing but that stanch little boat presented me by that generous fisherman, who, I fear, is drowned by this time. Well, let us enjoy ourselves! Excellent real snapper this! Sausage rather too much garlic perhaps; but the brown bread and the aguardiente unexceptionable. Blaze away, my little fire; your sticks cost me much labor to dig out of my once comfortable house, but you are better than gunpowder any day.

"Just to think of the years that have passed! That great bank of sand there over the sheds, nearly as high as the crag, where my brave fellows once caroused; the young cocoa-nut springing up on the crag itself--not a vestige of my old habitation left, or the bright blades or pleasant guests to dine with me!"

Here there was something of the old cold murderous scowl on the captain's face as he twisted the point of his nose.

"Ah! yes, there may be my wary-eyed Sanchez left, though the last I heard of him he was in the Capilla dungeon of the Moro. And that"--grating his teeth, and glaring with his icy eyes at the fire, as if those two blocks of ice would put it out--"cursed doctor who pursues me!

"Well, well, neither of those old friends are here yet, and before another sun sets I shall bequeath the old den to them both! Ho, ho! with those solid bags of clinking metal, I shall leave them as much sand and rocks as they choose to walk over. What a sly devil I was to stow that treasure away for a rainy day! Never told a living being! Poisoned the fellow, too, who made the lock! Capital joke, 'pon my soul!"

This was the very last of the very few jokes that Captain Brand ever enjoyed.

"And, now I think of it, I wonder if my thirsty old mate's bones are yet lying there in the vault. What _was_ his name? such a bad memory I have! Oh! Gibbs--Bill Gibbs--with one leg! Ho, ho!"

Here Captain Brand drained some more aguardiente out of a cracked earthen pot, and slapped his fine legs with rapture.

"And those dear girls who married me! Lucia, too!"

The dirty wretch started as the wing of a sea-bird swooped down over the pure inlet; and he thought he saw a white fore finger beckoning him on to his doom.

"Pshaw!" said he, smoothing down his filthy tattered shirt with the finger of his mutilated left hand, "how nervous I am! But what a bungle Pedillo made of that marriage! And my good Ricardo, too! What a feast the sharks must have had on his oily, well-fed carcass! Misericordia! Ho, ho! I believe I'll bid my friends good-night."

Captain Brand stretched himself out at full length on the shelly strand, his boat secured by a clove-hitch round his right leg, which rode calmly in the little inlet; his bald head, with the few dry gray hairs on his temples, resting on Miguel's sennit hat, and the thin scum of frosty eyelids drawn over his frozen eyes--cracking their covering at times--until at last the pirate, aided by fiery aguardiente, slept.

A few late cormorants and sea-birds sailed over him in his fitful slumber, and uttered a cold cry, as if their pecking-time had not come yet, but would shortly, as they sought their silent retreats on the wall of rocks opposite.

And Captain Brand dreamed, too--of the old laird, his father, in prison; his mother weeping over forged notes; the sleeping, unsuspecting people he had treacherously murdered; the pillages he had committed; the men he had slain in open conflict; those he had executed with his own private cord; the poor woman who had died in worse torments, when, indeed, even knife or pistol, rope or poison, would have been a mercy; the agony and sufferings of those who survived them; with all the concomitant horrors which make the blood run cold to think of, and which made the pirate's almost freeze in his veins--living years in minutes--did Captain Brand, as he lay there on the chill sand in his troubled nightmare of a sleep.

"Ah! _Dios! Dios!_" chattered the Señora Banana Pancha, at the other outlet to the inlet, rolling over on the ledge of the rocks at the Tiger's Trap.

"What has become of my Ig--Ig--naçio--the one-eyed old villain who has persecuted me for forty years? Why did I cut the old launch adrift before I got in myself? And here I am alone and desolate on this cursed island, and my Ig--Ig--naçio--bless his spark of an eye--not come back to me! Ah! _Dios! Dios!_ what has become of the little man? He will kill me, _cierto_, when he comes back and finds the boat gone with all the money, which nearly broke his thin back to bring here; but, _Dios! Dios!_ I am dying of thirst, and not a shred of dried fish or jerked beef has gone into my old mouth--"

Yes there has, Doña Pancha, for just then a piece of hawser-laid rope--rather dry, perhaps, for mastication--was placed across your crying mouth that you might bite upon, if you would only stop your old tongue.

For while you were screaming on the rocks, and yelling for your Ig--Ig--naçio, who went back for the last bag of gold that wasn't there, a light gig glided in like a blackfish, and a bigger blackfish jumped up and stopped your old mouth, Pancha, with that bit of hide rope. But if you will keep quiet, Pancha, and not exorcise Banou for the Evil One, that old nigger will give you a cup of liquid not known in the devil's dominions, and treat you also to some white biscuit to nibble upon.

Ah! you will, eh? and tell all about that thin curl of smoke, which you believe to have been made by that coal-eyed Ig--Ig--naçio, away up there by the inlet? Now keep quiet again, old Lady Banana; and while your screaming mouth is gagged, don't cut this small gig away, or else she may navigate herself out to sea, as did your Ig's launch, and you be left desolate again.

The tropical night was still; the lizards wheetled, the breakers roared on the outer ledge, the ripples washed musically on the shelly shores, the alligators flapped about on the surface of the lagoon, the insects buzzed around the mangrove thickets; and as the gray dawn of morning appeared, and the rain began to fall, a steaming hot mist arose, through which the sea-birds flapped their wings and sailed away in search of their morning's meal. The sharks and the deep-sea fish, however, lay still and motionless low down by the base of the reefs, and watched with their cold, round eyes. Captain Brand, too, arose, and, opening _his_ green-bluish eyes, smoothing his moulting feathers, and splashing his fins in the wet sand, took an observation.

This was the rainy day for which Captain Brand had laid by all that money to spend it in!

It was a Monday morning--Black Monday for Captain Brand--when, after divesting his leg of the clove-hitch, he secured old Miguel's boat to a large stone, and then, according to his own ancient practice, he clambered with difficulty up to the venerable crag. Captain Brand had no spy-glass, and there was a good deal of rain falling, but yet he thought he saw a large ship, a brig, and a small schooner in the offing.

So Captain Brand scrambled down again, a good deal disconcerted, knowing it would be hours and hours before those vessels got up to the island, even were they so inclined; but, nevertheless, he bestirred himself. Fortifying his inner man with the last half pint of aguardiente for breakfast, which quite refreshed him, he went to work.

First, he took Miguel's copper coffee-pot, into which he emptied that disciple of the net's shark-oil jug, which Miguel himself used for a torch to attract the fish. Then, with a strip of old canvas--part of one leg to Captain Brand's trowsers; to such straits was he reduced--seized like a ball on the end of a stick, and a match-box, he was all ready for Black Monday's work.

Captain Brand, however, made one serious omission; he snugly stowed away his beautiful pistols in a locker of the boat to keep them dry, never having been wet but twice before in all his marine excursions--the first time at Cape Garotte, and the next when he jumped overboard from the brigantine at St. Jago. He set great store by these valuable implements, for they had done him good service in time of need. Miguel came into possession of them afterward, and sold them almost for their weight in gold.

But, for the first time, Captain Brand forgot his personal friends and bosom companions. It was a great oversight; and he was extremely sorry when it was too late to go back for them. However, with the copper oil-pot dangling from his little finger, where the sapphire once shone, and the torch-stick in the other hand, he marched boldly over the sandy ridges toward the crag.

But, Captain Brand, there had been three pairs of open eyes watching you through every mouthful of snapper you snapped, and every drop of fiery white rum you swallowed. Ay! and while you tossed about on the shelly beach, with the red glow of the embers of the fire lighting up your cold-blooded, wrinkled face--while, twisting your nose, you muttered ho! ho's! of murderous satisfaction--there was not a bird that swooped over you, or a lizard on the rocks with jet beads of eyes, that watched you so sharply as did those attentive beholders from the crag.

And when you made your observations from the young cocoa-nut clump, those watchers retired down the opposite side, and two of them clambered through a hole in the roof of the decaying little chapel, while the other moved to the little cemetery of coral gravestones, and there scooped a place in the sand and cactus behind the one cut with the