Pieces of Eight Part 17

"What is it, Jack?" I asked him for once when, early in our acquaintance, we had asked him what we were to call him, he had answered with a laugh: "O! call me Jack--Jack Harkaway." We had laughed, reminding him of the schoolboy hero of that name and he had answered: "Never mind. One name is as good as another. That is my name when I go on adventures. Tell me your adventure names. I don't want your prosaic every-day names." "Well," I had replied, entering into the lad's humour, "my friend here is Sir Francis Drake, and I, well--I'm Sir Henry Morgan."

"What is it, Jack?" I repeated.

But he shook his head.

"No!" he replied, "I like you ever so much--and I wish I could; but I mustn't."

"Somebody else's secret again?" I ventured.

"Yes!" And he added: "This time it's mine too. But--some day perhaps; who knows?--" He broke off in boyish confusion.

"All right, dear Jack," I said, patting his shoulder, "take your own time. We're friends anyway."

"That we are," responded the lad, with a fine glow.

We left it so at the moment, and had ourselves poled in the direction of Charlie's voice, which was breaking mirror after mirror of exquisite lagoon-like silence with demands for our return to camp. He evidently had shot all the duck he wanted, for that day, and was beginning to be hungry for dinner.

Yet, I mustn't be too hard on Charlie, for, as we know, even Charlie had another object in his trip besides duck. As a certain poet brutally puts it, he had antic.i.p.ated also "the hunting of man." In addition, though it is against the law of those Britannic islands, he had promised me a flamingo or two for decorative purposes. However, flamingoes and Tobias alike kept out of gunshot, and, as the week grew toward its end, Charlie began to grow a little restive.

"It looks," he murmured one evening, as we had completed our fourteenth meal of roast duck, and were musing over our after-duck cigars, "it looks as if I am not going to have any use for this."

He had taken a paper from his pocket. It was a warrant with which he had provided himself, empowering him to arrest the said Henry P. Tobias, or the person pa.s.sing under that name, on two counts: First, that of seditious practices, with intent to spread treason among His Majesty's subjects, and, second, that of wilful murder on the high seas. I should say that, following my recital of the eventful cruise of the _Maggie Darling,_ old Tom and I had been required to make sworn depositions of Tobias's share in the happenings of that cruise, the murder of the captain and so forth, and I too had surrendered as evidence that eloquent manifesto which I had seen Tobias reading to the ill-fated George and "Silly" Theodore, and had afterward discussed with him.

The probabilities were that the Government would treat Tobias's case as that of a dangerous madman, rather than as a hanging matter, but, whatever its point of view, it was clearly undesirable for such an individual to remain at large. So the governing powers in Na.s.sau, with whom Charlie Webster was _persona grata,_ had been glad to take advantage of his enthusiastic patriotism and invest him with constabulary powers, hoping that he might have an opportunity of using them. Personally, he was rather ashamed of having to employ such tame legal methods. From his point of view, shooting at sight was all that Tobias deserved, and to give him a trial by jury was an absurdity of legal red-tape. In this respect he agreed with the great Mr. Pickwick, that "the law is a ha.s.s." It was always England's way, he said, and, if she didn't mind, this leniency to traitors would some day be her undoing!

Charlie put the despised, yet precious, warrant back into his pocket, and gazed disgustedly across the creek, where the loveliest of young moons was rising behind a frieze of the homeless, barbaric brush.

"There was never such a place in the world," he a.s.serted, "to hide in--or get lost in--or to starve in. I have often thought that it would make the most effective prison in the world. Instead of spending good public money in housing and feeding scoundrels behind bars, and paying officials to keep them there, supporting expensive establishments at Dartmoor and so forth, why doesn't the British Government export her convicts over here, land them on one of those mangrove shoals, and--give them their freedom! Five per cent. might succeed in escaping. The mangrove swamps would look after the rest."

As I have said, Charlie was a terrifying patriot. For most offences he had the humanity of a vast forgiveness. He was, generally speaking, the softest-hearted man I have ever met. But for any breach of the sacred laws of England he was something like a Spanish Inquisitor. England, in fact, was his religion. I have heard of worse.

The young moon rose and rose, while Charlie sat in the dusk of our shanty, like a meditative mountain, saying nothing, the glowing end of his cigar occasionally hinting at the circ.u.mference of his broad Elizabethan face.

"I'll get him, all the same," he said presently, coming out of a sort of trance, in which, as I understood later, his mind had been making a geographical survey of our neighbourhood, going up and down every creek and corner on a radius of fifty miles.

"If," he added, "he knows this island better than I do, I'll give him this warrant to eat for his breakfast.... But let's turn in. I'll think it out by the morning. Night brings counsel."

So we sought our respective cots; but I had scarcely begun to undress, when a foolish accident for which I was responsible happened, an accident that might have had serious consequences, and which, as a matter of fact did have--though not at the moment.

As I told the reader at the beginning of this story, I am not accustomed to guns--being too afraid of my bad temper. Charlie knew this, and was all the time cautioning me about holding my gun right and so on, and especially about shaking out any unused cartridges at the end of the day's shoot.

Well, this special night, I had forgotten his warnings. Neglecting everything a man should do to his gun when he is finished with it for the day, I had left two cartridges in it, left the trigger on the hair-brink of eternity, and other enormities for which Charlie presently, and quite rightly, abashed me with profanity; in short, my big toe tripped over the beast as it stood carelessly against the wall of my cabin, and, as it fell, I received the contents in the fleshy part of my shoulder.

The explosion brought the whole crew out of their shanty, in a state of gesticulating nature, and, as Charlie, growling like a bear, was helping to bring first aid, suddenly our young friend Jack--whose romantic youth preferred sleeping outside in a hammock slung between two palm trees--put him aside.

"I know better how to do this than you, Sir Francis," he said, laughing.

"Same as the sharks, eh?" said Charlie.

"Just the same ... but, let's have a look at your medicine chest, and give me the lint quick."

So Jack took charge, and acted with such confidence and skill,--finally binding up my wound, which was but a slight one--that Charlie stood by dumbfounded and with a curious soft look in his face which I didn't understand till later. The tears came into my eyes at the wonderful tenderness of the lad, as he bent over me.

"Do I hurt you?" he kept saying. "You and I are pals, you know."

"You don't hurt me a bit, dear Jack," I answered; "what a clever lad you are!"

Then Jack looked up for a moment, and caught Charlie's wondering look; and, it seemed to me that he changed colour, and looked frightened.

"Sir Francis is jealous," he said; "but I've finished now. I guess you'll sleep all right after that dose I gave you. Good night...." And he slipped away.

Jack had proved himself a practised surgeon, and, as he predicted, I slept well--so well and so far into next morning that Charlie at last had to waken me.

"What do you think?" were his first words.

"Why, what?" I asked, sitting up, and wincing from my wounded shoulder.

"Our young friend has skipped in the night!"

"'Skipped?'" I exclaimed, with a curious ache at my heart.

"Sure enough! Gone off on that little n.i.g.g.e.r sloop that dropped in here yesterday afternoon, I guess."

"You don't mean it?"

"No doubt of it--I wonder whether you've had the same thought as I had."

"What do you mean?"

"You know I always said there was a mystery about that boy?"

"Well, what of it?"

"Did you notice the way he bound your shoulder last night?"

"What of it?"

"Did you ever see a man bind a wound like that?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean simply that the mystery about our Jack Harkaway was just this: Jack Harkaway was no boy at all--but just a girl; a brick of a dare-devil girl!"

CHAPTER VIII