Chapter XIV: The Dead Man’s Chest

When I returned to the main cabin Ben Gunn was placing the food on the table, and my great-uncle was removing the liquor from Colonel O’Donnell’s reach.

“We have had sufficient to drink, Ben,” he said and, heedless of the Irishman’s disappointed face, waved away that which had been before them as well as the new array of bottles one of the lackeys bore upon a silver tray.

Nothing more was said until the steward and the negroes had retired. Then Murray sat forward in his chair.

“There is a certain matter of importance to be discussed, colonel,” he announced. “I must have your attention.”

O’Donnell nodded sulkily.

“As you know, the crew of my associate, Captain Flint, some of whom you saw in New York, are not under the same discipline as my own men. Captain Flint saw fit to express jealousy of the terms I arranged with your principals for the division of the treasure, and in order to conciliate him and assure him of my good faith I gave him my grandnephew and Master Corlaer as hostages. They went unwillingly and succeeded in escaping before we sailed, returned aboard the _James_ and secreted themselves for several days. I dared not risk the time to return them to Flint, and I anticipate that he will receive me now with augmented suspicion.”

“I said all along ye were crazy to let a low fellow like him have any hand in the affair,” fumed O’Donnell.

“We need not go over that again,” rejoined my great-uncle. “I must have the security of the Rendezvous, and for that I must needs pay Flint. Also, I may have need of him in other ways. This venture is not yet consummated. There is likewise the consideration that we have worked together in the past, and I owe him a modicum of loyalty.”

“Loyalty to the Cause should come first,” declared O’Donnell.

“True, sir, and I yield it. But I must look to the future. ’Tis contrary to my policy to break with Flint if it can be avoided. ’Tis similarly contrary to my instinct to trust him farther than I must, and in this immediate case I am loath to trust him.”

“What’s to do?” rasped O’Donnell. “Raise his price?”

“No, no. My suggestion is that we should stow away our friends’ portion of the treasure before we return to the Rendezvous.”

“Where?”

“I have been turning that in my mind for several weeks. There is an island south of Porto Rico in the Virgin Group, a barren dot, hated by all seamen for sorry memories of shipwreck and suffering. They call it the Dead Man’s Chest.”

I remembered the deep, swinging chorus I had first heard in the Whale’s Head tavern the night I sought O’Donnell for his daughter. It sounded like a fit place for pirate treasure.

The Irishman frowned.

“What? Dump this gold we have risked so much to win on a sandbar for the first passing fellow to----”

“I have said no man will go there if he can help it.”

“I like it not!” scowled O’Donnell. “My friends would have ugly things to say did the stuff slip from our hands in that way.”

“’Tis less likely to slip from our hands on the Dead Man’s Chest than abroad the _Royal James_,” answered Murray. “Bethink you, _chevalier_! To begin with, there is Flint to reckon with. He will be nasty, as nasty as he dares, depending upon the temper of his crew and the quantity of rum he has consumed. Second, there is always the chance that we might fall in with a frigate too swift for us. On all scores ’tis preferable to get the treasure off the _Royal James_. ’Twill give us time to let the hue and cry of the Spaniards die down and to arrange with your friends for its reception.”

“Whatever you say, ’tis a miserable alternative,” protested O’Donnell. “Let us rather hold north and set the treasure ashore in France.”

“To run the gauntlet of French and English cruisers?” my great-uncle demanded scornfully. “’Odsblood, man, you are out of your mind! And when you had landed it, what would you do? How much of it would go to your friends and how much to grease the pockets of French officials? A great treasure is not so easily disposed of.”

“_Ja_,” spoke up Peter, “dot’s right, Murray. But what goodt is it to go back to Flint? He makes trouble, always he makes trouble--andt if he don’t, his men does. It’s better you go anodder place.”

My great-uncle took snuff, tapping the box thoughtfully after he had dusted the powder in his nostrils.

“To be strictly honest with you, gentlemen,” he remarked at last, “I am disposed to return to Flint because I foresee a possibility of my desiring to sacrifice him to cover our tracks. I have no definite plan in mind, but a situation might shape itself in which it would be desirable to supply a fugitive for Spaniard, Frenchman and Englishman to chase. I should vastly prefer--as I am sure you would, too--that the fugitive be the _Walrus_ and not the _James_. Also, until that situation arises, the Rendezvous is the safest hiding-place I know this side of Africa.”

O’Donnell eyed him with involuntary respect.

“I should hate to have ye set on my track, Murray!” he exclaimed. “Is not Flint your friend?”

My great-uncle considered this question.

“Scarcely my friend,” he decided. “Say, rather, associate. And the fellow is troublesome occasionally. I should have no hesitation in sacrificing him to secure the stake we play for.”

“And there is no real feeling of loyalty in your heart!” I gibed. “’Tis simply a question of using him to your best advantage.”

“Yes and no, Robert,” he retorted coolly. “As you grow older you will learn that as naught is wholly bad neither is it wholly good.”

A step clumped in the companionway, and Martin stuck his grizzled head in the cabin.

“Last o’ the ---- ---- ruddy-boys is comin’ aboard, sir,” he said. “What course will ye set?”

Murray looked at the Irishman.

“Here’s the moment for decision, sir,” he said. “’Tis for you to say what shall be done.”

O’Donnell’s long face seemed to grow longer.

“Sure, and how will I know what to say that never gave thought to the matter before?” he parried dubiously. “Do I understand you to suggest Captain Flint might attempt to possess the entire treasure?”

“I should consider it likely,” assented my great-uncle.

“He is more likely to make trouble if you come to the Anchorage after disposing of half the gold,” I thrust in. “’Twill only serve to stimulate his suspicions.”

“There is reason in what you say,” agreed my great-uncle. “Nevertheless, permit me to indicate that if we have not the half of the treasure ’twill be impossible for him to secure it by any means.”

O’Donnell smacked his open hand upon the table top.

“A truce to arguing!” he exclaimed. “I am in your hands, Murray, whether it pleases me or not. Do whichever you think best.”

My great-uncle turned to the mate.

“Cast loose from the prize, Master Martin, and make all sail. The course is so’east by south. I would have you stand off out of sight of the Porto Rican shore.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Martin hesitated.

“And the treasure, cap’n?” he added.

“Benn Gunn will give you the keys of the lazaret. ’Twill go there as usual.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

There was an interval of silence after he had gone. The shouts of the pirates echoed from the deck, with the creaking of halyards and napping of sails. The _Royal James_ seemed to shake herself as she sidled free of the battered hull of the _Santissima Trinidad_, and through the stern windows showed the bowsprit and fo’csle of the Spaniard, still smothered beneath a mess of canvas and broken spars and rigging. Slowly we drew past her, and I was amused to see that men leaned from her ports and on her bulwarks, watching us with the idle curiosity to be expected in any friendly meeting at sea.

The Spanish flag still flaunted at her main where it had stayed throughout the action. Don Ascanio, her captain, still stood with folded arms and furious mien on the poop. The group of religious were all on their knees in prayer. The fat monk raised his crucifix with a threatening gesture as we glided under her stern.

“Observe the fallacy of religious conviction,” commented Murray. “The monk curses us for a crime we have not committed.”

“There is enough evil to your credit to warrant him, even so,” I answered.

O’Donnell crossed himself.

“Leave religion alone, Murray,” he said sourly. “’Tis a bid for ill-fortune to mock the Church and holy men and women.”

“Prejudice, my dear _chevalier_!” protested my great-uncle. “Yet any sane view of mundane affairs must recognize religion hath its uses to mankind.”

He rose.

“If you will pardon me, I have much to see to on deck. Should you desire any refreshment do but ring that bell and state your wants to the steward. Robert, if you and Peter can so far submerge your Hanoverian sympathies I should appreciate such aid as you might render in the accounting of the treasure.”

Peter and I went with him, as much to escape the company of the Irishman as to satisfy our curiosity regarding the chests and boxes we had glimpsed in transit across the _Santissima Trinidad’s_ deck. And certes, the scene that awaited us was worth going far to see. The maindeck, immediately for’ard of the poop, was jammed with the contents of the Spaniard’s lazaret, piled helterskelter as the working-parties had hastily shifted it from one ship to the other.

Murray produced tablet and ink-horn; a desk was arranged for me atop of a water-butt, and one by one a procession of pirates filed past, each with his load of gold or silver, minted and in bullion.

’Twas a marvelous concentration of wealth. The columns of figures I set down upon the tablet never condescended to detail--5,000 pieces of eight, they would run, or 10,000 doubloons, 12,000 onzas, 20,000 castellanos, 25,000 eights, and so on. One cask we opened was filled with quaint Eastern coins, some square, some oblong, some cubical, some round, inscribed with spidery characters, a consignment from the Spanish possessions in the South Seas. There was upward of two hundred thousand pounds in bar silver, fifty-pound ingots sheathed by threes in thick canvas jackets to facilitate their transport by mule-trains--each mule carrying a load of three hundred pounds. There was a quantity, too, of gold bullion, each ingot of eighty pounds in its own canvas jacket. There were a chest of precious stones, the value of which we could only guess at, and three chests of plate.

The total value, by the Government estimates upon each package, chest or keg, was £1,563,995 in English money, exclusive of the jewels and the plate; and we did not conclude the accounting and bestowal of the treasure in Ben Gunn’s wine-cellar until an hour past dusk, when Murray dismissed all hands with an extra ration of rum and instructed Saunders, who had the watch, to allow his men to sleep on deck, except those actually needed for lookouts and the wheel.

In the cabin we found Colonel O’Donnell asleep, sprawled on the table with his head rested on his folded arms, a puddle of wine by his elbow. My great-uncle’s eyebrows twitched upward.

“This gentleman is a chamberlain to King James, Robert,” he remarked, “a Knight of Malta and of Santiago in Spain, a colonel of Spanish engineers and lord of I know not how many bog-manors in Ireland if he had his rights. And look at him!”

He was not a pleasant sight, I’ll own; but my redoubtable relative’s perpetual air of omniscience grated upon me.

“Who brought him to this?” I retorted.

“Not I, my boy! To intrigue is not necessarily to license appetite. Well, well, ’tis doubtly fortunate I induced him to fetch along the little maid.”

“’Twas well nigh your most dastardly act!”

He took snuff, deliberately pondering the charge, and despite the toil of the day his face preserved its uncanny fulness of outline.

“The appearances are against me,” he answered. “Yet I am inclined to believe that in the long run you will concede I acted for the best. Consider her plight in a Spanish convent, if anything happened to her father.”

“Consider her plight in a pirate ship, if anything happened to him!” I jeered.

He appealed to Peter, whimsically humorous.

“Stap me, the boy wears upon my nerves! Was ever a youth so callow in his assurance of righteousness?”

Peter’s little eyes twinkled.

“He is right, andt you are right. But we better put der colonel in his bed, _ja_.”

“’A Daniel come to judgment!’” cried Murray. “Now what might you mean by that, friend Peter?”

“You know what I mean--andt I know what you mean,” returned the Dutchman solemnly. “You are a big rascal, but dot time maybe you was right.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Peter,” I rasped.

“’Tis you are the idiot,” affirmed my great-uncle. “Here are you and Peter--two honest men if any ever were--and myself, with less claim to virtue perhaps, but as acute an interest, if the truth be known. And all three of us a-hungering to safeguard the lass. What mother might ask more?”

“And Flint,” I amended. “He’d protect her, I suppose.”

“He’ll never have the chance, Robert,” he answered gravely. “You and Peter have played ducks and drakes, between you, with my plans; but John Flint is not the man to overreach me. Give him rope, lad--and we’ll present him his chance to hang.”

“_Ja_,” said Peter. “We take care of der little gal--andt so we put der colonel in his bed.”

And so we did, to an accompaniment of stammered oaths and tags of Jacobite ditties.

Afterward, in Peter’s stateroom, I asked him what he had been hinting at in his exchange with Murray.

“Oh, we just talk,” he replied, rolling into his berth with a ponderous sigh of satisfaction.

“I heard you,” I snapped. “But of what?”

There was a dim light in his eyes, buried behind rolling flaps of blubber.

“We just talk,” he murmured. “Murray talks, andt I talk. Murray, he likes to talk, _ja_.”

I was up early in the morning, but Mistress O’Donnell and my great-uncle were before me. As I climbed to the poop I saw them standing by the weather rail, Murray expressing deference in every line of his straight figure and handsome, old-young face, the little maid eying him with a comical mixture of antipathy and respect.

The wind had veered in the night, providentially for us, and we were running free, the _James_ riding the easy swell with the dash of a race-horse. We were out of sight of land.

My great-uncle clapped his hand on my shoulder in his best paternal manner, and Mistress O’Donnell gave me a shy look that I read to reflect a double attitude of mind similar to that she evidenced for him.

“Here is my nephew, who will settle all your remaining doubts, Mistress Moira,” proclaimed Murray; “and with your leave I’ll be about my morning inspection--for we must maintain a high level of discipline, since we sail on the king’s errand and are therefore the king’s ship.”

She watched his retreating back with a kind of fascination.

“Sure, I never met the like of him,” she said at last. “He puts me in mind of the grand gentry the _padre_ brings to see me in Madrid--and him a pirate! Glory, what a tale I could be telling the girls if I ever see the four walls of St. Bridget’s again! Whiles I talk with him he makes me feel there’s none other so grand and fine in the broad world. And again I’ll remember the screaming on the _Santissima Trinidad_ and what Frey Sebastian said of him--and then the shivers turn me winter-cold. But I’m thinking yourself will be the same queer sort, Master Ormerod, you that can be generous and gallant to a foolish maid and as cruel as the wildcat the Indians showed us in the hills up behind Porto Bello.”

“It must seem so to you,” I answered. “But the truth is that I am as much the sport of Fate as yourself.”

“Do you tell me so?” she replied politely.

“I do,” I said with energy. “Let me tell you the whole story--it begins on the night I accompanied you to the Whale’s Head----”

“Ah, that was a night of nights!” she exclaimed. “The first breath of adventure ever I drew, and I was thinking to myself as I hugged the memory afterwards I could never get enough of that same savor. But yesterday was the curing of my hunger.”

And her blue eyes clouded with tears and the corners of her mouth quirked downward most dolefully.

“Do but let me tell you my story,” I pleaded, “and you will think better of that night and maybe of some things that happened afterward.”

“Why, sir,” she said, “here are you with a ready tongue, and me with two ears wide open. There’s naught to stop you. But as to believing--that will be a story for me to tell and you to hear.”

So I began at the beginning and told her all from the moment Darby McGraw had run into the counting-room in Pearl Street--and how remote in time and place that seemed as we stared out upon the blue-green rollers of the Caribbean and the tropic sun warmed toward its noon intensity! She listened with mounting interest, never interrupting save for an occasional “Glory!” “Oh, blessed saints!” “Holy Virgin, can such things be!” But when I came to the escape from the _Walrus_ she broke in upon me.

“And you did that to be handy by if I had need of you! Oh, sir, forget the wicked suspicions I owned! ’Tis a true friend you will be--and the large gentleman, too. What is he called? Master Corlaer? Alas, I am heavy in your debt, and always shall be. But the only payment I ever can make will be just my bare thanks and the prayers I’ll say on my bended knees my life long.”

She was wholly trustful with Peter and me from then on and spent most of her time with us. Her father, when he was not drinking, was engaged in conferences with Murray. They worked for hours at a time with quill and paper, figuring the strength of clans, costs of muskets and powder and lead and the number of field-cannon to be stowed in a ship’s hold, as also the individual requirements of chiefs and nobles and the amounts for which several persons would “sell out.” And as they worked my great-uncle’s confidence increased, and Colonel O’Donnell’s long, horsey face took on a flush over the cheekbones that was not alone the result of four bottles of madeira at a sitting.

On the seventh morning after the action with the _Santissima Trinidad_ we raised a low, sandy islet, densely choked with low trees and bush growth, bare of any characteristic that invited human habitation. Its only distinguishing feature was its roughly oblong shape, which might, by a stretch of imagination, enable it to be likened to a sailor’s chest. Murray approached it with caution, a man in the chains dipping the lead continually, and we came to anchor under its lee and a mile or more offshore.

In the mean time Martin and a party of some fifty men had been passing up treasure from the wine-cellar or lazaret, the mate checking the amounts withdrawn upon the list I had prepared, the pirates muttering amongst themselves in a way not at all to my fancy as they gaged anew the size of the fortune they had won, without, so far, any benefit or reward. Martin was a competent officer, and he kept them at work, for all their grumbling and discontent, until the anchor cable ran out and Murray issued an order to lower all the small boats. The next thing we knew the fifty had hurled the mate into the scuppers and were swarming up the starboard poop ladder, a giant North-countryman at their head.

Murray, who had been talking with O’Donnell, leaped to meet them, as unperturbed as if the incident were a part of the ship’s routine.

“Get back there, men,” he ordered quietly.

The leaders halted, sullenly irresolute, cowed at once by the red glare in his tawny eyes, the cold power that radiated from his white face.

“We’m on’y seekin’ a bit goold,” said the first man hoarsely.

My great-uncle calmly produced a small, double-barreled French pistolet from an inner pocket, shot the fellow in the head, leaned forward and pushed his body off the ladder.

“Master Martin,” he called, “be so good as to have that carrion cast overboard. Go about your work, men, or I’ll flog the lot of you at the triangles.”

They tumbled down the ladder and disintegrated like a pack of sheep, and not one raised a hand when Martin came at them, cursing grotesquely in his gentle voice and striking right and left with knotted fists. Two of them obeyed his order to throw the dead man’s body over the rail, and they went straight to the boat-falls without another mutinous word or act.

Yet when Murray turned to face us I noted the tiny wrinkle betwixt his eyebrows which was a sure indication that he was worried.

Moira O’Donnell, who had been standing with Peter and me, listening to my recital of the song about the island, was the first to speak.

“Will you have had to shoot that man?” she challenged.

“’Twas that or maybe the deaths of all of us, my lass,” he replied, unwontedly grim. “A shipload of men like my crew are a volcano of lawlessness held in restraint by fear. Let them once break the spell of discipline--which is maintained by fear--and they in their numbers would soon overpower us. This incident is relatively unimportant, but it points a lesson I should be reckless not to heed.

“To be brief, my friends,” my great-uncle, summed up, “I dare not leave the _Royal James_ whilst any of the treasure is aboard; nor would it be safe for me to entrust any of my crew with the location of the hiding-place.”

He took snuff, staring contemplatively at the sand-hillocks of the Dead Man’s Chest.

“Here, then, is my plan,” he pursued. “I will have eight hundred thousand pounds set ashore in the boats--my own share of one hundred thousand, _chevalier_, as well as the seven hundred thousand pounds guaranteed to your friends. I will then land you four, with sufficient provisions, and bear away in the _James_ to the so’th’ard, returning in five days to pick you up. In the intervening period you should be able to transport the treasure to a safe spot and bury it. In that way, _chevalier_, its safety can be assured until we are able to return for it with the _James_ or some other craft dispatched by your friends.”

“Your plan is maybe the best in the circumstances,” answered O’Donnell, “but I’d have ye remember, Murray, that of the four people who will know of the gold’s location two are Hanoverians and the third is my daughter, who is a weak maid.”

My great-uncle laughed.

“You need have no fear on the score of those three. You little know Mistress Moira if you call her a weak maid; and as for Robert and Peter, they are men of honor--and best of all, are not likely to be submitted to the temptation to reveal the treasure to their political friends. No, no, colonel; by my plan the treasure will be safer than in a bank.”

There was more talk back and forth, but the end of it all was that O’Donnell accepted my great-uncle’s plan, and Moira was won over likewise by the argument that so long as the treasure was stolen it had best be assured to a worthy purpose. Peter and I agreed for a complex of reasons--because of the little maid for one thing, and for another, because there was an excitement in the burial of treasure which neither of us had tasted before, and also, of course, because, when all was said and done, we were prisoners and we must. But I’d never seek to deny that we had pleasure from the thrill that came to us late in the afternoon of that day as we stood on the narrow beach of the islet beside a great stack of kegs and chests, axes, pickaxes and shovels, a barrel of water and boxes of food from Ben Gunn’s larder, watching the boat that had landed us pull back to the _James_.

The ensuing five days demanded an amount of manual labor which extracted wails of indignation from Colonel O’Donnell, much uncomplaining effort from Moira and all the strength Peter and I possessed. Indeed, without the big Dutchman we might never transported that amount of treasure, dug a hole for it and concealed the location, all within the time-limit Murray had allowed us.

The first afternoon and evening we spent in selecting a hiding-place in a shallow valley protected from the terrible storms which sweep those seas. Colonel O’Donnell and Moira were detailed to do the digging, as neither was as capable as Peter and I of managing the weighty bulk of the casks and chests. And after that we worked unremittingly, except for a couple of hours at midday and a short snatch of sleep about dawn; for the starlit nights, with their bracing sea-winds, were the most comfortable times we had. Yet the tops’ls of the _James_ were within sight before we had disposed of the last spadeful of sand from the hiding-place and replanted its area with the trees and bushes we had removed with every care to preserve their roots.

O’Donnell had an unconquerable aversion to laboring with his hands, but his engineering knowledge enabled him to survey crudely the site we used and plot certain angles which fixed it in our memories--a precaution highly necessary, as when we had finished there was no more evidence of what we had done than a slight instability about several trees. We had even gone so far as to transplant an enterprising colony of land-crabs to scuttle back and forth over the fresh-turned sand. And in a month, we knew, the luxuriant growth would have obliterated the narrow slash of the path that zigzagged across the sand hillocks to the valley’s lip.