“Visiting cards and cut-throating don’t go together,” Francis shot back across his shoulder, as he squatted in the canoe and dipped his paddle. “My name’s Morgan.”
Surprise and startlement were the stranger’s portion, as he opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind and murmured to himself, “Same stock—no wonder we look alike.”
Still in the throes of disgust, Francis regained the shore of the Bull, sat down on the edge of the dugout, filled and lighted his pipe, and gloomily meditated. Crazy, everybody, was the run of his thought. Nobody acts with reason. “I’d like to see old Regan try to do business with these people. They’d get his ears.”
Could he have seen, at that moment, the young man of the canvas pants and of familiar appearance, he would have been certain that naught but lunacy resided in Latin America; for the young man in question, inside a grass-thatched hut in the heart of his island, grinning to himself as he uttered aloud, “I guess I put the fear of God into that particular member of the Morgan family,” had just begun to stare at a photographic reproduction of an oil painting on the wall of the original Sir Henry Morgan.
“Well, Old Pirate,” he continued grinning, “two of your latest descendants came pretty close to getting each other with automatics that would make your antediluvian horse-pistols look like thirty cents.”
He bent to a battered and worm-eaten sea-chest, lifted the lid that was monogramed with an “M,” and again addressed the portrait:
“Well, old pirate Welshman of an ancestor, all you’ve left me is the old duds and a face that looks like yours. And I guess, if I was really fired up, I could play your Port-au-Prince stunt about as well as you played it yourself.”
A moment later, beginning to dress himself in the age-worn and moth-eaten garments of the chest, he added: “Well, here’s the old duds on my back. Come, Mister Ancestor, down out of your frame, and dare to tell me a point of looks in which we differ.”
Clad in Sir Henry Morgan’s ancient habiliments, a cutlass strapped on around the middle and two flintlock pistols of huge and ponderous design thrust into his waist-scarf, the resemblance between the living man and the pictured semblance of the old buccaneer who had been long since resolved to dust, was striking.
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew....”
As the young man, picking the strings of a guitar, began to sing the old buccaneer rouse, it seemed to him that the picture of his forebear faded into another picture and that he saw:
The old forebear himself, back to a mainmast, cutlass out and flashing, facing a semi-circle of fantastically clad sailor cutthroats, while behind him, on the opposite side of the mast, another similarly garbed and accoutred man, with cutlass flashing, faced the other semi-circle of cutthroats that completed the ring about the mast.
The vivid vision of his fancy was broken by the breaking of a guitar-string which he had thrummed too passionately. And in the sharp pause of silence, it seemed that a fresh vision of old Sir Henry came to him, down out of the frame and beside him, real in all seeming, plucking at his sleeve to lead him out of the hut and whispering a ghostly repetition of:
“Back to back against the mainmast
Held at bay the entire crew.”
The young man obeyed his shadowy guide, or some prompting of his own profound of intuition, and went out the door and down to the beach, where, gazing across the narrow channel, on the beach of the Bull, he saw his late antagonist, backed up against the great boulder of coral rock, standing off an attack of sack-clouted, machete-wielding Indians with wide sweeping strokes of a driftwood timber.
And Francis, in extremity, swaying dizzily from the blow of a rock on his head, saw the apparition, that almost convinced him he was already dead and in the realm of the shades, of Sir Henry Morgan himself, cutlass in hand, rushing up the beach to his rescue. Further, the apparition, brandishing the cutlass and laying out Indians right and left, was bellowing:
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew.”
As Francis’ knees gave under him and he slowly crumpled and sank down, he saw the Indians scatter and flee before the onslaught of the weird pirate figure and heard their cries of:
“Heaven help us!” “The Virgin protect us!” “It’s the ghost of old Morgan!”
Francis next opened his eyes inside the grass hut in the midmost center of the Calf. First, in the glimmering of sight of returning consciousness, he beheld the pictured lineaments of Sir Henry Morgan staring down at him from the wall. Next, it was a younger edition of the same, in three dimensions of living, moving flesh, who thrust a mug of brandy to his lips and bade him drink. Francis was on his feet ere he touched lips to the mug; and both he and the stranger man, moved by a common impulse, looked squarely into each other’s eyes, glanced at the picture on the wall and touched mugs in a salute to the picture and to each other ere they drank.
“You told me you were a Morgan,” the stranger said. “I am a Morgan. That man on the wall fathered my breed. Your breed?”
“The old buccaneer’s,” Francis returned. “My first name is Francis. And yours?”
“Henry—straight from the original. We must be remote cousins or something or other. I’m after the foxy old niggardly old Welshman’s loot.”
“So’m I,” said Francis, extending his hand. “But to hell with sharing.”
“The old blood talks in you,” Henry smiled approbation. “For him to have who finds. I’ve turned most of this island upside down in the last six months, and all I’ve found are these old duds. I’m with you to beat you if I can, but to put my back against the mainmast with you any time the needed call goes out.”
“That song’s a wonder,” Francis urged. “I want to learn it. Lift the stave again.”
And together, clanking their mugs, they sang:
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew....”
CHAPTER III
But a splitting headache put a stop to Francis’ singing and made him glad to be swung in a cool hammock by Henry, who rowed off to the Angelique with orders from his visitor to the skipper to stay at anchor but not to permit any of his sailors to land on the Calf. Not until late in the morning of the following day, after hours of heavy sleep, did Francis get on his feet and announce that his head was clear again.
“I know what it is—got bucked off a horse once,” his strange relative sympathised, as he poured him a huge cup of fragrant black coffee. “Drink that down. It will make a new man of you. Can’t offer you much for breakfast except bacon, sea biscuit, and some scrambled turtle eggs. They’re fresh. I guarantee that, for I dug them out this morning while you slept.”
“That coffee is a meal in itself,” Francis praised, meanwhile studying his kinsman and ever and anon glancing at the portrait of their relative.
“You’re just like him, and in more than mere looks,” Henry laughed, catching him in his scrutiny. “When you refused to share yesterday, it was old Sir Henry to the life. He had a deep-seated antipathy against sharing, even with his own crews. It’s what caused most of his troubles. And he’s certainly never shared a penny of his treasure with any of his descendants. Now I’m different. Not only will I share the Calf with you; but I’ll present you with my half as well, lock, stock, and barrel, this grass hut, all these nice furnishings, tenements, hereditaments, and everything, and what’s left of the turtle eggs. When do you want to move in?”
“You mean...?” Francis asked.
“Just that. There’s nothing here. I’ve just about dug the island upside down and all I found was the chest there full of old clothes.”
“It must have encouraged you.”
