Read Ebook: A Romany of the Snows vol. 5 Being a Continuation of the Personal Histories of Pierre and His People and the Last Existing Records of Pretty Pierre by Parker Gilbert

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Ebook has 397 lines and 18772 words, and 8 pages

"D'ye mean to say," he groaned, "that the game is up? Is it all finished? Sweat o' my soul, my skin crawls like hot glass! Is it the end, eh? The beast, to die!"

Gobal's eyes glistened. He had sent up the mercury, he would now bring it down.

"Not such a beast as you think. Alive pirate, a convict, as comrade in adventure, is not sugar in the teeth. This one was no better than the worst. Well, he died. That was awkward. But he gave me the chart of the bay before he died--and that was damn square."

Tarboe held out his hand eagerly, the big fingers bending claw-like.

"Give it me, Gobal," he said.

"Wait. There's no hurry. Come along, there's the bell: they're going to drop him."

He coolly motioned, and passed out from the cabin to the ship's side. Tarboe kept his tongue from blasphemy, and his hand from the captain's shoulder, for he knew only too well that Gobal held the game in his hands. They leaned over and saw two sailors with something on a plank.

"We therefore commit his body to the deep, in the knowledge of the Judgment Day--let her go!" grunted Gobal; and a long straight canvas bundle shot with a swishing sound beneath the water. "It was rough on him too," he continued. "He waited twenty years to have his chance again. Damn me, if I didn't feel as if I'd hit him in the eye, somehow, when he begged me to keep him alive long enough to have a look at the rhino. But it wasn't no use. He had to go, and I told him so.

"Then he did the fine thing: he give me the chart. But he made me swear on a book of the Mass that if we got the gold we'd send one-half his share to a woman in Paris, and the rest to his brother, a priest at Nancy. I'll keep my word--but yes! Eh, Tarboe?"

"You can keep your word for me! What, you think, Gobal, there is no honour in Black Tarboe, and you've known me ten years! Haven't I always kept my word like a clock?"

Gobal stretched out his hand. "Like the sun-sure. That's enough. We'll stand by my oath. You shall see the chart."

Going again inside the cabin, Gobal took out a map grimed with ceaseless fingering, and showed it to Tarboe, putting his finger on the spot where the treasure lay.

"The Bay of Belle Amour!" cried Tarboe, his eyes flashing. "Ah, I know it! That's where Gaspard the pilot lived. It's only forty leagues or so from here." His fingers ran here and there on the map. "Yes, yes," he continued, "it's so, but he hasn't placed the reef right. Ah, here is how Brigond's ship went down! There's a needle of rock in the bay. It isn't here."

Gobal handed the chart over. "I can't go with you, but I take your word; I can say no more. If you cheat me I'll kill you; that's all."

"Let me give a bond," said Tarboe quickly. "If I saw much gold perhaps I couldn't trust myself, but there's someone to be trusted, who'll swear for me. If my daughter Joan give her word--"

"Is she with you?"

"Yes, in the Ninety-Nine, now. I'll send Bissonnette for her. Yes, yes, I'll send, for gold is worse than bad whisky when it gets into a man's head. Joan will speak for me."

Ten minutes later Joan was in Gobal's cabin, guaranteeing for her father the fulfilment of his bond. An hour afterwards the Free-and-Easy was moving up stream with her splintered mast and ragged sails, and the Ninety-Nine was looking up and over towards the Bay of Belle Amour. She reached it in the late afternoon of the next day. Bissonnette did not know the object of the expedition, but he had caught the spirit of the affair, and his eyes were like spots of steel as he held the sheet or took his turn at the tiller. Joan's eyes were now on the sky, now on the sail, and now on the land, weighing as wisely as her father the advantage of the wind, yet dwelling on that cave where skeletons kept ward over the spoils of a pirate ship.

They arrived, and Tarboe took the Ninety-Nine warily in on a little wind off the land. He came near sharing the fate of Brigond, for the yawl grazed the needle of the rock that, hiding away in the water, with a nose out for destruction, awaits its victims. They reached safe anchorage, but by the time they landed it was night, with, however, a good moon showing.

All night they searched, three silent, eager figures, drawing step by step nearer the place where the ancient enemy of man was barracked about by men's bodies. It was Joan who, at last, as dawn drew up, discovered the hollow between two great rocks where the treasure lay. A few minutes' fierce digging, and the kegs of gold were disclosed, showing through the ribs of two skeletons. Joan shrank back, but the two men tossed aside the rattling bones, and presently the kegs were standing between them on the open shore. Bissonnette's eyes were hungry--he knew now the wherefore of the quest. He laughed outright, a silly, loud, hysterical laugh. Tarboe's eyes shifted from the sky to the river, from the river to the kegs, from the kegs to Bissonnette. On him they stayed a moment. Bissonnette shrank back. Tarboe was feeling for the first time in his life the deadly suspicion which comes with ill-gotten wealth. This passed as his eyes and Joan's met, for she had caught the melodrama, the overstrain; Bissonnette's laugh had pointed the situation; and her sense of humour had prevailed. "La, la," she said, with a whimsical quirk of the head, and no apparent relevancy:

"Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home, Your house is on fire, and your children all gone."

The remedy was good. Tarboe's eyes came again to their natural liveliness, and Bissonnette said:

"My throat's like a piece of sand-paper."

Tarboe handed over a brandy flask, after taking a pull himself, and then sitting down on one of the kegs, he said: "It is as you see, and now Angel Point very quick. To get it there safe, that's the thing!" Then, scanning the sky closely: "It's for a handsome day, and the wind goes to bear us up fine. Good! Well, for you, Bissonnette, there shall be a thousand dollars, you shall have the Belle Chatelaine Inn and the little lady at Point Pierrot. For the rest, you shall keep a quiet tongue, eh? If not, my Bissonnette, we shall be the best of strangers, and you shall not be happy. Hein?"

Bissonnette's eyes flashed. "The Belle Chatelaine? Good! That is enough. My tongue is tied; I cannot speak; it is fastened with a thousand pegs."

"Very good, a thousand gold pegs, and you shall never pull them. The little lady will have you with them, not without; and unless you stand by me, no one shall have you at any price--by God!"

He stood up, but Joan put out her hand. "You have been speaking, now it is my turn. Don't cry cook till you have the venison home. What is more, I gave my word to Gobal, and I will keep it. I will be captain. No talking! When you've got the kegs in the cellar at Angel Point, good! But now--come, my comrades, I am your captain!"

She was making the thing a cheerful adventure, and the men now swung the kegs on their shoulders and carried them to the boat. In another half- hour they were under way in the gaudy light of an orange sunrise, a simmering wind from the sea lifting them up the river, and the grey-red coast of Labrador shrinking sullenly back.

About this time, also, a Government cutter was putting out from under the mountain-wall at Quebec, its officer in command having got renewed orders from the Minister to bring in Tarboe the smuggler. And when Mr. Martin, the inspector in command of the expedition, was ordered to take with him Mr. Orvay Lafarge and five men, "effectively armed," it was supposed by the romantic Minister that the matter was as good as done.

What Mr. Orvay Lafarge did when he got the word, was to go straight to his hat-peg, then leave the office, walk to the little club where he spent leisure hours, called office hours by people who wished to be precise as well as suggestive,--sit down, and raise a glass to his lips. After which he threw himself back in his chair and said: "Well, I'm particularly damned!" A few hours later they were away on their doubtful exploit.

On the afternoon of the second day after she left Labrador, the Ninety- Nine came rippling near Isle of Fires, not sixty miles from her destination, catching a fair wind on her quarter off the land. Tarboe was in fine spirits, Joan was as full of songs as a canary, and Bissonnette was as busy watching her as in keeping the nose of the Ninety-Nine pointing for Cap de Gloire. Tarboe was giving the sail full to the wind, and thinking how he would just be able to reach Angel Point and get his treasure housed before mass in the morning.

Mass! How many times had he laughed as he sat in church and heard the cure have his gentle fling at smuggling! To think that the hiding-place for his liquor was the unused, almost unknown, cellar of that very church, built a hundred years before as a refuge from the Indians, which he had reached by digging a tunnel from the shore to its secret passage! That was why the customs officers never found anything at Angel Point, and that was why Tarboe much loved going to mass. He sometimes thought he could catch the flavour of the brands as he leaned his forehead on the seat before him. But this time he would go to mass with a fine handful of those gold pieces in his pocket, just to keep him in a commendable mood. He laughed out loud at the thought of doing so within a stone's throw of a fortune and nose-shot of fifty kegs of brandy.

As he did so, Bissonnette gave a little cry. They were coming on to Cap de Gloire at the moment, and Tarboe and Joan, looking, saw a boat standing off towards the mainland, as if waiting for them. Tarboe gave a roar, and called to Joan to take the tiller. He snatched a glass and levelled it.

"A Government tug!" he said, "and tete de Diable! there's your tall Lafarge among 'em, Joan! I'd know him by his height miles off."

Joan lost colour a trifle and then got courage. "Pshaw," she said, "what does he want?"

"Want? Want? He wants the Ninety-Nine and her cargo; but by the sun of my soul, he'll get her across the devil's gridiron! See here, my girl, this ain't any sport with you aboard. Bissonnette and I could make a stand for it alone, but what's to become of you? I don't want you mixed up in the mess."

The girl was eyeing the Government boat. "But I'm in it, and I can't be out of it, and I don't want to be out now that I am in. Let me see the glass." She took it in one hand. "Yes, it must be M'sieu' Lafarge," she said, frowning. "He might have stayed out of this."

"When he's got orders, he has to go," answered her father; "but he must look out, for a gun is a gun, and I don't pick and choose. Besides, I've no contraband this cruise, and I'll let no one stick me up."

"There are six or seven of them," said Joan debatingly.

"Bring her up to the wind," shouted Tarboe to Bissonnette. The mainsail closed up several points, the Ninety-Nine slackened her pace and edged in closer to the land. "Now, my girl," said Tarboe, "this is how it stands. If we fight, there's someone sure to be hurt, and if I'm hurt, where'll you be?"

Bissonnette interposed. "We've got nothing contraband. The gold is ours."

"Trust that crew--but no!" cried Tarboe, with an oath. "The Government would hold the rhino for possible owners, and then give it to a convent or something. They shan't put foot here. They've said war, and they'll get it. They're signalling us to stop, and they're bearing down. There goes a shot!"

The girl had been watching the Government boat coolly. Now that it began to bear on, she answered her father's question.

"Captain," she said, like a trusted mate, "we'll bluff them." Her eyes flashed with the intelligence of war. "Here, quick, I'll take the tiller. They haven't seen Bissonnette yet; he sits low. Call all hands on deck--shout! Then, see: Loce will go down the middle hatch, get a gun, come up with it on his shoulder, and move on to the fo'castle. Then he'll drop down the fo'castle hatch, get along to the middle hatch, and come up again with the gun, now with his cap, now without it, now with his coat, now without it. He'll do that till we've got twenty or thirty men on deck! They'll think we've been laying for them, and they'll not come on--you see!"

Tarboe ripped out an oath. "It's a great game," he said, and a moment afterwards, in response to his roars, Bissonnette came up the hatch with his gun showing bravely; then again and again, now with his cap, now without, now with his coat, now with none, anon with a tarpaulin over his shoulders grotesquely. Meanwhile Tarboe trained his one solitary little cannon on the enemy, roaring his men into place.

From the tug it seemed that a large and well-armed crew were ranging behind the bulwarks of the Ninety-Nine. Mr. Martin, the inspector, saw with alarm Bissonnette's constantly appearing rifle.

"They've arranged a plant for us, Mr. Lafarge. What do you think we'd better do?" he asked.

"Fight!" answered Lafarge laconically. He wished to put himself on record, for he was the only one on board who saw through the ruse.

"But I've counted at least twenty men, all armed, and we've only five."

"As you please, sir," said Lafarge bluntly, angry at being tricked, but inwardly glad to be free of the business, for he pictured to himself that girl at the tiller--he had seen her as she went aft--in a police court at Quebec. Yet his instinct for war and his sense of duty impelled him to say: "Still, sir, fight!"

"No, no, Mr. Lafarge," excitedly rejoined his chief. "I cannot risk it. We must go back for more men and bring along a Gatling. Slow down!" he called. Lafarge turned on his heel with an oath, and stood watching the Ninety-Nine.

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