Pieces of Eight Part 9

After breakfast, our first thought was naturally to the sad and disagreeable business before us.

"I tell you what I've been thinking, sar," said Tom, as we rowed ash.o.r.e, and I managed to pull down a turkey-buzzard that rose at our approach--happily our coverings had proved fairly effective--"I've been thinking that the only one of the three that really matters is the captain, and we can find sufficient soil for him in one of those big holes."

"How about the others?"

"Why, to tell the truth, I was thinking that sharks are good enough for them."

"They deserve no better, Tom, and I think we may as well get rid of them first. The tide's running out strong and we won't have them knocking about for long."

So it was done as we said, and carrying them by the feet and shoulders to the edge of the bluff--George, and Silly Theodore, and the nameless giant who had knocked me down so opportunely--we skilfully flung them in, and they glided off with scarce a splash.

"See that fin yonder!" cried Tom eagerly; and next minute one of the floating figures was drawn under. "Got him already!" (with a certain grim satisfaction). "That's what I call quick work."

Then we turned to the poor captain, and carried him as gently as we could over the rough ground to the biggest of the banana holes, as the natives call them, and there we were able to dig him a fairly respectable grave.

"Do you know the funeral service, Tom?" I asked.

"No, sar, can't say as I do, though I seem to have heard it pretty often."

"Wait a minute. I've got a Bible aboard, I'll go and get it."

"I'd rather go with you, sar, if you don't mind."

"Why, you're surely not frightened of the poor fellow here, are you, Tom?"

"Well, sar, I don't say as I'm exactly that; but somehow he seems kind of lonesome; and, if you don't mind--"

So we went off, and were back in a few moments with the Bible, and I read those pa.s.sages, from Job and the Psalms, immemorially a.s.sociated with the pa.s.sage of the dead:

_"Man, that is born of woman, is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not--;_ and again:

_Behold Thou hast made my days as a hand-breadth: and mine age is as nothing before Thee: Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity. Surely every man walketh in a vain show: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them. When Thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, Thou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth: surely every man is vanity. Have mercy, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry: hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with Thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were--."_

And, by the time we had got to the end, our tears were falling like rain into a brave man's grave.

CHAPTER X

_In Which Tom and I Seriously Start in Treasure Hunting._

Tom and Sailor and I were now, to the best of our belief, alone on the island, and a lonesomer spot it would be hard to imagine, or one touched at certain hours with a fairer beauty--a beauty wraith-like and, like a sea-sh.e.l.l, haunted with the marvel of the sea. But we, alas!--or let me speak for myself--were sinful, misguided men, to whom the gleam and glitter of G.o.d's making spoke all too seldom, and whose hearts were given to the baser shining of such treasure as that of which I for one still dreamed--with an obstinacy all the more hardened by the opposition we had encountered, and by the menace of danger the enterprise now held beyond peradventure--a menace, indeed, to which Tobias's words had given the form of a precise challenge. Perhaps but for that, remembering the count of so many dead men--men who had lost their lives in the prosecution of my probably vain desire--I would have given the whole thing up, and sailed the boat back to less-haunted regions, which Tom and I might easily have done, and as Tom, I could plainly see, would himself have preferred.

But Tobias's challenge made such a course impossible for any man worthy of the name, and I never gave the alternative a moment's consideration.

But I did give Tom his choice of staying or going--a choice made possible that day by a schooner sailing close in sh.o.r.e and easy to signal. Yet Tom, while making no secret of his real feelings, would not hear of quitting.

"I sha'n't think a cent worse of you, Tom," I a.s.sured him. "Indeed, I won't. It's no doubt a mad business anyway, and I'm not sure I've the right to endanger in it any other lives than my own."

"No, sar," said Tom; "I came with you, you have treated me right, and I am going to see you through."

"You're the real thing; G.o.d bless you, Tom," I exclaimed. "But I doubt if I've the right to take advantage of your goodness. I'm not sure that I oughtn't to signal those fellows to take you off with them w.i.l.l.y-nilly."

"No, sar, you wouldn't do that, I'm sure. I'm a free man, G.o.d be praised, though my mother and father were slaves"--and he drew himself up with pathetic pride--"and I can choose my own course, as they couldn't. Besides, there's no one needs me at home; all my girls and boys are well fixed; and if I have to go, perhaps there's some one needs me more in heaven."

"All right, Tom, and thank you; we'll say no more about it." And so we let the schooner go by, and turned to the consideration of our plans.

First we went over our stores, and, thanks to those poor dead mouths that did not need to be reckoned with any more, we had plenty of everything to last us for at least a month, not to speak of fishing, at which Tom was an expert.

When, however, we turned to our plans for the treasure-hunting, we soon came to a dead stop. No plans seemed feasible in face of that rocky wilderness, all knives to the feet, and writhing serpents of fanged and toothed foliage to the eye, with brambles like barbed-wire fences at every yard.

The indications given by Tobias seemed, in the face of such a terrain, nave to a degree. Possibly the land had changed since his day. Some little, of course, it must have done. Tom and I went over Tobias's directions again and again. Of course, there was the compa.s.s carved on the rock, and the cross. There was something definite--something which, if it was ever there at all, was there still--for in that climate the weather leaves things unperished almost as in Egypt.

Sitting on the highest bluff we could find, Tom and I looked around.

"That compa.s.s is somewhere among these infernal rocks--if it ever was carved there at all--that's one thing certain, Tom; but look at the rocks!"

Over twenty miles of rocks north and south, and from two to six from east to west. A more hopeless job the mind of man could not conceive.

Tom shook his head, and scratched his greying wool.

"I go most by the ghost, sar," he said. "All these men had never been killed if the ghost hadn't been somewhere near. It's the ghost I go by.

Mark me, if we find the treasure it'll be by the ghost."

"That's all very well," I laughed. "But how are we going to get the ghost to show his hand? He's got such bloodthirsty ways with him."

"They always have, sar," said Tom, no doubt with some ancestral shudder of voodoo worship in his blood. "Yes, sar, they always cry out for blood. It's all they've got to live on. They drink it like you and me drink coffee or rum. It's terrible to hear them in the night."

"Why, you don't mean to say you've heard them drinking it, Tom," I asked. "That's all nonsense."

"They'll drink any kind,--any they can get hold of,--chickens' or pigs'

or cows'; you can hear them any night near the slaughterhouse." And Tom lowered his voice. "I heard them from the boat, the other night, when I couldn't sleep--heard them as plain as you can hear a dog lapping water.

And it's my opinion there was two of them. But I heard them as plain as I hear you."

As Tom talked, I seemed to hear Ulysses telling of his meeting with Agamemnon in Hades, and those terrible ghosts drinking from the blood-filled trench, and I shuddered in spite of myself; for it is almost impossible entirely to refuse credence to beliefs held with such cert.i.tude of terror across so many centuries and by such different people.

"Well, Tom," I remarked, "you may be right, but of one thing I'm certain; if the ghost's going to get any one, it sha'n't be you."

"We've both got one good chance against them--" Tom was beginning.

"Don't tell me again about that old sucking fish."

"Mind you keep it safe, for all that," said Tom gravely. "I wouldn't lose mine for a thousand pounds."

"Well, all right, but let's forget the d.a.m.ned old ghosts for the present," and I broke out into the catch we had sung on so momentous an occasion--

_Some gave a nickel, some gave a dime; But I didn't give no red cent-- She was no girl of mine-- Delia's gone! Delia's gone!_

And it did one good to hear Tom's honest laughter resounding in that beautiful haunted wilderness, as the song brought back to both of us the memories of that morning which already seemed so long ago.