The Great Quest Part 16

The first sign that the others gave of noticing it was when Gleazen threw back his head and cried, "Pfaw! What a stench! The smell is all I have against the trade."

Matterson laughed, and Captain Jones with his grand manner said, "You have been too long away from it, Mr. Gleazen."

"Too long? That's as may be. An old horse settles easy into harness again."

Captain Jones smiled. With apparent irrelevance, but with a reminiscent air, he said; "Too long or no, it's a long time since first we met,--a long, long time, and yet I remember as yesterday what a night we had of it. It began when that blasted Frenchman slipped his cables and sought to beat us up the river. It was you, Gleazen, that saved us then. When your message came, with what haste we landed the boats and towed the old brig straight up stream! Row?

We rowed like the devil, and though our palms peeled, we won the race. It was a good cargo you had waiting, too. Only seven died in the pa.s.sage."

In the pa.s.sage! Already I had suspected, now I knew, that the s.h.i.+p with her fast lines and cruel officers was none other than a slaver; that the smell was the stench of a slave-s.h.i.+p; that in that very cabin men had bartered for human beings. If I could, I would have turned my back on them there and then; the repugnance that I had long felt grew into downright loathing. What would I not have given to be up and away with Arnold Lamont! But I was a mere stripling, alone, so far as help was concerned, in a den of villains crueler than wolves. Though I would eagerly have left them, I dared not; and almost at once something happened that in any case would have held me where I was.

Gleazen leaned across the punch-bowl and said to Captain Jones; "Who is there in port will make a good captain for a smart brig with a neat bow, swift to sail and clever to work?"

Captain Jones ran his fingers through his stiff, s.h.a.ggy hair. "Now, let me see," he replied, "there's a man--"

Cutting him sharply off, my uncle spoke up, "Gentlemen, I will choose the master of my own vessel."

I knew by his voice that he, as well as I, was sickened by the situation in which we found ourselves. Poor Uncle Seth, I thought, how little did he suspect, when he united his fortune with the golden dreams of Neil Gleazen, that he was to travel such a road as this!

"Ah!" said Gleazen. "And who will it be?" An unkind smile played around his mouth.

"Gideon North, if he will come back to us," said my uncle.

"Ah!" Matterson, Gleazen, and Captain Jones exclaimed as if with one breath.

For a minute or so the three sat in silence, looking hard at the top of the table; then Matterson with a queer twist of his lips spoke in Spanish. When, after another silence, the captain of the Merry Jack and Eleanor answered at length in the same tongue, Matterson responded briefly, and all three men nodded.

A quality so curiously and subtly dramatic pervaded the scene that I remember thinking, as I looked about, what a rare theme it would have made for a painter. I believe that a skillful artist, if he had studied the faces of us all as we sat there, could have put our characters on his canvas so faithfully that he would have been in danger of paying for his honesty with his life, had Matterson or the strange captain had a chance at him in the dark. The very place in which we sat smelled of villainies, and the rat-like captain of the s.h.i.+p was a fit master of such a den.

Gleazen now turned to my uncle. "Very well," said he, with an amused smile, "Joe, here, and Arnold Lamont are in good odor with him. Suppose, then, that we let them go ash.o.r.e and hunt him out and talk matters over. I've no doubt he'll come back. He went off in a tantrum, as a man will when he takes pepper up his nose. You must know where the fellow's staying. You were to send him the money due him. Captain Jones will lend them one of his boats for now, and I'll have our boat ready to take them all off together in, say, three hours' time."

As I have said in an earlier chapter of this narrative, by inclination I was a dreamer; and yet I must have been more than a mere dreamer, and worse, not to have scented by those dark looks and cryptic words some trouble or other afoot. It was as if for a long time I had seen the three to be united definitely against us, but as if I now for the first time perceived what a desperately black and sinful alliance they made--it was as if the spectacle struck me into a daze. When Gleazen finished, the other two again nodded, and in the very manner of their nods there was something as cold and deliberate as a snake's eye. Had I been able to rely upon the impressions of the moment, I should have said that time stood as still as the sun upon Gibeon; that for many minutes we stared at one another in mutual suspicion; that the beating of my heart had all but ceased. But the impressions of the moment deceived me.

When Gleazen stopped speaking, he hit with his elbow the ink-bottle that stood on the table. It tipped on its side, rolled deliberately across the table, and fell; but before it struck the floor, Matterson, leaning out with a swift, dexterous motion, caught it, tried the stopper, and murmured as if to himself, "There's luck for you! Not a drop is lost." In the time it had taken that bottle to roll across the table, and not a second more, I had suffered that untold suspense.

Now the spell was shattered, and hearing someone speaking in an undertone behind me, I turned and caught Captain Jones in the act of giving instructions _in Spanish_ to his negro steward.

I was surprised and angry. Though of late I had heard much Spanish, it seemed to me that to speak it under the circ.u.mstances was so rude as to verge on open affront. Then Uncle Seth, gulping down his astonishment that Gleazen should so readily accede to his wishes, spoke up for himself; and because I was so deeply interested in whatever he might have to say, I turned my back on the mungo, ceased to watch Captain Jones, and did not notice that the steward went immediately on deck. Nor did I attribute any significance to the sound of oars b.u.mping against the pins, which I soon afterwards heard. Had not Arnold Lamont been waiting on deck with his eyes fixed apparently on the dark outline of the frigate, my stupidity must have cost us even more than it did.

"Very well," said Uncle Seth. "I will do as you suggest."

"Perhaps," said Gleazen, thoughtfully, "Sim Muzzy, here, would like to go."

"Oh, yes," cried Sim, "I'm fair dying for a trip on dry land. Yes, indeed, I'd like to go. I'd like it mightily. You've always said, Mr. Gleazen, I was too thick to do harm. Oh, yes indeed!"

Matterson smiled and Captain Jones covered his mouth with his hand, but Gleazen gravely nodded.

"Well, Sim, go you shall," said he. "There ain't one of us here but is glad to see an honest man take his fling ash.o.r.e, and Havana's a city for you. Such handsome women as ride about in their carriages!

And such sights as you'll see in the streets! You'll be a wiser man e'er you come back to us, Sim. I swear, I'd like to go myself,--but not to-night! I ain't one to neglect business for pleasure."

When he shot a glance at Matterson and Captain Jones, my eyes followed his, and I saw that once more they had fixed their gaze on the top of the table. Now I was actually unable, so baffling had been their change of front, to make up my mind whether they were to be suspected or to be trusted.

"Well," said Gleazen, "we are all agreed. Lay down your orders, Seth. They'll carry them out to the last letter."

So Uncle Seth told me where to find Gideon North, and Neil Gleazen wrote it on a paper,--_in Spanish_, mind you!--and they put their heads together, every one, to think up such arguments as would induce Captain North to return, all with an appearance of enthusiasm that amazed me and might easily have put my suspicions to shame but for those other things that had happened.

"I'll be civil to him," Gleazen cried. "And you can tell him, too, that this is an _honest voyage_. We're to run no race with the king's cruisers, Joe."

"Aye," Captain Jones put in, "an able vessel and an honest voyage."

"With a mountain of treasure to be got," added Matterson.

The three spoke so gravely and straightforwardly now, that I wondered at their insolence; and as Sim and I got up to go, not yet quite believing that in reality, and not in a dream, we were being dispatched into the heart of that strange city, they accompanied us on deck and told Arnold Lamont that he was to go with us on our errand, and saw us safely started in the long boat of the Merry Jack and Eleanor before returning to their punch.

I could see that Arnold had no liking for the mission, but while we were in the boat he gave me no explanation of his uneasiness.

Indeed, Sim Muzzy talked so much and so fast that, when he once got started, you could scarcely have thrust the point of a needle into his monologue.

"She's a slaver," he murmured as we pulled away from the Merry Jack and Eleanor. "A cruel-hearted slaver! Thank heaven, we're never to have a hand in any such iniquity as that."

We looked back at the s.h.i.+p, black and gloomy against the sky, with many men moving about on her deck.

"You're a silly fool," one of the oarsmen cried, having overheard him, "a man without stomach, heart, or good red blood."

"Stomach, is it?" Sim retorted. "I'll have you know I eat my three hearty meals a day and they set well too. I can eat as much victuals as the next man. Why--" And there was no stopping him till the boat b.u.mped against a wharf and we three stepped out.

The boat, I noticed, instead of putting back to the s.h.i.+p, waited by the wharf.

I turned and looked at the restless harbor, on which each light was reflected as a long, tremulous finger of flame that reached almost to my feet, at the sky, in which the stars were now s.h.i.+ning, and at the anch.o.r.ed s.h.i.+ps, each with her own story, could one but have read it; then I yielded to Sim's importunate call and in the darkness turned after him and Arnold. What reason was there to suspect that Simeon Muzzy and I stood at a crossroads where our paths divided?

Coming to the street, we stopped, and in the light from an open window put our heads together over the paper that Gleazen had written out and given to us with instructions to show it to the first person we met and turn where he pointed.

"Why, it's all in foreigner's talk!" Sim exclaimed.

"Let me see it," said Arnold.

He looked at it a long time and smiled. "I wonder," he said, "do they think we are so very simple?"

Now a man came toward us. Before he could pa.s.s, Arnold stepped suddenly forward and _addressed him in Spanish_.

"Why," cried I, when the pa.s.serby had gone, "you, too--do you talk Spanish?"

Arnold turned to me with a smile and said, for the second time, "A man does not tell all he knows."

Thrusting the paper into his pocket, he continued, "According to the directions that Mr. Gleazen has written down for our guidance, my friends, we should turn to the right. But according to my personal knowledge, which that man confirmed, we shall find Gideon North by turning to the left."

To the left, then, we turned; and only Arnold Lamont, who told me of it afterward, saw one of the boatmen, when we had definitely taken our course, leave the boat and run into the darkness in the direction that Neil Gleazen wished to send us.

Carriages pa.s.sed us, and men on horseback, and negroes loitering along the streets. There were bright lights in the windows; and we saw ladies and their escorts riding in queer two-wheeled vehicles that I later learned were called _volantes_.

All was strange and bizarre and extraordinarily interesting. Never did three men from a little country village in New England find themselves in a more utterly foreign city. But although Sim and I had our eyes open for every new sight, I was nevertheless aware that Arnold was more alert than either of us, and twice he urged us to keep our eyes and wits about us.