Page:Post - Uncle Abner (Appleton, 1918).djvu/100

 ships are they that sail the Caribbee and rendezvous on the Dry Tortugas?" His voice took a strained, wild note. "Have they spacious cabins, or does one take three steps thus in the narrow pen of their hold?"

My uncle gathered his chin into his big fingers and looked steadily at the man.

"Strange quarters, Dabney," he said, "for a son of Thorndike Madison."

"Well, Abner!" cried the man, "what would you have? It was that or the plank. It's all very nice to be a gentleman and the son of a gentleman under the protection of Virginia; but off the Bermudas, with the muzzle of a musket pressed into your back and the sea boiling below you—what then?"

My uncle watched the man closely and with a strange expression.

"A clean death," he said, "would be better than God's vengeance to follow on one's heels."

The sailor swore a great oath.

"God's vengeance!" And he laughed. "I should not care how that followed on my heels. It's the vengeance of old Jules le Noir and the damned Britisher, Barrett, following on a man's heels, that puts ice in the blood. God's vengeance! Why, Abner, a preacher could pray that off in a meeting-house; but can he pray the half-breed off? Or the broken-nosed Englishman?"

The man seemed caught in a current of passion that whirled him headlong into indiscretions from 87