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Captain Scarfield
by
“James Mainwaring,” he said, “I promised thee to report if I had news of the pirate. Is thee ready now to hear my news?”
There was something so strange in his agitation that it began to infect Mainwaring with a feeling somewhat akin to that which appeared to disturb his visitor. “I know not what you mean, sir!” he cried, “by asking if I care to hear your news. At this moment I would rather have news of that scoundrel than to have anything I know of in the world.”
“Thou would? Thou would?” cried the other, with mounting agitation. “Is thee in such haste to meet him as all that? Very well; very well, then. Suppose I could bring thee face to face with him–what then? Hey? Hey? Face to face with him, James Mainwaring!”
The thought instantly flashed into Mainwaring’s mind that the pirate had returned to the island; that perhaps at that moment he was somewhere near at hand.
“I do not understand you, sir,” he cried. “Do you mean to tell me that you know where the villain is? If so, lose no time in informing me, for every instant of delay may mean his chance of again escaping.”
“No danger of that!” the other declared, vehemently. “No danger of that! I’ll tell thee where he is and I’ll bring thee to him quick enough!” And as he spoke he thumped his fist against the open log book. In the vehemence of his growing excitement his eyes appeared to shine green in the lanthorn light, and the sweat that had stood in beads upon his forehead was now running in streams down his face. One drop hung like a jewel to the tip of his beaklike nose. He came a step nearer to Mainwaring and bent forward toward him, and there was something so strange and ominous in his bearing that the lieutenant instinctively drew back a little where he sat.
“Captain Scarfield sent something to you,” said Eleazer, almost in a raucous voice, “something that you will be surprised to see.” And the lapse in his speech from the Quaker “thee” to the plural “you” struck Mainwaring as singularly strange.
As he was speaking Eleazer was fumbling in a pocket of his long-tailed drab coat, and presently he brought something forth that gleamed in the lanthorn light.
The next moment Mainwaring saw leveled directly in his face the round and hollow nozzle of a pistol.
There was an instant of dead silence and then, “I am the man you seek!” said Eleazer Cooper, in a tense and breathless voice.
The whole thing had happened so instantaneously and unexpectedly that for the moment Mainwaring sat like one petrified. Had a thunderbolt fallen from the silent sky and burst at his feet he could not have been more stunned. He was like one held in the meshes of a horrid nightmare, and he gazed as through a mist of impossibility into the lineaments of the well-known, sober face now transformed as from within into the aspect of a devil. That face, now ashy white, was distorted into a diabolical grin. The teeth glistened in the lamplight. The brows, twisted into a tense and convulsed frown, were drawn down into black shadows, through which the eyes burned a baleful green like the eyes of a wild animal driven to bay. Again he spoke in the same breathless voice. “I am John Scarfield! Look at me, then, if you want to see a pirate!” Again there was a little time of silence, through which Mainwaring heard his watch ticking loudly from where it hung against the bulkhead. Then once more the other began speaking. “You would chase me out of the West Indies, would you? G—- —- you! What are you come to now? You are caught in your own trap, and you’ll squeal loud enough before you get out of it. Speak a word or make a movement and I’ll blow your brains out against the partition behind you! Listen to what I say or you are a dead man. Sing out an order instantly for my mate and my bos’n to come here to the cabin, and be quick about it, for my finger’s on the trigger, and it’s only a pull to shut your mouth forever.”