And then, before Wolverstone could make answer, sharp and clear above the noise the buccaneers were making rang the note of a bugle from the side of the river. Blood leapt to his feet.

«It will be Hagthorpe and Yberville returning!» he cried.

«Pray God they've got the gold at last!» said Wolverstone.

They dashed out into the open and made for the parapet, to which the men were already swarming. As Blood reached it, the first of the returning canoes swung alongside of the jetty, and Hagthorpe sprang out of it.

«Ye're soon returned,» cried Blood, leaping down to meet him. «What luck?»

Hagthorpe, tall and square, his head swathed in a yellow kerchief, faced him in the dusk.

«Certainly not the luck that you deserve, Captain.» His tone was curious.

«Do you mean that you didn't overtake them?» Yberville, stepping ashore at that moment, answered for his fellow–leader.

«There was nobody to overtake, Captain. He fooled you, that treacherous Spaniard; he lied when he told you that he had sent off the gold; and you — you believed him — you believed a Spaniard!»

«If ye'd come to the point now!» said Captain Blood. «Did I hear ye say he had not sent off the gold? D'ye mean that it is still here?»

«No,» said Hagthorpe. «What we mean is that, after he had so fooled you with his lies that ye didn't even trouble to make search, you allowed them to go off scot–free, taking the gold with them.»

«What?» the Captain barked at him. «How do you know this?»

«A dozen miles or so from here we came upon an Indian village; and we had the wit to stop and inquire how long it might be since a Spanish fleet of canoes had gone that way. They answered that no such fleet had passed to–day, or yesterday, or any day since the last rains. That's how we knew that your gallant Spaniard had lied. We put about at once to return, and midway back we ran into Don Domingo's party. The meeting took him by surprise. He had not reckoned that we'd seek information so soon. But he was as smooth and specious as ever, and a deal more courteous. He confessed quite frankly that he had lied to you, adding that subsequently, after our departure, he had purchased his liberty, and that of all who accompanied him, by surrendering the gold to you. He was instructed by you, he said, to order us to return at once; and he showed us your note of hand, which made him safe.»

And then Yberville took up the tale.

«But we being not quite so trustful of Spaniards, and arguing that he who lies once will lie again, took them ashore and subjected them to a search.»

«And d'ye tell me that you found the gold?» cried Blood, aghast.

Yberville paused a moment and smiled.

«You had permitted them to victual themselves generously against that journey. Did you observe at what spring Don Domingo filled his water–casks?»

«His water–casks?» quoth Blood.

«Were casks of gold — there's six or seven hundred–weight of it at the least. We've brought it with us.»

By the time the joyous uproar excited by that announcement had settled down, Captain Blood had recovered from his chagrin. He laughed.

«I give you best,» he said to Hagthorpe and Yberville. «And the least I can do, by way of amends for having suffered myself to be so utterly fooled, is to forgo my share of the booty.» And then, on a graver note: «What did you do with Don Domingo?»

«I would have shot him for his perfidy!» said Hagthorpe fiercely. «But Yberville here — Yberville, of all men — turned mawkish, and besought me to let him go.»

Shamefacedly the young Frenchman hung his head, avoiding the Captain's glance of questioning surprise.

«Oh, but after all,» he flung out, defiant almost in self–defence, «what would you? There was a lady in the case — his little Indian wife.»

«Faith, now, it was of her that I was thinking,» said Blood. «And for her sake and his — oh, and also for our own — it will be best to tell Brazo Largo that Don Domingo and his wife were slain in the fight for the gold. The sight of the recovered water–casks will amply confirm the story. Thus there should be peace for all concerned, himself included.»

And so, although they brought back that rich booty from Santa Maria, Blood's part in that transaction was rated as one of his few failures. Not so, however, did he himself account it.

The love–story of Jeremy Pitt, the young Somerset–shire shipmaster, whose fate had been linked with Peter Blood's since the disastrous night of Sedgemoor, belongs to the later days of Blood's career as a buccaneer, to the great days when he commanded a fleet of five ships and over a thousand men of mixed nationality, held in a discipline to which his skill and good fortune made them willing to submit.

He had lately returned from a very successful raid upon the Spanish pearling fleet in the Rio de la Hache. He had come back to Tortuga to refit, and this not before it was necessary. There were several other buccaneer vessels in the harbour of Cayona at the time, and the little town was boisterous with their revelry. Its taverns and rum–shops throve, whilst the taverners and the women, white and half–castes, as mixed in origin and nationality as the buccaneers themselves, eased the rovers of a good deal of the plunder of which they had eased the Spaniards, who, again, were seldom better than robbers.

Usually these were unquiet times for Monsieur d'Ogeron, the agent of the French West India Company and Governor of Tortuga.

Ogeron himself, as we know, did very well out of the buccaneers in the percentages on their prizes which they very readily paid as harbour dues, and in other ways. But M. d'Ogeron had two daughters, the dark and stately Madeleine and the slight and joyous brunette Lucienne. Now Madeleine, for all her stateliness, had once succumbed to the wooing of a ruffianly buccaneer named Levasseur. To abstract her from this danger her father had shipped her off to France. But Levasseur, getting wind of it in time, had followed, seized the ship that carried her, and the worst might have befallen her but for the timely intervention of Captain Blood, who delivered her, unscathed, from his clutches and restored her, sobered by the experience, to her father.

Since then M. d'Ogeron had sought to practise discretion in the guests he received in the big white house set in its fragrant garden just above the town.

Captain Blood, by the service he had rendered the family on that occasion, had come to be regarded almost as a member of it. And since his officers, all of them driven to their trade as a consequence of transportation suffered for a political offence, were men of a different stamp from the ordinary buccaneer, they, too, were well received.

Now this in itself created a difficulty. If Monsieur d'Ogeron's house was open to the captains who followed Blood, he could not without offence close it to other buccaneer commanders. Therefore he was constrained to tolerate the visits of some whom he neither liked nor trusted, and this despite the protests of a guest from France, the fastidious and delicate Monsieur de Mercceur, who cared little for the company of any of them.

Monsieur de Mercoeur was the son of one of the governors of the French West India Company, sent by his father on a voyage of instruction to the settlements in which the company was interested. The frigate Cygne, which had brought him a week ago, had been at anchor since in Cayona Bay, and would continue there until the young gentleman should see fit to depart again. From this his social consequence may be inferred. Obviously he was a person whose wishes a colonial governor would do his utmost to respect. But how was he to respect them, for instance, where such a truculent, swaggering fellow as Captain Tondeur of the Reine Margot was concerned? Monsieur d'Ogeron did not quite see how he could forbid him the house, as Monsieur de Mercceur would have desired, not even when it became apparent that the rascal was attracted thither by Mademoiselle Lucienne.