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Now began the complications. Quite openly, Santos had bought the
schooner Spindrift, freighted her with wool, given me the command,
and vowed that he would go home in her rather than wait any longer
for the Lady Jermyn. At the last moment he appeared to change his
mind, and I sailed alone as many days as possible in advance of the
ship, as had been intended from the first; but it went sorely
against the grain when the time came. I would have given anything
to have backed out of the enterprise. Honest I might be no longer;
I was honestly in love with Eva Denison. Yet to have backed out
would have been one way of losing her for ever. Besides, it was
not the first time I had run counter to the law, I who came of a
lawless stock; but it would be the first time I had deserted a
comrade or broken faith with one. I would do neither. In for a
penny, in for a pound.
"But before my God I never meant it to turn out as it did; though
I admit and have always admitted that my moral responsibility is
but little if any the less on that account. Yet I was never a
consenting party to wholesale murder, whatever else I was. The
night before I sailed, Santos and the captain were aboard with me
till the small hours. They promised me that every soul should
have every chance; that nothing but unforeseen accident could
prevent the boats from making Ascension again in a matter of hours;
that as long as the gig was supposed to be lost with all hands,
nothing else mattered. So they promised, and that Harris meant
to keep his promise I fully believe. That was not a wanton ruffian;
but the other would spill blood like water, as I told you at the
hall, and as no man now knows better than yourself. He was
notorious even in Portuguese Africa on account of his atrocious
treatment of the blacks. It was a favorite boast of his that he
once poisoned a whole village; and that he himself tampered with
the Lady Jermyn's boats you can take my word, for I have heard
him describe how he left it to the last night, and struck the
blows during the applause at the concert on the quarter-deck. He
said it might have come out about the gold in the gig, during the
fire. It was safer to run no risks.
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