inside. A short while ago she had seemed so crisp and sure of herself, and now, though her shoulders didn’t sag, she had about her an air of helplessness. She was extremely feminine.
“Ask me?” he repeated, dropping his voice again. “Ma’am, forgive me, but until now I had supposed that the purpose of this interview was to get me a chance to ask him for something?”
He did not, properly, mean a pardon. Only the king could grant that. What he really meant—as he the lawyer knew—was a commutation of sentence pending royal decision on an application for pardon. In other words, Woodes Rogers might have recommended that this one prisoner be freed, keeping him from the gallows until word came back from London. Such recommendations almost always were acted upon favorably. But this would have been difficult to explain to the small beauty who stood before him.
Now she raised her head. There were tears in her eyes.
“Master Rounsivel, my uncle is not made of putty. I know that he loves me, but even for me he wouldn’t have consented to receive you if he did not have something else in mind.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure that I’d tell you if I did, but I don’t anyway. But whatever it is, I hope you’ll consider it. And as you consider it I hope you’ll think of his position.”
“I am not likely to forget it, ma’am. Now . . . where do I go?”
“This way, sir,” said a soldier.
Delicia Rogers for the first time put out a hand.
“Good luck.”
He did not touch the hand, only bowed over it.
“Thanks,” he said again, and he turned and went upstairs, a soldier before him, a soldier behind.
One floor above the level of the court they paused. There was a door, but no light slid from around it. A light did glow, faintly, indirectly—for the stair curved—above.
“Yours,” said one of the soldiers, and they clumped away.
George Rounsivel fetched a deep breath.
He went upstairs.
There was a narrow door, light beneath it. He knocked.
“Come in,” said a voice.
He opened the door and went in.
CHAPTER II
THE ROOM was large, the ceiling high. The windows to right and left were real windows, not musket-slits. Floor and walls were bare. On a table was a branch of candles, and by the side of this an unpowdered wig and a sword-and-sword-belt.
Behind the table, asprawl in an X-chair, was Woodes Rogers.
The governor was alone. Since he received a felon this implied either high courage, not to say foolhardiness, or else a naiveté not likely to be found in the man who had held Guayaquil for ransom and captured the Acapulco treasure galleon. He lounged. His coat was open, the waistcoat unbuttoned, and it was patent that he carried no pistol. The sword he had tossed upon the table was not even near his hand. It was no seaman’s cutlass but long and thin, a “court” sword.
Bristling with defensiveness, George gave a bow.
“Ave, Caesar! Moriturus saluto!”
“There’s no call to be caustic,” said Woodes Rogers. “Sit down.”
A large man, he had a high, curiously effeminate voice. He seemed indeed to speak with difficulty, as though the words hurt his mouth. George remembered that this man had had a good part of his upper jaw carried away by a Spanish ball.
George glanced at the indicated stool, and shook his head. In the first place, he was nervous. In the second place, the thing had the look of a penitent’s chair in some puritan church, or the sort of stool you’d find in the prisoner’s dock in court, and George wished to avoid all hint of guilt.
“I’ll not crawl before you,” he declared.
“I didn’t ask you to crawl. I asked you to sit down.”
Still George stood. He was angry.
“I can’t tell your Excellency more than I told the court, for that was the truth,” he blurted. “I was a passenger in the brig Barkus out of Philadelphia bound for Jamaica, but I was to be put off here. Somewhere south of Hatteras we were beset by as mangy a pack of rats as ever prowled around a garbage dump—my so-called ‘associates’ downstairs. They stripped us of everything, as they stripped the brig itself. But when they learned that I was a lawyer they insisted that I go with them. And when I say they insisted I mean they pointed pistols at me. So of course I went.”
“Of course.”
George looked sharply at him. Was this meant to be ironic? The captain-general, however, waved for him to go on.
“The Barkus had no extra canvas or line left then, so she put back for Philadelphia. They took everything, those scavengers. Everything! Deck fastenings, belaying pins, lanterns, even the skipper’s small square of rug from his cabin.
“The skipper wouldn’t risk coming down here in that condition, right in the middle of the hurricane season. And those damned pirates, your excellency, treated me like a pig in a sty—”
Here Governor Rogers held up a hand. Though amazed and seemingly somewhat amused by George’s presumption in breaking into speech before he’d been granted leave, Rogers had listened to the first part with a wry smile; now he called a halt.
“That will do. A vice admiralty court has heard you and has found you guilty, and there’s enough for me.”
“Then why in the name of the Devil are you having me up here?”
“I am not doing it in the name of the Devil, my impious friend. I’m doing it in the name of self-defense. I need help.”
“Eh?”
‘Your sentence stands. There is nothing I can do about it. But there are a few facts that I’d have you know—”
“Damn any facts you’d have me know! You’re cat-and-mousing, and I won’t stand it!”
Then he did a very foolish thing. Augur, Cunningham, Lewis, and the others had thought of George Rounsivel as a man without emotion. They were mistaken. He had seethed inside. And tonight, the unexpected summons after those hours of waiting, the talk with Delicia Rogers, the abrupt dismissal of the plea he had forced himself to start—these were too much for him. Something snapped. He sprang.
To snatch the sword and lug it out was the work of an instant.
Had the governor tried to cover himself it might have been his last living movement. But the governor only smiled.
“Captain Robinson,” he called.
The door was flung open. George whirled around.
Thomas
