The swift tropic night had fallen, and the black sky was aglow with winking stars—miniature moons that turned key, reef, and water into a phosphorescent glow. Out of the silence came only the weird songs of the black boatmen gathered about the camp fire at the hut under the palms. On the schooner the evening meal was over, and Andy sat almost lost in dreams, while his host drew on his after-dinner cigar.
When Andy and Captain Bassett had landed, after their aerial flight into the cove, it was nearly dusk. The boy suggested that he would at once dismantle his machine and take it aboard the schooner, to be carried to his host’s home on Andros Island, and thence to Nassau and the steamer. After his nerve-wrecking flight in the afternoon, he did not feel equal to another sky voyage of perhaps one hundred and fifty miles.
At this, the Englishman made a peculiar request.
[187]
“I wish you wouldn’t take it apart for a little while.”
“Then it isn’t convenient to sail to-night?” said Andy. “But, just as you like.”
It had been agreed that the schooner was to set sail for distant Andros as soon as the moon rose.
“Yes,” answered the man slowly. “But I’ve been thinking of something. I can’t quite make up my mind—I’d like to talk to you about it after a bit. Then we’ll go as we’ve arranged, if you like.”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” exclaimed the boy. “Nothing would please me more than to stay here always. But you can see how it is—they’ll all be worried. I’ve got to get to the telegraph as soon as possible and wire them I’m not lost in the sea.”
“I understand,” answered Captain Bassett. “It was thoughtless of me to ask it. Go ahead. We’ll leave with the moon.”
But instead of going ahead, the boy walked to his new-found friend’s side.
“What was it?” he asked curiously.
“A crazy idea,” answered his host, with a laugh. “Please forget it.”
“I can’t,” said the boy decisively. “If you[188] have the slightest reason to have me stay here awhile, I know it isn’t a crazy idea. Anyway, I won’t consent to taking you away from your business on an hour’s notice and unless it is convenient for you to go.”
The man shrugged his shoulders.
“Coming or going is nothing to me,” he replied. “I am here not because I am needed—my black overseer can be trusted with my business. But there are strange things in these faraway keys. For a time you and your flying machine set me thinking. I’ve dismissed the idea—”
“I haven’t,” interrupted Andy. “Whatever it was, if the Pelican was a part of it, she’s goin’ to stand there until you tell me what you had in mind.”
The white-costumed man looked at the boy with a quizzical smile, appeared to be about to speak, and then only shook his head. He and the boy were yet standing by the ghostly planes of the aeroplane, on which the Englishman’s hand rested as if the machine meant much to him.
“It’s about Timbado Key, isn’t it?” suggested Andy, at last.
“Yes,” retorted Captain Bassett, startled.[189] “But how—Oh, yes, I remember: I told you it had a tragic story. You’re a good guesser,” he concluded, smiling again.
“I’m not guessing now,” went on the boy impulsively, and unable longer to restrain himself. “I know about Timbado and about Cajou.”
The man came toward him, a look of surprise on his face.
“I’ve never met any white person who knew that,” he said at once. “What is it you know?”
The remark had escaped Andy unwittingly. He was embarrassed.
“I—I didn’t mean to speak yet,” he began.
“Why not?” retorted his companion. “What do you know?”
“I’m awfully sorry I said that, Captain Bassett,” went on the boy slowly. “But I’ll tell you after you tell me the real story.”
“Isn’t yours a real story?” laughed the Englishman.
“I’m sure it isn’t,” answered Andy impulsively. “At least, I don’t want to talk of it now.”
“It must be uncomplimentary to someone,” suggested his friend.
[190]
The boy, still much confused, blurted out:
“It is.”
“Am I concerned?” asked Captain Bassett.
Andy looked at the man again. There was anything but a bad look in the Englishman’s face. His strong, sunburned countenance was set in feature, but the boy saw nothing more than the face of a man accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed. Yet, being in for it, the lad could not lie. Caught in his indiscretion, he only nodded his head.
“After supper, then, we’ll talk it over,” was the Englishman’s only comment.
“And,” added Andy, eager to show some appreciation of the man’s kindness to him, “we won’t take the machine apart until I know what you were figuring on.”
“As you like,” replied the man in quite another tone.
Nothing more was said until Captain Bassett’s after-dinner cigar was going well.
“Now,” he said, “before I tell you of what I was thinking and of Timbado Key, I’d like to hear what you know about the place—that is, if you like.”
“I don’t like it at all,” answered Andy in renewed confusion. “And I’m sure part of[191] what I’ve been told is not true. But I’ll finish what I started, even if you think the less of me for it. I ain’t much for carryin’ tales.”
“It may be true,” was the Englishman’s comment, as he settled down in his canvas deck chair and luxuriously drew on his Havana cigar.
With no further preface, Andy repeated the disjointed tale Ba, the colored man, had gradually revealed: how the Herculean negro had escaped from the jail in Nassau, how he had been carried away to Nassau practically a prisoner by Captain Bassett, how he and Nickolas and Thomas had been sent to steal the great pink pearl from King Cajou, how Ba had actually seen the jewel and was lashed so cruelly, and the unsolved mystery of what came after in Ba’s escape and the disappearance of the other conspirators.
When he had finished, there was no immediate response from the man who presumably had sent two men to their death at the hands of an African cannibal—no denial. But Captain Bassett’s cigar had gone out. The Englishman at last drew a match on the arm of his chair. As it flared up at the end of his cigar, the observant boy thought he could make out a smile on the[192] strong face of the accused man. Then it was dark and silent again.
“This nigger, Cajou,” came at last through the half dark night from Captain Bassett’s chair—and in a voice devoid of either guilt or innocence—“is more than you have been told. So far as I know, I am the only white man who has visited his island and come away again. He is a king, in a way. He is also the best type of the pure blood African as he exists in our island world. How he came to be on Timbado, no one knows. Nor how he made about himself a settlement of others of his kind. You can find bits of old savagery in similar people on some of the other ‘out islands.’ But on Timbado, in Cajou’s realm (if you can call it that), there no doubt exist practices that you can find nowhere else but on the Congo.”
“Cannibals?” interrupted Andy, drawing his chair forward.
“Among other things,” replied the speaker, “but, of course, only by report. We can imagine the rest. Also, by report, they are wreckers and pirates in a small way. By my own experience, I know they are thieves—Cajou an artful one.”
“Six years ago,” went on Captain Bassett,[193] “in an expedition such as I have made here, I visited the southern reefs of the Smaller Bank, north of Cajou’s island. As I told you, I am a fruit and sisal hemp grower on Andros. But, like everyone in the Bahamas, in the off season, I utilize my men sponging. And, as you will soon learn, sponging means possible pearls. Like the gold prospector in other lands, we Bahamans love to seek the unknown waters where always there is the possibility that we never quite realize—the Koh-i-noor of pearls; the perfect pink pearl that is to make us fortune and fame.”
“I understand,” assented the boy.
“As you can see,” continued the Englishman, “it isn’t an unideal fancy. Even here, in this beautiful cove, there is such a chance—” and the boy could almost see a smile. “But six years ago, idling as now in about the same kind of a sleepy place, I got my first sight of Cajou. In a leaky old ‘sponger,’ crowded with a cargo of half-naked subjects, he did us the honor of calling on us.”
“What’d he look l............