Part 21 (1/2)

”I would delight to hear your story from the first,” he said to me; ”for I cannot believe that you have arrived so far as this without some very exceptional adventures.”

”I did not know,” said I, ”that my affairs meant anything to you.”

”On the contrary, you interest me vastly,” he replied. ”Consider, had it not been for my humble self, you had now been lying with your throat cut beside the open grave--or, perhaps, we might have buried you, with some pretence of decent feelings.”

And so I told him as much as I thought it would do him no harm to hear--of how I had been found by the wild men of the woods, and had journeyed by myself to Cahazaxa's Temple. Thence, I told him, I had found my way to the Wood of the Red Fish, where I had had the good fortune to fall in with William Rushby. But I told him nothing of Atupo, the Peruvian priest, or of the map which I myself had found by so singular a chance, or of the Treasure that my living eyes had looked upon.

”And this is all your story?” he asked.

I thought it best not to answer him; but I saw by the sly, half-amused expression upon his face that he knew well enough that I would keep him half in the dark.

He said nothing for a long time. And then quite suddenly, he slapped a hand upon a knee.

”Upon my life and soul,” he cried, ”you are a lad of spirit, such as I myself once was, until I learned that in this world it is best to a.s.sume a pose! Let me explain to you. There are certain commodities upon the earth that all men are ever after, and money is the first of these. We are, therefore, all enemies of one another; we scramble in the same gutter--to such heights has civilisation attained. Be set down for a fool, a lazy rascal and a fop, and it is easy enough to take by surprise those who think they have the whip-hand of you. You have had an example of this yourself in your own brief experience of Gilbert Forsyth. When you made off from John Bannister's cabin, on the morning when you saw us first, you never suspected that I was the one who would catch you. And so now. It is I who will outwit you, where friend Amos, with his knife and oaths, has failed already.”

I p.r.i.c.ked my ears at that; for my curiosity was roused.

”And where are we going?” I asked.

”To William Rushby,” he answered, ”sometime boatswain of the _Mary Greenfield_.”

”And why?” I asked.

He laughed outright.

”You must learn to see things,” he observed, ”from the point of view of others. Remember that I am well aware of this: Rushby and you, when you met, compared notes and hatched a plot together. John Bannister himself may, or may not, have been a party to your mild conspiracy. That is a point that does not affect the issue. I am not so sure Rushby spoke the truth when he told us he had hidden the map in the Spaniard's Tomb; otherwise, I cannot see why we did not find it. I go back to Rushby, and I take you with me, to learn the real truth.”

”How will you do that?” I asked.

I thought, at first, that he had ignored the question; for he answered in a round-about way.

”There is a game of cards called Poker,” he observed, ”at which I myself am tolerably proficient. In this game--with which you are too young to be well acquainted--there is a method of gaining by what is known as Bluff. Amos played the game of Bluff on Bannister, and failed. He tried it again on Rushby, and was singularly successful. In other words, Baverstock pretended that he held you in his power, and he was never asked to show his cards. To bluff, therefore is a risky business, which should be practised only in moments of emergency or urgent need. I go now to William Rushby, to lay my hand upon the table, knowing for a certainty that I hold the best card in the pack.”

”I quite fail to understand you,” said I, shaking my head; for all this was so much double Dutch to me.

”You,” said Forsyth, ”are the best card in the pack. There is no occasion for us to bluff. We have you in our power, as we have also Rushby. Between you, you know the truth. If one will not speak, the other will. If neither speaks, Amos can have his way, and both of you can leave your bones in this savage country, where you have ventured of your own free will.”

I saw now there was nothing about the matter so subtle as I had thought.

After all, it was no more than the old game they had played from the beginning.

”I see,” said I, quite slowly.

”I am glad of that,” said Forsyth.

Whereupon he lay down upon his side, and almost immediately fell sound asleep.

And for a long time I watched him slumbering, and wondered greatly upon the strange complexity of the man's character. He was polished and refined, and something of a scholar, too, if there was real learning behind his tags of Latin. He was also not without humanity and a sense of justice; else I had now been dead for a whole day and night--and that I was still alive I was profoundly grateful. And still, he was a villain, as cold-blooded as Amos himself, and more dangerous in the sense that he was saner.