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Updated: June 13, 2025
Pike and cutlass and good red gold! saith the plain man. O Apollo, what a thing it is to be learned and a maker of songs!" Athwart his laughing words came from the lower end of the board a deep and harsh voice. The speaker was Captain Robert Baldry of the Star, and he used the deliberation of one who in his drinking had gone far and fast.
"The insult was gross," he said, with haughtiness, "but since I may not deny the truth of your words, John Nevil, I will reword my cartel. Captain Robert Baldry, I do solemnly challenge you to meet me with sword and dagger upon that day which sees our return to England!" "A far day that, perhaps!" cried Baldry. "But so be it! I'll not fail you, Sir Mortimer Ferne. Look that you fail not me!"
Did the first beams of the sun find the English yet in Nueva Cordoba, then the light should also behold the death with ignominy of the prisoner. "He will not die with ignominy," spoke the Admiral when the herald had come and gone. "Death cannot wear a form so base that he, nobly dying, will not ennoble." "Do you purpose, then, that he shall die?" demanded Baldry, roughly.
The speech was of the longest for the Admiral, who was a man of golden silences. His look had been upon Baldry, but his words were for Mortimer Ferne, at whom he looked not at all. "I have been challenged, sir," cried Baldry, roughly. "Draw back? God's wounds, not I!" His antagonist bit his lip until the blood sprang.
Ah, Captain Baldry, Giles Arden, good Humphrey, give you welcome! Here's room for Englishmen. Well, die, then, pertinacious señor! Now, now, Henry Sedley, there are lions yet in your path, but not so many. Have at their golden banner an you prize the toy! No, Arden, no let him take it single-handed.
The story ended, he gave his meed of grave sympathy to the man whose whole estate had been that sunken ship. Baldry sat silent, fingering, as was his continual trick, the hilt of his great Andrew Ferrara. But when the Admiral, with his slow, deliberate courtesy, went on to propose that for this adventure Captain Baldry cast his lot with the Mere Honour, he listened, then gave unexpected check.
No life had been forfeited, and Captain Robert Baldry must even digest as best he might his private loss and discomfiture.
Stumbling over the sand, he fell beside the man whose soul cried in vain unto Robert Baldry to return and claim his vengeance, and wrenched at the hand that seemed to have grown to the sword-hilt. "You are not kind!" he wailed. "Oh, let me have it!" "Kind!" echoed Ferne, slowly. "In this sick universe there is no kindness no, nor never was! There is the space between rack and torch."
One splendid lie followed another, until Baldry was caught by his own words, and saw himself thus, and thus, and thus! a sea-dog confessed, a gatherer of riches, a dealer of death from the poop of the Star! In his mind's eye the lost bark swelled to a phantom ship, gigantic, terrible, wrapped with the mist of the sea; while he himself ah! he himself
Dressed in flame she bore down upon, struck, and sunk the Phoenix.... Now we are the Mere Honour and the Marigold, and we go under press of sail because behind us, whitening the waters that we have left, is the plate-fleet from Cartagena." "Where is Robert Baldry?" asked Ferne. "In the hands of Don Luiz de Guardiola dead or living we know not.
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