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"You think I give my parole to leave you sons of filth with this beautiful Spanish ship, to go make war upon other Spaniards! Ha!" Don Diego laughed in his throat. "You fool! You can kill me. Pish! It is very well. I die with my work well done. In less than an hour you will be the prisoners of Spain, and the Cinco Llagas will go belong to Spain again."
The mystery of the succour that had come at the eleventh hour to wreak vengeance upon the Spaniards, and to preserve for the island the extortionate ransom of a hundred thousand pieces of eight, remained yet to be probed. That the Cinco Llagas was now in friendly hands could no longer be doubted after the proofs it had given.
He carried further a bulky package addressed to a grande of Spain, heavily sealed with the arms of Espinosa another piece of evidence hastily manufactured in the cabin of the Cinco Llagas and he was spending these last moments in completing his instructions to his young companion. Don Esteban expressed his last lingering uneasiness: "But if you should betray yourself?" he cried.
As he stood there deep in thought, he was joined by Hagthorpe, Wolverstone, and Ogle the gunner. In silence they stared with him across the water at that other ship. She had veered a point away from the wind, and was running now on a line that must in the end converge with that of the Cinco Llagas.
As they were pulling away, the Admiral waving to them from the taffrail, they heard the shrill whistle of the bo'sun piping the hands to their stations, and before they had reached the Cinco Llagas, they beheld the Encarnacion go about under sail. She dipped her flag to them, and from her poop a gun fired a salute.
He made his preparations quickly, and on the morrow the Spanish carack lately labelled Nuestra Senora de las Llagas, but with that label carefully effaced from her quarter trimmed her sails and stood out for the open Atlantic, navigated by Captain Jasper Leigh.
'It is false, I answered; 'I am no spy, and I am come to these seas for one purpose only to find you. 'Then you have succeeded well, too well for your own comfort, perhaps. Say now, do you deny that you are Thomas Wingfield and an Englishman? 'I do not deny it. 'Your pardon. How comes it then that, as your companion the priest tells me, you sailed in Las Cinque Llagas under the name of D'AILA?
Ogeron, most accommodating of governors, advanced him money for the proper equipment of his ship the Cinco Llagas, which he renamed the Arabella. This after some little hesitation, fearful of thus setting his heart upon his sleeve. But his Barbados friends accounted it merely an expression of the ever-ready irony in which their leader dealt.
The Cinco Llagas and the Encarnacion, after a proper exchange of signals, lay hove to within a quarter of a mile of each other, and across the intervening space of gently heaving, sunlit waters sped a boat from the former, manned by six Spanish seamen and bearing in her stern sheets Don Esteban de Espinosa and Captain Peter Blood.
Three steps he took before he lost his balance and went tumbling into the green depths below. When he came to the surface again, gasping for air, the Cinco Llagas was already some furlongs to leeward. But the roaring cheer of mocking valediction from the rebels-convict reached him across the water, to drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul.
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