"Keep your hands off me!" she ordered promptly, jerking away. "I will have naught to do with you, who believe me a bad woman."
"I don't believe it," I answered. "I most humbly crave pardon. It was a foul and unmanly thing for me to say. I have never doubted your honesty, and I said that which I did only because you had angered me."
She seemed somewhat appeased.
"As for Roger O'Farrel," said she, "he is twice as old as either of us. He took me off a sinking ship when I was a baby and raised me like his own daughter. And if I took to the life of a rover, it is not his fault, who would have established me like a fine lady ashore had I wished. But the love of adventure is in my blood and though Fate made a woman of me, I have lived a man's life.
"If I am hard and cold and heartless, what else might you expect of a maid who grew up among daily scenes of blood and violence, whose earliest remembrances are of sinking ships, crashing cannon and the shrieks of the dying? I know the rotten worth of my companions—sots, murderers, thieves, gallows birds—all save Captain Roger O'Farrel.
"Men say he is cruel and it may be so. But to me he has always been kind and gentle. And moreover he is a fine upstanding man, of high aristocratic blood with the courage of a lion!"
I said nothing against the buccaneer, whom I knew to be the disinherited black sheep of a powerful Irish family, but I experienced a strange sensation of pleasure to learn from her lips just what their relationship was to each other.
A scene long forgotten suddenly flashed in my mind: a boatload of people sighted off the Tortugas and taken aboard—the words of one of the women, "And it's Helen Tavrel we have to thank, God bless her! For she made bloody Hilton put all we a-boat with food and water, when the fiend would ha' burned us all with our ship. Woman pirate she may be, but a kind heart she hath for all that='
After all, the girl was a credit to her sex, considering her raising and surroundings, thought I, and felt strangely cheerful.
"You'll try to forget my words," said I. "Now let us be getting toward our hiding place, for it is like we will have need of it tomorrow."
I helped her to her feet and gave her rapier into her hand. She followed me then without a word and no conversation passed between us until we reached the pool beside the cliff. Here we halted for a moment.
Truth, it was a weird and fantastic sight. The cliffs rose stark and black on either side, and between them whispered and rustled the thick shadows of the fronds. The stream sliding over the cliff before us glimmered like molten silver in the moonlight, and the pool into which it slipped shimmered with long bright ripples. The moon rode over all like a broad buckler of white gold.
"Sleep in the cavern," I commanded. "I will make me a bed among these bushes which grow close by."
"Will you be safe thus?" she asked.
"Aye; no man is like to come before morning, and there are no dangerous beasts on the island, save reptiles which lurk among the swamps on the other side of it."
Without a word, she waded into the pool and vanished in the silver mist of the fall. I parted the bushes near at hand and composed myself for slumber. The last thing I remembered, as I fell asleep, was an unruly mass of golden curls, below which danced a pair of brooding grey eyes.
THE SECOND DAY
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SOMEONE was shaking me out of my sound slumber. I stirred, then awoke suddenly and sat up, groping for blade or pistol.
"My word, sir, you sleep deep. John Gower might have stolen upon you and cut out your heart and you not aware of it."
It was hardly dawn and Helen Tavrel was standing over me.
"I had thought to wake sooner," said I, yawning, "but I was weary from yesterday's work. You must have a body and nature of steel springs."
She looked as fresh as if she had but stepped from a lady's boudoir. Truth, there are few women who could endure such exertions, sleep all night on the bare sand of a cavern floor and still look elegant and winsome.
"Let us to breakfast," said she. "Methinks the fare is a trifle scanty, but there is pure water to go with it, and I believe you mentioned fruit?"
Later, as we ate, she said in a brooding manner:
"it stirs my blood most unpleasantly at the thought of John Gower gaining possession of the Mogar treasure. Although I have sailed with Roger O'Farrel, Hilton, Hansen, and le Ban between times, Gower is the first captain to offer me insult."
"He is not like to find it," said I, "for the simple reason that there is no such thing on this island."
"Have you explored all of it?"
"All except the eastern swamps which are impenetrable."
Her eyes lighted.
"Faith, man, were the shrine easy to find, it had been looted long before now. I wager you that it lies somewhere amid that swamp! Now listen to my plan.
