This time Captain Blood was put out of temper.

“Trouble me no more,” he snapped at Cahusac, who came growling to him again.  “Send word to Don Miguel that you have seceded from me.  He’ll give you safe conduct, devil a doubt.  Then take one of the sloops, order your men aboard and put to sea, and the devil go with you.”

Cahusac would certainly have adopted that course if only his men had been unanimous in the matter.  They, however, were torn between greed and apprehension.  If they went they must abandon their share of the plunder, which was considerable, as well as the slaves and other prisoners they had taken.  If they did this, and Captain Blood should afterwards contrive to get away unscathed — and from their knowledge of his resourcefulness, the thing, however unlikely, need not be impossible — he must profit by that which they now relinquished.  This was a contingency too bitter for contemplation.  And so, in the end, despite all that Cahusac could say, the surrender was not to Don Miguel, but to Peter Blood.  They had come into the venture with him, they asserted, and they would go out of it with him or not at all.  That was the message he received from them that same evening by the sullen mouth of Cahusac himself.

He welcomed it, and invited the Breton to sit down and join the council which was even then deliberating upon the means to be employed.  This council occupied the spacious patio of the Governor’s house — which Captain Blood had appropriated to his own uses — a cloistered stone quadrangle in the middle of which a fountain played coolly under a trellis of vine.  Orange-trees grew on two sides of it, and the still, evening air was heavy with the scent of them.  It was one of those pleasant exterior-interiors which Moorish architects had introduced to Spain and the Spaniards had carried with them to the New World.

Here that council of war, composed of six men in all, deliberated until late that night upon the plan of action which Captain Blood put forward.

The great freshwater lake of Maracaybo, nourished by a score of rivers from the snow-capped ranges that surround it on two sides, is some hundred and twenty miles in length and almost the same distance across at its widest.  It is — as has been indicated — in the shape of a great bottle having its neck towards the sea at Maracaybo.

Beyond this neck it widens again, and then the two long, narrow strips of land known as the islands of Vigilias and Palomas block the channel, standing lengthwise across it.  The only passage out to sea for vessels of any draught lies in the narrow strait between these islands.  Palomas, which is some ten miles in length, is unapproachable for half a mile on either side by any but the shallowest craft save at its eastern end, where, completely commanding the narrow passage out to sea, stands the massive fort which the buccaneers had found deserted upon their coming.  In the