“Drunk or sober, allus ’derstand you.”

“Then listen.”  And out came the tale that Wolverstone had told.  The Captain steadied himself to grasp it.

“It’ll do as well asertruth,” said he when Wolverstone had finished.  “And... oh, no marrer!  Much obliged to ye, Old Wolf — faithful Old Wolf!  But was it worthertrouble?  I’m norrer pirate now; never a pirate again.  ‘S finished’” He banged the table, his eyes suddenly fierce.

“I’ll come and talk to you again when there’s less rum in your wits,” said Wolverstone, rising.  “Meanwhile ye’ll please to remember the tale I’ve told, and say nothing that’ll make me out a liar.  They all believes me, even the men as sailed wi’ me from Port Royal.  I’ve made ’em.  If they thought as how you’d taken the King’s commission in earnest, and for the purpose o’ doing as Morgan did, ye guess what would follow.”

“Hell would follow,” said the Captain.  “An’ tha’s all I’m fit for.”

“Ye’re maudlin,” Wolverstone growled.  “We’ll talk again to-morrow.”

They did; but to little purpose, either that day or on any day thereafter while the rains — which set in that night — endured.  Soon the shrewd Wolverstone discovered that rum was not what ailed Blood.  Rum was in itself an effect, and not by any means the cause of the Captain’s listless apathy.  There was a canker eating at his heart, and the Old Wolf knew enough to make a shrewd guess of its nature.  He cursed all things that daggled petticoats, and, knowing his world, waited for the sickness to pass.

But it did not pass.  When Blood was not dicing or drinking in the taverns of Tortuga, keeping company that in his saner days he had loathed, he was shut up in his cabin aboard the Arabella, alone and uncommunicative.  His friends at Government House, bewildered at this change in him, sought to reclaim him.  Mademoiselle d’Ogeron, particularly distressed, sent him almost daily invitations, to few of which he responded.

Later, as the rainy season approached its end, he was sought by his captains with proposals of remunerative raids on Spanish settlements.  But to all he manifested an indifference which, as the weeks passed and the weather became settled, begot first impatience and then exasperation.

Christian, who commanded the Clotho, came storming to him one day, upbraiding him for his inaction, and demanding that he should take order about what was to do.

“Go to the devil!” Blood said, when he had heard him out.  Christian departed fuming, and on the morrow the Clotho weighed anchor and sailed away, setting an example of desertion from which the loyalty of Blood’s other captains would soon be unable to restrain their men.

Sometimes Blood asked himself why had he come back to Tortuga at all.  Held fast in bondage by the thought of Arabella and her scorn of him for a thief and a pirate, he had sworn that he had done with buccaneering.  Why, then, was he here?  That question he would answer with another:  Where else was he to go?  Neither backward nor forward could he move, it seemed.