Adam looked out of the window, smiling a little. The guard indeed was waiting behind a bush, watching the door, his back to the vine that climbed up past this window.
"And so what do you want?" rasped Vice Admiral Benbow.
Adam crossed quietly to him, and sat at the foot of the bed.
"To talk to you, sir. I have a proposition to make."
"If it's from those captains—"
"It's not from those captains," Adam cried.
Benbow blinked.
"You'll mind your manners, young man. Remember—I could just raise my voice and you'd be shot."
"You could. And I would be. Yes."
They looked at one another.
"Well, are you going to do it?" asked Adam.
The tiniest of all possible smiles touched the corners of the admiral's mouth. It was as though some movement of a glacier had opened a crack through which sunlight now peered hesitantly, half afraid.
"Well, I'll hear what you have to say for yourself first anyway."
"Thank you, sir. I'm sure you'll be interested. What I propose to do is clear out that whole colony of pirates on Providence."
"You—and how many thousand men and how many ships?"
"I'm going to do it alone, sir."
Benbow sighed.
"I might have known you was mad. This whole island's packed with madmen, but I don't know why they can't leave me alone."
He reached for a bellpull.
"Please don't do that, sir!"
Benbow paused. Adam swallowed. The scene was quiet enough—the tropic night, a high-ceiled room, the little old man in bed, a smell of medicine. From the harbor came the clean sweet sound of bells striking three times—half past nine. Oh, as peaceful as all-get-out! Yet if the little old man yanked that cord the motion would end Adam Long's life. Those around Admiral Benbow adored him. Adam knew this. Why, even that whining wizened little Willis Beach, who hated and feared everything else about the Royal Navy, never had anything but praise for John Benbow. The marines, upstairs and down, guarded their master jealously. If they found a stranger in this bedroom—well, it wouldn't need a command. Adam would be bayoneted instantly.
"Give me a chance to say what I came for. After all, I do know something about Providence. I lived there for a month."
"Oho, you're a God-damn' pirate yourself, I take it?"
"I'm not a pirate, no, and I never was. I don't like pirates. They—they stink."
"Lots of men of the sea," pointed out John Benbow, "stink."
"Pirates stink in a peculiar way. Let me tell you about it, sir."
Benbow took his hand away from the bellpull.
"Oh, go ahead. Might as well listen. Can't sleep anyway."
Before Adam had a chance to start, however, there was a knock on the door. He sank to the floor on the far side of the bed.
"Come in," the admiral called.
It was the sergeant of the guard with the marine Adam had bribed. The marine told his story, though he made no mention of money. He'd got to thinking it over, he said, and he decided he ought to tell his sergeant.
"Should've done that in the first place."
"Yes, sir. But I thought I'd catch 'im in the act."
"He didn't give you any money?"
"Oh, no, sir!"
"And you say he was a very desperate-looking character?"
"Werry, sir! Scare you just to see 'im."
"Well, you did wrong. But no matter—now. So long as I've escaped. No punishment, sergeant."
"Very good, sir."
"That'll be all now. Thank you."
"Thank you, sir!"
A moment later Benbow said: "All right, come out again, desperate character. I want to learn how you propose to knock out a whole colony of cutthroats single-handed."
Adam nodded in a matter-of-fact way, and sat again on the foot of the bed, and told the admiral about Providence. He made no mention of Maisie, but he did describe the camp in details—its leaders, the pass, the bay, fort, beach, marketplace, warehouse.
"You really do know the place!"
"You couldn't get in there, sir. You could stand off and blast it to bits, yes, but you'd have to knock out that fort before you could put a landing party ashore anywhere near the bay, even in good weather. That would take time. And men. And gunpowder."
Benbow nodded.
"What's more," he said, "I can't spare even a fifth-rater. Need 'em for convoy duty. The merchants of this damn' place are yipping loud enough as it is—not to mention the Lords of Trade back home."
"And even if you did flatten the camp that way, and set fire to it, sir, the Providencers'd simply retreat to the other side of the island. And when you'd gone away they'd come back. They could build that camp up again inside of a week. It's nothing but old boards and tarpaulin. Loot their warehouse and that'd hurt 'em, but in the long haul it'd only make 'em all the more eager to go out and snatch cargoes."
"Aye, they'll pounce on anything that's not convoyed. And we can't keep far away from 'em on the run home, the way the winds are."
"This man van Bramm," Adam went on, "is no fool. But he's greedy. They put on a lot of talk about being brethren and all sharing alike and so-forth, but as a matter of truth it's every man for himself."
"I am not amazed to hear it."
"Van Bramm's ambitious. He wants more than his share. Naturally he's got enemies."
"Naturally."
"I reckon he's got more enemies than friends. It happens that I got acquainted with a good many of them, for the simple reason that they made me into a kind of hero there for a while, as I told you. What it came to, sir: they wanted me to lead a revolt against van Bramm."
"They ask you to do that?"
"Not in so many words. But they would have—if I'd given 'em half a chance. Thev're still sore, those same men. All they want is a shove, and in no time at all you'd have a civil war on Providence."
"Now see here, young man, it strikes me you're almighty glib about this. What if you do get 'em all shooting at one another—what then? Whichever side won, they'd still be on Providence. You couldn't expect to divide those pirates so evenly that they'd all kill one another off down to the last man."
"I wasn't thinking of the pirates at all, sir."
"Eh? But you just said—"
"I said I had a plan for cleaning out the colony. And I have. But I don't mean by making it too hot for the pirates. Nothing's too hot for them. They're salamanders. They can stand anything. They have to— they don't dare go back to civilization. No, it's not them I mean. It's the traders that sponge off of them."
"Well, goon."
"Because the camp couldn't be run without those traders, sir. You think of it like a sailing man, just as I did—at first. But if you'll think of it the way a merchant would—"
"I'll never think of anything the way a merchant does," coldly.
"Well then, think of it the way a pirate would. A pirate can't eat the stuff he steals. He's got to sell it. You can't make a supper out of silks from Samarkand. You can't slaughter a sapphire necklace and cut it up like as if it was a cow, and roast it."
"I begin to see your point, Captain."
"Take away a pirate's receivers, and what is he? And those merchants ain't going to stand around and get sabered. They don't like fighting. They'll scamper right back here."
"Where you wouldn't know 'em from any other bloody merchants!"
"That could be true, sir. But they don't have a price on their heads. They'd get out of Providence as fast as they could—and what's more, they'd stay out. And the pirates'd have to find some new source of supplies. And that wouldn't be easy to do, these days."
There was a considerable silence in the room. Poked by a vagrant breeze the curtains at the window lifted a little, then fell back, limp. A sentry could be heard pacing below.