Ramage conjured up a bloodcurdling laugh.
"He soon will, if he doesn't step forward!"
With that he saw men moving aside and a tall, slim man walked to the head of the column. He stopped before he was abreast of the three leaders and stared at Ramage.
"Who are you?" he demanded querulously in Spanish.
Ramage turned to Jackson and said in English: "Remove his sword. Don't be too gentle."
The Lieutenant protested in the peevish voice of a shrewish young wife. He protested but, Ramage noted, not too much.
As soon as Jackson was holding the sword, Ramage said to the Spaniard: "Tell your men to lay down their arms."
He did so with remarkable alacrity as Ramage watched warily. Muskets came from shoulders and were put on the ground. Other weapons, which he could not recognize in the dim light, were dropped.
"Tell the slaves to stand still and the soldiers to walk forward and stand ten paces behind me."
As the Lieutenant gave the order Ramage stepped back off the track and, led by the three in front, the soldiers began walking.
Suddenly there was an urgent, high whistling noise and as Ramage jumped back, startled, there was a flash and bang of a pistol going off almost beside him and something snakelike writhed for a moment on the ground in front of him.
A few feet away, among the group of soldiers, there was a dreadful gurgling and Ramage realized it came from a soldier lying on the ground, a long stick-like object clutched in one hand. Then, with his ears ringing from the sound of the shot and dazzled for a moment by the flash, he saw that Jackson had fired. The whistling had come from the tail of a whip wielded by the Spanish soldier and intended to strike him down.
"Stand still," he shouted in Spanish. "No one move, or you all die!"
What a splendidly melodramatic language is Spanish, he thought to himself as he called in English down the track: "Mr Bowen - there's work for you here."
Then, realizing he was needlessly handling everything with only Jackson's help, he said briskly: "Tritons! Take the soldiers prisoner!"
As the seamen rustled from the shrubs he called to the slaves to stand still.
Five minutes later, with it getting lighter every second, the Lieutenant was standing to one side with Jackson behind him on guard, a pistol in each hand. The Spanish soldiers were in single file, each man tied to the next by a rope from one ankle. The slaves were in a group, chatting excitedly.
Bowen walked up, wiping his hands on a cloth.
"It's no good, sir, he's dead."
"Too bad," Ramage said, remembering the whistle of the whip and trying to guess what it would have done to him if the thick tail had hit him. He walked back to the dead man and picked up the whip.
It was the vilest thing Ramage had ever seen, designed as an instrument of torture, a means of punishment, a weapon. One heavy blow could cut a man almost in half. The whole whip was made of finely plaited leather; the handle, some five feet long, was as thick and rigid as a broom handle and then tapered to the tail, which was at least eight feet long, and little thicker at the tip than a piece of thin codline.
He loosened the dead man's grip, picked up the whip and found he was trembling with rage as he remembered the slave Roberto describing how the teniente sent for a slave if none was due to be flogged for punishment. He heard the echo of the teniente's querulous voice a few minutes ago. He remembered the teniente's reluctance to leave the anonymity and safety of the column and come to the front and accept his task as leader.
Bowen sensed his rage, gestured at the whip and said quietly: "It's a habit that's catching, sir."
Ramage pitched the whip away.
"Thank you," he muttered, and started walking back to the camp, calling orders to the corporal for bringing in the prisoners and slaves and burying the dead man.
Back at the camp he washed and shaved and had breakfast alone. The whip episode had left him in a fury. He imagined soldiers whipping slaves out of sheer boredom, or for slight infractions. The Navy's cat-o'-nine-tails was hardly a toy but it was used for punishment only in specific circumstances. Only the captain of a ship - or a court-martial - could order its use. There were some bad captains - like Pigot of the Hermione, who was so addicted to the cat his crew mutinied and murdered him - but such men were rare, and held in contempt by their fellow captains.
By comparison to these whips, the cat-o'-nine-tails was a bundle of shopkeeper's string; by comparison a flogging round the Fleet - the harshest sentence, apart from death, that a court could award - was merely painful. With this whip the lowest soldier could, with one or two blows delivered as a whimsy, punish a man as severely as a naval court-martial. With three or four blows he could kill, and from what Roberto had said, he was only blamed because it meant a slave less to work.
Ramage was not looking forward to interrogating the contemptible teniente, who was being guarded by the inevitable quartet of Jackson, Stafford, Rossi and Maxton. He had thought some time ago that he might be accused of favouritism, because he often gave them special tasks, but the quartet was popular among the men. They had been with him in so many situations, ranging from the desperate to the bizarre, that each knew how the other's mind worked. In emergencies this saved valuable seconds.
Ramage tucked a pistol in his belt, jammed his hat on and strode across the coarse grass and prickly pear to the provisions dump, where Jackson had the prisoner. The sun was getting heat in it now and the glare made him frown. The dry air reminded him of the smell of hay.
He found the four seamen standing round the Lieutenant, who was sitting on a tree stump the picture of petulant dejection. At Ramage's approach he tried to stand up, but Ramage told him to remain seated - he wanted to avoid any of the usual polite formalities.
"Your name?"
"Teniente Jaime Colon Benitez."
"Your regiment?"
"The first battalion of the Regiment of Aragon."
"What are you doing on this island?"
"Commanding a platoon of men."
"Obviously. What were your orders?"
"They are secret," Colon said contemptuously, as if while sitting on the tree stump he had recovered his courage.
"Very well," Ramage said, apparently accepting the reply. "Where is the headquarters of your regiment?"
"San Juan - at El Morro."
"The rest of your battalion is stationed in the fortress?"
"Yes. A few platoons such as mine are detached."
"When did you arrive here at Culebra?"
"Three weeks ago."
"With your orders?"
"With my orders."
"Since which time you have dug graves."
"Graves? How absurd!" Colon was contemptuous again, as though the word summoned up thoughts of tradesmen and other things with which no one of Colon's breeding would associate but which an Englishman like Ramage could not understand.
"Trenches, then."
"I'm not prepared to discuss it."
"Of course not," Ramage said easily. "Because of the nature of your orders."
"Precisely. They are secret."
"But I can find them at your quarters - the house in the village - and read them."
"Oh no you can't!" Colon exclaimed triumphantly. "They were verbal. The Colonel was most emphatic that nothing was put in writing. Because of the need for secrecy," he added, his voice dropping conspiratorially.
"Ah yes," Ramage said sympathetically. "It is dangerous to confide matters of such secrecy to paper."
"It certainly is!"
"Very well. Let me see now, I want to make sure I have all your details correct."
He repeated the man's name, regiment, and the fact he was based at El Morro, in San Juan.
Colon nodded and said: "That is correct. You speak Spanish very well - with the accent of Castile."
Ramage inclined his head in acknowledgment, and then said: "My apologies: there are one or two other details I need. Then no more questions."