“And then--why, you will astonish der herr baron--ha, ha!”
Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in a hoarse bass.
“And you believe he has all that plunder by him?” asked Ricardo, rather perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely probable when looked at all round by his acute mind.
Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.
“How can it be otherwise? He was going home, he was on his way, in this hotel. Ask people. Was it likely he would leave it behind him?”
Ricardo was thoughtful. Then, suddenly raising his head, he remarked:
“Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh? That's not much of a sailing direction. I've heard of a port being missed before on better information. Can't you say what sort of landfall a fellow may expect? But I suppose you have never seen that island yourself?”
Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a man congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an unsavoury experience. No, certainly not. He had never had any business to call there. But what of that? He could give Mr. Ricardo as good a sea-mark as anybody need wish for. He laughed nervously. Miss it! He defied anyone that came within forty miles of it to miss the retreat of that villainous Swede.
“What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at night? There's a volcano in full blast near that island--enough to guide almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano to steer by?”
These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared. The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs. Schomberg, dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room. She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her place, where she sat down to stare straight before her, as usual.
Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial enterprise. The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where prying eyes--if any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or in sorrow--could have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine enterprise.
Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass of two wet seasons' growth. The silence of his surroundings, broken only by such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain through the foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing the leaves of the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the shore, favoured rather than hindered his solitary meditation.