“The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted at sea, and that may bring awkwardness later on. A ship’s boat with three white men in her, knocking about out of sight of land, is bound to make talk. Are we likely to be seen on our way?”
“No, unless by native craft,” said Schomberg.
Ricardo nodded, satisfied. Both these white men looked on native life as a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and needs
HKUE ENG. No. Native craft did not count, of course. It was an empty, solitary part of the sea, Schomberg expounded further. Only the Ternate mail-boat crossed that region about the eighth of every month, regularly — nowhere near the island though. Rigid, his voice hoarse, his heart thumping, his mind concentrated on the success of his plan, the hotel-keeper multiplied words, as if to keep as many of them as possible between himself and the murderous aspect of his purpose.
“So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on the eighth — always best to make a start at night, with a land breeze — it’s a hundred to one — What am I saying? — it’s a thousand to one that no human eye will see you on the passage. All you’ve got to do is keep her heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps not quite so long here will always be draft enough to keep a boat moving; you may reckon on that; and then —”
The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with eagerness, with impatience, and with something like apprehension, the true nature of which was not clear to him. And he did not want to investigate it. Ricardo regarded him steadily
HKUE ENG , with those dry eyes of his shining more like polished stones than living tissue.
“And then what?” he asked.
“And then — why, 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?”
