“No, no, it’s better than that!” the Spaniard exclaimed. “After combing the sea for many days, we found a smaller vessel—a brig of perhaps seventy-five tons’ displacement—trapped among sand-banks in the Muertos Cays, which lie between Cuba and Florida. The storm surge had carried her into a sort of basin whence she could not now escape, for fear of running aground on the shifting sands that encompassed her. We anchored in deeper water nearby and sent out longboats to take soundings. In this manner we discovered an aperture in the sand-bank through which this brig could pass, provided that we waited for high tide, and also offloaded some of her cargo, giving her a shallower draught. The master of this ship was strangely reluctant to follow my advice, but at length I convinced him that this was the only way out. We brought our longboat alongside and set all hands to work lightening the brig’s load. And as any seaman will tell you, the quickest way to get weight off a ship is to remove those objects that are heaviest, but least numerous: typically, the armaments. And so, by means of blocks and tackle rigged to the yards, we raised her cannons up out of the gundeck one by one, lowered them into the longboat, and took them out to my ship. In the meantime other sailors busied themselves carrying cannonballs up from belowdecks. And that was how we discovered that this brig was armed, not with lead and iron, but with silver. For the strong places down below, the shot-lockers built to carry cannonballs, were stacked full of pigs.”
“Pigs?!” exclaimed several; but here Jack for once was able to make himself useful. “El Desamparado means, not the squealing animals with curly tails, but the irregular bars of silver made by the refinery at the head of a mine by pouring the molten ore out into a trough of clay.” And here Jack was prepared to go on at some length about the silver refineries of the Harz Mountains, which he had once visited, and had explained to him, by the Alchemist Enoch Root. But it seemed that his comrades had already heard many of these details from his own lips, and so he moved on to what he assumed was the point of Jeronimo’s story. “Pigs are strictly an intermediate form, meant for one purpose only: to be taken direct to a refining furnace, re-melted, purified, and made into bars, which are assayed and stamped—at which point the King would normally take his rake-off…”
“In New Spain, ten percent for the King and one percent for the overhead, viz. assayers and other such petty officials,” Jeronimo put in.
“And so the presence of pigs aboard this ship proved beyond argument that it was in the act of smuggling silver back to Spain.”
“For once, the Vagabond has spoken truthfully and to the point,” said Jeronimo. “And you will never guess what person we discovered in the best cabin on the ship: the Viceroy’s wife, who still remembered me. She was on her way back to Madrid to go shopping.”
“What did you say to her?”
“It is better not to remember this. Knowing that she would make a full report of these events to her husband in Mexico City, I did not delay in writing the Viceroy a letter, in which I related these events—but obliquely, in case the letter was intercepted. I assured him that his secret was safe with me, for I was a Caballero, a man of honor, and he could rely upon my discretion; my lips, I told him, were sealed forever.”
There was now a long and somewhat agonizing silence there on the roof of the banyolar.
“Some months later, I received a communication from this same Viceroy, inviting me to go to the Governor’s House in Vera Cruz on my next visit to that port, to receive a gift that awaited me there.”
“A lovely new set of neck-irons?”
“A pistol-ball to adorn the nape of your neck?”
“A ceremonial sword, delivered point-first?”
“I have no idea,” said Jeronimo, a bit ruffled, “for I never reached the house of the Gobernador. It is important to mention that our purpose in visiting Vera Cruz was to pick up a shipment of small arms from a merchant I had come to know there—a fellow who had a knack for taking delivery of the King’s armaments before they reached the King’s soldiers. Several of my men and I accomplished this errand first, in a couple of hired wagons, and then we told the teamsters to take us to the Governor’s House via the most direct route, for we were running late even by the standards of New Spain. I was in my finest clothes.
“We entered the central plaza of Vera Cruz from a direction that they did not expect, for instead of proceeding up the main street with its boarded-up houses, we had come in from the depot of the arms merchant, which lay on the other side of the town. Our first hint that something was amiss came from the countless fine tendrils of smoke spiraling up from various places of concealment around the town square—”
“Matchlocks!” Jack said.
“Of course our pistols were already loaded and at the ready, for this was Vera Cruz. But this gave us warning to break out the muskets and to knock the lids from several cases of granadoes. The matchlock-men opened fire on us, but raggedly. We charged them with cutlasses drawn, intending to kill them before they could reload. Which we did—but we were astonished to discover that these were Spanish soldiers of the local garrison! At this point fire came down on us from all around: the windows of the Governor’s House and of the churches and monasteries ringing the square all served as loop-holes for this emboscada.”