‘Buon amigo—malo adversario,’ replied Hayston. ‘We shall be unlikely to meet again; though, but for hard luck, and the mystery of fate, you and I, and your friend—a man whom I honour and respect from the bottom of my heart—might have been comrades to our lives’ end.’
‘And why not now? Surely it is not too late—why not change your career? Why not uproot the ties and habits of early youth—atone for the mistakes—crimes, if you will—of a reckless manhood?—retrace the downward path—repent in sackcloth and ashes—a white sheet, if you like.’
‘Fancy “Bully” Hayston in a white sheet!’ The absurdity of the situation seemed to strike him, and he laughed till the tears came into his eyes. ‘No,’ and a sad, stern look came over his changeful brow—‘what says Byron, whom I used to read in my youth?
‘In fierce extremes—in good and ill. But still we love even in our rage, And haunted to our very age With the vain shadow of the past, As is Mazeppa to the last!’
Once more the course was changed—another forty-eight hours would bring the _Leonora_ to Apia harbour. Here the erstwhile Spanish Don would be landed. The identification of Alister Lilburne with the Spanish-speaking, Spanish-garmented Alvarez would be difficult, if not impossible.
All that the crew—discreet of their kind—knew, or could testify to, was, that a Spanish-speaking individual had been on board their vessel for a few weeks, and had left them at Norfolk Island. They had heard that he had come from Sydney, and was going back as soon as he could get a ship. Had he come from Molokai? They did not know. In fact, the four Rotumah men had been carefully prevented from showing themselves on shore, and the rest of the crew had been _advised_ by Bill Hicks to recognise no one, and to notice nothing outside of the ordinary cruise of their voyage. They had shipped a cargo of copra at Ponapé, and declined to answer any questions save such as related to island produce.
Carteret was always reticent as to the route by which he and Lilburne made their way to West Australia—landing at Albany from a German cargo-boat, and parting at Perth. It was discovered after Lilburne had been on board the _Leonora_, that the white mark, more or less circular, on account of which he might so easily have lost his life, as well as his liberty, had no more to do with leprosy than with scarlet fever. It was simply the remains of a cicatrice, resulting from an Arab spear-wound received in one of his desert wanderings in early life. The skin had contracted, after the healing process was complete, and, as often happens, had lost its original colour and shape. Hayston himself—who had taken a medical course in his University days, and was no mean practitioner in the department of wounds, and surgical matters generally—after a minute examination pronounced it to be free from the remotest likeness to the earlier stages of the disease. Not satisfied with this, he called a quartermaster, who had lived on every island in the South Pacific, and had acquired a reputation as a successful medicine-man among the sailors and beach-combers.