Page:Cup of Gold-1929.djvu/106

may sit and talk again in the evenings. You will remember my wish about Paulette?”

“Who is Paulette?” the planter asked.

“Why, the servant girl I mentioned. Never let her go with the slaves, because I am fond of her.”

“Ah, yes! I remember. And where do you go now, Henry?”

“To Jamaica. My uncle, Sir Edward, has long been Lieutenant-Governor there in Port Royal. But I have never seen him———well, because I was a bond-servant, and he is a gentleman, I have a letter to him that my father gave me years past. Perhaps he will help me to buy a ship for my plundering.”

“I would help you buy a ship. You have been very good to me,” the planter said hopefully.

Now Henry was dipped in a kind of shame, for in the box under his bed there glistened a pile of golden coins———over a thousand pounds.

“No,” he said, “no; I have more payment in your teaching and in the father you have been to me than money could ever equal.” Now he was going, Henry knew that he had grown to love this red-faced, wistful man.

Strong, glistening blacks pulled at the oars of the canoe, and it went skimming toward an anchored ship, a ship commissioned by the States-General to carry black slaves from Guinea to the islands. James Flower, sitting in the canoe's stern, was very red and very silent. But as they neared the ship's