As for the _café arabique_, Captain Shawn had been heard to say that he supposed Jack made it from a secret crock of hog manure hidden in the hold. Ben more charitably suspected an infusion from scraps of old leather salvaged maybe on the field of Blenheim. Red-haired Jack claimed to have fought gloriously there under the banners of Marshal Tallard until the surrender, when a great light burst around him, and God told Jack that Louis the Fourteenth was no mortal king but an incarnation of the fiend Asmodeus who cut up little girls and ate them. Well--Jack could have been at Blenheim; far more likely he wasn't. Peter Jenks, captain in 1705 of the ship _Iris_, had happened on French Jack in Barbados, and being in sore need of a cook, had signed him on, with Jenks' usual massive disregard of authorities and formalities--Jack doubtless had the status of a prisoner of war, but he was somehow at large on the island, he seemed to be declaring that he knew how to cook, and that was good enough for Jenks. ("I say to dat captain, I am so big man, so good man, me, I am _coq du village, coq de la paroisse_, me. He say strong, 'You coq?' I say coq, he not know nut'n, nor me not more. I fool, I crazy, me--he big fool, strong crazy, go to hell.") Somewhere, before then, Daniel Shawn might have known the man. At any rate French Jack, as well as Ball and the carpenter Ledyard, had been a part of Shawn's conspiracy. When Shawn took _Artemis_ by deceit in broad daylight, it was French Jack who loomed up behind Peter Jenks with a capstan bar and struck him down. Ben could still see that--Jenks reeling, clutching at the mizzenmast, missing it and going down--as almost a year ago he had seen it in reality across a gap of shining water, the sunlight of that May sparing Ben nothing of it as he writhed at the rope that held him and gnawed the gag in his mouth. Everything had been well planned that day, in the clear Atlantic, the island of Nantucket just over the rim of the world. If Ben had been able to struggle free, a scream of warning would likely have done no good: Jenks was down. The strangely methodical skirmish came to an end with the prim grace of a minuet--but that was no dance, that shifting and interweaving of pigmy man-figures over there in the sunlight. That was plain murder, like the death of Dyckman.... Then Manuel lashed the tiller of the sloop and came to Ben, removing gag and rope, patting his hands, troubled in his soft way by Ben's unhidden loathing, but grinning with a dazzle of white teeth and explaining: "Iss good, got ship now. All be ver' rich, much gold, much women. You like women, boy, so pretty? You like gold?..." Very shrewdly planned, even to the tarpaulin spread over Ben and covering him up to the eyes.