Сердца трех / Hearts of Three

’

Could he have seen, at that moment, the young man of the canvas pants and of familiar appearance, he would have been certain that naught but lunacy resided in Latin America; for the young man in question, inside a grass thatched hut in the heart of his island, grinning to himself as he uttered aloud, �I guess I put the fear of God into that particular member of the Morgan family,’ had just begun to stare at a photographic reproduction of an oil painting on the wall of the original Sir Henry Morgan.

�Well, Old Pirate,’ he continued grinning, �two of your latest descendants came pretty close to getting each other with automatics that would make your antediluvian horse pistols look like thirty cents.’

He bent to a battered and worm-eaten sea-chest, lifted the lid that was monogramed with an �M,’ and again addressed the portrait:

�Well, old pirate Welshman of an ancestor, all you’ve left me is the old duds and a face that looks like yours. And I guess, if I was really fired up, I could play your Port-au-Prince stunt about as well as you played it yourself.

A moment later, beginning to dress himself in the age worn and moth-eaten garments of the chest, he added:

�Well, here’s the old duds on my back. Come, Mister Ancestor, down out of your frame, and dare to tell me a point of looks in which we differ.’

Clad in Sir Henry Morgan’s ancient habiliments, a cutlass strapped on around the middle and two flint-lock pistols of huge and ponderous design thrust into his waist-scarf, the resemblance between the living man and the pictured semblance of the old buccaneer who had been long since resolved to dust, was striking.

�Back to back against the mainmast,

Held at bay the entire crew…’

As the young man, picking the strings of a guitar, began to sing the old buccaneer rouse, it seemed to him that the picture of his forebear faded into another picture and that he saw:

The old forebear himself, back to a mainmast, cutlass out and flashing, facing a semi-circle of fantastically clad sailor cutthroats, while behind him, on the opposite side of the mast, another similarly garbed and accoutered man, with cutlass flashing, faced the other semi-circle of cutthroats that completed the ring about the mast.

The vivid vision of his fancy was broken by the breaking of a guitar-string which he had thrummed too passionately.