"Do not follow your plan, Monsieur—you must not!"
Displeased at the receipt of such peremptory advice, I was upon the point of making a curt reply, but the fellow was so evidently in earnest that curiosity concerning his motive in objecting to a plan that did not in the least concern him, led me to question him.
"Pray, why not?" I demanded.
"Because," slowly answered Lafitte, "Captain Manuel de Ruiz, your friend and the gunboat's commander, is marked for the vengeance of Jean Lafitte!"
I do not know what reply I made to this amazing statement, or whether I said anything at all, but I do know that my last doubt as to Lafitte's mental condition left me, then and there. Probably he understood my thought, which would make clear his reason for explaining to me as much as he did—although why he should care for my opinion is beyond me.
"Monsieur," he began, "they will tell you that Jean Lafitte—the Jean Lafitte—perished in Galveston; or at sea, under the guns of this or that man-of-war—some say an American, and some say an English vessel. But they are wrong! When an American warship bombarded Galveston, of which Lafitte was then governor, it is true that he was forced to flee the island. But he fled, Monsieur, not to sea, where every man's hand was against him, but to the mainland.
"The fugitive governor sought sanctuary in old Mexico, where he had many friends. But, alas! he had also many enemies, and treachery brought him full into the eager clutches of the chief of them all: one Don Manuel de Ruiz, the governor of Matamoras."
Lafitte's face contracted with a spasm of fierce and somehow terrifying hate at the mention of the name, and he broke off his narrative to glare malevolently at the approaching gunboat.
"De Ruiz was not one to pass by the opportunity to settle an old grudge," he continued, "which was only the more bitter because unjust. His end was attained by the simple and expedient use of a firing squad, unattended by such superfluous trifles as formality or pretense of justice."
"But where," I interposed, "is your authority for such statements? With proof, your story becomes an important contribution to history; but without such proof—and that of a very definite nature—it remains nothing more than another of many interesting tales about the same subject."
"Monsieur," replied Lafitte, with an enigmatic expression in his eyes, and contempt in his voice, "I, who know, tell you what is the truth. Proof I have none; but I do not seek to write history, and I am little concerned with what fate history may assign to Jean Lafitte. What does concern me is the fact that, as the Mexican governor's ragged soldados riddled his body with an uneven volley, Lafitte cursed de Ruiz with his final breath, and swore vengeance on him, and all who bore his name after him! And, Monsieur, the last de Ruiz, the great-grandson and namesake of the murderer of Jean Lafitte, commands that teakettle, yonder."
"At any rate," I remarked a trifle maliciously, "he does command it, so that Lafitte's curse can not have been entirely efficacious."
"Ah!" snarled my fanciful grocer (I still thought of him in that light, and found the fact amusing), with an air of baffled rage. "Yet, Monsieur, the original de Ruiz sickened and died of a malady that baffled his physicians, shortly after the 'execution' of his enemy. The Mexican had laughed at Lafitte's curse, but there were those who remembered and
