staring. His mind was busy; his
thought went back to that rugged Welsh land where he had been born. He
saw himself a little boy playing in the fields that surrounded the
farmhouse of his father and mother.

He took again that long trip across the ocean. He lived again in the hot
hell of the Caribbean. Old forms of forgotten buccaneers clustered about
him. Mansfelt, under whom he had first become prominent himself. There
on the horizon rose the walls of a sleeping town. With his companions he
slowly crept forward through the underbrush, slinking along like a tiger
about to spring upon its prey. The doomed town flamed before his eyes.
The shrieks of men, the prayers of women, the piteous cries of little
children came into his ears across forty years.

Cannon roared in his ear--the crash of splintered wood, the despairing
appeals for mercy, for help, from drowning mariners, as he stood upon a
bloody deck watching the rolling of a shattered, sinking ship. Was that
water, spray from some tossing wave, or blood, upon his hand?

The water was higher now; it was at his neck. There were Porto Bello,
Puerto Principe, and Maracaibo, and Chagres and Panama--ah, Panama! All
the fiends of hell had been there, and he had been their chief! They
came back now to mock him. They pointed at him, gibbered upon him,
threatened him, and laughed--great God, how they laughed!

There was pale-faced, tender-eyed Maria Zerega who had died of the
plague, and the baby, the boy. Jamaica, too, swept into his vision.
There was his wife shrinking away from him in the very articles of
death. There was young Ebenezer Hornigold, dancing right merrily upon
the gallows together with others of the buccaneers he had hanged.

The grim figure of the one-eyed boatswain rose before him and leered
upon him and swept the other apparitions away. This was La
Guayra--yesterday. He had been betrayed. Whose men were those? The men
hanging on the walls? And Hornigold had done it--old Ben Hornigold--that
he thought so faithful.

He screamed aloud again with hate, he called down curses upon the head
of the growing one-eyed apparition. And the water broke into his mouth
and stopped him. It called him to his senses for a moment. His present
peril overcame the hideous recollection of the past. That water was
rising still. Great God! At last he prayed. Lips that had only cursed
shaped themselves into futile petitions. There was a God, after all.

The end was upon him, y