r, I think we shall have a sad duty to perform to-morrow.
Our old friend Gibbs has behaved badly, and I shall punish him. He is
now in the Capella dungeon. After early mass go and console him."

The padre returned a meaning smile, crossed himself, and slowly left the
pirate alone in his saloon.

CHAPTER XIX.

FANDANGO ON ONE LEG.

"God! 'tis a fearsome thing to see
That pale wan man's mute agony--
Those pinioned arms, those hands that ne'er
Shall be lifted again--not even in prayer!
That heaving chest! Enough; 'tis done!
The bolt has fallen! the spirit is gone."

Day dawned in the east. The early spikes of morning shot up in rosy
bands from behind the lofty hills of Cuba and announced the coming of
the sun. The inlet and basin, framed in by their rocky walls, were still
clothed in the gloom of night, and dimly reflecting the fading stars on
the calm unruffled surface where the schooner and felucca were moored.
Away off in the distance a dense white misty vapor hung flat and low
over the lagoon and thickets of mangroves, with not a breath of air to
disturb the noxious fog or quiver a leaf in the silent groves. The
revels, too, of the drunken sailors had long since ceased; the
sentinels, with their cutlasses in the sheaths, paced slowly to and fro
before the doors of the sheds, and the look-outs at the signal-stations
and battery peered through the early dawn to seaward; else not a sound
or moving thing, save a teal or two fluttering with a sharp cry up and
down the lagoon; the music of the tiny ripples lapping on the shelly
beach; and the low roar, in a deep bass, breaking and moaning over the
ledge beyond the island. Such was the appearance of things where our
scene is laid in the Twelve League Group of Keys, on a Sunday morning,
in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and five.

Half a mile, perhaps, inland from the sheds where the sailors lived, and
beneath the steep face of the ridge-like crag which split the island in
two parts, stood a low chapel, built of loose stones nicely fitted
together and roofed with tiles. A rough iron cross was fastened over the
doorless entrance, and at the other end was a stone balustrade, with a
rude painting of the Virgin over the altar, on which stood four or five
tall brass candlesticks and a lighted taper. Outside the building was a
narrow and secluded inclosure, surrounded by a low wall of coral rocks,
with a few head-stones marked with blac