schemes for the padre's reform, for
the next copious draught the holy father imbibed was the briny salt
water from the Caribbean Sea.

"Well, my Baba, a drop of water, then! Thank you, old lady. Here's to
your health while I am gone. There--you need not blubber so over my
hand--good-by!" And so passed away from Captain Brand's sight the only
creature in the wide world who loved him.

CHAPTER XXIV.

CAUGHT IN A NET.

"I closed my lids and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky,
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet."

Captain Brand did not linger long over his frugal dinner, and when he
had finished, as if he had not had enough exercise for the last three
days, he began to walk with long nervous strides across the saloon.

"He called me coward, did he? and dared to lay his hands on me! By my
right arm, my Creole doctor, I'll teach you not to call hard names
again, and I'll paralyze your hands for all time to come."

The pirate's jaws grated like a rusty bolt as he hissed out these
murderous threats; but as his eye caught the squirming green silk rope
as he swung round on his heel in his walk, he paused and muttered,

"That bit of stuff may be of use. I'll take it by way of precaution."

Hereupon he rapidly unrove the cord and coiled it away in the bosom of
his shirt. Then looking at his watch, he said, "Ho! the time approaches,
and here comes Pedillo."

Lighting a cigar, he left his dwelling for the last time; and, after
pausing to hear a report from Pedillo that his orders had been executed
and the vessel all ready for sea, and whispering a few precise
directions in return, Captain Brand mounted up the steep face of the
crag again, and accosted the signal-man at the station.

"Any thing in sight?"

"Nothing to the eastward, _capitano_; but it has been a little hazy here
away to the southward since meridian, and I can hardly see through it."

"_Bueno_, my man! give me the glass. You can go on board the brigantine.
I'll take a last look myself."

While the signal-man scrambled down the crag, Captain Brand rested the
spy-glass on the trunk of the single cocoa-nut-tree, whose skeleton-like
fingers of leaves rattled above his head like a gibbeted pirate in
chains, and then he searched steadily along the hazy horizon. As he was
about, however, to withdraw his eye from the tube, something--a mere