t, sir, an English gentleman. I
demand that you order your men to release me. For heaven's sake," he
added, pleadingly, "give me but a moment's private hearing!"

A loud guffaw rang through the group. In truth, if appearances make
the gentleman, Adrian was then but a sorry specimen.

The officer smiled--the insufferable smile of a conceited boy raised
to authority.

"I can have no possible doubt of your gentility, sir," he said, with
mocking politeness, and measuring, under the glimmering light, first
the prisoner, from head to foot, and then the girl who, scratching and
blaspheming, vainly tried to make her escape; "but, sir, as a
free-born English gentleman, it will be your duty to help his Majesty
to fight his French enemies. Take the English gentleman along, my
lads!"

A roar of approbation at the officer's facetiousness ran through the
party.

"An' his mother's milk not dry upon his lips," cried the girl, with a
crow of derisive fury, planting as she spoke a sounding smack on a
broad tanned face bent towards her. The little officer grew pink.
"Come, my men, do your duty," he thundered, in his deepest bass.

A rage such as he never had felt in his life suddenly filled Adrian's
whole being. He was a bigger man than any of the party, and the rough
life that fate had imposed on him, had fostered a strength of limb
beyond the common. A thrust of his knee prostrated one of his captors,
a blow in the eye from his elbow staggered the other; the next instant
he had snatched away the cutlass which a third was drawing, and with
it he cleared, for a moment, a space around him.

But as he would have bounded into freedom, a felling blow descended on
his head from behind, a sheet of flame spread before his eyes, and
behind this blaze disappeared the last that Adrian Landale was to see
of England for another spell of years.

When he came back to his senses he was once more on board ship--a
slave, legally kidnapped; degraded by full and proper warrant from his
legitimate status for no crime that could even be invented against
him; a slave to be retained for work or war at his master's pleasure,
liable like a slave to be flogged to death for daring to assert his
light of independence.

* * * * *

The memory of that night's doing and of the odious bondage to which
it was a prelude, rarely failed to stir the gall of resentment in Sir
Adrian; men of peaceable instincts are perhaps the most pr