t place.

"That were folly, Jack! She hath her station!"

Jack Battle pointed to the fading steel point above the vanishing
masthead.

"Doth looking hurt yon star?" asks Jack.

"Nay; but looking may strain the eyes; and the arrows of longing come
back void."

He answered nothing, and we lingered heavy hearted till the sun came up
over the pillowed waves turning the tumbling waters to molten gold.

Between us and the fan-like rays behind the glossy billows--was no ship.

Hortense was safe!

There was an end-all to undared hopes.

CHAPTER V

M. RADISSON AGAIN

"Good-bye to you, Ramsay," said Jack abruptly.

"Where to, Jack?" I asked, bestirring myself. I could no more go back
to Eli Kirke.

But little Jack Battle was squirming his wooden clogs into the sand as
he used to dig his toes, and he answered not a word.

"'Tis early yet for the Grand Banks, Jack. Ben Gillam's ship keeled
mast over hull from being ice-logged last spring. The spars were solid
with frozen sleet from the crosstrees to the crow's nest. Your dories
would be ice-logged for a month yet."

"It--it--it aren't the Grand Banks no more," stammered Jack.

His manner arrested me. The honest blue eyes were shifting and his
toes at work in the sand.

"There be gold on the high seas for the taking," vouched Jack. "An
your fine gentlemen grow rich that way, why mayn't I?"

"Jack," I warned, thinking of Ben Gillam's craft rigged with sails of
as many colours as Joseph's coat, "Jack--is it a pirate-ship?"

"No," laughed the sailor lad sheepishly, "'tis a pirateer," meaning
thereby a privateer, which was the same thing in those days.

"Have a care of your pirateers--privateers, Jack," said I, speaking
plain. "A gentleman would be run through the gullet with a clean
rapier, but you--you--would be strangled by sentence of court or sold
to the Barbadoes."

"Not if the warden o' the court owns half the ship," protested Jack,
smiling queerly under his shaggy brows.

"Oh--ho!" said I, thinking of Rebecca's father, and beginning to
understand who supplied money for Ben Gillam's ventures.

"I'm tired o' being a kick-a-toe and fisticuff to everybody. Now, if
I'd been rich and had a ship, I might 'a' sailed for M. Picot."

"Or Mistress Hortense," I added, which brought red spots to the sailor
lad's cheeks.

Off he went unanswering, leaving me at gaze across an unbroken sea with
a heart heavy as lead.

"Poor fellow! He will get