his own feet.
He did not wish to be unduly troubled with requests for permission; he
fancied it a babyish habit for a well-grown boy to fall into. The boy
should decide for himself, said he, where decision was reasonably
possible for him; and if he made mistakes he would surely pay for them
and learn caution and wisdom. For this reason Archie had no hesitation
in coming to his own decision and immediately setting out with Bill o'
Burnt Bay upon an expedition which promised a good deal of highly
diverting and wholly unusual experience.

Billy Topsail and Jimmie Grimm wished the expedition luck when it
boarded the mail-boat that night.

* * * * *

Archie Armstrong did not know until they were well started that Bill
o' Burnt Bay was a marked man in Saint Pierre. There was no price on
his head, to be sure, but he was answerable for several offenses which
would pass current in St. John's for assault and battery, if not for
assault with intent to maim or kill (which Bill had never tried to
do)--all committed in those old days when he was young and wild and
loved a ruction better than a prayer-meeting.

They determined to make a landing by stealth--a wise precaution, as it
appeared to Archie. So in three days they were at La Maline, a small
fishing harbour on the south coast of Newfoundland, and a port of call
for the Placentia Bay mail-boat. The Iles Saint Pierre et Miquelon,
the remnant of the western empire of the French, lay some twenty miles
to the southwest, across a channel which at best is of uncertain mood,
and on this day was as forbidding a waste of waves and gray clouds as
it had been Archie's lot to venture out upon.

Bill o' Burnt Bay had picked up his ideal of a craft for the
passage--a skiff so cheap and rotten that "'twould be small loss, sir,
if she sank under us." And the skipper was in a roaring good humour as
with all sail set he drove the old hulk through that wilderness of
crested seas; and big Josiah Cove, who had been taken along to help
sail the _Heavenly Home_, as he swung the bail bucket, was not a whit
behind in glowing expectation--in particular, that expectation which
concerned an encounter with a gendarme with whom he had had the
misfortune to exchange nothing but words upon a former occasion.

As for Archie, at times he felt like a smuggler, and capped himself in
fancy with a red turban, at times like a pirate.

* *