ger of that!" the other declared, vehemently. "No danger of that!
I'll tell thee where he is and I'll bring thee to him quick enough!"
And as he spoke he thumped his fist against the open log book. In the
vehemence of his growing excitement his eyes appeared to shine green
in the lanthorn light, and the sweat that had stood in beads upon his
forehead was now running in streams down his face. One drop hung like
a jewel to the tip of his beaklike nose. He came a step nearer to
Mainwaring and bent forward toward him, and there was something so
strange and ominous in his bearing that the lieutenant instinctively
drew back a little where he sat.

"Captain Scarfield sent something to you," said Eleazer, almost in a
raucous voice, "something that you will be surprised to see." And the
lapse in his speech from the Quaker "thee" to the plural "you" struck
Mainwaring as singularly strange.

As he was speaking Eleazer was fumbling in a pocket of his long-tailed
drab coat, and presently he brought something forth that gleamed in the
lanthorn light.

The next moment Mainwaring saw leveled directly in his face the round
and hollow nozzle of a pistol.

There was an instant of dead silence and then, "I am the man you seek!"
said Eleazer Cooper, in a tense and breathless voice.

The whole thing had happened so instantaneously and unexpectedly that
for the moment Mainwaring sat like one petrified. Had a thunderbolt
fallen from the silent sky and burst at his feet he could not have been
more stunned. He was like one held in the meshes of a horrid nightmare,
and he gazed as through a mist of impossibility into the lineaments
of the well-known, sober face now transformed as from within into the
aspect of a devil. That face, now ashy white, was distorted into a
diabolical grin. The teeth glistened in the lamplight. The brows,
twisted into a tense and convulsed frown, were drawn down into black
shadows, through which the eyes burned a baleful green like the eyes
of a wild animal driven to bay. Again he spoke in the same breathless
voice. "I am John Scarfield! Look at me, then, if you want to see
a pirate!" Again there was a little time of silence, through which
Mainwaring heard his watch ticking loudly from where it hung against the
bulkhead. Then once more the other began speaking. "You would chase me
out of the West Indies, would you? G------ --you! What are you come
to now? You are caught in your own trap, and you'll squeal loud enoug