ncredulous perplexity. Old Senor
Ramon! Such a respectable man. And I had been kidnapped? From his store!

"If I didn't see you here in my cuddy before my eyes, I wouldn't believe
a word you say," he declared absurdly.

But he was ready enough to take me to Havana. However, he insisted upon
calling down his mate, a gingery fellow, short, too, but wizened, and as
stupid as himself.

"Here's that Kemp, you know. The young fellow that Macdonald of the
Horton Pen picked up somewhere two years ago. The Spaniards in that
ship kidnapped him--so he says. He says they are pirates. But that's a
government chartered ship, and all the pirates that have ever been in
her were hanged this morning in Kingston. But here he is, anyhow. And
he says that at home he had throttled a Bow Street runner before he went
off with the smugglers. Did you ever hear the likes of it, Mercer? I
shouldn't think he was telling us a parcel of lies; hey, Mercer?"

And the two grotesque little chaps stood nodding their heads at me
sagaciously.

"He's a desperate character, then," said Mercer at last, cautiously.
"This morning, the very last thing I heard ashore, as I went to fetch
the fresh beef off, is that he had been assaulting a justice of the
peace on the highroad, and had been trying to knock down the admiral,
who was coming down to town in a chaise with Mr. Topnambo. There's a
warrant out against him under the Black Act, sir."

Then he brightened up considerably. "So he must have been kidnapped or
something after all, sir, or he would be in chokey now."

It was true, after all. Romance reserved me for another fate, for
another sort of captivity, for more than one sort. And my imagination
had been captured, enslaved already by the image of that young girl who
had called me her English cousin, the girl with the lizard, the girl
with the dagger! And with every word she uttered romance itself, if I
had only known it, the romance of persecuted lovers, spoke to me through
her lips.

That night the Spanish ship had the advantage of us in a freshening
wind, and overtook the _Breeze_. Before morning dawned she passed us,
and before the close of the next day she was gone out of sight ahead,
steering, apparently, the same course with ourselves.

Her superior sailing had an enormous influence upon my fortunes; and I
was more adrift in the world than ever before, more in the dark as to
what awaited me than when I was lugged along with my head in a sack.