ll. "Guess you'd 'a' said so! Why,
look at the after-bulwarks! and look at the windlass!"

The taffrail was gone, sure enough, and the stern bulwarks broken and
patched up down to the deck. The windlass was torn up too.

"Whew!" from all of us.

"Only one shot hit us," explained the captain. "Glanced up from the
water through the stern, knocked up the taffrail, and then went
forward: just missed the mast, but hit the windlass. Haven't been able
to anchor since."

"Well, I'll be blamed!" exclaimed Wade. "Hurt you much, Bonney?"

"Broke his arm!" said the captain.

"You don't say so!"

"Yes, sir. But we've set it; and it's doing well, I think."

"Well, you must have been short-handed here!" cried Donovan.

"Bet you, we have been! Had to have Palmleaf on deck half the time.
We've made quite a sailor of him."

We all praised the darky. Even Wade cried, "Well done, old snowball!
How's that under your wool?"

"I tinks," said the negro, grinning all over, "dat dis am a bery
j'yful 'casion!"

"So 'tis!"

"But how far did they chase you?" Raed inquired.

"Clean out into the Atlantic," replied Capt. Mazard. "I should have
given them a circular race about that ice-island where we were when
'The Rosamond' fired into us; but the tide has broken up the ice there
now. We've come back just as quick as we could. But how have you
fared? Why, I've had dismal fears of finding only one or two of you
alive, devouring the bodies of the rest."

We thereupon gave the captain a brief account of our sojourn on the
island, and how we had managed the Huskies.

"That only demonstrates that you are natural-born sovereign Yankees,"
remarked the captain, laughing heartily.

"But you must come ashore and see our _subjects_!" exclaimed Kit.

"I'll do it!"

"But not before you've ben ter brackfus', sar?" said Palmleaf. "Coffee
all hot, sar."

"Bully for you, Palmleaf!" shouted Weymouth. "Don't care if I do!"

"It seems an age since I last tasted coffee," said Raed.

That we did justice to Palmleaf's coffee and buttered muffins I have
no need to assure the reader.

Breakfast over, we went back to our island, taking the captain along,
and Hobbs in the place of Weymouth. The savages were gathered on the
shore, watching the _oomiak-sook_ rather disconsolately; for, roughly
as we had used them, I think they had somehow gotten up a regard for
us. Seeing us coming toward the shore again, they began to shout and
hop about in a most