mful of silver bars, ingots of gold, pieces of eight, and jewels
whose value has never been accurately known. The Spanish Adelantados,
accustomed to trust in their remoteness for defense, frantically looked
for Drake everywhere except where he was. Warships hung about the
Patagonian coast to catch him on his way home--surely he could not stay
at sea forever!

But Drake had other plans. Navigators were still searching for the
northern passage, the Straits of Anian, and he coasted northward until
his men were half paralyzed with cold and the creeping chill of the fog.
From the latitude of Vancouver he turned south again, and put into a
natural harbor not far from the present San Francisco, which he named
New Albion because of the white cliffs like the chalk downs of England.
Here he landed and made camp to refit and repair his flagship. He had
captured on one prize, two China pilots in whose possession were all the
secret charts of the Pacific trade.

Indians ventured down from the mountains to the little fort and
dockyard, wondering and admiring. Parson Fletcher presently came to the
Admiral with the extraordinary news that they were worshiping the
English as gods. Horror and laughter contended among the Puritans when
they found themselves set up as idols of the heathen, and the chaplain
endeavored by signs to teach the simple savages that the God whom all
men should worship was invisible in the heavens.

"'T only shows," remarked Moone, with a nail in one corner of his mouth,
after vehemently dissuading a persistent adorer, "that a man never knows
what he'll come to. Granny Toothacre used to say that if there's a thing
you fight against all your life it'll come to you sooner or later."

"So she did," said Drake with a grim smile as he passed. "Takes a woman
to tell a fortune, after all."

"D'you ever hear what become of the old Don we picked up that time?"
Moone asked in a lowered voice.

"Not since he sent Frankie the dagger with the gold work and the jewel.
Why?"

"'Cause the pilot o' the _Spit-silver_ he knowed un. He say the plague
broke out in the Low Countries, and the old Don took and tended that
Gallego servant o' his and then he died--not o' the pestilence--just
wore out like. I reckon maybe he told Mus' Drake. I didn't."

Silence fell. Then Will said thoughtfully, "He won't be Mus' Drake much
longer--by rights--but you never know what a woman'll do. She keep her
presents and her favors for them that h