I was still gazing with all my eyes, and drifting slowly in, when a sharp
hail brought me round facing a man who leaned with his arms on a wall of
rock and looked over and down at me.

"Hello there!"

"Hello!" I replied, and saw that it was young Torode himself.

From my position I could see little except the rising ground in the middle
of the island, but I got the impression, chiefly no doubt from what I had
heard, and from the thin curls of smoke that rose in a line behind him,
that there was quite a number of houses there. In fact the place had all
the look of a fortified post.

"Tiens! It is Monsieur Carre, is it not? And what may Monsieur Carre want
here?" His tone was somewhat masterful, if not insolent. I felt an
inclination to resent it, but bethought me in time that such could be no
help to my plans, and that, moreover, nothing was to be gained by
concealment.

"I came to see your father. Is he to be seen?"

"So? What about?"

"I want to join his ship there for the privateering. She's a beauty."

"Oh-ho! Tired of honest trading?"

"I didn't know privateering had become dishonest."

"Bit different from what you've been accustomed to, isn't it?"

"Bit more profitable anyway, so they say. Are you open for any hands?"

But Torode had turned and was in conversation with someone inside the
rampart. I heard my own name mentioned, and presently he disappeared and
his place was taken by an older man whom I knew instinctively for the great
Torode himself.

A massive black head, and a grim dark face with a week's growth of
bristling black hair about it, and a dark moustache,--a strong lowering
face, and a pair of keen black eyes that bored holes in one; that was
Torode of Herm as I first set eyes on him.

He stared at me so long and fixedly, as if he had never seen anything like
me before, that at last, out of sheer discomfort, I had to speak.

"Monsieur Torode?" I asked, and after another staring pause, he said
gruffly--

"B'en! I am Torode. What is it you want?"

"A berth on your ship there."

"And why? Who are you, then?"

"Your son knows me. My name is Carre,--Phil Carre. I come from Sercq."

"Where there?"

"Belfontaine."

"Does your father live there?"

"He's dead these twenty years. I live with my mother and my grandfather."

He seemed to be turning this over in his mind, and presently he asked--

"And they want you to go privateering?"

"I don't say they want me to. It's I want