confusion in his mind, he found coherent
thought impossible.

An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to open his eyes again, and once
more to consider his surroundings.

There could be no doubt that he lay in the great cabin of his own
ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his vague disquiet must be, surely,
ill-founded. And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance
of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was
not as it should be. The low position of the sun, flooding the cabin
with golden light from those square ports astern, suggested to him at
first that it was early morning, on the assumption that the vessel was
headed westward. Then the alternative occurred to him. They might be
sailing eastward, in which case the time of day would be late afternoon.
That they were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of
the vessel under him. But how did they come to be sailing, and he, the
master, not to know whether their course lay east or west, not to be
able to recollect whither they were bound?

His mind went back over the adventure of yesterday, if of yesterday it
was. He was clear on the matter of the easily successful raid upon the
Island of Barbados; every detail stood vividly in his memory up to the
moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped on to his own deck
again. There memory abruptly and inexplicably ceased.

He was beginning to torture his mind with conjecture, when the door
opened, and to Don Diego's increasing mystification he beheld his best
suit of clothes step into the cabin. It was a singularly elegant and
characteristically Spanish suit of black taffetas with silver lace that
had been made for him a year ago in Cadiz, and he knew each detail of it
so well that it was impossible he could now be mistaken.

The suit paused to close the door, then advanced towards the couch on
which Don Diego was extended, and inside the suit came a tall, slender
gentleman of about Don Diego's own height and shape. Seeing the wide,
startled eyes of the Spaniard upon him, the gentleman lengthened his
stride.

"Awake, eh?" said he in Spanish.

The recumbent man looked up bewildered into a pair of light-blue eyes
that regarded him out of a tawny, sardonic face set in a cluster of
black ringlets. But he was too bewildered to make any answer.

The stranger's fingers touched the top of Don Diego's head, whereupon
Don Diego winced and cried out in pain.

"Tender, eh?" s