is Levasseur. You may have heard of me."

They had, indeed. He commanded a privateer of twenty guns that had
dropped anchor in the bay a week ago, manned by a crew mainly composed
of French boucanhunters from Northern Hispaniola, men who had good cause
to hate the Spaniard with an intensity exceeding that of the English.
Levasseur had brought them back to Tortuga from an indifferently
successful cruise. It would need more, however, than lack of success
to abate the fellow's monstrous vanity. A roaring, quarrelsome,
hard-drinking, hard-gaming scoundrel, his reputation as a buccaneer
stood high among the wild Brethren of the Coast. He enjoyed also a
reputation of another sort. There was about his gaudy, swaggering
raffishness something that the women found singularly alluring. That
he should boast openly of his bonnes fortunes did not seem strange to
Captain Blood; what he might have found strange was that there appeared
to be some measure of justification for these boasts.

It was current gossip that even Mademoiselle d'Ogeron, the Governor's
daughter, had been caught in the snare of his wild attractiveness, and
that Levasseur had gone the length of audacity of asking her hand in
marriage of her father. M. d'Ogeron had made him the only possible
answer. He had shown him the door. Levasseur had departed in a rage,
swearing that he would make mademoiselle his wife in the teeth of all
the fathers in Christendom, and that M. d'Ogeron should bitterly rue the
affront he had put upon him.

This was the man who now thrust himself upon Captain Blood with a
proposal of association, offering him not only his sword, but his ship
and the men who sailed in her.

A dozen years ago, as a lad of barely twenty, Levasseur had sailed with
that monster of cruelty L'Ollonais, and his own subsequent exploits
bore witness and did credit to the school in which he had been reared. I
doubt if in his day there was a greater scoundrel among the Brethren of
the Coast than this Levasseur. And yet, repulsive though he found him,
Captain Blood could not deny that the fellow's proposals displayed
boldness, imagination, and resource, and he was forced to admit that
jointly they could undertake operations of a greater magnitude than was
possible singly to either of them. The climax of Levasseur's project was
to be a raid upon the wealthy mainland city of Maracaybo; but for this,
he admitted, six hundred men at the very least would be required, and
six