ort
to lift the body, "come and bear a hand with this other one!" Porter
advanced aghast, but just then another occurrence claimed the villain's
attention, and poor Grimes's life was spared for that time.

Rex, inwardly raging at this unexpected resistance on the part of the
pilot, flung himself on the skylight, and tore it up bodily. As he did
so, Barker, who had reloaded his musket, fired down into the cabin.
The ball passed through the state-room door, and splintering the wood,
buried itself close to the golden curls of poor little Sylvia. It was
this hair's-breadth escape which drew from the agonized mother that
shriek which, pealing through the open stern window, had roused the
soldiers in the boat.

Rex, who, by the virtue of his dandyism, yet possessed some abhorrence
of useless crime, imagined that the cry was one of pain, and that
Barker's bullet had taken deadly effect. "You've killed the child, you
villain!" he cried.

"What's the odds?" asked Barker sulkily. "She must die any way, sooner
or later."

Rex put his head down the skylight, and called on Bates to surrender,
but Bates only drew his other pistol. "Would you commit murder?" he
asked, looking round with desperation in his glance.

"No, no," cried some of the men, willing to blink the death of poor
Jones. "It's no use making things worse than they are. Bid him come up,
and we'll do him no harm." "Come up, Mr. Bates," says Rex, "and I give
you my word you sha'n't be injured."

"Will you set the major's lady and child ashore, then?" asked Bates,
sturdily facing the scowling brows above him.

"Yes."

"Without injury?" continued the other, bargaining, as it were, at the
very muzzles of the muskets.

"Ay, ay! It's all right!" returned Russen. "It's our liberty we want,
that's all."

Bates, hoping against hope for the return of the boat, endeavoured to
gain time. "Shut down the skylight, then," said he, with the ghost of an
authority in his voice, "until I ask the lady."

This, however, John Rex refused to do. "You can ask well enough where
you are," he said.

But there was no need for Mr. Bates to put a question. The door of the
state-room opened, and Mrs. Vickers appeared, trembling, with Sylvia by
her side. "Accept, Mr. Bates," she said, "since it must be so. We should
gain nothing by refusing. We are at their mercy--God help us!"

"Amen to that," says Bates under his breath, and then aloud, "We agree!"

"Put your pistols on the table,