fety as
well as your convenience." Frere scowled, and, stepping awkwardly into
the jolly-boat, fell. Pinioned as he was, he could not rise without
assistance, and Russen pulled him roughly to his feet with a coarse
laugh. In his present frame of mind, that laugh galled him worse than
his bonds.

Poor Mrs. Vickers, with a woman's quick instinct, saw this, and, even
amid her own trouble, found leisure to console him. "The wretches!" she
said, under her breath, as Frere was flung down beside her, "to subject
you to such indignity!" Sylvia said nothing, and seemed to shrink from
the lieutenant. Perhaps in her childish fancy she had pictured him as
coming to her rescue, armed cap-a-pie, and clad in dazzling mail, or, at
the very least, as a muscular hero, who would settle affairs out of hand
by sheer personal prowess. If she had entertained any such notion, the
reality must have struck coldly upon her senses. Mr. Frere, purple,
clumsy, and bound, was not at all heroic.

"Now, my lads," says Rex--who seemed to have endured the cast-off
authority of Frere--"we give you your choice. Stay at Hell's Gates, or
come with us!"

The soldiers paused, irresolute. To join the mutineers meant a certainty
of hard work, with a chance of ultimate hanging. Yet to stay with the
prisoners was--as far as they could see--to incur the inevitable fate of
starvation on a barren coast. As is often the case on such occasions,
a trifle sufficed to turn the scale. The wounded Grimes, who was slowly
recovering from his stupor, dimly caught the meaning of the sentence,
and in his obfuscated condition of intellect must needs make comment
upon it. "Go with him, ye beggars!" said he, "and leave us honest men!
Oh, ye'll get a tying-up for this."

The phrase "tying-up" brought with it recollection of the worst portion
of military discipline, the cat, and revived in the minds of the pair
already disposed to break the yoke that sat so heavily upon them, a
train of dismal memories. The life of a soldier on a convict station
was at that time a hard one. He was often stinted in rations, and of
necessity deprived of all rational recreation, while punishment for
offences was prompt and severe. The companies drafted to the penal
settlements were not composed of the best material, and the pair had
good precedent for the course they were about to take.

"Come," says Rex, "I can't wait here all night. The wind is freshening,
and we must make the Bar. Which is it t