pezo left, not one little, little pearl?"

I shook my head and heaved a prodigious sigh. "The treasure is gone,"
I said, "and the men with whom I took it are gone. I am a captain with
neither ship nor crew. I take you, my friends, for a ship and crew
without a captain. The inference is obvious."

The ring gaped with wonder, then strange oaths arose. Red Gil broke into
a bellow of angry laughter, while the Spaniard glared like a catamount
about to spring. "So you would be our captain?" said Paradise, picking
up another shell, and poising it upon a hand as fine and small as a
woman's.

"Faith, you might go farther and fare worse," I answered, and began to
hum a tune. When I had finished it, "I am Kirby," I said, and waited to
see if that shot should go wide or through the hull.

For two minutes the dash of the surf and the cries of the wheeling sea
fowl made the only sound in that part of the world; then from those
half-clad rapscallions arose a shout of "Kirby!"--a shout in which the
three leaders did not join. That one who looked a gentleman rose from
the sand and made me a low bow. "Well met, noble captain," he cried in
those his honey tones. "You will doubtless remember me who was with you
that time at Maracaibo when you sunk the galleasses. Five years have
passed since then, and yet I see you ten years younger and three inches
taller."

"I touched once at the Lucayas, and found the spring de Leon sought,"
I said. "Sure the waters have a marvelous effect, and if they give not
eternal youth at least renew that which we have lost."

"Truly a potent aqua vitae," he remarked, still with thoughtful
melancholy. "I see that it hath changed your eyes from black to gray."

"It hath that peculiar virtue," I said, "that it can make black seem
white."

The man with the woman's mantle drawn about him now thrust himself from
the rear to the front rank. "That's not Kirby!" he bawled. "He's no more
Kirby than I am Kirby! Did n't I sail with Kirby from the Summer Isles
to Cartagena and back again? He's a cheat, and I am agoing to cut his
heart out!" He was making at me with a long knife, when I whipped out my
rapier.

"Am I not Kirby, you dog?" I cried, and ran him through the shoulder.

He dropped, and his fellows surged forward with a yell. "Yet a little
patience, my masters!" said Paradise in a raised voice and with genuine
amusement in his eyes. "It is true that that Kirby with whom I and our
friend there on the groun