wning and their half-drawn knives mattered no
doit to me. It was their whim--a huge jest of which they could never
have enough--still to make believe that they sailed under Kirby. Lest
it should spoil the jest, and while the jest outranked all other
entertainment, they obeyed as though I had been indeed that fierce sea
wolf.

Time passed, though it passed like a tortoise, and we came to the
Lucayas, to the outposts of the vast hunting ground of Spaniard and
pirate and buccaneer, the fringe of that zone of beauty and villainy and
fear, and sailed slowly past the islands, looking for our prey.

The sea was blue as blue could be. Only in the morning and the evening
it glowed blood red, or spread upon its still bosom all the gold of
all the Indies, or became an endless mead of palest green shot with
amethyst. When night fell, it mirrored the stars, great and small, or
was caught in a net of gold flung across it from horizon to horizon.
The ship rent the net with a wake of white fire. The air was balm;
the islands were enchanted places, abandoned by Spaniard and Indian,
overgrown, serpent-haunted. The reef, the still water, pink or gold,
the gleaming beach, the green plume of the palm, the scarlet birds, the
cataracts of bloom,--the senses swooned with the color, the steaming
incense, the warmth, the wonder of that fantastic world. Sometimes, in
the crystal waters near the land, we sailed over the gardens of the sea
gods, and, looking down, saw red and purple blooms and shadowy waving
forests, with rainbow fish for humming birds. Once we saw below us a
sunken ship. With how much gold she had endowed the wealthy sea, how
many long drowned would rise from her rotted decks when the waves gave
up their dead, no man could tell. Away from the ship darted many-hued
fish, gold-disked, or barred and spotted with crimson, or silver and
purple. The dolphin and the tunny and the flying fish swam with us.
Sometimes flights of small birds came to us from the land. Sometimes the
sea was thickly set with full-blown pale red bloom, the jellyfish that
was a flower to the sight and a nettle to the touch. If a storm arose,
a fury that raged and threatened, it presently swept away, and the blue
laughed again. When the sun sank, there arose in the east such a moon
as might have been sole light to all the realms of faery. A beauty
languorous and seductive was most absolute empress of the wonderful land
and the wonderful sea.

We were in the hun