ting grounds, and men went not there to gather
flowers. Day after day we watched for Spanish sails; for the plate
fleets went that way, and some galleass or caravel or galleon might
stray aside. At last, in the clear green bay of a nameless island at
which we stopped for water, we found two carracks come upon the same
errand, took them, and with them some slight treasure in rich cloths and
gems. A week later, in a strait between two islands like tinted clouds,
we fought a very great galleon from sunrise to noon, pierced her hull
through and through and silenced her ordnance, then boarded her and
found a king's ransom in gold and silver. When the fighting had ceased
and the treasure was ours, then we four stood side by side on the deck
of the slowly sinking galleon, in front of our prisoners,--of the men
who had fought well, of the ashen priests and the trembling women.
Those whom we faced were in high good humor: they had gold with which to
gamble, and wine to drink, and rich clothing with which to prank their
villainous bodies, and prisoners with whom to make merry. When I ordered
the Spaniards to lower their boats, and taking with them their priests
and women row off to one of those two islands, the weather changed.

We outlived that storm, but how I scarcely know. As Kirby would have
done, so did I; rating my crew like hounds, turning my point this way
and that, daring them to come taste the red death upon it, braving it
out like some devil who knows he is invulnerable. My lord, swinging
the cutlass with which he was armed, stood beside me, knee to knee, and
Diccon cursed after me, making quarterstaff play with his long pike.
But it was the minister that won us through. At length they laughed, and
Paradise, standing forward, swore that such a captain and such a mate
were worth the lives of a thousand Spaniards. To pleasure Kirby, they
would depart this once from their ancient usage and let the prisoners
go, though it was passing strange,--it being Kirby's wont to clap
prisoners under hatches and fire their ship above them. At the end
of which speech the Spaniard began to rave, and sprang at me like a
catamount. Paradise put forth a foot and tripped him up, whereat the
pirates laughed again, and held him back when he would have come at me a
second time.

From the deck of the shattered galleon I watched her boats, with their
heavy freight of cowering humanity, pull off toward the island. Back
upon my own poop, the gra