sked.

"Probably not, unless madam has enlightened them. I did n't take the
trouble,--they would n't have believed me,--and I can take my oath my
lord has n't. He was only our helpless prisoner, you know; and they
would think madam mistaken or bewitched."

"It 's not a likely tale," I said grimly, "seeing that we had already
opened fire upon them."

"I trust in heaven the sharks got the men who fired the culverins!" he
cried, and then laughed at his own savagery.

I lay still and tried to think. "Who are they on board?" I asked at
last.

"I don't know," he replied. "I was only on deck until my lord had had
his say in the poop cabin with the master and a gentleman who appeared
most in authority. Then the pirates were strung up, and we were bundled
down here in quick order. But there seems to be more of quality than
usual aboard."

"You do not know where we are?"

"We lay at anchor for a day,--whilst they patched her up, I
suppose,--and since then there has been rough weather. We must be still
off Florida, and that is all I know. Now go to sleep. You'll get your
strength best so, and there's nothing to be gotten by waking."

He began to croon a many-versed psalm. I slept and waked, and slept
again, and was waked by the light of a torch against my eyes. The torch
was held by a much-betarred seaman, and by its light a gentleman of a
very meagre aspect, with a weazen face and small black eyes, was busily
examining my wounded shoulder and arm.

"It passeth belief," he said in a sing-song voice, "how often wounds,
with naught in the world done for them outside of fair water and a clean
rag, do turn to and heal out of sheer perversity. Now, if I had been
allowed to treat this one properly with scalding oil and melted lead,
and to have bled the patient as he should have been bled, it is ten to
one that by this time there would have been a pirate the less in the
world." He rose to his feet with a highly injured countenance.

"Then he's doing well?" asked Sparrow.

"So well that he could n't do better," replied the other. "The arm was
a trifling matter, though no doubt exquisitely painful. The wound in
the shoulder is miraculously healing, without either blood-letting or
cauteries. You'll have to hang after all, my friend." He looked at me
with his little beady eyes. "It must have been a grand life," he said
regretfully. "I never expected to see a pirate chief in the flesh. When
I was a boy, I used to dream of the bl