of vantage the watch now called out: "She's a long
ship,--five hundred tons, anyhow! Lord! the metal that she carries!
She's rasedecked!"

"Then she's Spanish, sure enough!" cried the Governor.

From the crowd of servants, felons, and foreigners rose a great clamor,
and presently we made out Sharpless perched on a cask in their midst and
wildly gesticulating.

"The Tiger, the Truelove, and the Due Return have swung across channel!"
announced the watch. "They 've trained their guns on the Spaniard!"

The Englishmen cheered, but the bastard crew about Sharpless groaned.
Extreme fear had made the lawyer shameless. "What guns have those
boats?" he screamed. "Two falcons apiece and a handful of muskets, and
they go out against a man-of-war! She'll trample them underfoot! She'll
sink them with a shot apiece! The Tiger is forty tons, and the Truelove
is sixty. You 're all mad!"

"Sometimes quality beats quantity," said West.

"Didst ever hear of the Content?" sang out a gunner.

"Or of the Merchant Royal?" cried another.

"Or of the Revenge?" quoth Master Jeremy Sparrow. "Go hang thyself,
coward, or, if you choose, swim out to the Spaniard, and shift from thy
wet doublet and hose into a sanbenito. Let the don come, shoot if he
can, and land if he will! We'll singe his beard in Virginia as we did at
Cales!

'The great St. Philip, the pride of the Spaniards,

Was burnt to the bottom and sunk in the sea.

the St. Andrew and eke the St. Matthew

We took in fight manfully and brought away.'

And so we'll do with this one, my masters! We'll sink her, or we'll take
her and send her against her own galleons and galleasses!

'Dub-a-dub, dub-a-dub, thus strike their drums,

Tantara, tantara, the Englishman comes!'"

His great voice and great presence seized and held the attention of all.
Over his doublet of rusty black he had clapped a yet rustier back and
breast; on his bushy hair rode a headpiece many sizes too small; by his
side was an old broadsword, and over his shoulder a pike. Suddenly, from
gay hardihood his countenance changed to an expression more befitting
his calling. "Our cause is just, my masters!" he cried. "We stand here
not for England alone; we stand for the love of law, for the love of
liberty, for the fear of God, who will not desert his servants and his
cause, nor give over to Anti-Christ this virgin world. This plantation
is the leaven which is to leaven the whole lump,