The victory was Barthelemy's; and his comrades' first act was to lift
him on their shoulders, declare him their captain and, with terrible
oaths, swear eternal fealty by death, hell, and the devil.

A Herculean fellow raised him aloft like a child, and, pointing to the
figures lying weltering in their blood, shouted in a voice of thunder:

"Who deserves to be your leader better than Robert Barthelemy?"

"No one! No one!" was the unanimous answer.

"Will you have him for your leader, captain, king?"

"Hurrah!" responded the crew.

"Stop!" cried Barthelemy from the Hercules' shoulder. "I heard some one
shout 'No.'"

"Who was it?" roared the athlete; "does any one want to jest with
death?"

"Don't rage, Skyrme, don't rage, my brave giant. Speech is free. Come
forward, Lord Simpson, you oppose my election. Step forward, my valiant
nobleman, and tell us your objection to me!"

The pirates, amid rude laughter, pushed before Barthelemy a tall, fair
man, who, with his hands thrust into his pockets, eyed the new captain
scornfully from head to foot.

"Speak fair, noble lord!" said Skyrme, raising his sinewy hand,
threateningly above Simpson's head, "or you'll bite your own tongue."

"I should do that without your telling me," replied Simpson,
nonchalantly, glancing at his comrades. "You know that my father was
Lord Simpson?"

"Of course we do!" shouted the others.

"My father was the sworn foe of Jeffreys, who, after Monmouth's fall,
brought the brave English Protestant nobles to the scaffold. My father
suffered with them. Since that time I have hated the Papists, and do not
want one even for a pirate chief. Not even you, Barthelemy, for you are
a Papist."

Instead of breaking the speaker's head, Skyrme raised him on his arm
and, amid the loud laughter of the pirates, drew him toward Barthelemy,
with whom he drained the cup of friendship, after Barthelemy had assured
him, on his honor as a pirate, that he had not entered a church since
his christening, and had never been in a priest's presence during his
entire life. The new captain was then formally given the leader's cap
with its scarlet plume, and the whole band then proceeded to the work of
distributing the booty.

Barthelemy sat on a cask turned upside down, holding on his knees a
black book in which were written in red letters the names of the
pirates, and read them one by one in a loud tone. Often nobody answered
and, at the end of a long pause, som