he cut.

[Illustration: "LANCELOT RUSHED FORWARD INTO THE WATER."]

Lancelot rushed forward into the water to give him his hand, and so drew
the poor fellow on to the dry land and amongst us again.

The first thing he did was to assure us--which was indeed hardly
necessary, considering his cloth and his character--that he was in no
wise leagued with the pirates, but simply and solely a prisoner at their
mercy, whose life they had preserved that he might be of use to them as
a hostage.

Lancelot called out to the pirate boats to withdraw further back, which
they did after he had passed his word that he would confer with them
again in a quarter of an hour, after he had heard what their envoy had
to say. When they had withdrawn out of gunshot, their scarlet suits
glowing like two patches of blood on the water, then Lancelot, still
bidding our line to be on guard against any surprise, withdrew with me
and the clergyman and two or three of our friends a little way up the
beach. And there we called upon Mr. Ebrow to tell us all that he had to
tell.

CHAPTER XXVII

AN ILL TALE

It was an ill tale which he had to tell, and he told it awkwardly, for
he was not a little confused and put about, both by his wound and by his
treatment at the hands of those people. We gave him somewhat to eat and
drink, and he munched and sipped between sentences, for he had not fared
well with the pirates. We would have given him a change of raiment, too,
after his ducking, but this he refused stiffly, saying that he was well
enough as he was, and that a wetting would not hurt him. And he was
indeed a strong, tough man.

Much of what he had to tell us we knew, of course, already--of the
appearance of Jensen on the island, of the attack upon the colonists and
the massacre of the most part of them. He himself had got his cut over
the head in the fight, a cut that knocked him senseless, so that by the
time he came to again the business was over and the pirates were masters
of the island.

But he was able to tell us the thing we most wanted to know, the thing
which the fugitives could give us no inkling of, and that was how it
came to pass that Jensen, whom we all deemed dead and drowned, should
have come so calamitously to life again.

It was, it seemed, in this wise. Jensen, who united a madman's cunning
to a bad man's daring, saw that my suspicions of him might prove fatal
to his plans. Those plans had indeed been, as I had guess