ow-fiends made
their attack--none of them, unhappily for themselves, were killed. My
cheeks blazed with shame and wrath as I listened to what the parson had
to say, and if Jensen had been before me I would have been rejoiced to
pistol him with my own hand.

The women were parcelled out among the men as the best part of their
booty. There was not a wickeder place on God's earth at that hour than
the island, and its sins, as I thought, should be blotted out by a
thunderbolt from Heaven.

Yet there is something still worse to come, as I take it. In all this
infamy Jensen reserved for himself the privilege of a deeper degree of
infamy. For he told Hatchett, it seems, that he must give up Barbara,
and when Hatchett laughed in his face Jensen shot him dead where he
stood and took her by force. Such was the terror the man inspired that
no one of all his fellows presumed to avenge Hatchett, or even to
protest against the manner of his death. As for the woman, as for
Barbara, she was a strong woman, and she loved Hatchett with all her
heart, and she fought, I believe, hard. But if she was strong, Jensen
was stronger, and merciless. He had everything his own way at the
island; he had his arts of taming people, and the parson told me that he
had tamed Barbara.

I have had to set these wrongs down here for the sake of truth, and to
justify our final deeds against Jensen and his gang. I have set them
down as barely and as briefly as possible, for there are some things so
terrible that they scarcely bear the telling. I cannot be more
particular; the whole bad business was hideous in the extreme, with all
the hideousness that could come from a mind like Jensen's--a mind
begotten of the Bottomless Pit.

But in all my sorrow I was grateful to Heaven that Marjorie had not been
left upon that other island. Better for her to die here by the hand of
the man who loved her than to have been on that island at the mercy of
such men. Thank God, thank God, thank God! I said to myself again and
again. I could say nothing more, I could think nothing more, only thank
God, thank God!

CHAPTER XXVIII

WE DEFY JENSEN

That unhappy Barbara! Her sin had found her out indeed. She was a wicked
woman, for she had been part and parcel in the treason, she had been
hand and glove with the traitors. But she did not mean such wickedness
to the women-folk, and she did what she had done for her husband's sake,
thinking that he would be a pirate k