to!" cried the pirate, blacker and more fantastically horrible than
ever, for his bare left shoulder was bound with a scarf of silk and his
great arm was streaked and bedabbled with his blood, "you are the most
cursed coward I have met with in all my days at sea. So frightened out
of your wits by a lively brush as that of yesterday! Too scared to count
gold! Never saw I that before. One might be too scared to pray, but to
count gold! Ha! ha!" and the bold pirate laughed a merry roar. He was
in good spirits; he had captured and sunk an English man-of-war; sunk
her with her English ensign floating above her. How it would have
overjoyed him if all the ships, little and big, that plied the Spanish
Main could have seen him sink that man-of-war. He was a merry man that
morning, the great Blackbeard, triumphant in victory, glowing with the
king's brandy, and with so little pain from that cut in his shoulder
that he could waste no thought upon it.

"But Eliza will like it well," continued the merry pirate; "she will
lead you with a string, be you bold or craven, and the less you pull at
it the easier it will be for my brave girl. Ah! she will dance with joy
when I tell her what a frightened rabbit of a husband it is that I give
her. Now get away somewhere, and let your face rid itself of its
paleness; and should you find a dead man lying where he has been
overlooked, come and tell me and I will have him put aside. You must not
be frightened any more or Eliza may find that you have not left even the
spirit of a rabbit."

All day Dickory sat silent, his misery pinned into the breast of his
coat. "Miss Kate Bonnet, Kingston, Ja."--and this on a letter written in
the dying moments of an English captain, a high and mighty captain who
must have loved as few men love, to write that letter, his life's blood
running over the paper as he wrote. And could a man love thus if he
were not loved? That was the terrible question.

Sometimes his mind became quiet enough for him to think coherently, then
it was easy enough for him to understand everything. Kate had been a
long time in Jamaica; she had met many people; she had met this man,
this noble, handsome man. Dickory had watched him with glowing
admiration as he stood up before Blackbeard, fighting like the champion
of all good against the hairy monster who struck his blows for all that
was base and wicked.

How Dickory's young heart had gone out in sympathy and fellowship
towards the