“Captain wants ye at the mast,” he answered.  “Going to flog ye, I fancy.”

“What for?”

“My eyes! you’ve been chalking your face, hain’t ye?”

“What am I wanted for?” he repeated.

But at that instant, his name was thundered forth by the other boatswain’s-mates, and Brown hurried him away, hinting that he would soon find out what the captain wanted.  Fernando swallowed down his heart as he touched the spardeck, for a single instant balanced himself on his best centre, and then, wholly ignorant of what was going to be alleged against him, advanced to the dread tribunal of the frigate.  The sight of the quarter-master rigging his gratings, the boatswain with his detestable green bag of scourges, the master-at-arms standing ready to assist some one to take off his shirt was not calculated to allay his apprehensions.  With another desperate effort to swallow his whole soul, he found himself face to face with Captain Snipes, whose flushed face showed his ill humor.  At his side was the first lieutenant, who, as Fernando came aft, eyed him with some degree of conscientious vexation at being compelled to make him the scapegoat of his own negligence.

“Why were you not at your station, sir?” asked the captain.

“What station do you mean, sir?” Fernando asked, forgetting the accustomed formality of touching his hat, by way of salute, while speaking with so punctilious an officer as Captain Snipes.  This little fact did not escape the captain’s attention.

“Your pretension to ignorance will not help you sir,” the Captain retorted.

The first lieutenant now produced the station bill, and read the name of Fernando Stevens in connection with the starboard main-lift.

“Captain Snipes,” said Fernando in a voice firm and terrible in its sincerity, “it is the first time I knew I was assigned to that post.”

“How is this, Mr. Bacon?” the captain asked turning to the first lieutenant with a fault-finding expression.

“It is impossible, sir, that this man should not know his station,” replied, the lieutenant.

“Captain Snipes, I will swear, I never knew it before this moment,” answered Fernando.

With an oath, the captain cried: 

“Do you contradict my officer?  I’ll flog you, by—!”

Fernando had been on board the frigate for more than two years and remained unscourged.  Though a slave in fact, he lived in hope of soon being a free man.  Now, after making himself a hermit in some things, after enduring countless torments and insults without resentment, in order to avoid the possibility of the scourge, here it was hanging over him for a thing utterly unforeseen,—­a crime of which he was wholly innocent; but all that was naught.  He saw that his case was hopeless; his solemn disclaimer was thrown in his teeth, and the boatswain’s-mate stood curling his fingers through the “cat.”  There are times when wild thoughts enter a man’s