At the time when Captain Brand so met his fate in Port Royal Harbor he had increased his flotilla to two vessels—­the Royal Sovereign (which was the vessel that had been fitted out for him in New York, a fine brigantine and a good sailer), and the Adventure galley, which he had captured somewhere in the South Seas.  This latter vessel he placed in command of a certain John Malyoe whom he had picked up no one knows where—­a young man of very good family in England, who had turned red-handed pirate.  This man, who took no more thought of a human life than he would of a broom straw, was he who afterwards murdered Captain Brand, as you shall presently hear.

With these two vessels, the Royal Sovereign and the Adventure, Captain Brand and Captain Malyoe swept the Mozambique Channel as clear as a boatswain’s whistle, and after three years of piracy, having gained a great booty of gold and silver and pearls, sailed straight for the Americas, making first the island of Jamaica and the harbor of Port Royal, where they dropped anchor to wait for news from home.

But by this time the authorities had been so stirred up against our pirates that it became necessary for them to hide their booty until such time as they might make their peace with the Admiralty Courts at home.  So one night Captain Brand and Captain Malyoe, with two others of the pirates, went ashore with two great chests of treasure, which they buried somewhere on the banks of the Cobra River near the place where the old Spanish fort had stood.

What happened after the treasure was thus buried no one may tell.  ’Twas said that Captain Brand and Captain Malyoe fell a-quarrelling and that the upshot of the matter was that Captain Malyoe shot Captain Brand through the head, and that the pirate who was with him served Captain Brand’s companion after the same fashion with a pistol bullet through the body.

After that the two murderers returned to their vessel, the Adventure galley, and sailed away, carrying the bloody secret of the buried treasure with them.

[Illustration:  “CAPTAIN MALYOE SHOT CAPTAIN BRAND THROUGH THE HEAD”]

But this double murder of Captain Brand and his companion happened, you are to understand, some twenty years before the time of this story, and while our hero was but one year old.  So now to our present history.

It is a great pity that any one should have a grandfather who ended his days in such a sort as this; but it was no fault of Barnaby True’s, nor could he have done anything to prevent it, seeing he was not even born into the world at the time that his grandfather turned pirate, and that he was only one year old when Captain Brand so met his death on the Cobra River.  Nevertheless, the boys with whom he went to school never tired of calling him “Pirate,” and would sometimes sing for his benefit that famous catchpenny ballad beginning thus: 

“Oh! my name was Captain Brand,
  A-sailing,
  And a-sailing;
Oh! my name was Captain Brand,
  A-sailing free. 
Oh! my name was Captain Brand,
And I sinned by sea and land,
For I broke God’s just command,
  A-sailing free.”