Captain Sharkey, of the twenty-gun pirate barque, Happy Delivery, had passed down the coast, and had littered it with gutted vessels and with murdered men.  Dreadful anecdotes were current of his grim pleasantries and of his inflexible ferocity.  From the Bahamas to the Main his coal-black barque, with the ambiguous name, had been freighted with death and many things which are worse than death.  So nervous was Captain Scarrow, with his new full-rigged ship, and her full and valuable lading, that he struck out to the west as far as Bird’s Island to be out of the usual track of commerce.  And yet even in those solitary waters he had been unable to shake off sinister traces of Captain Sharkey.

One morning they had raised a single skiff adrift upon the face of the ocean.  Its only occupant was a delirious seaman, who yelled hoarsely as they hoisted him aboard, and showed a dried-up tongue like a black and wrinkled fungus at the back of his mouth.  Water and nursing soon transformed him into the strongest and smartest sailor on the ship.  He was from Marblehead, in New England, it seemed, and was the sole survivor of a schooner which had been scuttled by the dreadful Sharkey.

For a week Hiram Evanson, for that was his name, had been adrift beneath a tropical sun.  Sharkey had ordered the mangled remains of his late captain to be thrown into the boat, “as provisions for the voyage,” but the seaman had at once committed it to the deep, lest the temptation should be more than he could bear.  He had lived upon his own huge frame until, at the last moment, the Morning Star had found him in that madness which is the precursor of such a death.  It was no bad find for Captain Scarrow, for, with a short-handed crew, such a seaman as this big New Englander was a prize worth having.  He vowed that he was the only man whom Captain Sharkey had ever placed under an obligation.

Now that they lay under the guns of Basseterre, all danger from the pirate was at an end, and yet the thought of him lay heavily upon the seaman’s mind as he watched the agent’s boat shooting out from the Custom-house quay.

“I’ll lay you a wager, Morgan,” said he to the first mate, “that the agent will speak of Sharkey in the first hundred words that pass his lips.”

“Well, captain, I’ll have you a silver dollar, and chance it,” said the rough old Bristol man beside him.

The negro rowers shot the boat alongside, and the linen-clad steersman sprang up the ladder.  “Welcome, Captain Scarrow!” he cried.  “Have you heard about Sharkey?”

The captain grinned at the mate.

“What devilry has he been up to now?” he asked.

“Devilry!  You’ve not heard, then?  Why, we’ve got him safe under lock and key at Basseterre.  He was tried last Wednesday, and he is to be hanged to-morrow morning.”

Captain and mate gave a shout of joy, which an instant later was taken up by the crew.  Discipline was forgotten as they scrambled up through the break of the poop to hear the news.  The New Englander was in the front of them with a radiant face turned up to Heaven, for he came of the Puritan stock.