Ratsey gave me a questioning look, and I could see a little smile upon his face in the firelight.  ‘Ay, she is fair enough,’ said he, as though reflecting to himself, ’but white and thin.  Mayhap she would make a match for thee—­if ye were man and woman, and not boy and girl; if she were not rich, and thou not poor and an outlaw; and—­if she would have thee.’

It vexed me to hear his banter, and to think how I had let my secret out, so I did not answer, and we sat by the embers for a while without speaking, while the wind still blew through the cave like a funnel.

Ratsey spoke first.  ’John, pass me the flask; I can hear voices mounting the cliff of those poor souls of the Florida.’

With that he took another heavy pull, and flung a log on the fire, till sparks flew about as in a smithy, and the flame that had slumbered woke again and leapt out white, blue, and green from the salt wood.  Now, as the light danced and flickered I saw a piece of parchment lying at Ratsey’s feet:  and this was none other than the writing out of Blackbeard’s locket, which I had been reading when I first heard footsteps in the passage, and had dropped in my alarm of hostile visitors.  Ratsey saw it too, and stretched out his hand to pick it up.  I would have concealed it if I could, because I had never told him how I had rifled Blackbeard’s coffin, and did not want to be questioned as to how I had come by the writing.  But to try to stop him getting hold of it would only have spurred his curiosity, and so I said nothing when he took it in his hands.

‘What is this, son?’ asked he.

‘It is only Scripture verses,’ I answered, ’which I got some time ago.  ’Tis said they are a spell against Spirits of Evil, and I was reading them to keep off the loneliness of this place, when you came in and made me drop them.’

I was afraid lest he should ask whence I had got them, but he did not, thinking perhaps that my aunt had given them to me.  The heat of the flames had curled the parchment a little, and he spread it out on his knee, conning it in the firelight.

‘’Tis well written,’ he said, ’and good verses enough, but he who put them together for a spell knew little how to keep off evil spirits, for this would not keep a flea from a black cat.  I could do ten times better myself, being not without some little understanding of such things,’ and he nodded seriously; ’and though I never yet met any from the other world, they would not take me unprepared if they should come.  For I have spent half my life in graveyard or church, and ’twould be as foolish to move about such places and have no words to meet an evil visitor withal, as to bear money on a lonely road without a pistol.  So one day, after Parson Glennie had preached from Habakkuk, how that “the vision is for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak and not lie:  though it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come, it will not tarry”, I talked with him on these