port, took on fresh supplies, and stood away for Leeward Island.  The western anchorage had received and snugly hidden her.  Captain Magnus, meanwhile, by means of a mirror flashed from Lookout, had maintained communication with his friends, and even visited them under cover of the supposed shooting expedition.  And now, while we had been striving to overcome the recalcitrancy of Mr. Tubbs, Captain Magnus had taken a short cut to the same end.  You felt that the secret of Mr. Tubbs would be extracted, if need be, by no delicate methods.

But Mr. Tubbs’s character possessed none of that unreasonable obstinacy which would make harsh measures necessary under such conditions.  His countenance, as the illuminating conversation of the pirates had proceeded, lost the speckled appearance which had characterized it at the height of his terrors.  Something like his normal hue returned.  He sat up straighter, moistened his dry lips, and looked around upon us, yes, even upon Aunt Jane and Miss Higglesby-Browne, with whom he had been so lately and so tenderly reconciled, with a sidelong, calculating glance.  After the pirates had eaten, the prisoners on the log were covered with a rifle and their hands untied, while Cookie, in a lugubrious silence made eloquent by his rolling eyes, passed around among us the remnants of the food.  No one can be said to have eaten with appetite except Mr. Tubbs, who received his portion with wordy gratitude and devoured it with seeming gusto.  The pirates, full-fed, with pipes in mouths, were inclined to be affable and jocular.  “Feeding the animals,” as Slinker called it, seemed to afford them much agreeable diversion.  Even Magnus had lost in a degree his usual sullenness, and was wreathed in simian smiles.  The intense terror and revulsion which he inspired in me kept my unwilling eyes constantly wandering in his direction.  Yet under all the terror was a bedrock confidence that there was, there must be somehow in the essence of things, an eternal rightness which would keep me safe from Captain Magnus.  And as I looked across at Dugald Shaw and met for an instant his steady watchful eyes, I managed a swift little smile—­a rather wan smile, I dare say, but still a smile.

Cuthbert Vane caught, so to speak, the tail of it, and was electrified.  I saw his lips form at Mr. Shaw’s ear the words, Wonderful little sport, by jove!  For some time after our capture by the pirates Cuthbert’s state had been one of settled incredulity.  Even when they tied his hands he had continued to contemplate the invaders as illusions.  It was, this remarkable episode, altogether a thing without precedent—­and what was that but another name for the impossible?  And then slowly, by painful degrees—­you saw them reflected in his candid face—­it grew upon him that it was precisely the impossible, the unprecedented, that was happening.