monstrous luck.  “Baldry’s luck,” quoth the mariner who had sailed with the Star, then held his breath and looked askance at his present Captain, who, however, could never have heard him up there on the poop-deck!  Natheless that night the man was ordered forward, and finding Sir Mortimer Ferne sitting alone, save for the boy, in the great cabin, was bidden to talk of Robert Baldry.  “Speak freely, Carpenter,—­freely!  Why, thou art one of his friends, and I another, and we go, somewhat at our peril, to hale him from perdition!  Why, thou thyself saw him beckoning to us to hasten and do our friendly part!  So praise thy old Captain to me with all thy might.  We’ll fill an empty hour with stories of his valor!” He put forth his hand and turned the hour-glass, and the carpenter began to stammer and make excuses, which no whit availed him.

At last, one afternoon, they came to Margarita, and, the ship needing water, they entered a placid bight, where a strip of dazzling sand lay between the rippling surf and a heavy wood, but found beforehand with them a small bark from the mainland, her crew ashore filling barrels from a limpid spring, and her master and a Franciscan friar eating fruit upon her tiny poop.  The dozen on land showed their heels; the worthless bark was taken, a party with calivers landed to complete the filling of the abandoned casks, and the master and the friar brought before the Captain of the Sea Wraith where he sat beneath a great tree, tasting the air of the land.  An insatiable gatherer of Spanish news, it was his custom to search for what crumbs of knowledge his captives might possess, but hitherto the yield, pressed together, had not made even a small cake of enlightenment.  He was prepared to have shortly done with the two who now stood before him.  The seaman cringed, expecting torture, furtively watching for some indication of what the Englishman wished him to say.  A fellow new to these parts and ignorant, he would have sworn a highway to El Dorado itself if that was the point towards which his inquisitor’s quiet, unemphatic questions tended; but he knew not, and his lies fell dead before the grave eyes of the man beneath the tree.  At last he was tossed aside like a squeezed sponge and the Franciscan beckoned forward, who, being of sturdier make, twisted his thumbs in his rope girdle and prepared to present a blank countenance to those queries of armaments and treasure which an enemy to Spain would naturally make.  But the Englishman asked strange questions; so general that they seemed to encompass the mainland from Tres Puntas to Nombre de Dios, and so particular that it was even as if he were interested in the friar himself, his order, and his wanderings from town to town, the sights that he had seen and the people whom he had known.  The questions seemed harmless as mother’s milk, but the friar was shrewd; moreover, in his youth had been driven to New Spain by flaming zeal for the conversion of countless