“I’m second mate,” answered Mr. Butts.

“You and your men are down there associatin’ with the most pestilent set of robbers and land-pirates that ever disgraced a civilized country,” announced the Colonel.  “They robbed me of fifteen thousand dollars and left me marooned here on this desert island, but the wind of Providence blew ’em back, and the devil wouldn’t have ’em in Tophet, and here they are.  They’ll have your wallets and your gizzards if you don’t get away from ’em.  I invite you over there to my fire, gentlemen.  Mr.—­”

“Butts,” said the second mate, staring with some concern at the group about him and at the Cap’n, who still held his fragment of rock.

“Mr. Butts, you and your men come with me and I’ll tell you a story that will—­”

Hiram Look thrust forward at this moment.  The ex-showman was not a reassuring personality to meet shipwrecked mariners.  His big handkerchief was knotted about his head in true buccaneer style.  The horns of his huge mustache stuck out fiercely.  Mr. Butts and his timid Portuguese shrank.

“He’s a whack-fired, jog-jiggered old sanup of a liar,” bellowed this startling apparition, who might have been Blackbeard himself.  “We only have got back the fifteen thousand that he stole from us.”

These amazing figures dizzied Mr. Butts, and his face revealed his feelings.  He blinked from one party to the other with swiftly calculating gaze.  Looking at the angry Hiram, he backed away two steps.  After staring at the unkempt members of the Smyrna fire department, ranged behind their foreman, he backed three steps more.  And then reflecting that the man of the piratical countenance had unblushingly confessed to the present possession of the disputed fortune, he clasped his hands to his own money-belt and hurried over to Colonel Ward’s rock, his men scuttling behind him.

“Don’t you believe their lies,” bellowed the Colonel, breaking in on Hiram’s eager explanations of the timber-land deal and the quest of the treasure they had come to Cod Lead to unearth.  “I’ll take you right to the hole they sold to me, I’ll show you the plank cover they made believe was the lid of a treasure-chest, I’ll prove to you they are pirates.  We’ve got to stand together.”  He hastened to Mr. Butts and linked his arm in the seaman’s, drawing him away.  “There’s only two of us.  We can’t hurt you.  We don’t want to hurt you.  But if you stay among that bunch they’ll have your liver, lights, and your heart’s blood.”

Five minutes later the Ward camp was posted on a distant pinnacle of the island.  Cap’n Sproul had watched their retreat without a word, his brows knitted, his fists clutched at his side, and his whole attitude representing earnest consideration of a problem.  He shook his head at Hiram’s advice to pursue Mr. Butts and drag him and his men away from the enemy.  It occurred to him that the friendliest chase would look like an attack.  He reflected that he had not adopted exactly the tactics that were likely to warm over the buried embers of friendship in Mr. Butts’s bosom.  He remembered through the mists of the years that something like a kick or a belaying-pin had been connected with Mr. Butts’s retirement from the Benn.