“So?  What about?”

“I want to join his ship there for the privateering.  She’s a beauty.”

“Oh-ho!  Tired of honest trading?”

“I didn’t know privateering had become dishonest.”

“Bit different from what you’ve been accustomed to, isn’t it?”

“Bit more profitable anyway, so they say.  Are you open for any hands?”

But Torode had turned and was in conversation with someone inside the rampart.  I heard my own name mentioned, and presently he disappeared and his place was taken by an older man whom I knew instinctively for the great Torode himself.

A massive black head, and a grim dark face with a week’s growth of bristling black hair about it, and a dark moustache,—­a strong lowering face, and a pair of keen black eyes that bored holes in one; that was Torode of Herm as I first set eyes on him.

He stared at me so long and fixedly, as if he had never seen anything like me before, that at last, out of sheer discomfort, I had to speak.

“Monsieur Torode?” I asked, and after another staring pause, he said gruffly—­

“B’en!  I am Torode.  What is it you want?”

“A berth on your ship there.”

“And why?  Who are you, then?”

“Your son knows me.  My name is Carre,—­Phil Carre.  I come from Sercq.”

“Where there?”

“Belfontaine.”

“Does your father live there?”

“He’s dead these twenty years.  I live with my mother and my grandfather.”

He seemed to be turning this over in his mind, and presently he asked—­

“And they want you to go privateering?”

“I don’t say they want me to.  It’s I want to go.  They are willing—­at all events they don’t object.”

“And why do you go against their wishes?”

“Well, it’s this way, Monsieur Torode.  I’ve been four voyages to the West and there’s no great things in it.  I want to be doing something more for myself.”

“Why don’t you try the free-trading?”

“Ah, there!  We have never taken to the free-trading, but I don’t know why.”

“Afraid maybe.”

“No, it’s not that.  There’s more risk privateering.”

“Well, then?”

“My folks don’t like it.  That’s all I know.”

“But they’ll let you go privateering?”

“Yes,” I said, with a shrug at my own lack of understanding on that point.  “Privateering’s honest business after all.”

“And free-trading isn’t!  You’ll never make a privateer, mon gars.  You’re too much in leading-strings.”

“I don’t know,” I said, somewhat ruffled.  “I have seen some service.  We fought a Frenchman in the West Indies, and I’ve been twice wrecked.”

“So!  Well, we’re full up, and business is bad or we wouldn’t be lying here.”

“And you won’t give me a trial?”

“No!”

“And that’s the last word?”

“That’s the last word.”