In answer to his questions I told him who I was, and where from, and how I came to be on the spar.

“But, by ——!” he swore lustily, when I came to the flying flails and the shooting of the drowning men, “that was sheer bloody murder!”

“Murder as cruel as ever was done,” I said, and told him further of the round hole that bored itself in John Ozanne’s forehead right before my eyes.

“By ——!” he said again, and more lustily than ever.  “I hope to God we don’t run across him!  Which way did he go, did you say?”

“He went off nor’-east, but his prowling-ground is hereabouts.  What guns do you carry, sir?”

“Ten eighteen-pound carronades.”

I shook my head.  “He could play with you as he did with us, and you could never hit back.”

“——­ him!” said the old man, and went out much disturbed.

The cheery little doctor chatted with me for a few minutes, and told me that both they and the Indiaman we saw Red Hand looting belonged to the convoy we had seen pass three days before, but, having sprung some of their upper gear in the storm, they had had to put into Lisbon for repairs, and the rest could not wait for the two lame ducks.

“Think he’ll come across us?” he asked anxiously.

“I’ll pray God he doesn’t.  For I don’t see what you can do if he does.”

“I’m inclined to think that the best thing would be to let him take what he wants and go.  He let the Mary Jane go, you say?”

“She went one way and he the other, when he’d sunk us, and we were told he rarely makes prizes.  Just helps himself to the best, like a pirate.  He’s just a pirate, and nothing else.”

“Discretion is sometimes the better part of valour,” he said musingly.  “When you can’t fight it’s no good pretending you can, and this old hooker can’t do more than seven knots, and not often that.  We’ve been last dog all the way round.  The frigates used to pepper us till they got tired of it;” and he went out, and I knew what his advice would be if he should be asked for it.

About midday I felt so much myself again—­until I got onto my feet, when I learned what forty-eight hours starving on a spar can take out of a man—­that I got up and dressed myself, by degrees, in some things I found waiting for me in one of the other bunks.

I hauled myself along a passage till I came to a gangway down which the sweet salt air poured like new life, and the first big breath of it set my head spinning again for a moment.

I was hanging on to the handrail when a man came tumbling down in haste.

“It’s you,” he cried, at sight of me.  “Cap’n wants you;” and we went up together, and along the deck to the poop, where the captain stood with his officers and a number of ladies and gentlemen.  From the look of them they all seemed disturbed and anxious, and they all turned to look at me as if I could help them.