“Me no shabbee Pilat inside housee; me shabbee Pilat outside housee.  Spose you lun away longside Chinee boy—­Chinee boy makee you Pilat.”

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Hickory softly scratched his leg while a broad, bashful smile, almost closed his small eyes.  “Wot!” he asked.

“Mebbee you too frightened to lun away.  Melican boy’s papa heap lickee.”

This last infamous suggestion fired the corsair’s blood.  “Dy’ar think we daresent,” said Hickory, desperately, but with an uneasy glance at Polly.  “I’ll show yer to-morrow.”

The entrance of Polly’s mother at this moment put an end to Polly’s authority and dispersed the pirate band, but left Wan Lee’s proposal and Hickory’s rash acceptance ringing in the ears of the Pirate Queen.  That evening she was unusually silent.  She would have taken Bridget, her nurse, into her confidence, but this would have involved a long explanation of her own feelings, from which, like all imaginative children, she shrank.  She, however, made preparation for the proposed flight by settling in her mind which of her two dolls she would take.  A wooden creature with easy going knees and moveable hair seemed to be more fit for hard service and any indiscriminate scalping that might turn up hereafter.  At supper, she timidly asked a question of Bridget.  “Did ye ever hear the loikes uv that, Ma’am,” said the Irish handmaid with affectionate pride, “Shure the darlint’s head is filled noight and day with ancient history.  She’s after asking me now if Queen’s ever run away!” To Polly’s remorseful confusion here her good father equally proud of her precocious interest and his own knowledge, at once interfered with an unintelligible account of the abdication of various Queens in history until Polly’s head ached again.  Well meant as it was, it only settled in the child’s mind that she must keep the awful secret to herself and that no one could understand her.

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The eventful day dawned without any unusual sign of importance.  It was one of the cloudless summer days of the Californian foot hills, bright, dry, and as the morning advanced, hot in the white sunshine.  The actual, prosaic house in which the Pirates apparently lived, was a mile from a mining settlement on a beautiful ridge of pine woods sloping gently towards a valley on the one side, and on the other falling abruptly into a dark deep olive gulf of pine trees, rocks, and patches of red soil.  Beautiful as the slope was, looking over to the distant snow peaks which seemed to be in another world than theirs, the children found a greater attraction in the fascinating depths of a mysterious gulf, or “canon,” as it was called, whose very name filled their ears with a weird music.  To creep to the edge of the cliff, to sit upon the brown branches of some fallen pine, and putting aside the dried tassels to look down upon the backs of wheeling hawks that seemed to hang in mid-air was a never failing delight.  Here Polly