So we rowed ashore, and there was Theodore capering in front of a pile of sponges, but no other face that I knew.  But there were seven or eight negroes whose looks I took no great liking to.

“Like some fancy sponges to send home?” said one of these, coming up to me.  “Cost you five times as much in Nassau.”

“Certainly I’d like a few sponges,” I said.

And then Theodore came up to me, looking as though he had lost his mind over the rather fancy silk tie I happened to be wearing.

“Give me dat!” he said, touching it, like a crazy man.

“I can’t afford to give you that, Theodore.”

“I’d die for dat,” he declared.

“Take this handkerchief instead;” but, meanwhile, my eyes were opening.  “Take this instead, Theodore,” I suggested.

“I’d die for dat,” he repeated, touching it.

His voice and touch made me sick and afraid, just as people in a lunatic asylum make one afraid.

“Look out!” murmured Tom again at my elbow.

And just then I noticed, hiding in some bushes of seven-year apple trees, two faces I had good reason to know.

I had barely time to pull out the Commandant’s revolver from my pocket.  I knew it was to be either the pock-marked genius or the engineer.  But, for the moment, I was not to be sure which one I had hit.  For, as my gun went off, something heavy came down on my head, and for the time I was shut off from whatever else was going on.

CHAPTER VIII

In Which I Once Again Sit Up and Behold the Sun.

“Which did I hit, Tom?” were my first words as I came back to the glory of the world; but I didn’t say them for a long time, and, from what Tom told me it was a wonder I ever said them at all.

“There he is, sar,” said Tom, pointing to a long dark figure stretched out near by.  “I’m afraid he’s not the man you were looking for.”

“Poor fellow!” I said; it was George, the engineer; “I’m sorry—­but I saw the muzzles of their guns sticking out of the bush there.  It was they or me.”

“That no lie, sar, and, if it hadn’t been for that sucking-fish’s skin, you wouldn’t be here now.”

“It didn’t save me from a pretty good one on the head, Tom, did it?”

“No, sar, but that was just it—­if it hadn’t been for that knock on the head, pulling you down just that minute, that thar pock-marked fellow would have got you.  As it was, he grazed your cheek, and got one of his own men killed by mistake—­the very fellow that hit you.  There he is—­over there.”

“And who’s that other, Tom?” I asked, pointing to another dark figure a few yards away.

“That’s the captain, sar.”

“The captain?  O I’m sorry for that.  God knows I’m sorry for that.”

“Yas, sar, he was one of the finest gentlemen I ever knowed was Captain Tomlinson; a brave man and a good navigator.  And he’d taken a powerful fancy to you, for when you got that crack on the head, he picked up your gun, and began blazing away, with words I should never have expected from a religious man.  The others, except our special friend—­”