Ten minutes before, the young captain would have said that every dead Spaniard was so much to the good, but he had the life-saving instinct of a Newfoundland dog.  He set about reviving the rescued man without thinking twice on the subject.

“’T is unlucky,” grumbled Will Harvest under his breath.  “Take a drownded man from the sea and she get one of us—­some time.”

“Like enough,” agreed his master blithely.  “But this one’s not drownded—­knocked on the head and robbed, I guess.  D’you think we might take him to Granny Toothacre’s, Tom?”

“I reckon so,” returned Tom with a wide grin, “seein’ ’t is you.  If I was the one to ask her I’d as lief do it with a brass kittle on my head.  She don’t like furriners.”

Drake laughed and brought his craft alongside an old wharf near which an ancient farm-house stood, half-hidden by a huge pollard willow.  Here, when he had seen his guest bestowed in a chamber whose one window looked out over the marshes, he stayed to watch with him that night, sending the ship on to Chatham in charge of the mate.

“Now what’s the lad up to?” queried Will as they caught the ebbing tide.  “D’ye think he’ll find out anything, tending that there Spanisher?”

“Not him.  He don’t worm secrets out o’ nobody.  But he’s got his reasons, I make no doubt.  You go teach a duck to swim—­and leave Frankie alone,” said Moone.

The youth did not analyze the impulse that kept him at the bedside of the injured man, but he felt that he desired to know more of him.  The stranger was gaunt, gray and without jewel, gold chain or signet ring to show who he was, but it was the same man who had spoken to him at Gravesend five years ago.

A barge-load of London folk had come down to see the launching of the Serchthrift, the new pinnace of the Muscovy Company, and among them was the venerable Sebastian Cabot.  Alms were freely distributed that the spectators might pray for a fortunate voyage, but Frankie Drake was gazing with all his eyes at the veteran navigator.  A hand was laid on his shoulder, and a friendly voice inquired,

“Did you get your share of the plunder, my son?”

The lad shook his head a trifle impatiently.  “I be no beggar,” he answered.  “I be a ship’s boy.”

“Ay,” said the man, “and you seek not the Golden Fleece?”

His eyes laughed, and his long fingers played with a strange jewel that glowed like Mars in the midnight of his breast.  It was of gold enamel, with a splendid ruby in the center, and hanging from it a tiny golden ram.  Could he mean that?  But the crowd surged between them and left the boy wondering.  He had never spoken to a Spaniard before.

As the fluttering pulse grew stronger and the man roused from his stupor, disjointed phrases of sinister meaning fell from his lips.  No names were used, and much of his talk was in Spanish, but it suggested a foul undercurrent of bribery, falsehood and conspiracy hidden by the bright magnificence of the young Queen’s court.  The queer fact seemed to be that the speaker appeared himself to be the victim of some Spanish plot.  Now why should that be, and he a Spaniard?