“It’s a bargain he’ll never be offered,” retorted Wolverstone, and his earlier vehemence was as nothing to his vehemence now.  “Ye’re surely daft even to think of it, Peter!”

“Not so daft as you when you talk of fighting that.”  He flung out an arm as he spoke to indicate the pursuing ships, which were slowly but surely creeping nearer.  “Before we’ve run another half-mile we shall be within range.”

Wolverstone swore elaborately, then suddenly checked.  Out of the tail of his single eye he had espied a trim figure in grey silk that was ascending the companion.  So engrossed had they been that they had not seen Miss Bishop come from the door of the passage leading to the cabin.  And there was something else that those three men on the poop, and Pitt immediately below them, had failed to observe.  Some moments ago Ogle, followed by the main body of his gun-deck crew, had emerged from the booby hatch, to fall into muttered, angrily vehement talk with those who, abandoning the gun-tackles upon which they were labouring, had come to crowd about him.

Even now Blood had no eyes for that.  He turned to look at Miss Bishop, marvelling a little, after the manner in which yesterday she had avoided him, that she should now venture upon the quarter-deck.  Her presence at this moment, and considering the nature of his altercation with Wolverstone, was embarrassing.

Very sweet and dainty she stood before him in her gown of shimmering grey, a faint excitement tinting her fair cheeks and sparkling in her clear, hazel eyes, that looked so frank and honest.  She wore no hat, and the ringlets of her gold-brown hair fluttered distractingly in the morning breeze.

Captain Blood bared his head and bowed silently in a greeting which she returned composedly and formally.

“What is happening, Lord Julian?” she enquired.

As if to answer her a third gun spoke from the ships towards which she was looking intent and wonderingly.  A frown rumpled her brow.  She looked from one to the other of the men who stood there so glum and obviously ill at ease.

“They are ships of the Jamaica fleet,” his lordship answered her.

It should in any case have been a sufficient explanation.  But before more could be added, their attention was drawn at last to Ogle, who came bounding up the broad ladder, and to the men lounging aft in his wake, in all of which, instinctively, they apprehended a vague menace.

At the head of the companion, Ogle found his progress barred by Blood, who confronted him, a sudden sternness in his face and in every line of him.

“What’s this?” the Captain demanded sharply.  “Your station is on the gun-deck.  Why have you left it?”

Thus challenged, the obvious truculence faded out of Ogle’s bearing, quenched by the old habit of obedience and the natural dominance that was the secret of the Captain’s rule over his wild followers.  But it gave no pause to the gunner’s intention.  If anything it increased his excitement.