Colonel Bishop mastered himself, and rose.  A merciless despot, who had never known the need for restraint in all these years, he was doomed by ironic fate to practise restraint in the very moment when his feelings had reached their most violent intensity.

Peter Blood gave an order.  A plank was run out over the gunwale, and lashed down.

“If you please, Colonel,” said he, with a graceful flourish of invitation.

The Colonel looked at him, and there was hell in his glance.  Then, taking his resolve, and putting the best face upon it, since no other could help him here, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his fine coat of biscuit-coloured taffetas, and climbed upon the plank.

A moment he paused, steadied by a hand that clutched the ratlines, looking down in terror at the green water rushing past some five-and-twenty feet below.

“Just take a little walk, Colonel, darling,” said a smooth, mocking voice behind him.

Still clinging, Colonel Bishop looked round in hesitation, and saw the bulwarks lined with swarthy faces — the faces of men that as lately as yesterday would have turned pale under his frown, faces that were now all wickedly agrin.

For a moment rage stamped out his fear.  He cursed them aloud venomously and incoherently, then loosed his hold and stepped out upon the plank.  Three steps he took before he lost his balance and went tumbling into the green depths below.

When he came to the surface again, gasping for air, the Cinco Llagas was already some furlongs to leeward.  But the roaring cheer of mocking valediction from the rebels-convict reached him across the water, to drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul.

CHAPTER X

DON DIEGO

Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez awoke, and with languid eyes in aching head, he looked round the cabin, which was flooded with sunlight from the square windows astern.  Then he uttered a moan, and closed his eyes again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache in his head.  Lying thus, he attempted to think, to locate himself in time and space.  But between the pain in his head and the confusion in his mind, he found coherent thought impossible.

An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to open his eyes again, and once more to consider his surroundings.

There could be no doubt that he lay in the great cabin of his own ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his vague disquiet must be, surely, ill-founded.  And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was not as it should be.  The low position of the sun, flooding the cabin with golden light from those square ports astern, suggested to him at first that it was early morning, on the assumption that the vessel was headed westward.  Then the alternative occurred to him.  They might be sailing eastward, in which case the time of day would be late afternoon.  That they were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of the vessel under him.  But how did they come to be sailing, and he, the master, not to know whether their course lay east or west, not to be able to recollect whither they were bound?