“I trust, monsieur,” said he, with mock suavity, “that I have made myself quite clear.  So that there may be no misunderstandings, I will recapitulate.  Your ransom is fixed at twenty thousand pieces of eight, and you shall have liberty on parole to go to Tortuga to collect it.  In fact, I shall provide the means to convey you thither, and you shall have a month in which to come and go.  Meanwhile, your sister remains with me as a hostage.  Your father should not consider such a sum excessive as the price of his son’s liberty and to provide a dowry for his daughter.  Indeed, if anything, I am too modest, pardi!  M. d’Ogeron is reputed a wealthy man.”

M. d’Ogeron the younger raised his head and looked the Captain boldly in the face.

“I refuse — utterly and absolutely, do you understand?  So do your worst, and be damned for a filthy pirate without decency and without honour.”

“But what words!” laughed Levasseur.  “What heat and what foolishness!  You have not considered the alternative.  When you do, you will not persist in your refusal.  You will not do that in any case.  We have spurs for the reluctant.  And I warn you against giving me your parole under stress, and afterwards playing me false.  I shall know how to find and punish you.  Meanwhile, remember your sister’s honour is in pawn to me.  Should you forget to return with the dowry, you will not consider it unreasonable that I forget to marry her.”

Levasseur’s smiling eyes, intent upon the young man’s face, saw the horror that crept into his glance.  M. d’Ogeron cast a wild glance at mademoiselle, and observed the grey despair that had almost stamped the beauty from her face.  Disgust and fury swept across his countenance.

Then he braced himself and answered resolutely: 

“No, you dog!  A thousand times, no!”

“You are foolish to persist.”  Levasseur spoke without anger, with a coldly mocking regret.  His fingers had been busy tying knots in a length of whipcord.  He held it up.  “You know this?  It is a rosary of pain that has wrought the conversion of many a stubborn heretic.  It is capable of screwing the eyes out of a man’s head by way of helping him to see reason.  As you please.”

He flung the length of knotted cord to one of the negroes, who in an instant made it fast about the prisoner’s brows.  Then between cord and cranium the black inserted a short length of metal, round and slender as a pipe-stem.  That done he rolled his eyes towards Levasseur, awaiting the Captain’s signal.

Levasseur considered his victim, and beheld him tense and braced, his haggard face of a leaden hue, beads of perspiration glinting on his pallid brow just beneath the whipcord.

Mademoiselle cried out, and would have risen:  but her guards restrained her, and she sank down again, moaning.

“I beg that you will spare yourself and your sister,” said the Captain, “by being reasonable.  What, after all, is the sum I have named?  To your wealthy father a bagatelle.  I repeat, I have been too modest.  But since I have said twenty thousand pieces of eight, twenty thousand pieces it shall be.”