He was a short, lean man with a leathery face and long, black ropy hair, and beady black eyes that caught the light like a cat’s.  His looks, indeed, would have scared a timid person into a fit; but I resolved I would die rather than show the fear with which he inspired me.  He was dressed in an old navy uniform with dirty lace.  His cabin was bare enough, being scattered about with pistols and muskets and cutlasses, with a ragged pallet in one corner, and he sat behind an oaken table covered with greasy charts and spilled liquor and tobacco.

“So ho, you are risen from the dead, are you, my fine buck?  Mr. What-do-they-call-you?” cried the captain, with a word as foul as any he had yet uttered.  “By the Lord, you shall pay for running my bosun through!”

“And by the Lord, Captain What’s-your-name,” I cried back, for the rum I had taken had heated me, “you and your fellow-rascals shall pay in blood for this villanous injury!”

Griggs got to his feet and seized his hanger, his face like livid marble seamed with blue.  And from force of habit I made motion for my sword, to make the shameful discovery that I was clothed from head to foot in linsey-woolsey.

“G-d—–­my soul,” he roared, “if I don’t slit you like a herring!  The devil burn me to a cinder if I don’t give your guts to the sharks!” And he made at me in such a fury that I would certainly have been cut to pieces had I not grasped a cutlass and parried his blow, Cockle looking on with his jaw dropped like a peak without haulyards.  With a stroke of my weapon I disarmed Captain Griggs, his sword flying through the cabin window.  For I made up my mind I would better die fighting than expire at a hideous torture, which I doubted not he would inflict, and so I took up a posture of defence, with one eye on the mate; despite the kind offices of the latter below I knew not whether he were disposed to befriend me before the captain.  What was my astonishment, therefore, to behold Griggs’s truculent manner change.

“Avast, my man-o-war,” he cried; “blood and wounds!  I had more than an eye when they brought thee aboard, else I would have killed thee like a sucking-pig under the forecastle, as I have given oath to do.  By the Ghost, you are worth seven of that Roger Spratt whom you sent to hell in his boots.”

Wherewith Cockle, who for all his terrible appearance stood in a mighty awe of his captain, set up a loud laugh, and vowed that Griggs knew a man when he spared me, and was cursed for his pains.

“So you were contracted to murder me, Captain Griggs?” said I.

“Ay,” he replied, a devilish gleam coming into his eye, “but I have now got you and the money to boot.  But harkye, I’ll stand by my half of the bargain, by G—.  If ever you reach Maryland alive, they may hang me to the yardarm of a ship-of-the-line.”