Any work which makes men into parts of a machine is not likely to improve them as men.  When they have no love for their work and no hope of reward, and do not even speak the same language, the one motive which can be depended upon to keep them going is fear.  The whip of the overseer bred festering, burning hatred, but it kept the sweeps from breaking their monotonous unceasing motion.  If the voyage were quick, the profits were the greater, and no one cared for anything else.

Thinking of the hard sea-bitten faces of the galley-slaves Nicholas rejoiced that rather than live so the crew of the Sainte Spirite would every man of them choose a clean death at sea.

Some days later it seemed as if they were fated to die so.  A Biscay tempest caught them, and from dark to daylight they were buffeted by the giant battledores of wind and sea.  Nicholas spent the sleepless hours in lending a hand and cheering the men as he could.

At last they sighted the great Rock of Gibraltar, fifteen hundred feet of it clear against the sky, like the gateway pillar of another world.  Between Europe and Africa they passed into the blue Mediterranean,—­blue with the salty sparkle beloved of all sea-lovers since Ulysses.  Light warm winds, the scent of orange-groves and rose-gardens, a sky only less deep in its azure splendor than the sea itself—­it seemed indeed another world.

But the Sainte Spirite had not come whole out of her struggle with the powers of the abyss.  Timbers were sadly strained, a mast was gone, every man on board was weary and muscle-sore.  And then a Levantine gale drove the crippled merchantman down on the Barbary coast.

The blackness of that storm ended, for Nicholas Gay, in a plunge into the black waters and a glimpse of the high lantern of his father’s ship dancing above the tossing foam like a witch-fire, for an instant before she went down.  When he came to himself he was lying on hot sand in the sunshine, and Edrupt and David Saumond were bending anxiously over him.

Half the seamen were gone; so was the captain; so was all of the cargo.  Gervase Gaillard had been injured by a falling mast and was helpless.  The coast was strange to them all, but the old merchant and Edrupt made a guess that it was a part of Morocco somewhere near the town of Fez.  Food they had none; water they might find; and the merchants had not lost quite all they had in the wreck.  Some gold and jewels they had saved, secured about their persons.  These would pay the passage of the company to London--if they had luck.

They were considering what to do next when a body of some twoscore horsemen swept down upon them.  The leader might have been either Turk or Frank.  He was as dark as a Saracen and wore the chain-mail, scimitar and light helmet of the heathen, but he spoke Levantine rather too well for a Moor, and with a different intonation.

“Who are you?” he asked curtly.  Nicholas Gay stood up, not yet quite steady on his feet.