A big Breton sailor stepped forward.  “Kadoc of Saint Malo sticks to his ship,” he growled, and drew with his forefinger a line in the dust.  “Who’s next?”

One after another, but with little hesitation, the men crossed the line.  All had some idea of what awaited them in the Moorish provinces.  It was no new thing for captives of European blood to be sold as slaves.  Gangs of them toiled on canals, walls, fortresses, in grain-fields, on board galleys.  Those leaders of Islam who urged a holy war sowed fortifications wherever they went.  The need for slave labor for such work was greater than the supply.  Much of the slave population was unfit for anything but the simplest and rudest tasks, and could be kept at work only by the constant use of the whip.

All the tales Nicholas had heard of slavery crowded into his mind in the first moments of captivity.  Once a black-browed Sicilian had told of a night of blood and flame, when the slaves of a galley, mad with toil, privation and hatred, killed their masters and attempted to seize the ship,—­and almost succeeded.  “Slaves cannot unite,” the Sicilian ended contemptuously.  “There is always a Judas.”  But Gilbert Gay had chosen his men for this voyage with especial care.  Every man of them, Nicholas believed, could be trusted.

They had never dreamed of anything like the next few days—­the filth, the degradation, the cruelty.  Nicholas was glad, when half-naked Moslem boys called them names from a safe distance, that the others could not understand.  The insults of an Oriental are primitive and plain—­and very old.  Nicholas had a trick of absorbing languages, and already knew half a score of outlandish tongues and dialects.

Not only the townspeople but their Moslem fellow-slaves held the Kafirs in contempt.  Their rations were sometimes food condemned by the Moslem faith.  Edrupt’s cool common sense and David’s dry humor were of valiant service in those days.  The Scot averred that better men than Mahomet had been bred on barley bannocks, and that the flat coarse cakes of the Berbers were as near them as a heathen could be expected to come.  He also warned them that Moses knew what he was about when he forbade pork to his people, and that the pigs that ran in the streets of an African town were very different eating from the beech-fed hogs of Kent.  From a Jewish physician for whom he had once built a secret treasure-vault he had picked up a rough-and-ready knowledge of medicine which was of very considerable value.

One morning they were all marched off, in charge of a greasy indifferent-looking Turk, to work on a canal embankment.  The garden of an emir’s favorite was to have a new bath-pavilion.  Here the great strength of Kadoc, the hard clean muscle and ready resourcefulness of Edrupt, and the Scotch mason’s experience in the ways of stones and waters, set the pace for the rest.  The seamen studied how to use their strength to the best advantage as they had once studied the sky and the sea.  They moved together to the tune of their own chanteys, and the Turk discovered that this one gang was worth any two others on the ground.  When questioned, Nicholas replied briefly that it was the way of his people.