American Captain

CHAPTER 1 Death of the Eagle

My name is Homer Whitman. I am a native of Bath, an ancient port near the mouth of the Kennebec River in the District of Maine, of the State of Massachusetts. My father, Captain Elija Whitman, came of a family dwelling on and about the North New England Coast for a hundred years and busied with ships. On the distaff side, my blood was full as salty, for my mother was Ruth Luce of the whaling Luces of Marthas Vineyard. A few of my ancestors and kinsmen sailed their own vessels. Most, like my father, hired out to bottom-owning merchants. Some were fisherfolk or coasters, but the main were blue-water men, whether aft or before the mast.

I shall begin my chronicle on an April day in the year 1796, with my sixteenth birthday well behind me. Although I had not yet come to my full pounds and inches, I was unusually strong for my size. There was nothing to mark my appearance from other down-East boys of my age, except that some, whom I deemed the luckiest, had already gone to sea and bore the bronze of wind and sun on their faces. Like them all, I was blue-eyed. Indeed, I took it that blue was the standard color of American eyes, having seen no other kind except on French Canadians and Dons. I had the big nose with which so many down-Easters sniff the wind, but perhaps there was more laughter in my mouth than was common hereabouts, not that down-Easters are glum by nature, but to make up for their wet lives, their humor is dry. My hair was rough, hard to curry, and the shade which our elders called dun, a kind of reddish brown. It was written in the stars that my body would bear several marks before my course was run, but so far I had none whereby a sheriff could nab me in a crowd.

Although the log begins on a day mentioned, I would lead you back to a June day of the preceding year, the saddest of my life so far. On a calm sea, under the mild early-summer sky, all of those most close to my heart sailed away—Pa on his quarter-deck, Mama by the rail, my two brothers, Silas and Jesse, before the mast. I could look for them back perhaps within six months, at least within a year.

"Pa, let Homer go," I heard Mama whisper to my father, just before I must go overside to an empty house, a desert town.

My heart stood still, and I would have heard a tear drop on the deck if any one of us five would let one fall.

"Ye know our plans and dreams for our last-born, him with the best gifts of us all," he answered. "How may they work out, unless he can read books as well as weather? He's learned all the master at Bath can teach him, and now he must study triangulation to help him with his charts."

She was still a long time. Then she said what I could never forget, speaking in little gasps.

"Besides—when I was young they taught me—when I was a little girl at Holmes Hole they told me true—not to put all my eggs. . . ."

The whisper faded out. I talked with them awhile, made my farewells, then went to shore. The Eagle of Maine made for the open sea. She was well named, I thought—one of the proudest and most seaworthy vessels ever to go down a New England ways. While she was gone, I would study hard. In six months, within a year at least, she would return.

That was in June, 1795. In mid-April of the following year a fishing smack, making in before the northeast wind, crossed her bows as she labored up from the south'ard, wearily tacking to gain a windward position off the river mouth. She had signaled all was well, meaning no door need be hung with black in all the town, and she would gain port soon the following morning. And it so happened, having finished my term at Dartmouth a fortnight previously, that I was in Bath, staying with a neighbor boy, when the news was brought.

That night I slept fitfully and dreamed strangely. The wind wailed about the house, shouting at times, still in the northeast, but it was only half a gale—my roommate, a knowing boy, reckoned it at thirty miles, and I, at thirty-five. It was a fair wind for following a south'ard or westward course on the open sea—no sailor could ask for better. On our narrow coasts masters had best take care, and their ships should be good sailers, but there was no cause for alarm.

I went to the window at least five times. The interval between seemed each as long as a December night; still I looked in vain for a glimmer in the east and listened sharply but, I swore, not anxiously, to the wind. The stars shone in vast array, jewel-bright and true. At last the tall clock in the hall donged four times. I rose and dressed; and why I did not keep my promise of wakening my friend, I could not have told. He had wanted to go with me to see the Eagle of Maine make her run. I needed to go alone.

The way was hardly ten miles by footpath. Since the tide was starting to make and the wind adverse, I left my little sailing dinghy at the Bath wharf and legged it. The morning broke fair as the night, the sky clear except for very high, swift-sailing wisps of cloud and the sun bright as in midsummer, but there was no warmth in the flat rays, for the wind blew it away. Still, I could not believe it as high as last night, in spite of waving boughs and threshing leaves. Admitting some anxiety unfit for a captain's son, my heart was fight.

Not until coming in sight of Casco Bay did I get shed of wish-thinking. For all the bright sky and the dazzling water, this was a real northeaster. The land broke its full blast, but the whitecaps ran as far as I could see, a pretty sight for a picture painter, but not so fine for sailormen on a north'ard tack, yearning for the land. The waves that rolled toward Black Rock did not seem high, but they appeared to gather pace as they neared the barrier, then break in fury. The reefs beyond looked innocent in calm weather, but now had snowy crests.

AU this I saw and counted over before stopping to gaze at a port-bound ship. Not that I need ever question who she was. Twin babes will sometimes be indistinguishable from each other, but never two ships since the first keel was laid. Although a good league distant, close under Seguin Island, I knew this vessel as well as my father's face.

She was a brig of one hundred and eighty tons and in the high respect of all who knew her, my mother's and brothers' pride, and my father's love and charge. She was the fullest expression of his being and manhood. He himself was her master in all that the word means; a firm, steady man, level-headed, no fancy sailor but sound, who played safe when he might and ran risks when he must to get his business done. He knew these treacherous waters, and also his ship and her powers. He had reckoned the strength of the wind and the power of the Labrador Current which, flowing southwest, abetted the northeaster. With all that in his mind, he had decided to press on home.

I could picture him on his quarter-deck, watchful, quiet, his orders few and terse. This was no emergency to him; it was only the day's work. The hands sensed his confidence as well as his care. My heart lifted with theirs in the joy of the home-coming.

People from the settlements began to gather to watch the ship come in. Among them was a black-bearded man to whom I touched my cap. He was Captain John Phillips, master and half-owner of the schooner Vindictive. He was above my father in learning and wealth, but they were long neighbors, mutual respecters, and, whenever their paths crossed, sharers of tots of rum and conferees in grave talk. Beside him stood Captain Andrew Starbuck, a whaler from Nantucket.

Captain Phillips acknowledged my salute and gave me one of his slow smiles.

"Why, Homer Whitman, I'm not surprised to see ye here, and 'tis a happy morning for ye, or I miss my guess."

" 'Twill be happier, sir, when she's passed Black Rock."

I wanted him to answer 'twas as good as done. I need have no concern—so my ears ached to hear—when his old friend Cap'n Whitman turned toward home. He did not answer at all, and instead looked at the vessel, less than a mile from us now, with Black Rock an equal distance on her larboard bow. A deep line came into sight between his grave gray eyes.

"Cap'n Starbuck, has the wind risen a bit?" he asked.

"Not that I notice, Cap'n Phillips," his companion answered.

Captain Phillips started to say something more, but kept a closed mouth. I looked long at the ship, then turned to him.

"If you please, Cap'n, why did you think the wind had risen?"

"Ye ask me fair, and I'll tell ye, for ye've right to know. I didn't think so. But I could be mistaken, and 'twas the most welcome explanation for something I see."

"What do you see, if ye'll kindly tell me."

"I don't doubt you see it yourself. The Eagle's not cutting water as she ought."

I had seen it, but denied it. As she came in on a windward tack, she kept making too much leeway. Her helm would be close up. Pa would be ordering her hauled closer still. Now he gave further orders. They were to shake out reefs of the two mainsails and another out of the spanker. We saw them fill.

Still she kept falling off. I had felt the cold wind biting my bones only a few minutes ago, but now my flesh grew numb. I dared not look into the two grave faces with such watchful eyes.

"I don't like the look of it, Cap'n Phillips, I tell ye." Captain Starbuck broke forth when long and aching minutes had dragged away.

"Nay, nor I."

Nay, nor I, either. The Eagle of Maine had got too far to leeward to the liking of anyone here. There was quite a crowd now, bigger than I had realized at first, it being silent and standing still. Mainly they were families and friends of various men of my father's crew. A few were merchants from the town.

A wild impulse came to me to raise a cry for help. If I did, the people would pretend not to hear me or turn their faces from my shame. The issue would be decided before they could run and launch boats; if my father, Captain Whitman, had decided to abandon ship before then, he would launch his own boats. Of this there was no chance—no hope would be a woman's way to put it—for captains cannot leave their vessels to be broken to pieces every time they hove into danger. He was committed to the trial. He had spread all the sail her shuddering masts could carry; now he must make his run or drift into the rocks. If the moment should come when he knew he would fail, it would be too late to save life.

"What makes her so slow to come up, Cap'n Phillips?" Captain Starbuck asked. "She was yare as any vessel out of Casco Bay save for three or four. What ails her, think ye?"

"I'll tell ye what I believe. She's up from warm water, and I fear her bottom's foul with barnacle. It can happen overnight, or so it seems. Sometimes a master won't notice her drag until he must tack for her life. Then she's too dull to cut water."

"If she can clear Black Rock, she'll make it in."

"Aye."

There fell a long silence which at last I must break.

"Ain't she about to clear it, Cap'n Phillips? It looks so to me."

"God forbid that she strike it!" There was a fervor in his voice I had never heard before.

Then a grievous weakness came upon me, so that I closed my eyes. When I opened them, only one deep breath later, the Eagle of Maine was swinging broadside to the wind.

A strange sound rose from the crowd, not loud, but eloquent of terror and despair. It was the most awful human cry I had ever heard. The ship lurched on a few lengths further, still clean-cut, vivid in cruelly brilliant sunshine, beautiful in the presence of death, then her larboard quarter struck the rock.

Every man forward of the mast was knocked down by the shock. We had seen them, small in the distance all this while—standing still a space, then moving quickly to obey the master's orders, then standing still again; they were men 'fore the mast, but every one was a man, as sure as God. My two brothers stood among them, but I had not picked them out even by guess; I knew surely, with such assurance that comes but rarely in a man's life, that all were my brothers. Suddenly all those by the bow lay prone upon the deck.

I saw them get up. Some leaped up, one hauled himself up. None of them doubted what would happen now; but their captain was shouting orders, and they would obey them to the last.

The ship broached to. Listing to larboard, she careened off the rock and drifted broadside with the seas into the breakers beyond. By now the mate had dropped all his sails. The helm had been put hard over, to try to bring her bow into the wind and give time to launch boats. But she lurched on, the crew on the doomed vessel and we watchers on the shore waiting in strange stillness for her to strike again.

We did not see the reef that gave her the mortal blow: we only saw her check and her men fall down. Still the invisible might of the wind and the rush of seas on her broadside flung her from reef to reef, almost on her beam-ends now, until some horn of rock gored and caught her fast, there to breathe her last. She had seemed to breathe when she had sailed forth on her brave adventures, so alive she was. In a few seconds more, she died.

She had not yet broken up and would not for an hour or more, so stoutly was she made. People watching from the beach could still make out reminders of her beautiful form. But most of her crew had been knocked or had crawled overside in the hope against hope of getting to shore alive—the final fight against the sea that was their right, now that their ship was lost and no boat could reach them.

Only four people still clung to the steeply listed deck, and it seemed to me they were trying to join hands. Then I wished there had been five, for the dead ship rolled on her side, and these, too, were gone.

The long watch was almost over. Every soul of the ship's company had been lost, and all her dead except three had been washed on shore or found in the surf. Of these three missing, only one was my very own—my brother Jesse, seventeen and the next youngest to me. He and two shipmates were still at sea in a way of thinking more strange than any dream; but they would have come in hours ago unless caught in the reefs, and now the falling wind was in the northwest, and the tide was going out.

In the last glimmer of the sun, Captain John Phillips came to a little place on the beach where I kept watch and vigil. I touched my cap to him and waited for him to speak. He was slow to begin, but when the words came forth, their tone was man-to-man and their burden plain.

"Can ye give me ear, Homer Whitman?"

"Aye, sir."

"Homer Whitman, the loneliest night I pray ye'll ever spend lies before ye, but I'd not want ye to feel that ye are all alone, because you're not. Of heaven's ministers I can say naught. 'Tis not my place or within my knowledge. But ye'll be thought upon in a hundred prayers, more like a thousand, that will rise up from the town tonight, and ye'll have a place in many a kind heart. And not only from those who know ye and your loved 'nes will feel for ye. Good folk everywhere who hear of your loss wall be mindful of ye, and especially they that follow the sea. For mark ye, Homer Whitman, they are, in some way I cannot tell ye, your brethren. Aft or 'fore the mast, there's a bond amongst us all."

He paused, and I spoke.

"I thank you, Cap'n Phillips."

"Now I've a question to ask ye, the answer to which I must have before I can say more."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"Will this make ye hate the sea?"

"Nay, sir. How could it, when Pa followed it, and his pa before him, and my mother's father and brother?"

"I thought not. Love of it, for all its cruel ways, is in your blood and bone. Still, there's a question of fit time to say what I've in mind, whether now, or later. Most folk would have me wait till ye've watched and prayed over your dead and heard the reading from Holy Writ, and seen 'em returned to the ground. I reckon 'tis more fitting, for 'tis in the way of business, and yet more than business, if I judge aright."

"Cap'n, I'll ask you to speak now, whatever it is, if you'll oblige me."

"Then I will. I think it will be some comfort to ye, when ye need it sore. Ye've no home now, Homer Whitman, for an empty house is not a home, and ye have no kinfolk by blood closer than second cousins, now that your ma's brother was lost a-whaling. But I offer ye a home aboard my ship."

I could not speak, but Captain Phillips saw me nod my head. Instead of looking at my twisted face, he took his silver watch from his pocket and glanced at the dial.

"Ye can go aboard for biscuits and coffee as soon as ye come up to the town. There'll be plenty of neighbors to stay with your dead that little while, and they'd want ye to if they knew; for ye've gone all day without a bite in your stomach, and ye need strength of body to uphold the faith of your soul. Tomorrow night ye can sleep in the fo'c'sle. James Porter—ye know him as 'Giny Jim, the cook—will keep ye company, and the men of the shore watch too. There ye can live till we're ladened and set sail."

"But you mean, don't you, Cap'n, I can sail with you?"

"Blast my thick tongue! It was what I was trying to tell ye. Homer Whitman! Ye can make the Vindictive your home, at sea and in port, as long as ye serve her well and 'tis your desire. There'll be no business ye need stay for. My partner, Eli Morton, will look after it as faithful as his own. I'll sign ye as man 'fore the mast. Ye'll not be favored, for this is America, and we sail 'neath the Stars and Stripes, and every man has right to get ahead if he can make it, but ye'll receive your due in pay and promotion. And 'tis a snug ship as well as a tidy one, as ye know yourself. And I've got a friendship crew."

He fixed his eyes on mine.

"What say you. Homer Whitman?" he asked.

By that compulsion, my eyes cleared and the choke went out of my throat.

"I'll serve you and the ship as well as I'm able, Cap'n Phillips, and I thank you kindly."

"Then 'tis done. Now the dusk grows, and I'll leave ye. And may ye be of strong heart for the dark night ahead."

His hand lay briefly on my shoulder before he turned away. I wished that Pa and Mama and my older brother Silas—and Jesse too, whose manly form the sea had not yet given up—could see the fatherly gesture. If they could, wherever they were gone, they would be a little less bereaved over leaving me, having more reason to believe I would get along well.

CHAPTER 2 School of the Sea

With the passing months, the returning seasons, that hope showed well founded. The outward signs of it were plain to see. An unusual strength of body, apparent during my boyhood, did not fail as I became a man, and was admired, and in no case resented, by my shipmates. Perhaps the right word for it was fortitude, as used by our well-schooled master, although my mates lumped me off as hardy.

At heavy heaving and other short bursts of exertion, I was little more than equal to Farmer Blood, who had come from Poultney in Vermont and had never seen salt water until past twenty-one. Rather, it was at long duty, especially under conditions which sailors called "miserable," that I showed up best. I was the safest man to be sent aloft in a howling gale. Although it dipped and swung me blind to make me giddy, battered and bludgeoned me to break my will, and wrenched and jerked me to exhaust my strength, still I clung there, watching my chance between blows to do the trick ordered, until I got it done. More than once the captain durst not send some other and turned white in the face at his burden, and I turned blue with dread; but pride-helped lift me up. At last it seemed the winds knew me as I knew them.

There was no man aboard who could stand as much pounding by deck-sweeping seas. Sailors do most of their swimming in the scuppers, but when we lay in tropic harbors and wanted to cool off, I proved the swiftest swimmer and the deepest diver, although little brown boys going down for coppers made me look a booby. One off-watch sleep of four hours did me all day. Captain Phillips kept no starvation ship, but when, after being long becalmed or blown off our course, we went on half-rations, I kept weight and strength better than any officer or man except small, wiry Enoch Sutler, whom we called "Sparrow" because he looked and ate like one.

I grew to one inch under six feet, slightly taller than Pa and my brothers, although outspanned by Will and George Greenough, both an even fathom long, and dwarfed by Storky Wilmot, as tall as George Washington and as lean and tough as a hickory sapling. Naked as a newborn jay, I tipped the beam at one hundred and sixty pounds, one pound over the average weight of our whole company—the thinly peopled District of Maine being famed for her full-sized men, having plenty of room to grow in. Sometimes I had backaches and legaches from heavy strain, but never a headache, a toothache, or a bellyache.

This up-growth would have been the same if my parents and brothers and the Eagle of Maine had lived and I had gone to sea aboard her in due course. I counted it good, but not wonderful, and it hardly crossed my mind from dawn till dark. But there were other consequences of my loss and my finding a home aboard the Vindictive that I could dimly sense, but could not put in words even if they had not seemed a sacred secret. One was my love of the ship. I knew then, and I know now, no other word than love. I could not really doubt that I loved her as much as her master did. Another upshot was my feeling of brotherhood with my shipmates. When I worked on the deck with them, I gave it no thought and the same when we frolicked in port, but sometimes when I wakened in the night watches and made out their forms and faces by the dimly burning lantern, I felt a swelling of my heart that seemed a sending from beyond, an augury of things to come, the inkling of some great predestination.

Captain Phillips had spoken of the Vindictive as a "friendship" ship. He meant that the men liked one another and got along together in a friendly fashion, whereby they signed on year after year. Such conditions cannot exist except under a wise, high-minded master, not found in every cabin. When the lash is law, when shipowners hire slave-driving captains and brutal mates, when the crew is recruited by crimps from boarding houses, the ships become jails of hate and fear. I came to see many vessels of this ilk. Most returned handsome profits to their owners, who dwelt in fine houses and sat in prominent pews on shore. Some were trig-looking, but had an evil smell. Beholding these and the filthy slavers we passed on every sea lane, I was all the more thankful.

Besides Captain Phillips, the mainstay of us all, our company consisted of Mr. Hedric, our first mate, Mr. Tyler, our second mate and gunner's mate as well, twelve hands, every one of whom could fire a piece, and 'Giny Jim, our cook. I could say with pride that every man was a picked man. We had very few replacements and no deserters. If a new man proved a troublemaker or a shirker, he did not stay long. We did not think our master's judgment was infallible, but every man knew its honesty, and that healed his heart of bitterness and set his mind at rest.

In my first two years of following the sea, we touched home port four times. At our first returning, Mr. EH Morton, half-owner of the Vindictive, paid me $500, the remainder of my father's estate after the payment of his debts and some I had contracted in due care of my lost loved ones. I thought at first to buy a share in a ship new-building in the yard at Bath, truly a step upward in the world, but in the end I divided it equally among eight needy families who had lost sons or fathers or husbands on the Eagle of Maine. I had aimed to follow my father's wishes in this matter and to make a thank-offering for having found a new haven and home.

The heaviest gale we had ever weathered struck us off Cape Finisterre near the close of my second year aboard; and again I was shown the fatal power of the sea. Although we had heaved to, dragging a sea anchor, a green billow running atop the waves broke over our bow and came nigh to sinking us with one blow. We lurched up at last, but of six strong men nigh the mainmast, we counted only five. Our bosun, Thomas Childers, from our own neighborhood in Bath, once the boon-fellow of my brother Silas, had vanished without trace.

We had not even heard him cry out as the great sea swept him down—making fight of him as of a loose spar. And forty hours more must pass before the captain could assemble us for prayers for Thomas Childers's soul. Fifty-four hours in all we fought or fled the storm, and no man of our company, master or mates or cook or common seaman, had dry clothes on his back, hot food in his belly, or sleep upon his eyelids. At the end, only one man had the strength to climb that mainmast and cut loose some fouled gear—and I was he.

When Captain Phillips had read from the Book and we had said our belated prayers, he paused a moment, then spoke in his usual voice.

"Thomas Childers was a good bosun, but he's gone, and now I'm under the necessity of choosing one of ye to take his place. I've pondered which of ye would fill it the best. I can't know for certain, but in my judgment, it is one who came late amongst us, of less years and experience than many, yet fitted by natural gifts and assiduousness to duty to the highest position 'fore the mast.

"Homer Whitman, I appoint ye."

Thus that ill wind blew me good. I hated to think of it, for all that it was the way of life. Maybe the ancient saying was the wrong end to. It's a fair wind that does not blow ill to some one.

If I beheld the sea in his awful fury, I saw him also in his infinite majesty and glorious beauty. I was given glimpses of his mysteries, such as Saint Elmo's fire, leaping from mastheads and along our spars; waterspouts that tower like monstrous sea serpents, causing instant dissolution to any ship whose path they cross; house-high waves running without warning from the far horizon across calm, sunlit waters; mists haunted by the sounds of distant church bells, often with a pale, heavenly body, a duplicate of the sun, hanging near it with a glimmering train like a comet's.

But there was no greater wonder than the stars after a rain had washed the air and the wind had changed it. Besides the countless hosts that I could see, there were many millions so distant and dim that I could not distinguish them even as grains of silver dust, yet which somehow made their presence known unto my mind.

Once the fog held something more fearful than sundogs and ghostly voices and bells.

Early in the year 1800 we came once more by Finisterre, making for the Strait of Gibraltar. It was to be my first sight of the famous rock, for our captain had avoided Mediterranean waters during our hit-and-miss war with France. But although Napoleon had declared peace with United States, we must still tack from French sloops of war, our cargo being consigned to the military depot in the city of Syracuse, now under British rule.

We knew a better reason why we must pass the straits under convoy of British frigates—the Barbary pirates. A flock of them nested at Tangier, just across the passage, using these narrow waters for an ancient hunting ground. Beyond, the corsair fleets of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli raked the seas.

You would think that the great maritime nations of Christendom —England, France, and our own America, not least—would not put up with open piracy on one of the busiest and most important of the seven seas. You would suppose that Napoleon and Nelson would declare a truce while they razed the murderers' strongholds and sunk their blood-stained ships. Instead, all three of those nations sent annual tribute to the pirate kings, begging their promise not to kill us, buying their haughty consent that we might pass in peace.

My shipmates were outraged by it, and there was some wild talk in the fo'c'sle; but this quieted as we neared Tarifa; and we battened down our Yankee pride when a tall frigate, flying the Union Jack and bristling with guns, sailed up the Strait to meet us.

The officer who came aboard with a squad of bayoneteers treated us with surly suspicion. How did he know that our salt beef, pickled herring, and hides were not for smuggling into France? Could we prove that every man aboard was born on American soil? Our captain had a hard time keeping his temper with the high-handed dandy. We would have pitched into the whole passel at one wag of his beard.

As it turned out, he might as well have given him a blast or two of plain Yankee talk, of which our usually courteous captain had a firm grasp. We had hardly started through the Strait in the frigate's wake when a dense fog settled in, concealing us from friend or foe alike. It had come out of the Atlantic on a light breeze, blinding our eyes, chilling our bones, and darkening our spirits. The captain had us take in sail until we could barely keep steerage-way, then we crept along by chart.

Then Andrew Folger, sharp-eared as a school of weakfish, cocked his head as I had seen him do before.

"What is it?" I asked, instinctively low-voiced.

"I think it's a ship to windward."

"Then the frigate must have fallen behind us. I'd better tell captain to sing out. I wouldn't want her bearing down on us in this cursed smother." For we had been warned against ringing our bell in these pirate-rank waters.

"Wait a minute." Andrew climbed the shrouds of the foremast, Listened a moment, then swung down. "I could hear voices—and they weren't speaking English."

"What did it sound like?"

"Like nothing I ever heard. Some fellow was cursing and he kept saying, 'Allah—

"Report to the captain that there's a Moslem vessel close on our stern."

I gave him the duty to free my hands for duty elsewhere. It was only to secure some stays that occasionally slapped against the block.

The captain's orders came forward to me, passed from mouth to mouth.

"No man make a sound."

Meanwhile he had put the helm to larboard, to take us off the pirate's course. All of us could hear her now—her reis bawling orders in what I surmised was Arabic, her rigging making far more noise in this light breeze than any Christian ship except a Dago. She came up no more than two cables' length on our starboard stern. Carrying a little more sail, she would pass us in a matter of minutes, in point-blank range. We knew her ilk—the same that had captured and looted the Salem Queen only last year, killed some of her crew, and held the rest for ransom. Suddenly I must do something, hit or miss.

I sped to the break of the quarter-deck and saluted Captain Phillips.

"Cap'n, may I speak a plan o' action?"

"Aye, if ye make it short."

"We'll be looking for her sharp, and I think we'll raise her outline in the fog. If you give her a broadside at her waterline, we'll disable her sure, and likely sink her."

A glow came in his eyes that soon died away.

"Nay, I'll fall away a bit more and let her pass in peace. She may have prisoners aboard, and we'd drown 'em with the rest. And she may be a Turkish frigate on honest business."

I saw instantly that he was right, but nothing in his words or manner made me ashamed. I felt my fealty to him glowing through me, a force in my life I could not yet measure. I saluted and returned to my post.

Long moments passed. The sounds from the pirate ship reduced to a murmur, for we were no longer in her wind; we sailed in a silence as strange as it was chill. Enoch Sutler, whom we called Sparrow, signaled down to us from the masthead where he perched. We gazed hard. The fog glided by in tattered sheets and twisted skeins. It is the most cursed of all the elements by sailormen, but no man complained of its blinding, or uttered a sound.

Then the cold smoke thinned a little for no more than a second. Through it we saw the outline of a ship more ghostly than those a marooned man comes to see in visions from his lonely lookout on a desert isle. There was only one solid spot. That it showed black and real while all the rest was shadowlike was the fog's trick or the devil's jest.

It was the form of a man floating in the fog. The clouds rolled above him and around him and below him; there seemed no connection between him and the ship. His head was oddly bowed and his neck was long and he leaned a little forward and his toes were pointed down.

There was a connection, though; it was merely invisible in the softly blowing mists. It was a rope, for no sailor would use our word "line" for a strand of woven hemp put to such use; and the form was of a man hanged to the yardarm. Whether he was a captive or a crewman. Christian or heathen, we never knew.

In the next year, the Vindictive scurried about as though the ocean had the itch and we were his hand. Having passed my twentieth birthday, I got so close on twenty-one that I let it go at that, a notable number pleasant in my ears.

A ship at sea is a good place to study human nature. Men's strengths and weaknesses show plain, and while bound together to fight the sea, their separate identities stand forth. Of human generosity, fortitude, and especially bravery, I had seen an abundance. There was sin to be found at every waterfront—often to enjoy, occasionally to repent—and it seemed natural as breathing. It was in the knowledge of evil that I remained an ignoramus. Our fellowship under Captain Phillips had held it at bay.

What I had learned heretofore of ships and sailing was being expanded and better ordered and more deeply entrenched. As for learning navigation, I could not have picked a better school than the Vindictive. Captain Phillips was an old octant man, still awkward with Captain Campbell's sextant that came into general use about the time of our war with King George. Mate Hedric could shoot the sun as straight as old Chief Baldpate of the Kennebec, with his ceremonial arrow at a time of drouth; and with not much more consequence, since he was too thick-headed to chart a course. Our second mate, Mr. Tyler, was an excellent navigator, but when he went off watch, more and more of the figuring fell to me. The schooling I had had at Hanover no doubt proved useful to me, though I would have been hard put to it to say how; and my desire to please Captain Phillips and to get on drove me to study the science in my spare time. So by the spring of 1801 I was as fit for second mate's papers as most who held the post.

In all truth, the second mate of a 200-ton schooner is no great shakes. This last sounds like a Vermont expression, and since the Green Mountains grow folk of lively imagination, I wonder now if "great sheiks," pronounced the same, and of the same comic grandeur as "high Mogul," was not the original meaning. The sailors put it best by the saying that a second mate must still get his hands in the tar bucket. The fact remained that he was an officer, quartered aft the mast, and a long step up from a bosun. Even so, I could not take it now if it required my leaving the Vindictive.

This was my secret. I could not stand the thought of parting with her yet; as I had stood on the beach that late afternoon before Captain Phillips had spoken to me, I had drunk a cup of loneliness that I wished never to taste again. Time might heal the wound—time is the gentleman, say the wise Chinese—or when we brought the vessel home for an overhaul, I might find me a blue-water sailor's daughter, comely and shapely, who would banish the blue devils forevermore.

My best quick chance lay in Mr. Tyler getting a ship of his own. He was of quarter-deck size, and being considered for the captaincy of a sloop being built at Mr. Derby's yards in Salem. In March, when we touched at Lisbon, bound again for the Mediterranean, the harbor master brought him letters, the contents of which he had not divulged. He was patently cheerful over their reading, and our master somewhat glum.

We were fetching a cargo of Nantucket whale oil consigned to an English merchant in Naples. Again an English frigate undertook to convoy us and some other merchantmen through the Strait—and on this occasion she did not lose us in the fog. Moreover, her manner was more polite. Yankee clippers turned privateer had shown their mettle once more in our huggermugger war with France, and one of these days even England might need our help. It was true that Napoleon talked of peace, but the sailors said his treaties were only fit for Josephine's commode. Also, the Barbary seahawks, rifer than ever and more bold, pulled the whiskers of the British hon unless he gave them meat.

We raised no lateen sail on our voyage up and along the instep of the boot. When we had discharged, we took our empty bottom into the harbor of Marsala. Here we would lade the pale sweet wine of the same name, to fetch to Copenhagen.

Marsala lay on a low spit on the west coast of Sicily. We liked the look of her as we ran in, and I think of this and the whole scene as kind of a prelude of some events to come. Prelude means usually an introductory strain of music. There was a kind of music on the deck that morning, expressed not so much in sound as in men's harmony with one another and their surroundings. The sun was bright, the weather warm, and every face was cheerful at the prospect of going to shore, seeing new sights, eating spaghetti with grated goat cheese washed down with sweet wine, and larking somewhat when the evening lamps were lighted. Every one of us felt in close bond with the rest. We were happy in the strength of our body.

We were making toward our intended anchorage under close sail. Captain Phillips stood on his quarter-deck on the weather side; four hands waited about the 400-pound anchor on the fo'c'sle head; and its 4-inch cable was bighted to run out.

It must be that our master, too, was daydreaming of the port and good ground beneath his feet, because we had run in farther than he had at first intended. I saw him start, glance at the shore, then bawl his order.

"Heave your iron."

The urgency in his voice was transmitted to the minds and muscles of the four sailors. They made haste to lift the big hook, two grasping the flukes and two the stocks. "O-heave-0," they chanted in quick rhythm; but their grunt as they let go was cut from our hearing by a sharp cry. George Greenough, a fine six-footer from Falmouth, had got out of balance in the heavy heaving, so that one of the stocks had rammed under his belt and caught in his clothes. As the black shape plunged down, it looked like some sea beast that had snatched human prey from our deck and was bearing it to its weedy lair.

A thrill of horror passed through me the same as every soul aboard. In the ensuing instant there was no sound on the deck, and only one man left his place. George Greenough's brother Will, one of the steadiest men in our company, was thrown off another kind of balance by the sight. With his arms shooting out before him and his hands meeting to cleave water, he sprang to the rail. But before he reached there, our master had drawn his breath. Forth it came in a clear command.

"Will Greenough, hold your post."

I sensed a slight pause as his mind worked. Meanwhile I had raised my head and stood squarely with my eyes fixed on his. This was to attract his attention and make him remember what he knew about me germane to the present pass. Instantly he responded.

"Bosun Whitman, if you think you might help him, go down."

I had deemed the chance fair, and perhaps good. The depth here was three and a half fathoms—I had looked at the charts before we ran in—and the bottom well-packed silt. In respect to the warm weather, I was already barefoot. Before Captain Phillips could complete his orders to Mate Hedric, I had shed my shirt and kicked out of my breeches. Then I ran aft to the point where the running cable slid hissing into the water and dived in.

In one gasp I had filled my lungs with air. Aye, they were brimming with it as casks with water, when men must abandon ship in mid-ocean. Grabbing the cable, I climbed down it hand under hand, my feet kicking to give me every possible jot of speed. But the slanting course seemed heartbreakingly slow. George had not buoyed up and was pinned down by the ponderous shackle. Perhaps it had wounded him to death. If not, how soon would it lurch forward over him?

I could be sure that the same horror lay on Captain Phillips. Every sailor finds out at last the power of a ship's headway—how she lunges on, making mock of wind or tide, despite dropped sails and hard-set helm. Now he must stop her before the cable could run out and come taut. Otherwise the anchor would be dragged a distance, its great flukes plowing the harbor bottom, and tearing to pieces any soft thing in its way.

But the terrible prospect soon faded from my mind. All other fear passed with it, driven off by a kind of elation I was never to understand or which folk can hardly believe. Truly, it was like that which rises to the brain from drinking wine. I fought the sea and the danger with devilish joy. Worse yet, I had not the least feeling of pity for George Greenough, dead or insensible or mangled or struggling feebly. Getting him out alive would be only a token of victory, proof of my own powers.

My ears throbbed, my head swam, my heart thumped my side. It seemed that many minutes had passed since my plunge; actually it was little more than one minute, for I was still holding my breath. And now I made out through the milky waters a weird shape that I knew was the anchor. Half under it, I saw a dark form.

At that instant my breath gave out. It was suck air or take in water, so I let myself buoy up fast as in a children's swing. My lungs filled with a sobbing sound, then I fought the hardest battle of my life so far—whether to go down again, or to give up.

The fresh air had sobered me instantly, and gone was my fool's glory, and I was afraid the soon-lurching anchor would catch me too. Surely George Greenough had died in all this while. I could not believe what my best mind tried to tell me—that he had been under less than five minutes, and perhaps no more than three. I might have known it, could I reason that far, by the still-slack cable. Perhaps by some counting deep within my brain, I did know it.

It was a hard fight, but short. I could not keep this place in the slow tidal current, and any life left in George was ebbing fast. I never knew what moved me, but I turned over like a striking fish and went down head first. Most likely I was still obeying Captain Phillips.

I found the anchor in the deep dusk. Laying hold of it, I turned it on its side. This task required great strength, although the iron had lost part of its weight in the heavy water; then my heart fainted to see George's form still hanging from its stock. God help me, I feared the iron knob had entered his body. A numbing terror gripped me now, for I knew, I know not how, that the captain had paid out all his cable with his ship still lurching on.

An instant later I received the warning. Although the length that I could see remained slack, I felt a stir of water close by, maybe a hissing, creaking sound. Lying belly down close to the bottom, kicking backward to keep down, I laid hold of the captive. My frantic hands could not loose his belt, but my tugging forced the stock's end from beneath it, and he was free.

I had barely caught him by one arm when the slack cable sprang taut. It was as though life were in it, the life of a sea snake wakened from his sleep, and the iron, too, looked like a living thing as it lurched forward. One of the flukes struck me just below the knee. Although floating free, I was not spared a cruel blow, racking me with pain and knocking out of me the little air remaining in my lungs. It seemed too that I heard a faint crack, such a sound as I had never heard before.

When I tried to kick backward with that leg, it floated out from me like a frond of seaweed. But now I held George Greenough's wrist in a firm grip as I thrust strongly against the bottom with my sound leg.

The anchor was lurching forward again. Just in time to avoid its clutch, I and my silent companion wafted upward. In brief seconds we had gained the surface and the bhnding light of day; and I took a great gulp of air. Stroking lightly with one arm and one leg, I drew him along side, his head on my shoulder; and for the first time since I saw him heaving on the iron, I looked into his face.

It was ghastly pale where it was not blue, and his eyes were wide open and staring, but a boat made toward us now—the long oars flashing in the sun and the stem cleaving the gentle ripple—and the thrilling inkling came to me that he could be brought back from the darkness to life and light.

I lay on the sunny deck where my mates had gently spread me. Others of our company, the most knowing and experienced in the task, went to work on George Greenough. First they rolled him, with hanging-out tongue, over a barrel, and the men cheered at the amount of sea water he was ridden of. Then, while one of his nostrils was pressed shut, air was shot into the other through tlie stem of a bellows. He could take only a little at first because of the congestion in his lungs, but thus began a wonderful process, no less than causing artificial breathing in the apparent dead. Alternately pressing the air out of him and giving him more, his rough-and-ready doctors were at last rewarded by a faint gasp rising of itself from his pale lips. By their keeping at it, he was soon thrown into a paroxysm of violent coughing and retching; and then the welkin rang with the boys' shouts, for they knew that he was saved.

With George coughing and spewing, but able at last to swallow a tot of rum, my good fishing for him had proven the greatest triumph of my days. In my pride in it, I had almost forgotten my own hurt. Presently a stab of pain, as from a knife blade stuck deep into my calf, made me remember it well enough. Then my spirits took a great fall, for at last I confronted the scurvy fact that George Greenough would return to duty long before I did. He would be clambering to the tops and taking his turn to hand reef and steer while I sat flat-bottomed on the deck, my leg broom-stiff before me, splicing rope or —an even duller shipboard task—shredding oakum.

George was carried to the fo'c'sle to have his harrowed spirit balmed with sleep. Captain Phillips, Mate Hedric, and three or four would-be doctors among the crew gathered around me to look at my helpless leg. The master himself undertook its examination. No doubt he tried to be gentle, but his main forte was being thorough, and I must bite my tongue to keep from howling.

" 'Tis done, and I fear 'twas far from pleasant," he told me at last, in his old-fashioned speech.

"Nay, sir, it wasn't."

"I'd 've given ye a gill of grog, to dull your sensibilities, but 'twas needful that ye feel and indicate pain, to disclose to me your condition."

"What is it, sir, if you'll kindly tell me?"

"The shinbone, called the tibia, is surely broke. I can't be sure of the smaller legbone, known as the fibula, but I think 'tis whole. Moreover, I believe the break to be clean and not compound, which should expedite its healing."

"I'm glad to hear it, Cap'n."

"Mate Hedric, what would you recommend to be done?"

"Why, if 'twas mine, I'd rather have Owens here put his hand at setting it, than leave it to some Sicilian sawbones, always singing and wine-bibbling, or a Frenchman either."

Ezra Owens had joined our company soon after we had lost Tom Childers off Finisterre, and except for 'Giny Jim, he was the only man aboard not a New England Yankee. About forty, somewhat windy, and a Philadelphian besides, he would fit the part of ship's lawyer; instead he aspired to physic. However, I had never seen him perform any medical feats beyond giving pills for a binding, sumac to stop a flux, removing slivers, and curing gurry sores.

"I reckon we'd best not have any journeyman doctors setting the bosun's bones," the captain replied. "And since we can't get him to an American leech, the next best would be a British, who when he means leg,' can say leg,' and not 'jamby.' "

"I'm of the same mind, Cap'n."

"Then why not run him down to Malta, where there's an English naval hospital, and doctors most as good as we'd find in Boston? The bone was broke helping a shipmate beyond call o' duty, and if my charterers revile me for doing what I deem fit, to hell and damnation with 'em."

It was not lightly or on small occasion that Captain Phillips cursed. It seemed to me that those Boston merchants must look about the rooms they were sitting in, wondering what had shaked the walls.

Captain Phillips turned to me and spoke in his usual manner.

"We'll land you there, then lade our cargo of Marsala wine to fetch to Copenhagen. By the time we get back here—say nine weeks—your leg will be fit to stand on, though not as good as new. We'll pick you up as we come by for duty aft the mast."

The last three words were spoken by him so calmly, and heard by me so fervently, that my head reeled. Perhaps his tongue had slipped, when he had meant to say, " 'fore the mast."

"Sir, I'm not sure I understood you," I replied as steadfastly as I could, while the men gaped.

" 'Tis no wonder, since I'd given you no hint of it before. In truth, I'd meant to wait till Mr. Tyler went his way. But some good news to raise your spirits while we're away will surely help the healing, so I'll tell you now. In short, Mr. Tyler's returning to Salem as soon as I can spare him, to be master of Mr. Derby's two-masted sloop a-building in his yard, and I mean to appoint you to his berth as second mate."

There was only one thing I had breath to say. Happily it was the best and proper thing.

"Aye, aye, sir."

"Ye should know that I'm sole owner of the vessel, having bought Eli Morton's share when we last came up home, so my choice is final. But ye've a hard duty ahead of ye, to equal Mr. Tyler, and I'll expect you to come to it, and so will all hands."

"Sir, may I speak free?"

"Every man has the right to speak free on this ship until he speaks unfit for a man, for we sail 'neath the flag of freedom."

"It's that difference between us and foreign ships that makes me ask this favor." I had sat up, my broken leg stiff in front of me, but it was not its throbbing pain that wet my face with sweat. "You know how British officers look down on men 'fore the mast. I'm not used to it, and it would go hard with me. So if you could see your way to brevet me second mate before you leave me in Malta, I'd be better treated by all who deal with me."

"Now that's to be thought of, and if 'tis a little irregular, since when have Americans bowed down to regulations? By God I'll do it."

I had been weakened more than I knew by my ordeal underwater, for now my chest heaved and I must bow my face in my hands. For a little space I feared I had shamed myself before all hands, but it was not so.

Until I could master myself again, they looked away, talking to one another of other matters.

CHAPTER 3 The Visitor

Malta was known as the Crossroads of the Sea. I reckoned it a good name, since it lay almost an equal distance from Gibraltar to Alexandria, and you could not sail from any western Mediterranean port to any eastern without passing its door. It was the rock that had stood between Turkish fleets and the Christian coasts. In olden days, before America was discovered, it was the Crossroads of the World.

Only a little larger than Marthas Vineyard, but almost in cannon shot of the pirate strongholds of Tunis and Tripoli, it caused many a turbaned reis to tug his beard.

We came into Valletta, called the New Capital, on the northeast side of the island. At a distance it looked like a multi-colored rock, all its buildings being yellow, red, or orange-colored stone. When we anchored in the roads, under the guns of St. Elmo, lighters came rushing to us in the shape of gondolas, manned by medium-size, agile, somewhat handsome men, fairer-skinned than the Sicilians and more soberly dressed. These were the genuine Maltese. The captain told us they descended from Phoenicians settling here three thousand years ago, and their language, although sounding like Arabic, was incomprehensible to any other people in the world. Many of the lighter-men spoke Italian, and now the island had come under British rule, no few were learning English.

Much of the hill above the harbor being too steep for roads, long flights of steps served the townfolk, and most of the freight went up on donkeyback. For the nonce, I myself was a piece of freight. Although our carpenter had fixed braces of board to hold my leg steady, I must be lightered in and toted pickaback to the nearest carrozza—a carriage so small that I almost, not quite, had to stretch my leg on the horse's rump—then drawn by a roundabout course to the hospital. Even so, the dignities of my new rank were properly preserved.

Before making the trip I had bought part of Mate Tyler's wardrobe. Although not quite as tall, he weighed almost the same, so the clothes fitted me well enough; and since he was a neat and sparing man, they were nearly as good as new. Better yet, they were of a quality befitting a junior officer of a little trader, respectable but not in the least rich; in fact they would hardly be in keeping with his captaincy. Yet when the jollies guarding the hospital gate saw scales on the shoulders of my broadcloth coat—these were distant, poor relations of epaulets—and anchors embroidered with gilt thread on my sleeves, they gave me a routine salute.

The hospital occupied one of the lodges of the Knights of Malta, who had ruled the island until the French conquest three years before. My mates who had brought me here stood about a moment, their arms dangling, then with glum faces and blunt farewells, took themselves off. Three hours later, a snuff-taking dandy with a train of flunkeys condescended to glance at my leg, pinch it, wipe his hands on a towel, and call in a small, pale-colored, soft-spoken Maltese addressed as Doctor Korda. When I had looked well into his face, marking his quiet, quick, sure ways, I was glad my case had not been worth the bigwig's attention.

" 'E knows a bloke's bones as I knew the spars of a hooker," an old seadog told me. He had learned his art as an orderly at the great hospital of Saint John. Before laying hand on me, he gave me a tot of rum and a pill of opium; after that, with my leg battened down till I could not wiggle a toe, I could curse or complain as the notion struck me without him pausing an instant or modifying his treatment in the least jot. Actually I did neither, for the honor of the Vindictive in sight of other patients from great ships o' the line. And once my silence stopped his small, strong hands and caused him to look at me, smile, and wipe some cold drops from my face.

After this there was nothing to do but wait for the bone to knit. I could progress from bed to chair, from chair to crutches, at last from crutches to a little walking, favoring the leg like a lame mule. Meanwhile my acquaintance ripened with the plain kind of Englishmen. Once the ice was broke betwixt us, I found them more like us Yankees than I could hardly have believed.

The greatest difference between us, and which puzzled me the most, was the way they bowed down to great folk. A common American envies and greatly admires the rich and famous, and he may feel awkward and uneasy in their presence, but he would take a beating if not a hanging before he would call them his "betters." But I found them manly in their other dealings—brave, tenacious, more honest, I thought, than most Yankees, less inclined to boast, patriotic, and jealous of their freedom.

The humble could come up by industry and thrift, an earnest young chaplain assured me. I told him that the shortest route to the reward would be by way of America. Many of my fellow patients harbored the same thought, for they could not hear enough of our fields and forests, where the poorest farm boy could go a-hunting; of the lakes and rivers free to fish in; of the vast, fertile lands over the mountains where every comer bold enough could carve out a farm. But the thing to which they listened with bated breath was our doctrine of equality. Seeing that we had rich and poor, intelligent and stupid, honored and dishonored, I could not explain it to them. But I could tell them this: no man was lord of another by birthright, and none need bow his head or bend his knee against his will.

When talk and tales ran short, I took to reading. It so happened that I had read very little for pleasure. Except for the Bible, most of the books available in Bath had been sober tomes—collections of sermons or state papers, the theological works of Jonathan Edwards, and essays so dull that Pilgrim's Progress seemed lurid by comparison. Now I got my nose in a battered copy of Robinson Crusoe lying about, and the covers snapped shut upon it like an angry clam.

Later my clerical friend lent me a heavy tome, containing ten of Shakespeare's plays, warning me that many of the words had disappeared from the language. Actually, I found very few unused by old settler families in Maine; and when he and I compared notes, the astonishing fact came forth that Maine speech was more like Shakespeare's than the king's English of the day. The truth was, he said, that the latter had a German flavor, caught from the Hanover kings, so that ass was pronounced with a soft a, ant almost rhymed with taunt, and either sounded as though it were eyether. Hereafter, I would not feel so countrified when I heard rich Boston shipowners talking like Londoners.

Now eight weeks had passed, and I longed to return to duty—hard work, happy leisure, good fellowship, and day-by-day adventure of life at sea. Stiff and still weak, my leg limbered and stoutened with every day of use, and you would have thought it was Doctor Korda's leg instead of mine, such pride he took in its mending. I could begin to look for the Vindictive in another week or so, but not to expect her for a good month. The reason was, hard to heavy gales still swept the northwest coast of Europe, the effect of the late spring. These were reported to the Navy bigwigs by pinnace from Gibraltar, the news sifting down to the lowest jack-tar in quarantine.

I began taking in the sights of Valletta, such as the great palace of the Knights and the Cathedral of Saint John. Perhaps my favorite resort was the fish dock on the West Harbor. From here the gay-sailed smacks set forth with a priest's blessing and a long-furred, dark gray cat, of a kind peculiar to Malta, fetched along for good luck; and here they returned, with the cat on the masthead if they had made a good catch. But no gray malkin saved from disaster some of the tall ships from the west.

Two Yankee vessels that had passed the Straits had failed to come to port, their fates unknown. One limped into Genoa after a two-hour stand and fight with a Moroccan gunboat. Another, a Med-ford brig, struck her colors under the guns of a Tripoli frigate, was brought in shame to his rockbound den, and her crew enslaved. Indeed, the Pasha of Tripoli was the bloodiest pirate of the whole evil passel. The rumor had spread far, with much to support it, that he had become dissatisfied with the $83,000 annual blackmail America paid him, and had sent new demands through our consul there to our President. God knows that "blackmail" is an ugly word, but I liked it better than the right word, which was "tribute."

If the people at home had known the shame, they would have ridden John Adams on a rail. Maybe he could not help himself, but with a new president in the new mansion in our new capital and new hope in the air all over our broad land, with our flag flying undaunted from a thousand mainmasts, unbowed before the tricolor and the Jack, I took it we would not demean ourselves again before a heathen pirate. It was said he wanted fifty 24-pound cannon as part of his blood price; but if we did not speak our answer out of their black mouths, I did not know my nation.

Having stoutened my leg by walks in the country, now I ranged the whole island for pleasure's sake. I admired the intensely cultivated fields behind walls of stone, the olive and orange groves, and the clean warm villages full of church bells and laughter. Often I followed the shore, to gaze out at the cobalt water or to look down from some rugged cliff to the white line of the surf.

In one of my rambles along the northwest shore, I marked a school of large fishes feeding in the shallow water of a small inlet. I soon made them out to be bass, running from twenty to sixty pounds, silvery colored with bluish backs; they were feeding on small crabs. On the following morning I went crabbing, then with a bucketful for bait and a hand line twenty fathoms long with hooks and sinkers, I went a-fishing. The big school of bass had vanished, but hopeful that they would return, I fixed a crab on the hook, whirled the lead, and cast it some fifteen fathoms. Then I sat down on the warm sand, under the balmy sky, to wait a bite, to daydream, and to enjoy my outing.

It happened that this reach of beach ran longer and straighter than any hereabouts. No houses were in sight, and I shared it only with little sandpipers, flying and settling and piping along the water's edge—the hindmost ever the first to take off again. Since the breeze blew offshore, the cobalt blue of the sea stood almost unruffled; and all I could see of it was forsaken, too, except for gulls so far out that they were only visible when the sunlight glinted their snowy wings, and once in a while a small flock of pelicans, flying parallel to the coast on business that brooked no delay. The whole effect was of solitude deeper and more touching than any I had felt since I came to Malta.

That solitude was not broken, only oddly changed, when I made out a dot of life moving slowly along the beach a good mile off. It was a human being, walking—or rather wandering—in my direction, his gait unusually slow for the brisk, businesslike Maltese. He stopped now and again, and at one point he turned and began to retrace his steps. I felt pleased when again he stopped, hesitated, and came on.

Sitting as still as the old sand-sunk snag beside me, I did not think he had discovered my presence. When ten minutes had passed, his raiment began to puzzle me a great deal. The low-crowned, narrow-brimmed hat and the full skirt suggested a priest, but the latter was too short and the waist too narrow to fill the bill. On the other hand, the Maltese women invariably wore the faldetta, which is a black headdress extended into a cloak.

Suddenly I knew the person was female with a youthful step. Sometimes women working in the fields pinned up their dresses just below the knee, but she had more likely done so to cross the runnels of the making tide. Her tan skirt and tight-fitting jacket looked foreign to the island; still she might be a fisherman's daughter, going to meet her father's smack at some cove up the beach and carrying something fairly large, brown, and glossy in her hand. If she had time to loaf along the way, I thought I might persuade her to stay awhile with me.

I rose slowly to my feet so she could see me. Drawing in my line, I rebaited and cast again, to show her I was here on honest business. To my joy she kept her course, and with quickening step. This last puzzled me more than any other incident so far. It was one of those little things that go against one's positive expectations. A child might hurry to look at me and at what I might be doing, but girls of courting age should be more circumspect.

Only when she drew within fifty paces and I had bowed my head and touched my cap in salutation, did I surmise the strangeness of the adventure. The girl was not a Maltese. I did not think she belonged to any Mediterranean nation. Although she went barefoot and bare-legged to her knees, she was a far cry from a fisherman's daughter. She wore a beautifully fitted buff riding habit, pinned up for her comfort, and carried glossy riding boots in her hand.

She stopped about forty feet away and regarded me with frank curiosity. I expected to speak first, but she beat me.

"Are you catching any fish?" she asked, in a cheerful, rather friendly, completely assured voice.

"Not yet. The tide's still a little low for them to start biting."

She cocked her head a little in puzzlement or surprise. I did what I had learned to do in situations I did not wholly grasp—waited in silence.

"What is your shire? Your accent is—I was going to say York or Lancashire, but it isn't quite like either. I'm not sure I ever heard it before."

"I'm a native of Bath," I told her with a straight face.

"Wiltshire? I don't believe you. I mean, you must have left there before you learned to talk. I know Wiltshire from one end to the other."

"I lived there all my life, just up the bay from Portland."

"Portland is in Dorsetshire. You're a liar—and no English sailor would dare lie to me—and that means you're not English. I know what you are. I was a fool not to tell it right away. You're a Yankee."

"I am, but I didn't lie to you about Bath, or Portland either. I came from the District of Maine, in Massachusetts."

"Massachusetts! The hotbed of rebellion! Well, what are you doing here?"

"Fishing."

"Stop being impudent. You're a sailor, aren't you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Haven't sailors in America any manners?"

I did not answer at once. It came to me that this girl was not naturally as high-handed as she showed. Her eyes had brightened, and I believed she was pleased to come on a young Yankee so unexpectedly, and her baiting me was a kind of game, to see what I would do. With that to go on, I could perceive her more clearly than before.

There was no getting out of it—she was an aristocrat. I had seen only a few in my fife, since America was settled almost altogether by yeomanry with a sprinkling of gentry, and we were too young a nation to have developed many. The delicate molding of her hands and face gave me the clue, and her easy manner, complete composure, even her high skirt and bare feet which she had forgotten, clinched the matter in my mind. Indeed, she might be one of a high order, since she felt no need of putting on airs or minding Mrs. Grundy. Most likely she was rich. Her riding habit and boots looked expensive, her little hat was beaver, and a dark red stone, probably a ruby, burned in the clasp at her throat.

Still, I did not feel dismissed from her by this. Almost all except great folk know the feeling of dismissal—maybe these know it, too, although it cannot happen to them so often as to the poor—when we are brought to the attention of people who have everything. It is not that they are out of our reach. They simply do not want anything we can give them, and that brings a bleakness upon our souls. I felt a strong fellow humanity with the girl, and something more that did not seem to make sense. It was a desire to please her and make her laugh and be happy, not to gain her esteem, but for her own sake.

As I stood there, drinking her in, I knew there was something touching about her, which no amount of wealth or position or beauty could gainsay. But beauty is never something to drive people off. It always draws them in. There could be cold perfection in a face that would wither a bunch of posies, but that is not beauty. Real beauty makes every nonevil person feel warm-hearted and generous and happy along with being a little sorrowful. Unless they can have it for themselves, evil people hate it to the bottom of their hearts.

The girl's clean lines gave a trimness to her figure and a vividness to her face. They curved boldly or subtly, with no straight line on her, unless it was her nose; and on second look, it had a little upward tilt. Barefoot girls almost never look tall. She did so, for she was a good five and a half feet and slimly made; but that slimness never suggested fragility or dimmed her femininity. Bosom and butt are the badge: in her case neither was large, but both were prominent enough to take a sailor's eye and breath, trim, and, as is proper to young girls with spirit, rode somewhat high.

Her hair and rather heavy eyebrows appeared dusky black, and her skin might be called dusky too, as compared to the fair skins of England and New England. Actually it was only what we call a deep brunette, but it looked darker than her fight gray eyes and set them off. The sea lights upon them in contrast with their thickets of sable lashes gave them a jewel-like brilliance my gaze could not resist.

Over her small, prominent, finely worked and fitted facial bone, the flesh was spare, taut, and given to high lights. Her mouth was unevenly shaped—the upper-hp thin, the lower full, and the curved line at one corner was deeper than at the other. I did not know what had attracted my eyes to this minor oddity until I perceived it as a clue to her identity. Perhaps it was a flaw in her beauty. If so, I did not want it changed. Perhaps it only caused her mouth to appear wistful and childlike, denying that she had everything and no use for me.

I had not yet seen her smile, but wished I could.

"Won't you sit down and go back to your fishing?" she asked. "I'd like to watch you the little while before I must go."

"I reckon I haven't stopped fishing. I just haven't paid it any mind." This last was a Maine expression.

I sat down at my old place by the old snag, and she dropped on the sand beside me.

"My name is Sophia," she told me. "What's yours?"

This was deeper water than it seemed but, aroused and alert, I almost instantly saw through it. My last name did not matter, but hers did. I might have already heard it and its placing of her would prevent any easy communion between us. She wanted our meeting to be pleasant and interesting and uncomplicated; she might meet me a good halfway in that. But when we had parted, it would be over with.

"Homer," I answered.

"Homer?" she echoed in agreeable surprise. "How would you like to be named Ulysses?" She was watching me closely.

"It would suit me all right. I liked him a lot better than Achilles."

"Then you have read Homer! How wonderful!"

"Of course I read the poet I was named after!"

"Well—forgive me—but I was under the impression that most Americans can't read, and if they can, they read only the Bible and their account books and that terrible traitor and mob-inciter—maybe I'm mistaken about him, too—Thomas Paine."

"I think, ma'am, that you are."

"Don't get stuffy, Homer. Tell me about him later. Now I've got a surprise for you. The poet Homer visited this very island, possibly this very beach."

"I didn't know that."

"I'm sure of it. Do you remember that Ulysses fell under the spell of the witch Calypso on an island? That island has since been identified as Malta. So doesn't it stand to reason that Homer came here to get the proper background? In fact, I've positive evidence of it, but it's secret."

"I know what it is. You saw him with your own eyes three thousand years ago. You're the witch Calypso."

Her smile broke then, not a very brilliant one or beautiful either, yet wonderful to see. I could not have explained this very well. It broke slowly and was one-sided and twisted her mouth out of shape-not a smile that an artist would try to paint unless he was very great, then no one could forget the picture. I felt she did not smile much in front of folk—that kind of smiling was hard for her. But she smiled a great deal when she was alone at little things that amused and delighted her.

"Good for you, Homer!" she cried. "Only a London beau would say that, giving himself airs; but even they are more fun than the rough-and-ready fox hunters. I like Americans."

"Good for you, Sophia."

She was just a little startled, but remembered and smiled more.

"And you didn't miss it as far as you think—about Calypso. I've been here only six months, but at least she and I know the same secret. I might even tell you someday. How long have you been here?"

"Nearly three months."

"You said you are a sailor, no doubt 'fore the mast. But in America where people can get ahead—"

"I'm a second mate." I did not tell her my honors were brevet only.

"Oh, that's fine!"

"Why did you assume I was 'fore the mast? I have been until very lately."

"Well, the only ship officers I know are Royal Navy. The younger they are, the more swagger—but some of the old captains are plain as you are. What are you doing in Malta?"

"Resting my leg after breaking it in an accident at sea."

"Will you tell me about it?"

"Not now, if you please. Did you say you were from Wiltshire?"

"No, I didn't. I said I knew Wiltshire. I was raised in Cornwall. My mother was Cornish—she was dark Cornish as I am—and I lived at her old home while Papa was at sea."

"Well, I've been to Cornwall. We put in at Boscastle when running Napoleon's blockade—and had a heavy haul getting in."

As I spoke, her expression was changing in a wonderful way. The color rose in it until her cheeks were a dark quince and her mouth was a dark red.

"Did you hear the ghost bells?" she asked.

"No, but a passel of us went inland—"

"Wait just a minute. What does 'passel' mean?"

"We use it to mean a bunch of us."

"Go on. If you went to Bodmin moor—"

"That's where we did go. We went to see the stone monuments. They were more strange than the ghost bells. The whole moor was strange."

"Tell me about it"

"It's a great green and gray and brown waste. The only houses are stone huts where shepherds live. There are no roads but sheep paths and grass-grown ruts. I didn't see many trees, but there are great masses of granite that look like shapes of things—"

I stopped, because I knew from her eyes that she knew all this far better than I.

"Please go on," she said. "Like the shapes of what?"

"Of nothing you could recognize—something outside the world; they suggest mystery and sorrow."

"How did you come to have such clear eyes, Homer? What did you hear?"

"Nothing but the wind—I reckon it never stops blowing—and curlews shrieking and gulls crying and once in a while the bray of a marsh donkey way out on the moor."

"Did you see Brown Willie?"

"How could we miss it? We would have climbed it if we'd had time."

"I've climbed it a score of times."

Those few words painted a picture for me of Sophia on the moors, her dusky hair blowing in the wind. It caused me to look at her again. She was long-legged and of light build and light on her feet, so she could walk far and fast when the way was long, or run with an old shepherd dog till his tongue hung out. This was so out of keeping with my ideas of a daughter of nobility that I reviewed the evidence. No, I had not been misled. She was of ancient lineage and proud name. But her mouth was not proud and cold, one that could not speak to me in a common language. I could not keep my eyes off of it. Her strained and crooked smile, at once joyful and forlorn, had made us intimates.

Then there came an exciting interruption. The line coiled about my wrist, with one loop in my hand, tightened so violently as to jerk my arm straight and me half off my seat. I caught it with the other hand and sprang to my feet. There was a great splashing and tugging as the fish's run was checked and some excited squealing from my beautiful companion. Since I must not hoist him in lest the hook pull out—or give him any slack with which to throw it—he gave me a busy time for a minute or two, paying out and taking in line. When he tired, I worked him into the surf, then slid him onto the sand.

He was a beautiful blue-backed sea bass weighing at least twenty pounds.

"Oh, how wonderful!" Sophia cried.

"Would you like to catch one?"

"I'd adore to—to show Papa. He laughs at me when I tell him about the salmon I used to catch m the moor rivers—he thinks I made it up."

"If a school's come in to feed, the biting might be right lively. I'll cast for you—"

"No, I can do that."

When I had baited the hook and coiled the line at her feet, she whirled the lead and made a sixty-foot cast. Evidently she was a handy girl as well as a healthy one. However, the hook fouled the lead just before it plunged, and she had to haul in.

I reached to untangle the gear, but she showed eager as a child to do everything herself, so I sat down at my ease. Looping the end of the line about her waist to free her hands, she soon had it clear. Her second cast was clean and apparently the bait fell just in front of a fish's nose. The line began to run out. With a shriek she seized it with both hands, but it ran through them, no doubt burning the skin. The thought flashed through me that she had hooked a shark, so swift and powerful was the run, so I rose quickly to give her a hand if she needed it, or if it came to that—such things had happened at beach-fishing—cut the rope.

By now the last coil had jerked straight and, being caught off balance, she was being tugged toward the surf, her legs flying to save her a fall. But I was quite sure now that she had hooked nothing more formidable than an oversize bass, and watched her in great joy. As soon as she could apply her strength, she began to break his run. When she had splashed into shallow water, she stopped and held fast.

But the fish had not yet confessed her his master. He fought with fury, causing the line that held him yet to flay her waist and burn her hands. I had no idea of helping her, for my own satisfaction as much as hers, but I waded out to stand beside her. Of course I watched her instead of the fish. I had seen few sights as thrilling as this slender young girl, her skirt flying like a dancer's, careless of showing her shapely legs, her jacket so tight that her saucy breasts bid fair to break through the cloth, her hands gripped on the rigid line that ripped in great arcs through the water, her face quince-red from excitement, and her eyes ablaze. She did not squeal or shriek, for she had no breath to spare. And I, too, was short of it from wanting her to win.

My fear of the hook tearing out proved groundless, but he was trying hard to throw it, and once the fish leaped clear of the water, shaking himself and shining, splendid and immense. Soon Sophia began to force him in. Whenever he yielded line, she took and held it, her face dripping with sweat and splashings, and its bound-and-determined look gave me great joy. Before long she hauled him into the low surf where he flopped and threshed in a final frenzy, then to the water's edge. There he lay, all blue and silver, a vivid, new-found sixty-pound inmate of the ocean, brought up from the dark depths to shine in the shallows at our feet.

But he was not yet in hand. A ridge of sand prevented Sophia from sliding him up the beach. Then my eyes bulged to see the hook hanging, all but torn loose and its barb exposed, at the corner of his mouth. One flop could easily dislodge the point; then instantly he would feel the thrill of freedom and surge back to sea.

"Be careful," I told her.

She nodded, and carefully shortened her line to about a yard. Then she waited for the next high wave—the seventh, as it is called, although truly such waves do not come at any regular sequence. It rolled lightly in and lifted the fish to the top of the ridge of sand. At the same instant she drew him gently over. Then I must holler, for a second later she had him by the gill, dragging him clean up the beach.

Before she looked twice at her prize, she turned her eyes on me. They were snapping with excitement and triumph, and for a few seconds I thought she might give me a prize, long to remember, lovely to keep. But if she had an impulse to do so, she repressed it. Perhaps the gulf between her station and mine was too wide for her to make the brief crossing, regardless of any passing closeness between her and me. Quite possibly the interdiction was bred in her bone.

In due course I had bent a 3-ply line on the fish's gills and secured him to the snag in shallow water. Meanwhile I had reached a stage of happiness, the exact like of which I had never known, and as nearly perfect as some of the cloudless happiness of my childhood. There was no enchantment about it: it was down to earth as Sophia's bare toes; it rose from the combination of hers and my victory, the bright sun, the warm sand, the noble arch of the sky over us and the dark blue sea beside us, and being with her instead of away from her, both of us alive. Whether she experienced anything like its equal, I did not know. I only knew that her face shone like a child's.

"Let me see your hands," I told her with a doctorlike firmness.

She held them out to me, the beautifully molded hands of the high-born. On taking them, I found them more strong and more adroit than I had guessed at first, and not as badly burned as I feared. Still, they could use a little unguent that I carried in my haversack for anointing my leg when it stiffened on long walks. I took a long time for its application, so pleasant their touch against mine.

"I'll carry your fish home for you when the time comes," I told her.

"I'm afraid it's come already." A quite real shadow crept across her face.

"But I'd love to show him to Papa," she went on when I kept silent. "I think it will knock him over—just once. But you'll have to tell him I caught him. or he won't believe I didn't buy him from some trawler."

"All right."

"He'll believe you and treat you politely. He's far from a fool. Dick may pretend he doesn't believe you, but he'll be green with jealousy."

"Dick?"

"My half brother."

Her expression changed, and I saw something in her eyes I could hardly believe.

"You hate him, don't you?"

"I dare say I do. I don't like the idea of it, but can't seem to stop. Papa admires him much more than he does me, so part of it may be jealousy."

She did not expect a reply. I was thinking how many tilings I had found out about her without knowing her name or gaining any real insight into her nature. It was like one of those old-fashioned books with metal covers, closed by lock and key.

"My brother is a bastard," she went on. "I'm not just calling him a name. He's a real one. But his mother was a lady."

I nodded.

"You've never hated anyone, have you?"

"I've never had any reason to. We've a friendship crew on the Vindictive."

She looked startled. "That sounds more like a man-of-war than a merchantman."

"I reckon it does. The word's come to mean 'vengeful.' But Cap'n says it came from vindicate and should mean 'ready to defend her honor and deal retribution to her enemies.' "

"I doubt if there's much difference. Homer, we live three miles from here, just outside of Notabile, and that's seven miles from Valletta. Won't the fish be a big load?"

"I could carry him thirty miles—after I've had my lunch. And I've got enough for us both."

"You have!" She spoke incredulously and looked delighted at so slight a matter.

"Look here." I brought out the good bread of the country, with plenty of tasty crust, cheese made from goat's milk, small sweet oranges for which Malta was famous, and a flask of the pale, delicious wine of Marsala. Moreover, I had thought to bring a napkin for the spread, not from any daintiness, but because I was used to a tidy home at sea and objected to sand in my victuals.

"Homer, you've shown United States of America in a new light," she told me, greatly elated.

We ate bread and cheese, sucked oranges, and took turns at the bottle. "Old Farmer George in his castle never fared better," she remarked, rubbing her stomach.

"Isn't that a little disrespectful to His Majesty?" I asked.

"I think he likes to be called Farmer George. Anyway, Papa doesn't consider any Hanover his equal." At once she was contrite. "I shouldn't have said that. It isn't true either—exactly. As the king, he's Papa's liege lord. Papa himself would never dream of calling him anything but the king. And I've got to go home now."

I fixed a wooden buffer on my shoulder so I could sling the two fish on my back. They were cold and slimy, but no great load; and Sophia's incredulous glances at her catch, out of eyes childishly proud, made the task pleasant. The whole household would feast tonight, she said, and her father would gorge on the "hump"—the oily piece behind the head that I had told her was the most choice in any high-backed fish. I wondered how big her "household" was, but decided not to ask.

She soon fell quiet, and I was not inclined to disturb her thoughts. Meanwhile we walked hand in hand, and although I expected her soon to become ill-at-ease with this slight intimacy, she made no move to break it off, and indeed seemed happy in it. Her small hand relaxed more and more in my big one, and she did not mind the sweat.

We came to the mouth of a creek in a distant view of a fishing village. A little farther on was a grove of carob trees, their greenery so dark that on cloudy days it looked black. Here she slipped her hand out of mine, stopped, and faced me. She had come to some sort of decision, and there was no doubting her earnestness in it.

"I left my horse in that village," she told me slowly, her eyes on mine. "So leave me here and give my fish to some people who'll make good use of it."

I believe I kept my countenance, and when I spoke, my voice gave nothing away. But what I said seemed to have no meat.

"Then you don't want to show it to your father?"

"I want to, but I won't."

"You don't want him to see me? Isn't that it?"

"I don't want Dick to see you either."

"You're not ashamed of being with me. That doesn't fit in with you. So there must be a better reason."

"If there is, you'll have to find it for yourself."

"It's none of my business, I reckon, but I'll ask you something that is my business. Will you meet me again on the beach?"

"Yes."

"Tomorrow?"

"If you want me to."

"Where we met today or where we turned off?"

"Where we turned off."

"I want to a mighty lot. And I'm sorry about the fish."

"I am, too. And you did find the reason why I can't take him. If Papa knew we had been together on the beach—and his eyes are terribly sharp—he wouldn't forbid me going there again, but it would turn out that I wouldn't go. So good-by unto tomorrow—"

"There's just one thing more," I said.

I took her in my arms and held her close and kissed her beautiful warm mouth again and again. Since we stood in the dense shade of the carob trees, there was little likelihood of being seen. A far greater danger, plain as day, I could only disregard. My ship could never come in unless I spread her canvas and sailed close to the rocks.

Sophia did not resist or answer. When I let her go, her face deeply flushed, she turned without a word and walked away. I gazed after her, hoping she would look back and wave her hand, but she only grew small again, impersonal, unrecognizable, a moving dot of life.

CHAPTER 4 Cave of a Witch

In the end I lugged both fish to the hospital, where they caused great stir. Having told of catching them on a beach far from our meeting place, I could only hope that some finny beauties were biting there, for many of the walking patients and several of the staff planned to set forth at dawn. The two lunkers furnished a feast both in the wardrooms and the common tables.

That night I did a little fishing of another sort in talk with Chaplain Blain. Although the low cunning attributed to Yankees had not come out in me yet, by mentioning Captain Ball, governor of the island, I led him on to name other bigwigs in and about. It turned out that there was only one other. He was Captain Sir Godwine Tarlton, in command of all navy installations. And the chaplain's eyes glassed as he spoke his name.

" 'Sir' means that he's a knight?" I asked.

"Yes."

"But that's not as high as a lord."

"According to precedence, no. A new-made baron sits above Sir Godwine, but it would make him very uncomfortable. I don't mean Sir Godwine—I mean the baron. The old marquisate in North Ireland was lost. Again and again his ancestors have been offered peerages, only to decline. All they'll accept is knighthoods, a different thing entirely."

"Excuse me. I'm not well versed on English nobility and gentry. Why would he accept a knighthood when a knight is below a lord?"

"A knighthood is not hereditary and has little to do with family. In feudal times, knighthoods were often won in battle; it was a personal honor, not a family one. Sir Godwine accepted a knighthood for service against the Colonies; but it's the names Godwine and Tarlton, not the «r—more than that the man himself—that chills the backbone of impostors and upstarts. But of course you don't understand that. No American could."

"I find it mighty interesting."

"He was the only gentleman of England who refused to meet Beau Brummell, who's hand-in-glove with the Prince of Wales. Dukes bow and scrape to him, but Sir Godwine said he did not accept the acquaintance of clerks' sons and shopkeepers' grandsons. It made the prince furious, but what could he do? Sir Godwine has plenty of money. He didn't want any honors that the prince could pay him."

"I'd like to see him. Does he lodge in Valletta?"

"No, in one of the old palaces near Notabile—with his young daughter and his natural son. But his official headquarters are here. And if you see a small man, dandyish in dress, with a cocked hat and powdered hair and always carrying a stick instead of wearing a sword— that's one of the marks of the Tarlton family—you needn't look much farther."

"Will his natural son be able to take his place in society?" I was getting warm now, in the words of the old game.

"I doubt if he'll encounter any difficulty. It's pretty well known that his mother was a countess. The daughter is almost a beauty, I hear, although a bit odd-looking."

"But if she's an heiress—"

"She's not, according to the talk. The Tarlton money goes to Dick. Still, she won't be a drug on the market. There are too many young officers, of good name and prospects, loose on these seas. I hear of one in particular."

I did not ask his name. Maybe I was afraid of showing too much interest. Perhaps I did not want to know.

Despite temptation to put on my best clothes, I went to the rendezvous dressed the same as yesterday—a linen shirt with a fly collar and rolled-up sleeves, kersey trousers slashed off at the knee, and brogue slippers unhurt by wet. At first I was inclined to walk fast, but on thinking this might not be good for my leg, as well as lowering to my self-esteem, I took an easy pace. My haversack contained a flask of Tokay wine instead of Marsala, imported from Hungary and of deeper color and more heady, but hardly more dear.

By the time I arrived, I had convinced myself that Sophia would not come. I took out my silver watch and looked at it. It had been found in my father's pocket, strapped to his belt, and I had thought I could never bear the sight of it until I remembered what a friend it had been to him, serving him almost as well as an Earnshaw chronometer serves a great ship o' the line; then I had felt ashamed of my weakness, had it cleaned and oiled, and kept it by me constantly. Even in gales at sea I had worn it in a bag of oilskin lashed to my pocket. Gazing now into its candid face, as cheerful to instruct a man of the hour of his hanging as a child in the long time ere she must go to bed, I came to a sober conclusion.

I was not going to count time in my affairs with Sophia. I had nothing important to do with it even if I saved it, so I would give the day to her. If she made no use of it, it was still hers. If she never knew of the gift, I would still be glad I had made it. There were plenty of rocks to sit on, sand to doze in, sea to look out upon, sky to gaze into, birds to watch, wool to gather, castles in Spain to build. I was still aglow with the wisdom of the resolve when a little warm hand slipped into mine. From some unseen station behind the rocks, Sophia had stolen upon me, noiseless as an Indian. A thrill of happiness filled my body and being.

She was dressed more gaily than yesterday. Presently I recognized her costume as that worn by Sicilian peasant women, whose husbands and fathers leased vineyards in and about Notabile, and whom I had seen tending vines. She wore her hair in two black braids. In her hand was an almost empty oilskin bag of the expensive kind used by English naval officers to protect precious belongings from salt water.

"Homer, did you bring any lunch?" she asked before I could quit grinning.

"Of course."

"Will you be hungry for it in an hour? Bad news first—I can stay only two hours. I brought something nice to go with it."

I nodded.

"Now here's something much more important. Can you swim? Papa says lots of sailors can't swim."

"I could swim from here to . . ." But I stopped, deciding not to brag.

"Oh, good. I can swim a little—I learned on the moor pools, with an old nurse who could swim like a salmon. We're not going swimming, but we have to go in deep water to get where we're going. And we must start at once."

She led me to the end of the stretch of beach, then up and on rugged cliffs. When we had kept the high ground for about a half a mile, she took me down what looked like a goat path into a cove, surrounded by crags and cliffs except for a cleft, clean-cut, blue with the light of sea and sky, appearing more narrow than it was, but still not forty fathoms broad, by which a ship might enter. The water lay as still as in one of our little lakes in the hollows of the Maine hills in deep summer. Since the cove opened to the south, sheltered from the prevailing northeast winds, I thought it would rarely roughen enough to rock a fishing smack. It was a deeper blue than the darkest sapphire, except on the shoals, where it appeared emerald green.

Part of the cliffs rose almost sheer; some of the multi-colored crags overhung the water, shutting out the sun, so the effect was of wild grandeur. I had seen many coves somewhat like it on Malta's rock-bound coasts, but had missed this one somehow, the most impressive of all.

A rough path, part of which appeared hewn out of the rock, encircled the basin. We followed this until a steep crag barred our way.

"We've got to swim for it now," Sophia told me, flushed and sweating from the exercise and lovely with happiness. "When we're ready, the most proper way would be for me to leave you here, go alone, and then call you."

"Don't leave me."

"What have you under your breeches?"

She perceived the odd sound of this as soon as it came forth, but she gave no sign of embarrassment and trusted me to make courteous reply.

"Nothing but me."

"Do you mind getting them wet?"

"Not in the least."

"Well, I brought an old pair of our groom's breeches for you to put on when you get there. Take off your shirt and brogues and put them in my bag, also the lunch, and your valuables. Leave your haversack here. I've got to strip down to my shift and slashed-off pantalettes. My aunt in Bodmin wouldn't think that very modest, but I think it's all right. When we've got everything we need in the bag, we can ferry it over on a board. Even ff it falls off, it won't sink with the air in it, or let in any water. There are plenty of boards around here—I see one close by the path."

I saw it also and two more. They were hand-hewn, four feet long and two feet wide—very handy for the purpose. Obviously more than one swimmer had employed them to convey small articles and bundles across a water gap.

"Then we'll get ready," she went on. At once she went half out of sight in a cleft in the rock.

I caught only one clear glimpse of her before she slipped into the water, and it would take not a gentleman, only a clod, not to catch his breath. Suspended by a band on each side, her shift was cut below the round of her shoulders and across the swell of her breasts. No doubt it was the kind she wore at balls to permit a low-cut bodice, often the strings tucked away not to mar her partner's view of her glossy shoulders; but she could have worn a more modest kind on today's adventure. The white cloth enhanced the dark glow of her flesh. As she laved, she did not shrink from the crystal clarity of the water. Indeed no crystal I had ever seen had its illuminating quality; it emphasized every tint of color and grace of movement. I made haste to put in her oilskin bag my shirt, silver watch, flint-and-tinder which no sailor respectful of the elements ever goes without, and my packet of lunch; then clamped it watertight and balanced it on my board. The latter was easy to steer with one hand, and I needed only my feet for paddling, so when I came up to her, I took her hand.

A little way around the side of the crag, she stopped and tread water.

"You see the dark shadow on the limestone beginning about three feet down?" she asked.

"Of course."

"It's the mouth of a cave, but its floor rises steeply, and within fifteen feet comes up above water. All the rest of the cave is dry as a barn."

Such are the vagaries of the human mind that I thought of the beaver houses on the ponds at home, whose entrances are likewise water-sealed, but whose interiors are snug and warm.

"It's easy to go in empty handed," Sophia went on. "Do you think you'll have trouble taking in the bag?"

"I don't think so."

"Then I'll lead the way."

She dived, kicked once, and disappeared. Close in her wake, I carried down the bag and swam head first into the arched aperture in the rock. The sudden loss of the brilliant Mediterranean sunlight all but blinded me, but I had entered no realm of total darkness, and after a stroke or two I became aware of diffused light and then the ghostly form of Sophia emerging from the water above me. It shoaled swiftly with plenty of headroom. I waded out of a luminous pool about twenty feet in diameter, lying in the lower end of a dim chamber in the rock. Entering had been no feat at all. Anyone who could hold his breath for a few seconds could do so with ease.

I had already guessed that the gap in the limestone had once been the outlet of an underground watercourse. Except that this lay some feet below sea level, the cave was no doubt similar to numerous others in the rock-bound coasts I knew. However, it was very strangely lighted, partly by starlike fissures high aloft, but mainly by the luminous waters over the cavern mouth. These cast a glimmer into the cave as soft as candlelight and no stronger than that poured down from a rounding moon, yet having a fairy quality such as imaginative people associate with fata morgana and will-o'-the-wisp. "I know now the secret you share with Calypso," I told my beautiful companion.

"I thought you'd guess it when I brought you here. Of course this is her cave. Where else could she have held Ulysses in enchantment for seven years?"

She was more beautiful than ever—my Calypso—in the dim, blue-tinted luminance; and my pulse leaped at our utter solitude. Still my wonder at her bringing me here lived on. I did not find a cheap explanation of a kind dear to riffraff. Whatever she gave me would be Beauty's gift to a chosen one; whatever she yielded to me it would be my fair winning in her sight. At present she held me her companion in a happy adventure.

"Did you come on it by accident?" I asked.

"I might have. If I had seen this cove, I would have been tempted to go swimming. Actually, an old Maltese gardener who had fought against the French told me where it was."

She opened the bag, took out her peasant's dress and a dry shift and disappeared in the darkness beyond. In her absence I donned her groom's breeches and my shirt. In a few minutes she called to ask me to light a candle she had brought. The small, clean-cut blue-and-yellow flame burned punily close to the entrance m the water-screened sunlight, but further on it made a brave showing, so thick the dark grew. Near where Sophia waited for me, it showed me the charred sticks of a cooking fire, a copper pot, and a pile of clean-looking sheepskins.

"A hermit's retreat?" I suggested.

"It probably has been, now and again. Its last use that I know of was during the French occupation a year ago. The Maltese people revolted and sent to Lord Nelson for help. We couldn't land troops there at first, but we managed to smuggle in gun powder and guns to the revolutionists. The powder was in watertight canisters, and one of the main caches was in this cave."

"Then a good many people know about it,"

"Very few, I believe. Those that do know it keep the secret in case they revolt against us and need it again. No one goes swimming in the cove, and the few fishing smacks that come in don't find the opening."

As she spoke my Light fell on some carvings on a near-by wall. They were in low relief and clear enough to recognize. They showed the figure of a man with a high cap, a square-cut beard, and a long robe offering a bowl to a slender woman with narrow waist, shapely breasts and hips, and a long skirt with several circular bands. Fish swam about her feet, and a crescent moon hung over head. Below was an inscription in some strange-looking language.

"What do you think it is?" Sophia asked.

"I'd guess a king offering wine to a goddess."

"That's a good guess. I copied some of the letters and compared them with those in one of Papa's books on ancient history. They were a little like Hebrew letters and more like Assyrian. I think they're Phoenician. If so, the cave's old enough to be Calypso's."

"Is she a sea goddess? She's followed by fish—"

"I think she might be Astarte herself. One book said that fish were sacred to Astarte. If so, this cave, opening under the sea, might have been used as her temple. Come and sit by the entrance."

For our comfort I brought an armful of the sheepskins. Our happiness slowly increased, why we could not tell. When I opened my packet of lunch, the food's delicious taste was out of all proportion to its plainness. Sophia's "surprise" was a big piece of fruitcake marvelously spiced, and it proved of perfect affinity to the golden wine. Wine and cake were necessary adjuncts to all important ceremonies and celebrations, Sophia told me, and had been so this thousand years.

"What shall we celebrate today?" I asked.

"My coming here—if you will."

"You know I do that."

"You don't know that I barely made it. Papa asked me to do something else. I got out of it only with a lie. I don't know when I can come again—"

I did not answer except to draw her into my arms. For a long, blissful moment she let me kiss her lips, then her breathing quickened, her mouth moved against mine half in protest, half, it seemed, in waking hunger, and breaking the lock of my arms, she sat up.

"We can't do that," she told me.

"You'll have to tell me why, because I don't know."

"I thought we could. When I left you yesterday, I intended to let you make love to me today—as far as was safe. I wanted you to treat me as you would treat an American girl you were paying court to. But no part of it is safe. I should have known it."

"Why do you seek safety? If you insist on that, you can never go anywhere or do anything."

"Then I'll put it another way. I've got to keep the way open to go somewhere else—in a very short time—and do something else. I wanted a day of freedom before I did so. Another day I should say— I had never felt as free as yesterday—perhaps not even when I was alone on Bodmin moor. But wanting that doesn't mean I don't want the other—what's in store for me. I do. I'm sure of it. But just once I wanted to do something that Papa didn't decide for me to do—that I wanted to do and he, if he knew it, would not permit. And when you're gone—after you've sailed away on the Vindictive—I'm going to tell him."

"Why not tell him tonight?"

Her eyes searched mine in amazement, then she gave a rueful smile.

"You say that because you don't know him."

"I know his name and how he looks. I didn't ask anyone—just a little conversation about the bigwigs on the island brought it forth. I know that he refused to meet Beau Brummell. I know he carries a stick instead of a sword—as though he didn't need a sword. You see, that gives me a kind of picture."

Her eyes had rounded as she spoke. "A very good picture. And you still—"

"Yes, because if you tell him, I'll have a better chance of seeing you, not just once more—twice more at the most—but as many times as you like. If he found it out himself—as he surely will on such a thickly populated island, and you so prominent and so beautiful— he'd have the advantage. If you tell him tonight, you'll have the advantage."

"Do you suppose a man so haut that he refused to meet Beau Brummell would let me receive attentions from an American second mate who rose from the tar bucket?"

"I don't know. I wouldn't think it would be as easy to forbid you to as you might think. I heard he commanded a sloop-of-war when he was twenty-four. If he's that clever."

"He's more than clever." Sophia had interrupted me with a strange eagerness. "Many officers have told me he's the most brilliant tactician in the Royal Navy."

"Then I don't think he'd forbid you to receive me."

"I wonder. He's always surprising me. Let me tell you the rest. He had a great love affair before he met Mama. The lady was the estranged wife of an aging nobleman, and they lived together in Italy for two years. After that she broke off with Papa—I don't know why—and he insisted on taking Dick. So I always believed that my mother—beautiful and highborn though she was—was his second choice. I have the strangest feeling that she believed it too, the little while she lived.

"Papa had taken her to London; after her death I lived with my grandmother in Cornwall," Sophia went on. "I saw Papa hardly once a year. He would put his ship into Plymouth and come up to old Celtburrow—that was the name of my mother's home—in a great coach. He was a small man, always magnificently dressed and powdered. He terrified the coachmen and—you won't believe this—made the horses tremble and sweat. He walked about—I was going to say like an eagle, but eagles don't walk gracefully—more like a phoenix just come out of the ashes. But he told me I needn't be afraid of him —I was his daughter, one of his very blood, and look what he had brought me—always a wonderful gift, and one that I had yearned for without letting anyone know. When I was old enough, he would take me to his house in London and choose a beautiful young nobleman for me to marry."

She paused. "Did he?" I asked.

"It amounted to that. The war kept him at sea until he got shore duty here, then he sent for me. The man he chose for me to marry is not quite a nobleman—he's a younger brother of a new baron—but he looks like the statue of Hermes come to life."

"Do you love him?"

"Harvey? I would if I'd picked him myself—or he had picked me."

"It's a curious thing, I reckon—but I wasn't asking about him. I was asking whether you love Sir Godwine Tarlton? I take it that's who he is to you, more than your pa."

"It is a curious thing. And how do you hit upon truths like that? No, I don't think I love my father. If not, it's because he doesn't love me! I wanted him to, for Sir Godwine Tarlton to-nothing on earth could be so flattering-but I think he never loved anyone but Isabel, Countess of Harkness, and maybe his son by her, and the Our Eliza, his first ship."

"It's human for a captain to love his first ship."

"Papa's love was more than human."

"Did he name her after the Countess Isabel? Both are forms of Elizabeth."

"No, he commanded Our Eliza in '81 and lived with Isabel between '82 and '83." She paused, glancing away. "I forgot something. There's another woman in his life now."

The thought came to me that Sophia had forgotten on purpose.

"A girl, I should say. She's hardly older than I. I believe she's a great beauty, although without name or wealth. She came from the Isle of Jersey. Papa found her two years ago at Brighton. I-I believe he's married her."

"Don't you know?"

"He hasn't told me so. But I heard she's lately gone to Celtburrow, my mother's old home."

There was a look in her eyes that made me change the subject. "Did you promise Harvey you'd marry him?" I asked.

"No, but Papa promised I would, which comes to the same thing."

I looked at my watch. "Your two hours are up."

"Did you think I meant that?"

"I don't know. You said it."

"I did mean it, but I'm not going to keep it. You said you'd been lonely. I've been awfully lonely, too. If you want me to go back into your arms "

I held them out to her and she lay in my lap, her breast against mine. Her mouth was close and enough of my kisses took away its strange crook and touching strain, so that it could smile as quickly and wholly as a child's. It came to meet with mine, and for a while we asked no bliss greater than their making free. But there rose within us a hunger that these lovely passages could not satisfy. It had been waiting long in both of us, and there was nothing here to cry it down. There was only silence and solitude, the sense of being hidden from the world-safe from its dangers, free of its rules, sealed off by the very sea. The water in the pool at our feet, just now brimful of the hot June sunlight, gave off a gentle warmth. Its strange lights shone on our faces, gracing them in each other's sight and filling our eyes with guilty yearnings.

Her dress was a peasant girl's dress, which must not be invulnerable when the swain of her choice beckons her away from the other harvesters into a warm bower. No one knows better than she how easily its lacings and buttons and clasps may be circumvented by trembling, awkward hands—unless it was her mother who fashioned it and her grandmother who watched and her great-grandmother of failing mind, who has not forgot the spring-sowing, the sunlight on the fields, and their deep meanings. My hands found their way to her virgin breasts. They made love to them with unstudied art, whereby she gave me unstinted countless kisses, and her arms crept and clasped around my neck.

I broke the silence with a murmur strange-sounding in the whist.

"I love you, Sophia. Will you marry me?"

She drew a long, deeply troubled breath.

"I love you, Homer, and I wish I would!"

"Do you mean, you wish you could?"

"No, for I could if I would. Don't speak of it now, or I'll have to go home."

"Do you understand that if you stay here, I must do the same as though you'd promised?"

She hesitated, then brought her lips close to my ear and whispered one breathless word.

"Yes."

The spell that love casts on youth and maiden grew deeper and more rapturous. Yet it did not quite eclipse a sense of guilt that returned again and again to me, bequeathed to me by my Puritan ancestors, a shame of the flesh that is always an anomaly in nature and often base. Sophia had no such shame. She was eighteen, free, and falling in love with me. I wanted to marry her, to have her beauty always, and I had no fear that I could not make her happy once her old ties were broken; and instinct told me that I would not succeed unless we became interbound so firmly that some older chains fell off.

One moment I had brought her breasts into the strange sea lights and half-bared her glimmering thighs, and she was whispering to me of love. The next, she raised her head as though listening, then gazed wide-eyed into my face, and very slowly, reluctantly, I thought, drew back.

"I fooled myself, Homer, and tried to fool you," she said quietly, after her hands had busied. "This isn't Calypso's cave. I wanted to believe it, to make untrue—to take out of the world—anything we did. Instead it's a limestone cavern that happens to run down under water, and not even secure against surprise."

"It's a beautiful place," I told her.

"Oh, do you believe that?"

"Don't doubt your eyes, Sophia, or yourself. Will you meet me here tomorrow?"

"No."

"The next day?"

"Not here. Perhaps on the beach."

"No, on the cliffs above the cove. The view's good there." I meant I could keep better watch.

"I'll come if I can. The day after tomorrow, early in the morning."

"Will you tell your father I'm in love with you?"

"I might tell him that. But how could I ever tell him—I'm in love with you?"

"Remember what you said? You could if you would. I can, and if you give me leave, I will."

"And I'll tell you now—still playing Calypso and Ulysses—that you'd be safer in the cave of the Cyclops."

She smiled to tell me she was only joking in some trenchant way and came once more into my arms. But she wanted only to feel my warmth and strength; and as though in augury of long farewell, there were tears in her eyes.

My dreams were troubled on the night following Sophia's and my visit to the cave, and -I was glad to get shed of them when, coming wide awake, I heard seven bells, denoting half past three. I would buy my breakfast from a street vender, I thought—they always had bread and goat's milk and fried fish, a combination pleasing to my innards—then return to the cavern. I wanted to look again at the carving on the wall and search the upper chambers for other mementos of long ago.

I had brought a piece of oilskin to keep dry a couple of candles and my flint-and-tinder. At the last minute I put in some bread and fried fish left from my breakfast, not with the intention of a long stay, but half-unthinkingly in the way of habit. Sailors are not nearly as thriftless as the adage makes them out. At least this is true of those who live long and win authority, for mariners are subject to sudden and deadly attack in various forms. More than any other guild's, "secure" is a sailor's word. I lashed the oilskin tight enough to stand a brief ducking. My other cargo for the short voyage was a flask of water on a strap over my shoulder and a stout ten-fathom line I might use in climbing.

When first coming up from the luminous pool, I must stop and daydream, then doggedly I went ahead with my plans. The flickering glimmer of one of my candles guided me past the carving into a short passage Sophia and I had not entered yesterday, and into a chamber so lofty my light would not glim its ceiling. Although not a hundred paces from the entrance, I had left behind the last dim sifting of daylight or sea light, and no slightest rift appeared in the blackness overhead. The wall that I examined was deeply pitted, as in many limestone caves. These black gaps in the faintly sparkling stone and my own shadow endlessly changing shape and pouncing whenever I moved my hand began to excite my imagination. Although reason told me there was nothing to fear, my sense of separation from everyone became sharp, my nerves tightened, and I found myself on guard.

Holding the candle high, I looked in vain for any carving in the stone. Then the glimmer showed me a tiny object whose surface was either wet or smooth enough to refract light. I picked it up, and to my stupefaction, it was the seed of a date. Still sticky, it could not have been cast here more than a few hours before.

I was looking at it, my skin prickling, when the furthest dying glimmer of my candle disclosed something else foreign to the scene. I would not have believed that its beam could cast so far—a good thirty feet—and there seemed a gap of darkness between the aura and a wan glint further up the cavern wall. I saw it out of the side of my eye which, as all sailors know, will sometimes detect a distant beacon light invisible to a straight glance. And because I was already on high guard, in which every instinct of survival was awake and moving, I did not turn my head or give any sign that I had discovered it.

I knew to start with that it was a high light on metal, and almost instantly surmised that the latter was the steel barrel of a pistol.

I gave my candle a quick jerk to whisk out the flame. The act was as natural and unthinking as a scared rabbit's dive into cover. My body, too, moved swiftly to get out from under the gun's aim if it blazed in the dark—I think with a deep crouch and twist that brought me about six feet from my former position. A second passed in silence. My enemy kept his head and held his fire. At first I could hardly doubt that he was Sophia's lover, father, or brother, or their hired bully. Evidence to the contrary put my mind in turmoil. The date seed on the floor; the ambush being laid—if it were that—in a back chamber of the cave which Sophia and I or I alone would not necessarily visit; the high improbability of any of these three men resorting to crime to stop a love affair that had barely started. . . . Then the heat and confusion passed out of my head, and I was almost certain I had surprised the hiding place of a fugitive whom I did not know, or who knew not me, from Adam. He could be a smuggler with contraband. Quite possibly he was waiting for darkness for his chance to fly the island.

The belligerence went out of me as soon as I became persuaded he was not seeking my life, and I began creeping along the wall toward the cavern entrance. If I walked carefully, my bare feet would make no more noise than the wings of a bat. I intended to make a run for it as soon as I neared the pool, dive in, and swim to the shore of the cove. Except by carefully wrapping his gun in oilskin, he could not cross the water gap with dry powder.

The thought struck me then that he, too, might be stealing his way toward the entrance along the opposite wall. Rather than let me go to call the provost, he might make another ambush behind the dim glimmer and try to shoot me as I made for the pool. The possibility fetched me up short. I wanted no lead whistling by my ears as I beat an inglorious retreat, much less coming nearer home. Meanwhile, the thick darkness and the silence that I kept remained an almost certain shield. It was true that we might run into each other—a one-in-a-hundredth chance that yet chilled my backbone —but if so, I reckoned.I could get hand on him before he could fire, then need have little doubt of holding my own.

I crept on again, intending to draw into distant view of the twilit chamber ahead, then wait my chance. My right hand, drawn lightly along the wall, encountered the Phoenician sculpture: now I knew exactly where I was, not far from a sharp turn in the passage, here about thirty feet wide. A second later my foot touched a limestone fragment—big enough to be called a boulder—that I had noticed the day before. If my adversary should trip against it, he might fall down.

That was too much to hope for, but the wish was born in my brain to set a trap for him, and without conscious volition, almost without my consent, it set to work to devise one.

I had the means looped over my shoulder—ten fathoms of stout line. In a moment I had lifted the boulder enough to slip one end under it, fastened it with a knot on top the boulder, and ran the line out across the corridor. It was a long chance that I could find an anchor on the other side that would hold the line taut about shin height, and in my brief search I found only bare, unbroken walls. Then the heart-stopping fact dawned on me that I needed none, provided I had good New England nerve. Where was a better bight than my own strong hands?

Seeking the best lair in the limited space, I found in a few seconds' groping a part of the wall leaning sharply inward, with room for me to crouch at its base. The fellow would certainly draw his hand along the wall to keep his course: to make round the bulge he must swing out into the passage. If he touched the taut line without tripping over it, I still could ram him in good mughouse style in the region of the knees.

I could see all this in my head. And I had no more than crouched down, the line bighted about both of my hands but easy to shuck, when there came to me the sure inkling of my foe's approach.

Always the cavern had a dank smell that sailors call fresh. I was too used to it to notice it, but I noticed its eclipse by a musky smell. Meanwhile the silence became less deep—for I could not swear to hearing any sound. It was like an awareness of light that cannot consciously be seen—an experience known to every sailor. But as my ears pricked up like a dog's, listening with concentration so intense that it hurt my brain, I detected what seemed a succession of faint sighs. The movements of the person making toward me along the wall remained inaudible, but I heard him breathe.

I knew then he was somewhat short of breath, whether from exertion or excitement, or his bellows would have worked as noiselessly as my own.

He reached the bulge in the rock, stopped, stood still a long second as though baffled, then began to grope his way around it. His step was not carefully guarded, for his leg hit the rope hard. As he stumbled, I drove at him. As my shoulder with my weight behind it struck him in the thigh, he raised a despairing cry.

I would never forget how it rang through the silent cavern.

"Bismillah!"

I did not know then what it meant. Many tides would ebb and flow before I discovered it was the good Mohammedan's entreaty for the mercy of God. I only knew that the outcome of the adventure was showing far from my expectations.

As the man fell, he dropped his pistol, and I heard it clatter on the stone. With one sweep of my arm I slid it far out of his reach. Fearing he might seize a knife, I clamped his arms, only to find his struggles so feeble that they seemed spasmodic. In a few seconds these, too, ceased, and he lay in silent surrender that seemed to be not servile, but in some way proud.

Thinking it might be a trick, I drew his arms behind him and lashed his wrists, although half ashamed to do so when I observed their thinness. His smell was now as strong as any clean human smell in my remembrance—plainly he smoked heavily, drank not at all, ate highly scented food, and anointed himself with perfumed oils. Eager to see his face, I withdrew a few feet, got my spare candle from my pocket, and lighted it with my flint and tinder.

The flickering luminance steadied. It showed a pale-brown bearded man of about fifty—gray hairs glimmered among the black—wearing a high black felt cap that had somehow stayed on his head and disheveled but richly colored garments. That was my first quick view. The second view brought out that he was quite noble-looking in an alien way—his nose high, arched, and delicately molded, his eyes black and handsome, the skin of his face tight over strong, symmetrical bone. In that survey, I identified his brocaded jacket and coat and silk ankle-long pantaloons as Turkish or something like it. All had been recently wet and had lost much of their fine appearance in the drawing. No scimitar or dagger hung from his broad belt, and it became hard to believe that he bore any other arms.

Although somewhat frail-looking for the post, still he might be captain of a Barbary pirate. I hoped so, if it became my fate to deliver him to the provost; actually, after looking at him—thinking of his years and my easy victory—I hoped for a happier outcome. With that in mind, I retrieved the pistol. One glance at the pan showed that it was not primed. Plainly, he had intended to use it only as a bugbear threat.

Somewhat stunned by his heavy fall, he was slow in perceiving me as an individual instead of an inimical force. When he did, he exclaimed hoarsely.

54

"Anglais!"

Before I could answer, he drew a sharp breath and spoke as carefully as possible. "Inglish."

"No, American," I answered.

The word meant nothing to him. ""Meerican," he echoed dully.

"Yankee."

"Yan-ki?" He tried to sit up and presently succeeded. "You—speak —Inglish?"

"Yes, yes."

"I speak—Inglish—little."

"What are you? A Barbary reis?"

"No, no. I—Arab. My nom Suliman, Sheik el—of—Beni Kabir. My house at Baeed Oasis, raise horses on desert. I go Ingland one time, for sell horse. One time I meet Ingland man in Gibraltar, talk sell many horse for lancers, but no trade. My—king?—he Yussuf Pasha of Tripoh, but I no reis, no pirate. Just now I come by Alexandria on Tripoli warship with Ahmed Reis. Inglish frigate stop us, capiton see we same ship Ahmed Reis take away from Inglish two, three years. He take us to Valletta, provost maybe hang us all, place us in prison. Provost no believe I stud-horse man, say I pirate like Ahmed Reis. But I hide fine poniard with ruby hilt. I give to interpreter-man if he help me. He get me out, hide me last night this place, tonight Tripoli sponger boat come get me. I speak truth before Allah. I too old, too proud, to go felon's prison. If you make send me there, I beg you kill me."

He spoke haltingly, still short of breath. I thought over what he had said, glancing now and then at his drawn face. It was hard to believe that his spindly legs clothed in silk pantaloons had ever straddled a horse.

"What do you think of Eclipse?" I asked.

This was a shot in the dark if ever was. Although Eclipse had eaten his last oats about ten years before, the sailors still talked about him and held up all other horses in invidious comparison. Yet as I made the test, I knew it was unfair. Even if Suliman did breed horses in his benighted country, he wouldn't have heard. . . .

In that gloomy candlelight, the brown, bony face shown forth.

"Allah! Allah! He was descend of Darley, three, four generations. My father's father bred Darley—so Inglish call him—we call him Sultan. Eclipse was greater than Sultan. Ah, that is so!"

That fixed it as far as I was concerned.

"I reckon I'll let you go."

"Dakkil-ak ya Shaykhe!" But I did not know what he was saying.

"Are you hungry?"

"No, malik. Interpreter-man gave me some dates last night."

I thought this might be only pride, for he looked pinched enough, so I brought out my hunk of bread and piece of fried fish. After cutting his rope, I used half the edibles in making him a sandwich, which I handed to him.

"Eat, O Sheik," I told him.

He took a small bite and then a big one. Seeing him munch away, I fixed myself a sandwich to keep him company. I had hardly tasted it when I thought of something.

"O Sheik, the fried fish contains salt."

"Ah!"

"So we have broken bread together and eaten salt."

"By Allah, it is true."

"Doesn't it mean that we have become brothers?"

"More than that, Yan-kee mariner," he answered, choosing his words with care. "We be father and son."

CHAPTER 5 The Gentle Knight

My stay with Suliman, Sheik el Beni Kabir, was not long. If the English chased him here, I could do nothing to help him and I did not want to see him fall into their hands. If any of his shipmates or his rescuer had sudden business with him, my presence would complicate it, if not ruin it. So I shook hands with him in Yankee fashion—he touched his forehead and his heart in a stately gesture —then I took off through the water gate to the shore.

Wanting to share everything with Sophia, I could hardly wait to tell her of the adventure. But long before the day's end, I perceived that I must not. My best hopes hung on our revisiting the cavern and succumbing to its strange charms. If she thought of it as a hiding place for fugitives, it would spoil her play. For me the game was in deadly earnest.

I returned to the cove soon after sunrise, stripped to my breeches, and began a cautious scouting of the cave. Just inside the entrance,

56

lying on a white silk kerchief carefully spread on one of the ferrying boards, I found a curious little memento of Suliman's visit. It was a plait of black horsehair, about ten inches long and an inch wide, each end of which was bent on a brass ring. I had told him I intended to return early this morning to continue my explorations and could not doubt that he meant it for me to keep as a souvenir. Handy enough for securing a pocketknife or a watch or some personal belonging, now it served to free my imagination for a long, pleasant leap. I believed it was from the mane of a great and famous horse. Perhaps he was Darley, whom Suliman called Sultan, forebear of Eclipse.

The money-worthless but meaningful gift convinced me beyond any doubt that Suliman had gone. Still, I searched the cave carefully and thoroughly, this time with the penetrating light of an oil torch. I found no one or anything more of interest; even the happy ghosts of yesterday would not walk, and the rock was cold, and my shadow lonely looking against the wall.

What did all that matter, when, having come out into the sunshine, wrung out my wet breeches and dressed, I caught sight of Sophia light-footed as a young nanny on the clifftop?

She made her way toward me slowly, as though half-inclined to turn back. A level rock about twenty feet above me gave her a good view of the water and a comfortable seat. Finding one beside her, I noticed that she wore a long-sleeved, high-necked, dark blue dress fit for an English governess and a blue bonnet over hair drawn back and fastened in a big roll on the nape of her neck. Still she could not look anything but beautiful, vital, and, in this setting at least, adventurous.

"I came in a carrozza, as a young lady ought—as far as the village," she told me.

"I came on shank's mare," I answered.

"We say we go on the marrowbone stage or by Walker's gig. I mean they're folk sayings—I wouldn't say them any more than I'd say 'bloody.' Well, I do say 'bloody' sometimes—it's so patently low that it's all right, but I never say the worse one—the adverb used as an adjective. And do you think I'd as much as mention its existence to any Englishman? I'd be strangled first."

"My being an American— "

"Changes everything. But Papa would not be as shocked at either one—provided I'd pronounce it like a Cockney—as he would at my saying I came by Walker's gig. Do you understand that?"

I shook my head.

"He'd think it was common, and he demands that I be absolutely apart from, and untouched by, commonness. Poor people who had no horses invented the expression—it still has a folksy sound Papa couldn't stand. You see, common people don't say or do vulgar things—things are vulgar because common people say or do them. I know what you're thinking. High and low have to do a lot of the same things, but the great aristocrats get around this, somehow."

"That looks as though a lot of it is put on."

"No more than any cult is put on. Listen. As late as a quarter of a century ago there were lords in England who went to their chambers and changed their clothes if a common man touched them. Their feeling of being sullied was perfectly real."

"It makes me awful mad."

"You'd better know it, though, so you'll leave me alone."

"Leave you alone sounds like—"

"I am saying it just right. That's what you'll do. You'll go away— and leave me—alone."

"If I do, it will be because you've sent me."

"No, because your ship will have come in."

"Do you want to get close to me now?"

"Yes."

My arms had been aching to hold her, but I had hardly hoped she was in the same boat. Now she did not try to hide the hunger of her mouth seeking mine, and she was neither ashamed nor afraid of her passion. It was a lovely flame that swept through us both, its like unknown to me before these meetings, as it was to her. I need never doubt it was her maiden passion. The wonder was that I had been its waker; only I, Homer Whitman, a seaman late before the mast, had received these gifts.

It was a long time before her first yearnings were satisfied, then I would not let her go. At last she drew away so she could speak.

"Homer, what were you doing in the cave before I came?" she asked.

"Making sure that everything was all right for us to go in. Are you ready?"

"No, we can't go there any more. I'm afraid of being caught."

I marked the last word and was made thoughtful by it.

"I know how that sounds," she went on. "Maybe I should have said disturbed or—better yet—interrupted. But I mean caught. You see, I didn't tell Papa after all. I intended to—but I couldn't. And if we should get to the same point we did before—and he should happen to visit us at that moment—well, as you say, he'd have the advantage."

"You don't imagine he'd follow you—"

"It would be awfully infra dig. It would seem so, that is, until he did it; then his poise would be so perfect, his manner so flawless, his little smile so—but no one can describe that smile—that only you and I would be ashamed."

"If you'll promise to marry me— "

"Don't mention that now. We'll talk it over later."

"I have to tell you that anybody looking for you—especially with a spyglass—could be watching us this minute—"

"That wouldn't be quite so bad. We're not hiding. It would be just bad enough. And who's afraid of spyglasses? From long range, they don't show too much. From a half-mile we'd still look a hundred yards away."

"Not with a twelve-power glass."

"He could tell we were sparking, but not distinguish the details. And that sounds pretty wanton, doesn't it?"

"No." It only reflected a reckless frankness.

"Anyway I don't see any lookouts that near."

Lying in my arms, she was gazing over my shoulder. Suddenly she leaned back and fixed her eyes on mine,

"Homer?"

"Yes?"

"Are you truly brave?"

"I don't know. I hope so."

"Then will you hold me this way until I move to get up? When I do, rise politely and give me your hand? We're going to have a visitor. Will you keep from showing any embarrassment—or any shame or fear?"

"Of course. You should have more faith in me. Is it your father?"

"No. I might have known he wouldn't come. He sent Harvey, the man I'm intending to marry."

"I love you, Sophia. I want you to marry me."

"I don't think it's possible. Now hold me close."

Sophia did not look again over my shoulder, and I was careful not to turn my head. A minute or more passed in silence. Since the emissary had not called Sophia's name, it seemed certain that he hoped to take us by surprise; and happiness welled through me that thus the advantage lay with us after all. His approach from that direction would not have been visible as much as a furlong away, so he was surely close upon us now, and soon I believed that he had stopped on the path above and behind us hardly twenty paces off. I bent my head and gave Sophia a passionate kiss.

Then his voice rose, not loud, simulating surprise and lofty nonchalance, but roughened by emotion. This last was partly jealous fury, partly malicious triumph at what he thought was our predicament.

"Oh, there you are."

But he had pulled his trigger without even a flash in the pan. He had expected to give us a great shock—he himself had braced against its recoil to his own nerves as might a gunner bringing match to touchhole—but his words died away in silence. I did not stir. Sophia raised her head, as though in moderate curiosity, until she could look over my shoulder, then spoke in a tone of friendly, cheerful surprise.

"Harvey! What are you doing here?"

"I came to bring you a message from Sir Godwine. It was a pity to interrupt such a pretty scene—"

"I'm sure you wouldn't have unless the message was important." Sophia sat up and made to rise: I sprang to my feet and gave her my hand. The new event had a different mood and meaning. Sophia's brave defense of me and her own independence would thrill me when I grew old, but this simple issue had begun to be obscured by some sort of personal duel between Harvey and her. She was too well in command of the situation for my best hopes. High color ringed her cheekbones, and her eyes glimmered as she began to bait him in games and for gains not of my sharing.

"I want to introduce you two gentlemen, and you'll have to excuse me for not knowing which of you to ask for permission," she said gaily, yet with a touch of histrionics. "Harvey, your honorable' is a courtesy title and doesn't count, but does a sublieutenant in the Royal Navy outrank a second officer of an American merchantman? Anyway, Harvey, this is Homer Whitman, from Massachusetts. Homer—Harvey Alford, my father's aide."

I bowed properly; he gave a curt nod. But I did not blame him, considering his anger and jealousy. That Sophia was not in love with him was a sure thing. Either a real presentiment or a wild surmise told me she might never be, with great passion. Certainly he took her too much for granted. That was more than a Sunday obstacle to get over on Monday, because it reflected deep conceit. But I warned myself against wish-thinking. Conceit is no proof of weakness and often a sign of strength. The character that she took lightly might have a tough core.

Quite possibly his studied elegance of dress had been copied from Sir Godwine Tarlton. I was greatly impressed by it at the same time that I perceived, very deep and faint, a feeling of advantage. His figure was too fine to need careful adorning: taller than me by two inches, he had big shoulders tapering to a narrow waist and hips with long, clean-cut legs. Most tall, flat-muscled men with extremely handsome faces are occasionally called Greek gods. She knew, if I did not, that the comparison here was better-warranted than usual. His hair was truly golden and had an attractive wave. His head set proudly on the tomcat neck seen in Greek and Roman statuary and no doubt doted upon by sensuous women. The lack of a deep indentation between the eyes gave his nose a Greek sweep, and the eyes were deeply set, deeply blue. Just now he had been taken aback—a good seafaring phrase—but doubtless his mien was somewhat godlike in smooth sailing.

"May I give my message now?" he asked stiffly.

"If you please."

"Sir Godwine wants you to come home at once. Captain Ball is having tiffin with him, and he wants you to grace the table."

The word tiffin had a trivial sound. The whole message seemed unequal to the occasion. But the high color dimmed in Sophia's face, and I thought her games were through.

"In case you don't know," she said to me, "tiffin means 'lunch.' The word's become fashionable lately in military circles—I think Lord Cornwallis brought it back from India." Then to Harvey: "Is that all?"

"Not quite. Sir Godwine was reluctant to break into your engagement—perhaps I should say rendezvous— "

"Assignation?" Sophia proposed.

"I dislike the word as applied to a lady."

"How did Papa know where to send you?"

"How should I know? I assumed you'd told him."

"Well, I didn't. I sneaked off, as you damn well know."

"That's not my affair. To continue—Sir Godwine regretted interrupting it, and wishes to make amends by inviting Mr. Whitman to dinner tonight."

And now he need only look into Sophia's face to feel his hurts balmed and his losses recouped. It had turned white, and her eyes were big and dark, and a strained smile drew her mouth. He loved her, he thought, but she needed a lesson badly, and Sir Godwine was the one to give it to her. Master of the situation now, he turned to me and spoke formally.

"Sir, I've been instructed to convey to you that invitation. Since the company will be small and you no doubt travel light, full-dress is not obligatory. Eight o'clock is the hour set. Sir Godwine Tarlton requests that you answer at once, so I may bring him word how many covers to have laid."

He stopped. A second before I had had no notion what to say. Now the answer came easy enough. I need only speak truth.

"I've not had the honor of meeting Sir Godwine. I can accept only if his daughter will add her invitation to his."

I turned and looked her in the face. You could hardly believe how wonderfully it changed.

"Homer, I want you to come," she said.

"Then I'll be pleased to come."

Sophia and Harvey took up the goat path while I slung my haversack. When I looked again at them, they were walking side by side on the crest of the cliff—a fine-looking couple, surely, their tallness and easy stride taking the eye.

Before going to my quarters, I visited the Valletta waterfront, and my eyes could not help leaping from ship to ship throughout the teeming harbor, in search of one I could recognize two miles at sea in one flash of lightning, and whose every spar I knew. She had not come in. No news of her had reached me by the pinnaces from Gibraltar. What did I want of her anyway, for she would not loiter here—a night's shore leave for the land-sick crew likely her only detainment—and I needed more time than that to settle my affairs.

To answer truly, I wanted her Yankee deck beneath my feet before they took me through the door of Sir Godwine's palace. The essence of the New England oak would stouten my knees. I wished to see the faces that I need never search for hidden malice or veiled mockery. I needed their rough hands clasping mine or whacking my back. If I could have all that, I could settle my affairs before daybreak.

The clothes I had bought from Mate Tyler needed only laying out and putting on. By virtue of New England thrift and the habits learned on a tidy ship, I had kept them spotless and well-brushed, and their silver buttons bright. At no great outlay I bought a new stock and a linen shirt with lace cuffs. When I had dressed, I would not be ashamed to sit down at the table with Captain Phillips, Captain Starbuck, or Captain John Paul Jones if he were still alive; and that settled it. In due course I rode in a carrozza to Notabile, through a gate in a high wall guarded by sentries, and up to the arched door under stone towers. I found the iron knocker in the gloom and an ancient liveried servant admitted me to a dim hall.

"Your name and titles, please, Your Honor," he murmured in my ear.

"Homer Whitman, second officer of the United States ship Vindictive."

He tottered forward and repeated the words to a burly fellow standing near a wide, high, intricately carved door. He too wore wig and livery, but these could not conceal a positive personality. Seeing better now, I knew the cut of his jib. Unless he was an old man-of-war's man, probably a petty officer handy with the lash, I missed my guess. He opened the door wide and called in a queer mixture of salty and Cockney.

"'Omer Wittman, second orcifer of the Unity States Indicative."

I felt grateful for my small interior smile. It lightened my load a little as I walked into the room. I could call it a room—in fact I did not know what else to call it—although it must have been the main chamber of an ancient palace of the Knights of Malta. White marble lined the high walls, the floor and domed ceiling were mosaics of animals and birds and trees in rich color, the chimney piece was rose-colored marble with blue veins, reaching to the ceiling. Above the pillared mantle, griffons as big as wolves supported a huge sculptured square, surrounded by nymphs standing or lying down, and bearing heraldic devices. The doors were intricately carved black wood fastened with chains, the windows had many small leaded panes. The chairs were massively carved, not as cold-looking as the room, but too thronelike for comfort. The tables and cabinets had beautiful inlay of ivory and shell. A chandelier of a hundred candles, each in a crystal holder, gave forth clear but not brilliant light.

At first I got only an impression of all this, to grasp in detail later. Seen far more sharply, briefly arresting my attention, was the central feature of the splendid room—a stately teakwood table bearing a glass case that contained the most perfectly wrought ship model I had ever seen. It was about four feet long and in exact proportions, and its building must have taken a year's labor by a superb artisan. It was a sloop of war with all her canvas spread.

The main search of my mind was toward the four people seated at the far end of the room. One of them I knew well. She had not changed by being in this setting or by wearing a low-cut silvery dress and a necklace of pearls and a pearl wreath in her hair. She looked straight at me and smiled a smile I loved. One other I had seen before—Harvey Alford, Captain Sir Godwine's aide. He wore a brocaded waistcoat, pearl-buttoned coat, breeches of dark red plush, blue hose, and decorated slippers.

Another man near Harvey's and my own age I had not seen before, although I never doubted he was Dick Tarlton, Sir Godwine's bastard son. I had time only to notice the perfect proportions of his small form and his somewhat careless dress and catch a glimpse of his intense, dark face when I became busied with Sir Godwine himself. He had sat in the biggest chair and was the first of the four people to gain his feet. He came toward me, walking a little like an eagle, more—as Sophia had told me—like a phoenix. I could recognize him by that and by his dandyism and his walking stick; still, if I had seen him on the street, I would have felt confused. Sophia had said her father was forty-four. This man looked thirty-four or twenty-four, whichever figure you had heard. There was no age anywhere on him. His skin was perfectly smooth, his small hands white and elegant as any young lady's, his movements as young as Sophia's.

"Why, Sophia, 'tis the young American you've made so thick with, damn me if it ain't," he exclaimed, the hearty words spoken in a queerly rattling voice. "Mr. Whitman, I'm Godwine Tarlton, your happy host." With that he gave me a graceful bow.

"Pleased to meet you, sir," I answered in Maine parlance, bowing in return as my ma had taught me.

"And the same to you, Mate, and welcome to Lepanto Palace."

"It has a famous name, Sir Godwine."

"Why, blast me, have you heard of that set-to?" he asked in evident surprise as Sophia held her breath. "But wait a bit before you tell me. I'm keeping you from greeting the pretty lass. By God, I'd give her a kiss while about it if I were in your boots. 'Twon't be the first one, or you can blow me down."

As I came toward her, she raised her face and breast. Neither of us stinted the caress or prolonged it either, and my arms were about her the while. I looked up to find Dick's black eyes fixed on my face, his lips curled in a small gray smile as close to evil as any human expression I could remember.

"Twas a good job!" Sir Godwine cried. "Now to finish the formalities—you've met my aide, Lieutenant the Honorable Harvey Alford"—he paused while we bowed to each other—"but not my son, Dick."

"Your humble servant," Dick mouthed with a fine bow.

"Sophia spoke of you, sir," I answered, not knowing what else to say.

"Did she indeed! My half sister—on the right side of the blanket, you understand—rarely honors me so. But perhaps an American doesn't know that expression."

"Yes, I do."

"So all you have to do now, Dick, is recite, 'Thou, Nature, art my goddess'!" Sophia said quietly.

"Perhaps you're acquainted with that, too," Dick suggested, his lips smiling, but his eyes cold and intent.

"I read it only recently. It was in one of Shakespeare's plays, which I've made acquaintance with only since coming to Malta. I believe it was the bastard's speech in King Lear—"

As I spoke, I was comparing the two small-sized men standing on either side of me. Dick's countenance was sallow; Sir Godwine's very fair. But the latter was much more delicate, its bones finer molded, the nose more than Roman, so high its bridge.

"Why, sink me, he's right again," he cried. "Now all of you sit, for I've years on my back, and they call for an easy chair." Then when he had appointed us our places: "Young Whitman, how did you hear of the battle of Lepanto?"

"Our cap'n told us when we came by the Strait of Messina."

"Now, dash it all, who do you mean by 'us'? You and the other mate while you sat at table?"

Perhaps it was his rattling voice that seemed to lend undue emphasis to the question; yet I thought I saw tension in his posture, and his eyes gleamed.

"No, sir, the whole crew. It was on Sunday after prayers. He told how the Christian fleet assembled at Messina and set sail, and the reasons for the battle, and its outcome. I guess he spoke an hour."

"Is it the custom of Yankee skippers to be schoolmasters for a pack of lubbers? How did the cap'n know of it himself? Why, damn me, it was fought two centuries before John Paul Jones fired his first broadside at his king's ship." But Sir Godwine did not speak emphatically now. His voice had dropped very low, the rattle had gone out of it, and its tone was soft.

"Captain Phillips is the most learned man I ever knew." "I'm glad to hear it. The Yankees that I knew could do better with account books than with history books."

"They do pretty well with ships, Sir Godwine, and with guns." I couldn't have kept from saying it short of a broken jaw, but I said it as quietly as I could.

"Damned if you don't speak truth, and you're a man of spirit!" He turned to the others. " 'Twas the answer I deserved, and he gave it to me. They do well with ships and with guns, says he, and who can gainsay that? Not me, by God! Homer-I'll call you that, by right of my years-I found it out myself. The hardest fight in my life was with a Yank. 'Twas my first ship and my first fight—" "And your first victory," Harvey broke in.

"Never mind about that. It cost me dear enough. And 'tis no wonder the Yankee people have got ahead, with good shipping and good shooting, and with their noses in history books as well as account books, and in that respect, we should be proud that they're English stock."

He turned and looked at Harvey. "Isn't that so?" he asked. "You never said a truer word, Sir Godwine!" Harvey answered crisply.

His eyes moved to the hot black eyes of his son. "How about it, Dick?" "Aye, aye, sir."

"I needn't put it to you, Sophia, my love. You've already made it plain how you admire Americans."

"Yes, and I wish you'd change the subject." To my surprise, she had Little color and her eyes looked haunted.

"Why, 'tis one of the leading subjects of the world, or you can sink me. Homer, I'd like to meet your Captain Phillips, and for the time being let it go at that. And there's that blasted Millen."

The burly butler stood in a different door than before, announcing dinner. No one moved or spoke until Sir Godwine got gravely to his feet, and I could not help but marvel how all eyes, including mine, were fixed on him. All of us waited on his words by some unknown compulsion.

"I'll lead the way with my blasted stick," he pronounced. "Homer, if you'll follow with Sophia, Harvey and Dick will fetch up the rear."

The stick was a fine Malacca that he sometimes toyed with or whipped about, but never leaned on. I noticed now that he walked like an Indian, his feet in a straight line, and at a slow pace; still, that could not explain the effect of regalness that everyone felt. I could imagine him on the quarter-deck of a great English man-of-war. The wintry rattle in his voice would terrify every man aboard. The officers reporting to him would turn pale.

Why? I wished to heaven I knew. I could pick him up and heave him to his death against the stone wall—if I would. No one ever would, no matter what he did.

Sophia slipped her hand under my arm. Her ear was close; the others were out of easy hearing.

"Sophia, I'm going to ask his consent to marry you."

"You'd better get mine first." She giggled at that, a childish giggle that comforted my heart.

"Then I'll ask his consent to pay court to you."

"He won't grant it. He'll give you the nicest refusal you ever heard. So why expose yourself—"

"He doesn't think I'll do it. He's invited me here to give me the chance, but he's sure I won't take it. Tell me you're with me in it. Say you love me."

"I love you, Homer—and want you to pay court to me—but it's not any use."

We were walking through a dimly lighted hall. It led to an immense dining room with another wall-high fireplace, walls of plaster marvelously worked, and a frescoed ceiling whose central figures were a goddess of some sort with a pitcher in her hand, a bearded Greek with a short sword, and a crouching leopard. The table in the candlelight surpassed all my imaginings. I had not known that even kings and queens sat down to such boards—the covers of lace showing the rosewood and satinwood beneath, the shimmering crystal of glasses of many shapes and kinds, the white antique silver, and the ivory-colored china.

"I've never seen anything Like this before," I remarked to Sir Godwine.

Watching his face so closely—as we all must—it seemed that he did not like my saying that, that it was not on his program. I could not even guess why it was not. In the brief silence, Harvey spoke.

"Not even in Boston?"

The words were addressed to me, but his eyes moved instantly to Sir Godwine's.

"He hasn't mentioned Boston, Harvey," Sophia said clearly. "Why do you?"

"By God, you're right, Sophia! If he has, you can stove me. Homer, to tell you the truth, it's a rare Yankee who doesn't mention Boston with his first glass, and 'tis come to be a bit of jest. You see, we've a Boston of our own. The name came from Botulph—Saint Botulph in Saxon times; six hundred years ago 'twas a great port next to London, while only two hundred years ago Massachusetts was a wilderness. So we've got to stop and think what Boston the Yankees mean."

"Sir, I wouldn't think it would take much thought, with our Boston three times as big already."

"You can lay to that, by heaven!"

"Anyway, there's nothing like this there. What does the picture on the ceiling represent?"

Not that I doubted that the figures were of Ulysses and the witch Calypso. That would be fitting decoration for a Maltese palace. I had been about to say so, with the idea of scoring again, when a kind of prudence taught in New England warned me not to go too fast.

"Answer him, Harvey."

"I dare say it's Oenone of Mount Ida, Paris's wife, trying to stop him from skipping off with Helen."

"Right!" And Sir Godwine looked at me more pleasantly than before.

"How did that palace come to be named Lepanto, if you'll kindly tell me?"

"I will, with pleasure. There was an ancient edifice here under Sicilian rule—the room we just left is part of it. That goes back to the late eleven hundreds, and maybe longer. The Knights of Saint John acquired the island in 1530—by 1565 they were fighting for their lives against the Turk. They turned him back, and six years later Don John, with the Knights' help, destroyed his fleet. An English Knight of Saint John, Sir Oliver Starkey, took a lively part, and shortly after, he rebuilt and enlarged the old structure, naming it for the sea fight. So I felt happy to be-quartered here, in the home of a countryman of no short spell ago."

As he talked, something giving the effect of beauty came into his face. I heard Sophia, beside me, catch her breath. I noticed, too, that the bluff salty speech he usually employed quite disappeared, as did the wintry rattle from his voice.

He had glanced at Millen as he began. This seadog butler and the footmen, too, froze in their places. As he finished, he gave him a slight nod; and at once the work of serving the dinner went forward. There were at least a dozen dishes of fish, meat, and game—prawns, scallops, eels, roast, quail, and venison pastry—and, it seemed to me, a different wine to go with every one. Before long I took thought of the parade of glasses before me, each kept brimming full. The beverages had delicate taste and fragrance; sailors would swear they were weak as water, but I was not in a mughouse now surrounded by my friends—I had more to lose than a thin wallet slipped out of my pocket by a kittling barmaid—so I had best take care. Thereafter I drank only one pouring of any one wine, by one means or another foiling the diligent footman at my elbow. Thus I fell far behind Sir Godwine and his sallow-skinned son, but ran about even with Harvey, whom I reckoned no more than my match in hardness of head.

Instead of easier, I figured the trial would be harder when all the glasses were whisked away except tall narrow ones for champagne and short barrel-shaped ones for brandy. When the pale-gold sparkling wine glimmered in the candlelight, Sir Godwine rose.

"Homer, you're not called upon to drink the toast I'm about to propose—unless you care to. It's to an old man not popular in your native land." He lifted his glass and his tone changed. "To the king!"

I stood and drained my glass with the rest. We had hardly sat down, the goblets brimming once more, when I rose again.

"No one here is called upon to drink the toast I propose," I told the company. "To the President of the United States."

"Wait just a moment." Sir Godwine was gazing at me with a thoughtful expression. "Perhaps some of this company doesn't realize that the President is no longer Mr. Adams of Boston but Mr. Jefferson of Virginia. I understand he's of gentle birth."

"If you please, that doesn't enter into the toast."

"Well-spoke, by God! Let a man stand up for his own—I like to see it. I'll drink to the President's good health. I'll even add a bit-may he lead the American people in the way they should go. All of us on our feet. . . ,"

But Sophia had no need of the command. She was already up beside me, standing by me, her pearl wreath setting off the dusk of her hair, the glimmering necklace in contrast with the dark glow of her face and the gray luster of her eyes. She turned to me as she drank with a smile touching and beautiful, as though in pledge and pride and profound communion between us alone.

When we sat again, Sophia slipped her hand into mine.

"I'm going to leave the room as soon as we've had dessert," she told me in a low voice. "You must stay until Papa walks out—or is carried out."

"I see no sign of the latter."

"It doesn't happen very often. Now listen closely. He's got something to tell you—something he thinks important. I don't know what it is—something about America that will involve you. Whatever it is, play it as you have the rest."

"How soon can I see you again?"

"Maybe tonight in the salon. If not, come in a carriage about seven tomorrow night. There's a carnival near Rabat that we can watch."

"Have you a passport?"

"Of course—"

"Will you keep it with you? We might want to go further than Rabat—maybe across to Gozo, or even to Syracuse, where there's an American consul."

"Elope?"

"Yes."

"I'll have it with me, but—change the subject."

"Can't you stay to hear what your father has to say?"

"I wish I could."

"Can I say, 'Sir, Sophia said you had some news for me'?"

"Why not? Of course you can. This isn't exactly a love feast, and remember, an American goes after what he wants."

For the moment Sir Godwine was in earnest conversation with Harvey. Before I could break into it, Dick rose.

"I've a toast to offer, too," he said, his face darkly flushed. "To one who is with us no more, but whose gallant spirit inspires us yet. Our Eliza."

There followed a brief period of intense silence and complete stillness. It was charged with suspense I could share but not understand. Sophia stiffened in her chair. I caught a fleeting expression on Sir Godwine's face that was perhaps beautiful, perhaps sublime, but whose effect on me was frightening, although I could not possibly have told why. His love for his first ship was more than human, Sophia had told me. Perhaps his look was godlike.

"I don't know that we should do this, Dick, at this time," he replied after a thoughtful purse of his lips and in calm, level tones.

"Remember that at Our Eliza's first and greatest triumph—twenty years ago next Christmas Day—a fine American ship and crew went to the bottom. Still, our American guest knows that it was war—and I can assure him both vessels did themselves proud!"

He rose slowly. "Yes, we'll drink to the soul of Our Eliza! May she sail the seas of the hereafter as gallantly as she sailed our sea!"

I stood with the rest. I thought of offering a toast to the Yankee vessel who had engaged her and met defeat and death, only to decide against it. Afterward, Sir Godwine sat in reverie, the champagne in his glass casting a pale golden gleam on his white hand. When he emerged from it, I spoke.

"Sir Godwine, Sophia said you had news of America for me."

"Why, so I have! The minx had no business telling you until I gave her leave—but young ladies make their own rules, it seems, and feel free to break all others. But the tail of the cat is out of the bag, so I'll bring forth the body. The long and short of it is, your country's gone to war."

I answered with great care.

"With France—or again with England?"

Not that I harbored any real doubt. Most long-headed Americans believed that another war with England was in the stars. I could understand better now the talk and events of tonight's dinner—my feeling of something in the air, of emotions held in tight rein, and of words carefully chosen. The enmity and danger I had felt seemed of a different character than my affair with Sophia should create. All this was explainable by our two countries being at war.

But Sir Godwine had been struck speechless, as by great surprise.

"Sink me, but you're a cool one!" he broke forth at last. "With France, or again with England, say you, not turning a hair. Harvey, here's a Yankee as bluff as they come!"

"Bluff?" Dick asked quietly.

"I mean plain-spoken. No, sir. Homer, 'tis with neither one. On the fourteenth of May last, the Pasha of Tripoli cut down the flagstaff of the American consulate and declared war. Your consul there, by name of Cathcart, set out for home. My advices are there's no doubt the Yankees will meet the challenge—that they committed themselves to it when they refused the Pasha's demands—and will send a naval squadron to these waters to protect their shipping. If it ain't already on the way, 'twill soon be."

"Sir, I'm not surprised. I've heard talk of the Pasha's insolence and our exhausted patience for a good while."

"Then why didn't you guess Tripoli straight off?"

"You said, sir, we were at war. We wouldn't call it war, to be teaching a pirate king to stay clear of a Yankee ship."

He stared at me as might a sleepwalker. I thought that his bellyful of wine had finally washed up upon his brain. But he recovered with a little tremor and turned to Dick.

"Did you hear that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Harvey, you'd better listen to it, too, for our future's sake. Maybe all Europe had better stop their fooling and take notice. Homer, my lad, you'll have to forgive me for my old-fashioned ways. It seems just yesterday that what you call 'United States' were some English colonies, ruled by royal governors, a region where our yeomanry could buy cheap land. They rebelled against the king—France took their side—and we bitched the business right and left. Still, I can hardly believe you've got ahead this fast. After all, the king of Tripoli, pirate nest though it be, is still a king. But there's the new century, the New World. And Homer, you're as fine a representative as I'd want to meet. By heaven, I'm glad you came tonight! You were just the man to set me straight. A real, life-size, full-blooded young Yankee—"

He stopped, because Sophia had stood up. Truly she seemed to spring up, and her eyes were haunted and her mouth was drawn.

"Yes, daughter," he said in an indulgent tone.

"We've finished dessert, and with your permission, I'll withdraw."

"I fear I've bored you by reciting what you already know."

"You never bore anyone, but may I go?"

"Yes—yes—you may."

He rose and gave her a stately bow. We others were on our feet, but she would not look at Harvey and Dick, and it seemed she could not look at me. When Millen had bowed her through the door, he, too, went out.

"Now we can settle down to a good old-fashioned sailor's brandy bout," Sir Godwine remarked, "unless the company has other notions."

"I need a bit of air," Dick said. "Will you come with me, Harvey?"

"If Sir Godwine and Mr. Whitman can do the honors alone," Harvey answered, his tongue a little thick. Then with a sly wink at Dick, they went out together.

I did not care about that. I had more important business on my mind.

"Sir Godwine, I'd like a glass of brandy, but mainly I wish to make a request."

"Then come into my cubby, I've brandy there, and 'baccy and pipes, too, if you've a taste that way."

We climbed steep stone steps where it seemed likely his drinks would hit him. I did not believe it, though, and was not really surprised when he ran up them like a boy. He led me into an eight-sided room that might once have been the top of a battlement, now walled in and furnished like the captain's cabin on a man-of-war. The chairs, chests, and charting table were of massively carved teak-wood; the broad-based cone-shaped decanters, of heavy graven crystal, would not tip over in a heavy sea; a drunken man could fall down without knocking anything down, so well secured was all gear. I admired especially a telescope, two feet long and light as a spyglass, with magnifying power of some fifty diameters. I wondered if it had been used on Sophia and me.

"I'd hazard that your request concerns my daughter," Sir Godwine remarked in a pleasant tone when we were comfortably seated.

"Aye, sir, it does. I wish your permission to pay court to her."

"Now that's a different thing than asking her hand in marriage, yet it could come to the same thing. Suppose I granted your request and then you and she should take a notion to marry, could I refuse you, when I'd given you a clear field? Still, it's a proper request, when you're of a different nationality and station."

"I'm ignorant, sir, in matters of station. But I wish to court Sophia at her home, and in the open, without your forbiddance."

"I'll instruct you somewhat. In practice, only young men whom we call eligible pay court to an English girl of Sophia's station—being her escort at balls, riding with her, and such as that. They'll not ask her father's consent to pay her such attentions, but if one of 'em shows unfit, he'll get the chuck; and should she get thick with one, so it looks serious, her father will either let it go on or try to stop it. If he lets it go on, the young feller need have little fear of being refused when he seeks his consent to marriage."

"Aye, sir."

"I take it Sophia wants your attentions, or you wouldn't pay 'em."

"Aye, sir."

"Has she promised to marry you if I'd let her, or even if I wouldn't?"

I did not feel obliged to answer that question, but I did so, thinking it would be in my favor.

"No, sir."

"Wouldn't I be doing wrong to you both to consent to your courting her, when I could never consent to your marrying her? And the reason why—to put it in a nutshell—both of you would rue the day."

"Sir, I dispute what you say last. I think our chance of happiness would be first rate."

"You'd intend to take her to America?"

"Aye, sir."

"Out of all you've seen tonight, to a little house in some American seaport? For mark you, she has the merest pittance of her own."

"To Bath, on the Kennebec River, where I was born. It would be a small house to start with, but get better as I get on. As for what I saw tonight, Sophia wouldn't miss it as might most young ladies, if I judge aright. In America even the poor sit down to tables laden with meat and game, and as an officer of a good ship, on my way to be a captain, I'd not count myself poor."

"Would you count yourself rich on ten—fifteen—maybe twenty pounds a month?"

"Ten pounds is close to fifty dollars. I'd make thirty dollars to start with, plus my rations. Still I'd be in middle circumstances; and in place of luxury, Sophia could have adventure."

It seemed to me that he blanched a little as from sharp pain; and as he reached for his glass of brandy, he knocked it over. I offered him my cotton kerchief to wipe it up, but instead he used his own, heavy silk with a lace frill, on which a coat of arms had been embroidered. As he mopped, he smiled. It was such a smile as I never knew, making mock of God it seemed to me, and the sweat came out on me in cold beads, for at last I had seen evil.

"I'll go back to my original question," he said softly. "If I let you pay court to her, when on no account would I consent to your marrying her, wouldn't I do you wrong?"

"Nay, sir. You'd do wrong to refuse me, when there's no mark against me, and her knowing the truth about me, and still wanting my attentions."

"Then I'd do wrong to myself. I'd be flying in the face of what's best for her, according to my greater experience and knowledge. Still, it would go hard with me to shut my doors to you, for the reasons you gave, and you a ship's officer of a nation with whom the king made peace. And it would go harder yet to lock her in room, she being of marriageable age and proud."

"Then what do you say, Sir Godwine?"

"Will you give me your promise to take her or leave her when the Vindictive sets sail from Malta?"

"I'll sail with my ship when she leaves here, if that's what you mean, whether or not Sophia will go with me."

"I'll not forbid you—although it's against my wishes and advice— to pay court to her the short time you're here."

While I sat dumb, hardly able to believe my ears, he filled his glass and drained it. The respite allowed me to catch my breath.

"I thank you kindly."

"You've no news of the vessel, I dare say?"

"No, sir."

"Captain Ball gave me some today. Our frigates convoyed her through the Strait two weeks ago. Some days past she was at Palermo, unloading Danish butter, and was due to sail on last night's tide. If this weather holds, she ought to make it in sometime tomorrow."

Battening down my heart, I looked into Sir Godwine's face confronting mine. There should be a gleam of mirth, however sardonic, in his pale eyes. I could even expect a trace of a smile, triumphant but human, such as a winner should give a loser in fellowship's sake. But the blue around the diamond-bright black points was like blue sky in December, and his mouth was slightly pursed, showing the perfect molding of his lips, as his thoughts flew far.

He had dismissed me from his attention. He had not denied my existence—he would not bother to tell the he—but he had become oblivious to it. But I had another night in Malta. I remembered with a rush of joy, a sense of power, and I would not be surprised to hear from him again.

CHAPTER 6 The Ship Comes In

The highest hill overlooking the northwest coast was the hill I climbed. In midmorning I had gained its crest; since the day was clear and fine, I could gaze halfway or thereabouts across the Malta Channel. Besides fishing smacks under lateen or square sail, ketches, and suchlike craft, I marked a Yankee brigantine, an English frigate, a Barbary brig whose heavy bow spelled pirate as sure as a skimming fin spelled shark, and three sloops in a flock making straight east, too far away for me to know their nation.

Amid all this shipping, a white speck on the northwest horizon need not excite me. I thought it a brighter white than any skysails I had seen, but that was a trick of the sun. As all her tops rose into view, they were still too distant to show peculiarities of rigging. Still, I would bet a dollar she was my own ship, and not a dime that she was some other. Maybe she came up with a little different motion than other ships. Perhaps I merely felt it in my bones.

I waited a half hour longer. Her hull hung still below the horizon, but my head was free of doubt. It was no trick to walk down to Valletta in time to see her make her harbor run, or to catch a ride on the first lighter scampering out to meet her. She had hardly finished her first swing upon her cable when I had cleared her rail.

An officer now, as my shipmates kept in mind, I received no banging about, but there was no sea rule against Captain Phillips pumping my arm and turning red in the face with pleasure; or Mate Hedric from jesting broadly about my shore adventures; or the sailors from giving me hearty handshakes and big grins and simple words of welcome to stow in my heart. 'Giny Jim came out of the galley with his black face alight. He had laded a coop of fowls, he said, and tonight there'd be fried chicken for all hands. I did not see Mate Tyler, but no other face was missing from the ring, so all was well with the Vindictive. I had been ashamed to worry about her, it seeming a breach of troth with so stout and brave a ship, but I must have done so regardless, to have such a load off my mind.

"Mr. Tyler left us at Lisbon, catching a ride to Boston on the Rainbow" Captain Phillips told me. "Mr. Hedric and I spelled each other this little way, and 'twas like old times."

He looked somewhat heavy-eyed, I thought, but his sleep would not be easy for a good while yet, or I missed my guess.

"Sir, did you hear the news from America?"

"I heard rumors of trouble with Tripoli, and the true report of our consul there taking ship for home."

I repeated what Sir Godwine had told me. Straightway Captain Phillips beckoned Mr. Hedric and me into his cabin. After a tot of rum together and a brief palaver, it did not take him long to lay a course.

"I reckon this will be a job for our Regular Navy," he remarked. "Tripoli has no merchant fleet, only pirates decked and armed for battle. 'Twould be folly and worse for us to hunt 'em until we can refit in a Yankee yard—far more weight, more stanchions to support it, and holds turned into magazines and quarters for four times our number. If we're needed, we'll do it, and you can lay to that. But tomorrow we'll sail with an empty bottom for Naples and lade wine, hemp, silk, and olives for New York. We'd have run up and got it before hoving in here if 'twould save time, but the small gain in distance would be lost by contrary winds." This last was to inform me that he had not wasted our charterer's money to relieve my homesickness.

"Aye, aye, sir."

"When we're home, I'll see what's to be done to serve our country."

That settled it. Mr. Hedric went on deck to appoint his shipwatch and give shore leave to the rest. I asked Captain Phillips's permission to broach another matter. He looked at me closely and offered me a chair.

"Cap'n, I've proposed marriage to Miss Sophia Tarlton, the daughter of Captain Sir Godwine Tarlton of the Royal Navy."

"Do tell!" It was not often that Captain Philiips employed this ancient New England expression of surprise. Then, feeling that he owed me an explanation, "I should say, Mr. Whitman, that I'd heard of him more than most English officers of his rank. "Twas natural enough, since we served our respective countries in the late war. We were both young captains, and 'twas his ship. Our Eliza, that engaged and sank the brand-new Saratoga, commanded by my boyhood friend, Cap'n Ezra Fairbank. It went hard with me, for Cap'n Fairbank and every soul aboard was lost."

"Then I reckon there's not much hope for my petition "

"What is it? Do you think 'twould prejudice me against Cap'n Tarlton's daughter? Why, I've naught but respect for Cap'n Tarlton himself. He had heavier guns, but the Saratoga wouldn't strike her colors. And he did yeoman service against Napoleon in the Battle of the Nile."

"Sophia will accept or decline tonight. I'd like permission to bring her aboard, to see what a Yankee ship is like, and to have her to myself without much interruption. There will be only the shipwatch, and they'll give me a wide berth. If she accepts, I'll ask you to marry us tomorrow morning, and to let her come home with me."

"Well, I see little wrong with either thing. Marriage is a mighty serious matter, but you're a serious man. Ye can bring her aboard, and since ye're not trifling with her, ye can entertain her in your cabin if ye both see fit. As for taking her to America, we've had ladies aboard before—my own wife before I lost her and Mr. Hedric's wife— and the men were pleased, and 'twas good for their manners and language. But I doubt if I've right to marry ye here in the harbor. 'Twould be best for the knot to be tied on the open sea."

"We won't be there till some time tomorrow."

"How old is the young lady, Mr. Whitman?"

"Just past eighteen."

"Then she has the right to marry by her own choice under English common law. Now let me give ye a word of advice."

"I'd welcome it, Cap'n, 'cause I'm sorely troubled."

"Bring her here, and if ye can, get her promise. If she will, take her tonight to the Baptist mission, and ask the minister to marry ye. I don't doubt he'll do it. 'Twould be his duty, which Baptists believe in no end, and anyway, 'twould rejoice him to jar an English Navy captain, who no doubt belongs to the Church of England. But if he won't, consider well whether ye should elope with her aboard our ship. I'd relish it, I confess—although his hands were lascars and conditions unfavorable, I was never persuaded Captain Tarlton did his utmost to save life from the Saratoga. He could never get Captain Ball to give us chase—'twould make him a laughingstock of the whole Royal Navy—and I could marry ye as soon as we gain the high seas. But 'tain't as though you're running from Bath to Boston. And severance of that sort—with no chance to ask and give forgiveness—might cut 'em both a wound that would never heal."

I did not worry about this last. It would hold true to all other fathers and daughters I had known, but my mind refused to apply it to the small, stick-swinging knight and beautiful Sophia. I thought to tell Captain Phillips that they did not love each other, but I had nothing to back it except Sophia's remark, and it would sound ill in his ears.

I wished he could perceive how desperate the matter was. He could not because I could not tell him—I knew, but not why. I had no proof to offer of brooding evil, not even plausible evidence. How could I say I was frightened to the marrow of my bones?

Before setting forth in a carrozza for Lepanto Palace, I took a few stitches in time. One was to provide for a pleasant supper to be served Sophia and me in my cramped cabin. Another was to engage a shore gig, actually a two-man gondola, with a lateen sail, whose owner I had come to know, to wait my call. The most important was to pay a visit to the Baptist mission for a brief conversation with its head, a balding, square-jawed, ruddy-skinned Welshman known as Preacher Morgan. If we came to his abode about midnight, would he marry Sophia and me?

After he had questioned me briefly and sensibly, I left in high spirits and ranged the waterfront in search of a shipmate. The first I encountered could not be beat—Farmer Blood from Poultney—and his plain red face lighted wonderfully when he knew my need of him. On my drive to Notabile my spirits never tumbled, and I trimmed my tackle better than before. It was only to engage a closed carrozza in the way of an anchor to windward.

We had hardly driven through the gate of Lepanto Palace when I saw a postern door open narrowly and Sophia emerge. She walked lightly to the courtyard as I sprang out to meet her, and in a few seconds we were under way. But I had caught a glimpse of someone at a window.

"I didn't think you'd come," Sophia said as soon as we were out of sight of Lepanto Palace.

"What could stop me?"

"That dinner last night. It would stop anyone but a fool. And isn't your ship in? Papa told me this morning that you were expecting her today."

"She's in, and I think she'll sail tomorrow."

"Then why did you come? You could have gotten a pretty Maltese

girl for your last night on the island. I'U only bring you bad luck "

Still, she could not keep her eyes from shining.

"I'll show you in a few minutes what kind of luck it is. Now I need your help giving directions to the driver."

Well versed in French, Sophia could follow the Italian patois known to most Maltese. Without much trouble she informed our Jehu that he was to let us out at the carnival, take his stand with other carriages until shortly before midnight, then return to Valletta by a roundabout route. If in the meantime anyone asked for us, he was to say only that he was waiting our return. For this I would pay him two shillings extra, but if he disobeyed orders, I would report him to Ernesto, king of the carriage drivers and a name to conjure with.

"What will we be doing in the meantime?" Sophia asked me, big-eyed.

"I've arranged for another carriage to be waiting out of sight of the crowds. As soon as we can slip off, we'll make for Valletta."

"What then?"

"We'll take a shore gig out to my ship."

"And then sail away?" Sophia laughed raucously.

"Did you bring your passport?"

She sobered instantly. "Yes, but you said you wouldn't sail at least until tomorrow."

"We won't weigh anchor tonight. I intend to bring you home before dawn. Is that all right?"

"Yes, provided someone doesn't come for me before then. I've danced all night more than once. No one will kill me—no one will even hit me. Tomorrow night—"

"It may be tomorrow night you won't leave me at all."

"Has my passport anything to do with that?"

"Yes, and I'll tell you later."

"Homer, it's incredible. The whole thing is. Yet when you're with me, I believe it. You plan something—and it comes true."

"I've got to ask you something. Is your father going to look for us soon, or late, or not at all?"

"If at all, it will be late. His present intention is to indulge my whims. He thinks I know what side my bread is buttered on, and if he doesn't bear down too hard, I'll obey his wishes. If he kept me at home tonight, I might run off and marry you. He couldn't conceive of it himself, but I believe Dick told him so. Harvey will be furious but he won't do anything—he's under Papa's thumb. And none of them believe that I'll do anything very serious."

We were drawing close to the carnival. Fiddles shrilled, drums beat, clowns shouted, and crowds laughed.

"Sophia, do you think he'll guess I've taken you to my ship?"

She mused a moment, then shook her head.

"I believe it's the last place he'd look. You see, there's a certain pattern to his thinking—if I look far enough, it always fits. No English captain would let one of his crew bring a girl aboard. Not even an American would be crude enough to invite a young English gentlewoman on to his dirty hooker. If he did, of course she wouldn't come."

While hooker could mean a two-masted Dutchman as clean as a whistle, usually it meant an old, disreputable trader swarming with rats and roaches. All hands but Captain Phillips applied it affectionately, along with "The Old Bitch," to our trig lady, but never in his hearing or before outsiders. I had not foreseen that Sophia knew the word, though I should be sensible to her wide vocabulary by this time.

When the driver let us out at the carnival, we were hard put to it to leave the happy scene. There was an Italian troupe of jugglers and acrobats, monkeys and dancing bears, a merry-go-round that Sophia called a carousel, and peep and puppet shows. But great urgencies confronted us. Sophia faced them as squarely as I did; and her straits were worse than mine because she must make the desperate decision. But even if we could have spared an hour from our night of trial, the presence of some English man-of-war's men with pretty, vital-looking Maltese girls hurried us off. Quite possibly they knew Sophia by sight. Anyhow, they quieted her laughter.

When we were out of sound of the merrymaking, she took note of the closed carriage, better sprung and more luxurious than the other, and the spanking team that took the highroad at a good eight miles an hour.

"Homer, isn't the hiring of two carriages, and a boat, and I don't know what else, rather expensive?"

"I had sixty dollars when I hit Malta. I've still got almost ten,"

"That's a lot to spend out of six guineas'—thirty dollars—pay."

"I rather thought Sir Godwine wouldn't tell you that."

"Why not?"

"Wouldn't 'pittance' do well enough? I guess I thought that giving exact figures would be beneath his dignity."

"Nothing is. That's a strange thing to say. He feels so high he can do anything. Anyway, aristocracy is rooted in money somewhere along the line—cut the root, and it dies."

"I told him that instead of luxury, I could give you adventure."

"He told me you said that—and he didn't smile over it. He even acted quite impressed by it. In that he was very clever."

"That's too subtle for me."

"Did he tell you that I have a little money from my mother? I can draw it all after I'm twenty-one, and it might be enough to buy a small ship. It yields fifty pounds a year."

"I'd think that would buy a fine sloop. And until then, we could live well and keep a hired girl."

I began to tell her about America—little things that English travelers would hardly notice. I described our clambakes and lobster-boilings on the beach, to which every youth and maiden in the town could come and be welcome; husking-bees and cider-pressings and apple-butter making, with kisses for prizes; excursions to the snowy woods when word went forth of sap a-running; quilting parties in the winter and barn dances in the fall and kissing games at Christmas. In Charleston and Richmond people asked who your grandpa was, and the question was beginning to be put in Boston, but if you did not want to answer, you only had to move a ways west, where no one cared and life was even livelier than on the seacoast. I tried to make her understand the bigness of the land—room for nine Englands in the part already settled, while over the mountains it ran on and on, forest and prairie, deep black soil, corn land and pasture to come, and cities and towns to be, clear to the Father of Waters.

But I could not tell her how it felt to be an American—the inwardness of it. Very rarely a sharp feeling, hardly ever thought upon, yet it was with all of us, all the time. It made us different from every other people in the world. It worked upon our minds and changed our souls.

She listened almost in silence. Her hand in mine sometimes opened and closed. Once she stopped me with a kiss. Once she wiped away tears.

So we came into Valletta, and got out of the carriage not far off the Strad Reale; then we made our way down the half-mile staircase to the harbor. A short and breezy sail brought us alongside the Vindictive; and since she was no great ship o' the line, Sophia needed no Jacob's-ladder to gain her deck. I handed her up; Storky Wilmot's long lean arms reached down. After the light hoist, he touched his cap to her and vanished in the fo'c'sle.

"She's not as big as I thought," Sophia said, looking fore and aft.

"No, you can pitch a stone from knightheads to taffrail."

"She's very low to the water."

"Yes, the Yankee traders have low freeboard, which makes her get wet decks when the green seas roll, but helps her spank along in fair weather."

Sophia looked up. "She's quite tall."

"That she is. Foreigners say that Yankees carry too much sail."

"Does 'foreigners' include the English?"

"I reckon it does—until they come to live in America."

I showed her all parts of the ship that were fitting for her to visit, and told her the use and meaning of the gear. Lastly, I led her to my cabin and lighted the lantern bracketed to the wall.

She saw a room about six feet by five, containing a bunker cot with my chest pushed underneath, a bench, a washbasin hung on a nail, and a draw bucket. The dead light gave plenty of air on cool nights like this, and in tropic heat I could open the hatch. I could stand erect, although Storky Wilmot would have to bend his head. The room smelled clean, and there were no bugs in the bed, roaches in the boards, or rats in the walls.

"Is this all?" Sophia asked with round eyes.

"Yes, but it's as big as the cap'n's cabin on a ketch."

"I must say it's snug."

"I must say it isn't Lepanto Palace or the mansion—your mother's old home—Celtburrow—in Cornwall."

"The bed's wide enough for two."

"Plenty wide for you and me."

"Could two people cross the ocean in this little cabin?"

"I know of nothing to stop us but your will. We'd be on deck most of the time. We'd mess with cap'n and Mr. Hedric."

"To America?"

"Where else?"

The time had come to tell her about the Baptist mission and how we could go there any time tonight. It was a far cry from any scene of marriage she might have dreamed—as different from that as this cubby from the captain's cabin on a great ship of the line. Yet if people did not want to be married in a strange and empty church, and their own homes were out of reach and no friend's home was open to them, they were glad to come to the small, cheaply furnished parlor with its tiny organ, and the plain-faced, plainly dressed minister who officiated there. If we went there, I would have a witness whom the minister would believe, and our passports would show our age and, to any sensible man's satisfaction, our eligibility for marriage.

"You want to take me there tonight?" Sophia asked in low tones, her eyes on mine.

"Yes."

"Hold me a little while and don't kiss me, and I'll try to decide."

I sat on the bed with Sophia in my arms. Her mouth lay against my throat, so that her breathing seemed part of mine. Her eyes closed, and I thought she dropped to sleep. I kept vigil over her, careful not to waken her, although I did not keep the letter of her injunction. In a short while she woke with a start.

"I thought you'd gone," she said.

"No. Can I kiss you now?"

"Wait a moment. I want you to think of something. I met you only five days ago counting today. You count them up and see. Isn't that too soon for you to expect me to make a decision changing my whole life? Suppose when your ship is ready to sail, I've almost decided to go with you but need a little more time. Will you give it to me?"

"I wish I could, but I can't."

"Together we—or you alone—could go to America on another ship. You could get a berth, or I'd pay the way. Our way—or your way."

"I must stick to my ship."

"Is it because you promised Papa so? You wouldn't have to keep a promise he got you to make through trickery."

"I wouldn't think he would have told you."

"He didn't. He didn't tell me the other either—about your pay. The truth is, he hasn't mentioned you since you left. I made it up."

"Then how did you know?"

"I sneaked up the stairs when he took you to what he calls his cabin, and listened at the latch."

"Will you tell me why you did?"

"Yes, I was afraid you might take him and IdU him."

"That wouldn't seem very likely, would it?"

"You Yankees went to war with your own king when he wouldn't give you what you thought were your rights. You killed the soldiers sent to put down your rebellion. Why wouldn't you kill Sir Godwine Tarlton, far more kingly than plain old George—indeed as kingly as the cruel kings of the Middle Ages—when he wouldn't give you what you thought were your rights?"

"Did you want me to kill him?"

Her eyes shot wide open. "No. . . . No. I'm not even sure I want him dead. But go on and answer me. If I can't decide tonight, will you stay a few days more?"

"I can stay only until my ship leaves."

"Then I must decide.tonight?"

"It's come to that."

"If I go with you, what will I leave that I love?"

"You know, I don't."

"I love my old nurse, Melissa. Papa wouldn't let her come here. I could come to love Harvey, because he's in the same boat with me, but not passionately and wildly as I love you. I love pearls out of the sea. Those I wear are his, and I couldn't take them. I love beautiful clothes. I love old pictures and statuary and wonderful things of all kinds."

She paused. "A few rich merchants in Boston have some, but not many," I told her. "There are almost none in Bath."

"Sometimes great men come to dinner. Lord Nelson came once. They stop at Malta, and Papa entertains them. In London, married to Harvey, I would meet many prominent men—soldiers, statesmen, poets, and actors. Whom would I meet in America?"

"Well, a few like Cap'n Phillips. There are great leaders in our cities, but mighty few come to Bath."

"That's all right. People must pay for what they get. If you need me as much as I need you, I'd never be sorry I went."

"I reckon I need you a whole lot more."

"Haven't you plenty of others?"

"The ship and the men, and that's all."

She leaned out in my arms and searched my face. Her eyes looked depthless in the lanternlight.

"Where are your parents and your brothers and sisters? You haven't mentioned them—I thought you had had trouble with them —or maybe were ashamed of them."

"I had no sister. I haven't mentioned the others because I couldn't —my throat filled every time I started to, I don't know why. I can give you the main fact. My two brothers and my parents went down with my father's ship, the Eagle of Maine."

"The Eagle—of Maine . . ."

"It was a good name. It fitted her."

"How long ago?" She spoke quickly now.

"Five years."

"You were younger than I am now."

"Yes."

"Where were you when it happened?"

"On the beach watching."

Her hand came up and caught mine. "Tell me about it! Will you? Confide in me. Homer—no one ever has. I'll bear it with you, whatever it is. It's a terrible thing—I can see it in your face—and I think it will set me free."

I did not understand all that she meant, but I began to tell her of the wreck. Sophia saw the sparkling bay and the ship making too much leeway. She heard Captain Phillips and Captain Starbuck talking in low tones and watched their faces. I must not hide from her the sight of the ship striking and her men falling down and then her last hurtling from reef to reef until one of them gored her and held her fast. At last only four people clung to the steeply listed deck, and it seemed to me they were trying to join hands. Then another sea smote her, and they, too, were gone.

I felt Sophia's tears on my cheeks and tasted their salt in my mouth. Then the wreck of the Eagle of Maine withdrew gently into the past; it could not happen again because it had already happened; it belonged to a chapter that had closed. Sophia and I were back in my little cabin in the wann, still night, facing the days unborn.

"I love you, Homer."

"I love you, Sophia."

"I want to be with you always, and you to be with me."

"Then let's have it so."

"I want to go with you to the mission parlor, but I'm afraid."

"There's nothing to be afraid of."

"Nothing that I can tell you or even explain to myself. If only I were yours already and we were far at sea "

My heart began to bound.

"If you were mine already—if we belonged to each past all doubt so no one could separate us—would you still be afraid?"

She lay still a minute, then shook her head.

"Will you, Sophia?"

"It's so with many lovers who go to the priest," she whispered, her lips moving eagerly against my ear. "Why can't it be with us?"

"Afterward you'll go with me to the little parlor and—stand up with me?"

I had almost shrunk from the expression used by so many plain folk in America, but as it came forth, I saw how fitting and strong it was.

"If my gift to you means enough. Will it count any less than if we'd waited? You see, I have waited until now—waited for you."

"I've waited for you, too."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Just what you mean."

"Is that true? I see by your face it is."

"I guess it's not true. I didn't want any of the harbor girls."

"That makes it true enough. I wouldn't have minded—but I'm so glad."

She rose up out of my arms and turned the lantern low. In the pale glimmer that remained, she took the pins from her dusky hair and shook it down about her shoulders. Her preparations for her bridal adventure went unhurriedly forward, but I could not keep my own hands from flying. Before long, the tresses were more beautiful than before, their dark waves set off by a dim and secret luster of naked flesh. I became aware of beauty in its realness, beyond fancy's reach. All men who have loved woman know a like moment of revelation, of breathless unbelief, and those who have not loved woman cannot know it, because their eyes are dim.

"Be gentle with me, Homer," she told me as we lay side by side.

Passion came upon me as a gale upon a ship, gathering and rushing, so strong that it seemed an exterior force rather than one expression of my own strength, but when I remembered it was no more or less than that, that I was its master and it could not master me, her trembling ceased and the fear went out of her eyes. Then the storm within me shook me no more. Sometimes I had dreamed of sailing wide, still waters of infinite depth, and I half-remembered that dream, and instead of tumult I knew mystery and bliss.

She was giving me her beauty in mysterious ways. Bliss came upon us both, rising and growing until it seemed to pass all bounds, but it was not an unworldly dream from which we would wake; it was real as the lantern's glimmer. Like a long wave rolling under the moon it broke at last.

In that ecstasy and its warm and lovely aftermath, I could not doubt that we were joined forever.

CHAPTER 7 Far Voyage

A SENSE of triumph over evil stars stayed with us. As we dressed for a short journey of great consequence, we must pause and kiss and laugh; and in the bravado of our elation we were tempted to dally with time, for who could harm us now? So we asked each other by our gaiety or quiet joy; but perhaps we did not ask ourselves, from being not quite as brave as we wished to be. Although the midnight bells had not yet rung, our movements became increasingly brisk. We did not wait even to eat the supper Jim had prepared, but promised to do justice to it as soon as we had run an errand.

Truly I had no deep fear of Sophia's father or brother or suitor making us trouble. Somehow it did not fit into the picture. The tenuous shadows cast across my mind seemed to be fear of fate. Sophia appeared to be spared even this. Darkly flushed, she poured two glasses of wine, kissed the rim of one, and handed it to me. "To us in America."

I signaled with a lantern for our shore gig. It took so long to come that we fell silent and felt a little chill. But its sail filled with the crackle that sailors love to hear; the boatmen need not break out their oars; one dark hull after another dropped behind us as we skipped up the bay. When we had gained the dank wharf, Sophia slipped her arm into mine and we strode out. The inshore wind helped fly us up the steps, so soon we gained the byway on the hillside where the Baptist mission perched. It had been founded close to the waterfront, handy to sailors and longshoremen and their ilk.

From the wine shop at the corner, Farmer Blood had kept watch for me. Now he joined us quickly, and my heart glowed over his plain face and powerful, solid form. A lamp glimmered dimly in a window of the mission; when I had knocked on the door, there was only a brief wait, then it opened, disclosing an old Maltese woman in a black cloak with a candle in her hand.

"Ah!" she breathed at sight of us, her worn face lighting with a smile. "Coom tees way."

She led us to the little parlor of our destination where the lamp burned low. Turning up its wick, she said something in broken English, nodding and smiling, and withdrew. I followed Sophia's gaze to the window fronting the street and now clearly lighted.

"Please draw that curtain. Homer," she said.

I did so, then could not help but watch Sophia's struggles with her fears. They were rising now; they had prevailed over her elation, and she could not even simulate it now; the beautiful dark glow was gone from her face, and her eyes moved quickly. I thought she was trying to hold her fears at bay by fixing her attention on her surroundings. She looked at the plain, cheap, but solid furniture and the clean floor with its Brussels carpet, and she smiled a little tender smile over the small organ. Then she fixed her eyes with a curious intensity on a picture that I had barely noticed and forgotten.

It was a colored print of a portrait of George III, and apparently a very popular picture, since I had seen the same several times in English customhouses and the like. Its accent was on regalness, not humanity. The large features of the Hanover had been idealized to look like those of a Roman emperor; the eyes had a haughty stare; the shoulders were draped in ermine. With that dreadfully strained smile I had thought never to see again, she turned her back on it. I took the opportunity to ask for her passport. Although standing close together, it seemed that we three stood one by one as Preacher Morgan came into the room.

The big, balding man was smiling and self-assured. If he had stuffed the tail of his nightshirt into his trousers and hid the rest under his waistcoat, clerical coat, and stock, it was no one's business but his own. He greeted me warmly, then turned expectantly to Sophia. When I introduced her, he did not bow—clergymen should bow only to God—but shook hands with her cordially.

"Your hand is cold, my dear," he said, "but they say that is the sign of a warm heart."

When I had introduced Farmer Blood, he asked to see any papers verifying Sophia's and my eligibility to marry. He took these under the lamp to study through spectacles; I turned to find Sophia staring again at the king's picture, her eyes wide and black in her pallid face.

"What is it, Sophia?" I asked.

"Can't you tell him to please take it down and hang it somewhere else?"

"Of course I can't. It's his king."

The thought came to me that I might get rid of it by some subterfuge, but instantly I dismissed it.

"I can't stand to have him looking on— "

"That's just nerves, Sophia. It doesn't go with my gallant girl—"

"I'm not gallant. Our Eliza was gallant and so is the Vindictive, and all the ships are gallant, but I'm a coward— "

The minister's sonorous voice broke in.

"These are quite satisfactory. They establish beyond any doubt that you two are unmarried and of age to marry by your own will. Mr. Blood, I take you for an honest man. Will you take oath that this man and this woman who've come to me to be joined in matrimony are not close kindred?"

"Sir, I know all about Mate Whitman's family, and they're not kin at all."

"Then you two may take your places in the center of the room.

I'm sure my wife is about ready by now, and I shall summon her."

Opening an inner door, he called "Dear?" At once a pleasant-faced woman of middle size and age, neatly but plainly dressed, came in and kissed Sophia on the cheek. She sat down at the stool, thumped with her hands and pumped vigorously with her feet, and out came "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes." Except for a few squeaks in the first bar, it was a melodious and pleasing rendition of the ancient love song, in my mind the most noble ever composed. I took Sophia firmly by the hand and drew her beside me. The minister stepped in front of us with his open book. When the music died away, he began an ancient ceremony.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together. . . ."

Sophia's eyes fixed on his face. Her cold hand opened and shut in mine. I heard what he said only in my outer ear—a prayer—a moralism—soon the famed injunctive.

"If anyone knows ... let him speak now . . . forever hold his peace."

As the words came forth, Sophia put her head on one side as though listening to some very distant voice. I saw a change in her countenance, but I did not know yet what it meant; her eyes grew narrow and wildly bright. Then as Preacher Morgan paused, waiting a polite second as though for someone to burst in the door, Sophia herself spoke.

"There's no use of him asking that," she said to me.

"Be still."

"No, because I'm not going through with it. I'm backing out."

I said something, but it made no sense. "You shouldn't treat me so."

"I know it. I'm just as sorry as I can be. There's no use of my trying to explain—"

I turned to the minister. "Excuse us a moment, please." Then I took Sophia's hand and led her to the window.

"What are you going to say to me?" she asked, such dread and shame in her face that I could hardly bear to fix my eyes upon it.

"I was going to say it might be a kind of hysteria. I want you to steady yourself and consider everything. You're not a slave. You're a free human being. If you love me—"

"Loving you only makes it worse."

"You know what's between us— "

"There's a joke that answers that. It was popular last year in Bath -our Bath, not yours—all the toffs told it. A countess went there for the season and spent the night with a handsome coachman. Later he wanted to call on her in London. She sent him word that sexual intercourse and social intercourse were two different things."

This was not Sophia, or else she had put on a mask. Her face was drawn with mockery, but not of me—she would not look at me. Suddenly I knew it was mockery of herself.

She became grave, as though looking into a mirror. "Now watch this," she told me. "Have you ever seen this before?"

One corner of her lip curled up.

"I know what you mean, but it isn't like that at all."

"I dare say no one else can do it. It's completely unique. Now go back to your ship, will you? I don't ask you to forgive me—I know that's impossible—but maybe you can forget me. Do it if you can, I beg you. I don't want you ever to think of me again. I want to hide from you—my very existence. Every time I imagine you thinking of me, I'll want to die. I love you, Homer, I'll always love you. I want to be your wife more than anything in the world, but it's against orders. Do you believe me?"

"Yes, I believe you."

"Now will you get me out of your sight?"

"I'm going to put you in a carriage and take you to someone you know— "

"All right. And don't wait any more. . . ."

I spoke to Preacher Morgan and, beside myself over my loss, offered him a fee. He refused it gravely; in a moment we were in the street. Up the street from the wine shop where Farmer had waited for me, stood another of a better sort: from one of the tables under the balcony, a small man rose and came toward us. I knew he was not Sir Godwine by the way he walked. As he came under the street light, I recognized him as Dick Tarlton. He gave me a brief bow, then spoke to Sophia.

"You didn't stay very long."

"No, I didn't."

"Papa laid me a bet you wouldn't go through with it, and I dare say he won."

"Yes, he did."

"Well, I'm out ten pounds, and if you were any kind of a sport, you'd come down with half—"

"I certainly shan't. You should've learned your lesson by now."

"You may wonder what I'm doing here. Old Poison, Mrs. Dawson, found out you'd taken your passport. This looked pretty serious to me, so I searched for you at the carnival and then dashed out to the Zealous, where Papa was dining with Captain Hood. He was a bit irked by my disturbing him and said you'd probably gone either to the mission or out to your friend's ship. I could look for you hereafter he'd finished his brandy he'd go there—anyhow he wanted to pay respects to the Yankee skipper—and if he found you, he'd escort you home. I soon found out that the wedding party had gone in, so I sat down to wait. It wasn't to let you stew in your own juice—I wanted to win that bet. But I didn't have much hopes I would-and I was right."

"Yes, you were right. It's all very logical. Now what?"

But logical was one thing it was not, nor was it truthful. I smelled lies as strong as the taint of a slaver upwind. Sophia was caught in a cobweb of lies, evil and strange, but I could not set her free.

"I've got a carriage and we can go home," Dick said.

"What about Papa?"

"He's either at Mr. Whitman's ship, or on the way there—or has left there. Mr. Whitman, if you see him, kindly tell him we've both gone home."

I nodded my head.

"Then let's start at once," Sophia pleaded. "Good night, Homer, and a happy voyage." Her eyes were dry and burning.

I could not look at her or speak.

"You're a victim of circumstances, Mr. Whitman," Dick said. "Damned rotten luck, I tell you."

"Good night to you too, Farmer," Sophia said. "Thank you for wanting to help us. Homer, what I told you the last thing was true. And I'll always be glad you took me to your ship."

I nodded and had a hard job raising my head. When I did, she and Dick were walking off. One shadow after another obscured them until, thick and dark, the night lay over them.

I still stood under the street light, but the night was in my heart.

When a shore gig brought Farmer and me out to the Vindictive, a very fine craft, bearing a pennant and maimed by blue-jackets, lay beside her. As we swung aboard, we came full upon a small man with beautifully carved features and powdered hair, carrying a stick. Behind him, looming over him and around him, stood Captain Phillips. Plainly the noble knight was just leaving.

"Why, bless me, if it ain't young Whitman," Sir Godwine burst out at sight of me. "I was hoping you'd come aboard before I must end my pleasant visit with your cap'n."

Meanwhile Farmer saluted and withdrew. Sir Godwine spoke on in an anxious tone. "How have things gone with you?"

"Not well, sir."

"Is that so? Then I take it your hopes of winning Sophia have failed."

"Aye, sir."

"I thought they would. Twas one reason I regretted your harboring 'em. It was partly her fault for leading you on."

"No, sir, I wooed her with all my might and main."

"Yet she encouraged you, as I know right well. To tell you the truth, she doesn't know her own mind, and like many young girls, she's prey to her whims." He turned to Captain Phillips. "One day she wants this, the next day that."

Captain Phillips nodded, but did not speak.

" 'Tis my fault, too, that she's caused you pain," the knight went on. "You see, she's a dutiful girl at heart, and perhaps I sway her more than a father's right, more than I wish, for she must live her own life in the end. I'm used to command. Cap'n Phillips knows what I mean. I've a commanding way about me that I can't leave on the quarterdeck where it belongs. I never told her to refuse you, and that's my word on it. But she knew I disapproved you two making a match— for reasons that I told you—and it moved her in the end."

"Something moved her, sir," I said.

"I believe it's for the best." He turned again to Captain Phillips. "When will you sail, Cap'n? I'd hoped to send you a few flagons of my ancient Spanish brandy."

"They'd be welcome, Sir Godwine, if there's time. I've got to clear with the harbor master, and I reckon 'twill be about noon."

"Where are you bound? I'd be carrying out Cap'n Ball's wishes if I'd tell you the safest lanes."

"For Naples, and I'd thought to go through the Strait of Messina."

"Between Scylla and Charybdis? For no doubt you know, being a knowledgeable man, that these were the classical names for the rocks and whirlpools."

"Yes, sir, I did know it."

Sir Godwine's expression changed slightly, "They were a rightful source of terror in those days," he went on. "Their ships were such bad sailers. But the current's strong this time of year, and you'd not like to meet a Barbary frigate in those narrow waters, and we've none of ours about to chase 'em off. Although it's the longer sail by at least a day and more likely two, you'd do well to take the safe route by way of Marsala."

"Have you frigates on that side, Cap'n Tarlton?" For Captain Phillips had forgotten his guest's title.

"We're keeping a close watch for Frenchies from Cape Bon clear to the Aegadian Isles. Good night, Captain Phillips, Mr. Whitman, and the profitable voyage you deserve."

With that, he went overside. Cap'n Phillips wished for a piper to do him the proper honors. I was too stunned to want anything, even to take him and kill him as Sophia had said. I felt dimly that one of us should do it before too late—Captain Phillips or I, not Sophia or I —but that made no sense in my own mind and it faded away.

"Mr. Whitman, ye'd best turn in and rest that leg," the captain told me. "Ye've used it hard today."

"Aye, sir, I will, and thank you."

Presently I found myself in bed, only to worry about my clothes. When I got out to see about them, I found I had put them away with the usual care. It seemed that Sophia's wraith came to me, not to remind me of ecstasies so short time past, but able to come because of them—because for a while we had been one flesh and spirit, and the bond had not yet dissolved; and her business here was to bid me remember some other event and incident of the past few days, things heard and seen of great import yet, but they meandered through my mind without connection, and soon gave way to confused dreams.

I slept as heavily as though soaked with drink. In the morning I asked Captain Phillips's permission to adjust our compasses, an exacting task that took my full attention. When we weighed about noon, I had the watch, my long-awaited first command dear to my dreams; and after the captain had taken us out of the harbor, as was his custom, he went to his cabin and left the deck to me.

The keeping of a northwest course in a northeast wind took lively enough sailing to occupy my mind and to hold the hands' attention. They were a cheerful lot this afternoon, glad to have me back, pleasurably anticipating the cool sweet wine and the warm sweet girls of Naples; but when one of them fixed his eyes upon my face, his own was inclined to fall; which was proof to me that I did not look aright. I did not know how to remedy it, but would do so as soon as possible. Meanwhile I blessed the ship and every soul aboard.

So time passed until at sunrise of the third day we raised the Aegadian Isles on the west coast of Sicily. These were the scene of one of the great naval battles of the world, Captain Phillips told us—the Roman admiral Catullus's victory over the Carthaginians, ending the First Punic War. Having sailed wide of the eastern capes with tlie wind in the northeast, we would round Marettimo, the outermost island, now it had shifted north: I was as sure of that as though I could look into Captain Phillips's head. From thence we must take a north'ard tack into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Marettimo was rugged and thinly peopled. The morning being fine and bright, the men off watch lined the starboard rail to see what they could see. We were about to clear her—the view beyond her northern end was opening—when Enoch Sutler, whose small, hard body was always eaten up with curiosity, made a wondering remark.

"Where are all them Dago smacks that was out here fishing the last time we passed this way?"

"I reckon the fish have pulled out for some other bank," Sam Hopkins answered.

A few seconds thereafter someone raised a cry. We need not look at the cryer and ask the cause: all of us saw it plain. Out from the headland, a small, fast frigate with lateen sails scudded before the wind. Because of her speed and the swiftly widening vista, she came instantly, it seemed, into full view. In the same instant, we knew her purpose. Before we could check our way, we would be broadside to her.

She did not wait till then for her first salvo from her bow guns. These were heavy guns that she had bought with the blackmail and ransom money paid by England, France, and United States; and the black-bearded crews manned them well, used to training them on little merchantmen for loot and the glory of Allah. She did not aim to sink us. There would be no profit in that. She aimed to disable us so we would strike our colors to save life.

Men do not cry out in agony of soul, no matter how sudden and extreme. If, as Mussulmen relate, Mohammed revels in Paradise to hear a Christian wail, none had tickled his ears yet. In an awful silence we saw our foremast shot away, the jibs fall, the main topmast broken off and fouled, and the jiggers down. The shock stopped every man in his tracks, arrested every sound. Then, for one instant, our hearts stilled in our throats and our ears gaped in travail to hear Captain Phillips's command.

If it were, "Mr. Hedric, strike our colors," we would have seen the sense of it, for why throw away life to save breaking hearts? Instead his deep voice brought other tidings to us. It rang over the deck. "Helmsman, hard her over and fall away. Mr. Hedric, clear the fallen gear from the bow guns, and blanket your magazines and fill your fire buckets. Mr. Whitman, man your starboard guns, but wait till she's nigh broadside on us and make every shot count. Men, stand by your flag and your ship."

I saw the flush on the faces around me and felt the same fire in my heart; then we were occupied, speaking little, at our various tasks. The pirate saw we could not fly or maneuver, so she was in no haste to give us a broadside or to run down and grapple on us, for either action would expose her to costly fire. I could now undertake one small, delicate, but fateful operation. It pertained to the captain's orders to make every shot count. The pirate's lateen rigging of short masts and long yards would be hard to cut down with our little salvos, and we could not hope to sink her except by a lucky ball to her magazines or many broadsides at her waterline, almost too much to hope of any providence as long as we were disabled and she was not. But while we were yet fully manned—while the pirate, hoping for a free victory and bettering her position every moment, still held back her shattering broadside, there was one great counting possible to one well-sped ball.

"Strike your colors or we'll sink you," a renegade Englishman or Yankee, common enough on the Barbary pirates, shouted down the wind.

But I, the gunner's mate of the Vindictive, made other reply. At our best bow gun, a long, carefully cast nine-pounder, stood Andrew Folger. He had not only the keenest ears aboard, but the sharpest and truest eyes, and no hand I knew was steadier than his. My next best gunners, Storky Wilmot and Edward Piper, waited by our starboard battery with matches in their hands. Our vessel's bow swung into the wind as we fell away; the pirate's stern came into clearer view.

"When you've got your aim, fire."

Andrew was the first to bring match to touchhole; a few seconds later the midship-guns roared out. A piece of wood flew over the pirate's quarter-deck at the first report, but not until after the second did we have the answer we craved—a high-pitched howl from someone, I guessed the helmsman—thin and strange upon the wind, and then a yell of fury from the crew. No doubt the pirate would not answer her helm. It might be a rudder chain had been cut, but far more likely her rudder posts had been shot away. She could not play with us like a wolf with a hamstrung stag. Until she fixed a jury rudder, she could not run us down and grapple us.

She could sink us soon with repeated salvos, but we would be at the bottom, of not much profit to the Pasha of Tripoli. In the meanwhile, long or short, we could fight, harming her all we could until the fight was over.

So it came to pass that both ships fell away before the wind, keeping a distance of half of a sea mile. But the pirate was not nearly as lame as we; her guns were being trained on us as we tried to come up on her beam; two balls screamed through our mainsail and shrouds, narrowly missing the mast, before our starboard battery could again be brought to bear upon our foe. The gunners fired on the instant. At least one of our nine-pounders struck her close to the waterline and another carried away a davit from her main deck. Some bearded heathens soon would be busy below, shoring up wadded timbers over the hole in her hull, and one of her boats was kindling wood; but we had only borrowed a little time, and she had not begun to teach us our lesson.

Her bow guns blazed again. We waited for a whining shriek that did not rise. Instead there was a terrible swishing sound, then many hard thuds, almost but not quite simultaneous, with the effect of a swift tattoo. Some spars fell and shrouds were cut, and that was the only harm done our rigging. But Jeremiah Wilson, who had climbed our mainmast to cut away the broken topmast, lay on the deck with a yawning hole in his breast, and Storky Wilmot's head no longer had human aspect.

"Grape!" someone cried.

We had no grapeshot. All our shot were solid balls. Our guns had been shotted to fight off enemy vessels, to sink them if they would not let us pass, not to kill crewmen.

Near the break of the quarter-deck Farmer Blood said something to Charley Jervis. Lightning played on Charley's face, and he turned and repeated it to Edward Piper, who had picked up the match dropped from Storky's hand. When Edward passed it on to Will Greenough, I was near enough to hear it, but the thunder of our bow guns drowned it out. But when Will called it to Andrew Folger, I heard it plain.

"Fight on till Cap'n's gone!"

In a second or two more, every man of us had it in his heart. Thus a sending unto Farmer Blood's soul, or an impulse rising in it and sounding forth upon his lips, became our watch cry. It was not a sailor's saying. Sailors would think of us as fighting as long as our captain bade us, and stopping at his command. But Farmer came from the Green Mountains, and he saw what we had not yet seen. The murderous fire would go on. It would be Farmer Blood's turn next to fall, or some shipmate of his that he loved in his manly way, or Mate Hedric's or mine, but might Captain Phillips be spared to be among the very last! Until he fell we would fight at his command, but we would also fight by our wills, by the injunctions of our souls. Captain Phillips would know that dual motive. He need not bear the burden alone; he would not bid us stop against his own will, his own soul's injunction, in the hope of saving life. We were Americans, believing all men were created equal. While we fought on under his high command, we would put it to proof.

He sent men to the hold to bring up sheet iron we were using as ballast, with which to make flimsy shelters for the guncrews. These could not stop the cast-iron hailstones, but they might turn fragments of metal and splinters of wood flying in their wake and prolong a few lives. Before they could return, the pirate raked our decks again with the lethal grape. George Greenough, who less than three months ago had gone down to the gate of death only to be hauled up by my right arm, went back to stay. Edward Piper, one of my best gunners, had a ball through his belly, but it mercifully broke some lock of his life, probably his spinal cord, for he fell down dead. And then Mate Hedric, whom no one knew had been hit, reeled to the mast, clutched it with both hands, then spoke in a tone of command.

"Blast the dirty black legs—blast 'em—blast 'em."

Only then we saw the crimson torrent pouring from his trouser leg. As someone sprang to his help, he shook his head and quietly lay down. When I glanced again at him, the swab of death had been drawn across his face.

But meanwhile we had fired two salvos, and one of our balls had hit cleanly one of the pirate's guns, for we heard it blow up, and saw the flying metal shining in the sun, and it stood to reason we had wiped out its crew.

Now the pirate's rigging was thick with spotters and spies, showing black as buzzards on a death-watch tree. No doubt they knew our loss—five out of our company of sixteen—for again they held fire, as the English-speaking traitor bellowed through a megaphone. The sound came thin but clear.

"Strike your damned Stars and Stripes, or we'll kill every man."

Our answer was a blast from four guns, fired one after another as our ship swung clumsily. Two balls hit the pirate close to the water-line, hampering her awhile, and giving more time for our rescue if an English frigate were running to our help. Sir Godwine Tarlton had told our captain there were several in these waters. We had seen none at Marsala, but it was not unlikely that one lay in the harbor at Trapani, fifteen miles away, almost in sound of our guns beating back against the north wind: anyway her scouts might bring her news of the battle. I did not believe it. I could not, but did not ask why not, lest an unspeakable horror should numb my brain. The fact remained that Captain Phillips believed it, and it had been one of the props to his heart when he had ordered battle. No doubt he, too, shared the crew's most fond, wild, but poorest-grounded hope that one lucky shot would strike the pirate's magazine and blow her to pieces.

Her crew were putting out a spar, fast to the rope. When they had done the same on her larboard, she would have a jury rudder whereby slowly and clumsily she could get the wind on her beam and run down on us. Meanwhile she would not dally with us any more. She had forsaken the hope of making slaves of many of us, to sell or hold for ransom. All the guns she could train blazed in a broken salvo, and each had been shotted with grape. The deadly hail swept our decks in swashing flurries, in such rapid succession we could not see who fell.

But soon we saw how many more lay on the deck and how few remained. Will Greenough went to join his brother, George, a ball in the lungs serving to end their brief separation that I thought neither could bear. The wonderful eyes of Andrew Folger, the sharpest I had ever seen in a human head, were instantly turned to still, dark jelly by a three-cornered fragment of casing striking him full on the forehead. Washington Peabody, our youngest and most gay, son of a prosperous shipowner in Boston, reeled to the rail and pitched over. And like a tower shattered down the man most brotherly to me of any man aboard, a man who loved me and whom I loved. I looked at his plain face and rugged form. He turned his eyes upon me and spoke once more.

"Good-by, Homer. Better luck next time."

"Good-by, Farmer Blood."

Then up spoke Sparrow, Enoch Sutler, in the piercing treble that he employed in his greatest moments.

"Fight on till Cap'n's gone!"

That would not be long. At the next burst of grape, I saw Captain Phillips clutch his belly and sink down.

I sprang to the quarter-deck and crouched beside him to hear any last command. His greatness was in his face, stamped on my soul, when he raised his head and spoke.

"Mr. Whitman, I'm wounded unto death. Bring one of the crew to bear witness to my last words, and both of ye he beneath the gunnels while I give 'em ye, and order all left alive to protect themselves the best they can,"

I called the order and summoned Ezra Owens, who had longed to be a doctor, the oldest man before the mast. He was gray in the face, but steady and in perfect mind.

"I've a dreadful question to put to ye, Mr. Whitman, but I'll require the truest answer ye can make."

"Aye, sir."

"Has it crossed your mind that the captain who advised me to take this course might have betrayed us?"

"It's been deep within my mind, but I've not confessed it until now."

"If ye live, and if ye can, establish the truth of it. If it be true, which God forbid, do all ye can that lawful punishment may be visited upon him."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"Now mark me well. The reason I engaged a ship so greatly stronger was I could not bear for the Vindictive to fall into her hands, and be made a pirate, and prey upon American vessels and other Christian ships while we wore chains. But maybe I shouldn't have done it. I'll not know until I stand before the judgment seat of God."

"Right or wrong, we bless you for it, Cap'n," Ezra Owens said when I could not speak.

Then our talk was briefly arrested. In the belief that all our men were dead or had fled the battle and our guns silenced, the pirate captain had ordered his longboat launched. Into it had dropped thirty or so of his turbaned crew, who now were making toward us. They did not know that our signal gun, a short four-pounder light as a carronade, was shotted and primed.

Enoch Sutler wormed across the deck with a lighted match in his hand, Sam Hopkins and Charley Jervis crept from their cubbies to join him, and then 'Giny Jim, who had swabbed out guns and passed powder and shot throughout the battle, crawled along the scupper and lent them his strong black hands. Prone under the gunnels, they somehow moved the carriage and depressed the muzzle. When the pirate's longboat had approached within two cables' lengths, Enoch found his aim and brought his match to touchhole.

No cannon shot ever sped more true. The boat heaved up from the water as though struck by the flukes of a whale and broke into countless pieces. Now there were only black dots, strangely like a flock of ducks, to mark the spot, and these swiftly scattered or disappeared.

There came a passing glint into Captain Phillips's eyes. Ezra Owens flushed and nodded to himself, as though a job were finished, some great account closed.

"Mr. Whitman, I'll leave ye the ship—to be her captain and her owner, for she's mine to dispose of as I see fit—and with her I leave ye a cruel decision to make. I can't make it for ye, for if I did what my heart prompts, 'twould not be fair to ye few remaining because I'm nigh to death and have naught to lose. It's whether to blow her up, so she can die in honor and not be sullied by falling into pirates' hands. By using a long fuse, ye few who are left can swim clear—ye good swimmers can help the poor ones—but I fear the pirates will not give you even a slave's chance, but take a cruel revenge."

Before I could answer, grapeshot burst three times over the deck. Two of the four gunners—big 'Giny Jim and little Enoch Sutler-continued to make for their cubbies. The other two, Sam Hopkins and Charley Jervis, stopped and lay still. A dark red puddle under them became a swiftly spreading pool.

"We'll sink her and swim clear, Cap'n Phillips," I told him in the stillness.

"I count it for the good of God and man. Now I'll go off watch and to sleep."

We left him on his quarter-deck, for that was where he belonged when the ship went down, as his soul would bid us if it could speak. The four of us who remained alive made our way to our magazine. Swift moments later we had bent six feet of fuse to a fifty-pound cask of powder, lighted its end, and crept back to the deck. I wished we could use a longer fuse and hide the cask, so that the ship would be swarming with rats when fire and powder met, but there was no surety they would not find the set and foil our last great stroke. Dropping overside, we joined hands.

When we had swum a cable's length from the ship, we slowed our pace and kept a close watch behind us. So it came to pass we saw the first red burst of the explosion. The beautiful ship seemed bathed in crimson flame a good second before the thunder reached our ears, and by then the billowing smoke concealed her dissolution. What I thought was her wheel rocketed into the air, stopped, then fell with increasing speed. The smoke drifted away. Nothing was left but scattered flotsam a-rock on the gentle waves.

"I'll tell you a good game," said Ezra Owens. "Let's all get a load of air and dive as deep as we can before we take in water. The man who drowns shallowest is a lousy lubber."

"No, I'll play every chance for life and want all of you with me."

"We've taken a good toll of the dirty dogs. We've better than played even when you count heads. Why let 'em sell us into slavery to live and die at their mercy—all who're left of the Vindictive's company, us four Americans?"

For a few seconds, my heart yearning for death, I almost yielded. Then Enoch Sutler—Sparrow—the smallest man of our great company, spoke strangely.

"Who'd remember her name?"

"I spent ten years in prison, and this'll be longer and harder," Ezra Owens went on, not understanding what Enoch had said. "We sailed 'neath the flag of freedom, so let's go free."

"Stay with us, Ezra, to the last," I said.

"I'm sorry I can't oblige you."

Jerking free from Jim's hand, he dived under the waves and instantly disappeared.

We three remaining looked toward the pirate. A boat manned by a score of Mussulmen was making toward us.