e Isthmus, on the
Pacific side, by sea, as far as Chili, when he went into the interior to
Peru, crossed the Andes, and followed down the Orinoco to Para, when he
sailed again for England."

"Oh! no other motive than curiosity?"

"Perhaps he had; for he once told me he had some old scores to settle
with the man who commanded the pirate, and if he was alive he felt quite
sure he would, one of those days, put him to death. My father, sir, is a
very determined person, and never forgets an oath."

"Truly, monsieur, you interest me. But what sort of a man in appearance
is your father--a doctor, I think you said?"

"He is a tall gentleman of about fifty, sir, though he looks much older;
for he has suffered deeply in early life, when my mother--a--died; but I
shall have the pleasure of introducing him to you, colonel. He is now on
board our frigate at Kingston, and told me he would be up here to-morrow
or the next day."

"Ah! thank you extremely, Monsieur Darcantel. I shall have--a--much
curiosity to see him."

No more words that night; but much thinking and moving of thin lips, and
eyes staring in the dark, wide open. There was low grating of teeth,
too! And a man lay in that large room on a narrow cot, surrounded by a
gauze net; and, so far as mental torture went, it was not unlike a
trestle net we once saw without gauze, where a gaunt frame was
stretched, with myriads of sand-flies, musquitoes, and stinging
insects sucking his heart's blood. Sometimes the eyelids closed, as if
they were a film of ice forming over the blue cold orbs within; and
again the fabric cracked, and they were wide open once more. They
could read, too, those frozen orbs; and like heavy flakes of snow
falling on bloodstained decks, till it covered with a weight of lead the
stark, stiff corpse beneath, they yet tried to pierce into the dark
region beyond. And the heart beat with a slow and measured tramp, like
a moose crunching through the sharp, treacherous crust of snow, and
then stood stock-still! Had a letter, traced with the fingers of an
icicle, been congealed a hundred feet deep in the heart of a toppling
iceberg on the coast of Labrador, those eyes could have read it as
clear as day!

"You infamous pirate, Captain Brand!" it began--"the son of the man who
destroyed the 'Centipede' and her crew, and the boy whom your brutal
mate tore from the mother you saw at dinner to-day, are near you! That
calm, stern, determined doctor, too, whom yo