s to hiss
their angry way to leeward in her wake. On she went, far off to sea,
where the trade wind was strongest, disdaining gentle zephyrs near the
land, with her great square yards swinging round at every watch while
beating to windward--the tacks close down, yards as fine as they would
lay, and the heavy sheets flat aft.

Every evening the surgeon, the purser, the chaplain, the major, and the
old sailing-master were in the cabin, going over the chase of a certain
pirate in a schooner "Centipede" away down on the Darien Coast, with
Cape Garotte there under their lee, and the vultures and the sharks
grinding the bones and tearing the flesh of the half of a man with the
tusk gleaming out of his wiry mustache; and the padre, with his eyes
staring wide open, and the crucifix, borne away by the carnivorous birds
of prey.

All of those dreadful particulars, together with matters that had gone
before--of a lost boy, a heart-broken mother, and a murdered mate, Mr.
Binks, on board the brig "Martha Blunt"--the party at Escondido, the
snuff-box, and Paul Darcantel--all about him, too, from the tragedy on
the plantation, his despair, and reckless life afterward, when he served
in slavers, where he did something to allay the sufferings of the poor
wretches; and afterward how he was trepanned to the "Doce Leguas," went
a cruise with Mr. Bill Gibbs, whose leg he hacked off with a hand-saw,
not knowing at the time about the locket; the little child he had saved;
how that child had saved him from his torture on the trestle with his
mouselike teeth; how he had wandered the wide world over searching and
searching for the mother of that boy!

And there the boy was--the manly, brave young fellow now--whom officers
and sailors had always loved, flying away with the dark doctor--no
longer Darcantel, but Harry Piron--with his fond father and mother in
the distance, and the sweet girl he adored with her blonde head resting
in her mother's lap.

[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-LOGGED LAUNCH.]

Ay, every soul in the ship knew all about it, and talked of it, and
drank to the happiness of the young couple--all save Dick Hardy, who
moved energetically about the frigate's decks, with his eyes every
where, below and aloft, prompt, sharp, and quick, quite like Cleveland,
there, beside him, when they were together in the old "Scourge"
during the hurricane, and chased, to her destruction, the "Centipede."

"Sail ho!" sang out the man on the fore-t