ped, to dog me all over the world. Ho! I have no time
to lose; he may be here at any moment."

This was the last connected speech that Captain Brand ever made in this
world, or in the world to come, perhaps, for at the last word Paul
Darcantel rose in all his revengeful majesty before him. With folded
arms he bent his dark, stern eyes upon the pirate, wherein the revenge
of twenty years was gleaming with a concentrated power.

"You palsied villain! the oath I took to you, and for which I have been
accursed, expired yesterday! I took another myself, when we stood here
last together, and I am come to fulfill that oath, and--strike!"

His terrible voice and words came back in an echo from the crag, and
they seemed with their intense energy to pierce and shrivel the man
before him into sleet. And the pirate would have fallen had not two
huge, black, lignum-vitae paws grappled him about the body, pinioning his
arms to his sides as if they had been bolted through and through, while
at the same moment another pair of tough, sea-weed flippers wound a
lashing round his straight legs, and they laid him gently down on the
sandy esplanade.

"The trestle, Banou. And you, Ben, bring the hide strands, the faded old
cord, and that black altar-cloth!"

The pirate lay on his back, his eyes wide open--for he could not shut
them, since the lids had gone in frost--but the solid balls, light green
now in the light, rolled from side to side. He recognized the old
apparatus too, though it was in different hands than those of Pedillo
and his confederate; and he saw, also, that, though the pale green rope
was rotten, yet his knowledge of nautical matters taught him that it yet
might bear a taut strain, and that those coils of hide thongs never gave
way by any amount of tugging, and he saw as well that they had been
recently dipped in grease.

But what was to be done with that rotten, moth-eaten old cloth, which
the men used to play monte on on Saturday nights in the sheds, and on
which the good padre played _his_ cards likewise in the chapel? It was
not to keep the cold air away from him, or shield his half-naked body
from the poisonous insects. Then what could it be for?

"Lift him up, men, and when you lash him down, leave only that little
finger free!"

Ben Brown squatted himself on a stone beside the bier, and with his
cutlass unbuckled and laid on the sand, and sleeves rolled up, began
his work as if he had a chafing-mat to make fo