ad beheld, in my
dreams, the Petrel about to take the water, and Nancy Willett standing
very straight making a little speech and crashing a bottle of wine
across the bows. This was the content of the mysterious parcel; she
had stolen it from her father's cellar. But the number of uninvited
spectators, which had not been foreseen, considerably modified the
programme,--as the newspapers would have said. They pushed and crowded
around the ship, and made frank and even brutal remarks as to her
seaworthiness; even Nancy, inured though she was to the masculine sex,
had fled to the heights, and it looked at this supreme moment as though
we should have to fight for the Petrel. An attempt to muster her doughty
buccaneers failed; the gunner too had fled,--Gene Hollister; Ham Durrett
and the Ewanses were nowhere to be seen, and a muster revealed only Tom,
the fidus Achates, and Grits Jarvis.

"Ah, s'y!" he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing hordes. "Stand
back, carn't yer? I'll bash yer face in, Johnny. Whose boat is this?"

Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency? Here, in truth,
was the drama staged,--my drama, had I only been able to realize it. The
good ship beached, the headhunters hemming us in on all sides, the scene
prepared for one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had
so graphically related as an essential part of our adventures.

"Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar," proposed one of the
head-hunters,--meaning me.

"I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him," said Grits, and then resorted
to appeal. "I s'y, carn't yer stand back and let a chap 'ave a charnst?"

The head-hunters only jeered. And what shall be said of the Captain
in this moment of peril? Shall it be told that his heart was beating
wildly?--bumping were a better word. He was trying to remember that
he was the Captain. Otherwise, he must admit with shame that he, too,
should have fled. So much for romance when the test comes. Will he
remain to fall fighting for his ship? Like Horatius, he glanced up at
the hill, where, instead of the porch of the home where he would fain
have been, he beheld a wisp of a girl standing alone, her hat on the
back of her head, her hair flying in the wind, gazing intently down at
him in his danger. The renegade crew was nowhere to be seen. There are
those who demand the presence of a woman in order to be heroes....

"Give us a chance, can't you?" he cried, repeating Grits's appeal in
not