ugh blood cry aloud from stones, there
is no man to hear.

I easily guessed that M. Picot would try to keep me with him till M.
Radisson had sailed. Then I must needs lock hands with piracy.

Hortense and I were pawns in the game.

At one moment I upbraided him for bringing Hortense to this wilderness
of murder and pillage. At another I considered that a banished
gentleman could not choose his goings. How could I stay with M. Picot
and desert M. de Radisson? How could I go to M. de Radisson and
abandon Hortense?

"Straight is the narrow way," Eli Kirke oft cried out as he expounded
Holy Writ.

Ah, well, if the narrow way is straight, it has a trick of becoming
tangled in a most terrible snarl!

Wheeling the log-end right about, I sat down to await M. Picot. There
was stirring in the next apartment. An ebon head poked past the door
curtain, looked about, and withdrew without detecting me. The face I
remembered at once. It was the wife of M. Picot's blackamoor. Only
three men had passed from the cave. If the blackamoor were one, M.
Picot and Le Borgne _must_ be the others.

Footsteps grated on the pebbles outside. I rose with beating heart to
meet M. Picot, who held my fate in his hands. Then a ringing
pistol-shot set my pulse jumping.

I ran to the door. Something plunged heavily against the curtain. The
robe ripped from the hangings. In the flood of moonlight a man pitched
face forward to the cave floor. He reeled up with a cry of rage,
caught blindly at the air, uttered a groan, fell back.

"M. Picot!"

Blanched and faint, the French doctor lay with a crimsoning pool wet
under his head. "I am shot! What will become of her?" he groaned. "I
am shot! It was Gillam! It was Gillam!"

Hortense and the negress came running from the inner cave. Le Borgne
and the blackamoor dashed from the open with staring horror.

"Lift me up! For God's sake, air!" cried M. Picot.

We laid him on the pelts in the doorway, Le Borgne standing guard
outside.

Hortense stooped to stanch the wound, but the doctor motioned her off
with a fierce impatience, and bade the negress lead her away. Then he
lay with closed eyes, hands clutched to the pelts, and shuddering
breath.

The blackamoor had rushed to the inner cave for liquor, when M. Picot
opened his eyes with a strange far look fastened upon me.

"Swear it," he commanded.

And I thought his mind wandering.

He groaned heavily. "Don't you understa