ess_--while her gear's sound and she's all the wind she
craves for."

"I believe you, Captain." She looked over the roaring side. Long and
loose and lean, she was lengthening out like a quarter-horse, and he
was singing, but with a puzzling savageness of tone:

"Roll, you hunted slaver
Roll your battened hatches down--"

"Good-night, Captain." She turned to me. She was pale, but 'twas the
pallor of enduring bravery. There was no paling of her dark eyes. Even
darker were they now. "Good-night--" She hesitated. "Good-night, Guy."

"Good-night, Miss Shiela," and I handed her down the companion-way. At
the foot of the stairs she looked up and whispered, "You must take care
of that wound, Guy." And I answered, "No fear," and then her face seemed
to melt away in a mist under the cabin lamp.

Astern of us the dawn leaped up. It had been black night; in a moment,
almost, it was light again. I remembered what Captain Blaise had said of
a sunset in Jamaica; but here it was the other way about--a purple,
round-rimmed dish, and from a segment of it the blood-red salad of a sun
upleaping. And pictured clouds rolling up above the blood-red. And
against the splashes of the sun the tall palm-trees. And in the new
light the signal flambeaux paling. And the white spray of the bar
tossing high, and across the spray the white-belted squadron tacking and
filling futilely.

I grew cold and wondered what was wrong. I dimly saw Captain Blaise come
running to me. "Guy! Guy!" he called. I remember also myself saying,
"Nothing wrong with me, sir--and no harm if there is. It's sunrise on
the Slave Coast and the _Dancing Bess_ she's homeward bound!"

V

The blue-belted Trades! Day and day, week and week, the little curly,
white-headed seas, the unspecked blue sky, and the ceaseless caress of
the pursuing wind. No yard nor sail, never a bowline, sheet, or halyard
to be handled, and the _Bess_ bounding ever ahead. Beauty, peace, and a
leaping log--could the sea bring greater joy?

Captain Blaise had located the bullet--the second shot it must have
been--which had lodged under my right shoulder and cut it out. We were
nearing home, and the fever was now gone from me, but I was not yet able
to take my part on deck. "Perhaps to-morrow," she had said. And
to-morrow was come, and I lay there thinking, and at times trying to
write.

She had left me alone for a while. Her father had called her to hear
another of the Captain's stories. Thr