irons, and one of the mutineers stood
sentry in the cabin over him, while Mancillo and the rest went on deck
and set about disposing of the remaining prisoners, Mr. Todd was the
first man ordered into the boat, which had now been lowered and brought
alongside. Then Mancillo handed him the chart and a compass.

"Here," said the mutineer, "we give you fine chart, just made for you by
the mate. You see he has write out for you your course, so you will soon
make the land." Then he added with a grin--"Is not Antonio Mancillo
damn good fellow, eh?"

Poor Todd looked at the chart, and then at the writing at the back of
it, and miserably anxious and dejected as he was, he found it hard to
resist smiling at the clever way in which his fellow-officer had got to
windward of the Chileno. However, he pulled a long face, and said there
was mighty little chance of reaching anywhere but a savage island, with
such a poor chart as that. "What," he added angrily, "is the good of
this writing? We could find a cannibal island without this," and he
contemptuously flung the chart into the stern sheets of the boat.

Then, one by one, the wounded steward, the carpenter, and a Swedish
seaman whose name is not recorded, were brought on deck and forced, at
the point of cutlasses, to enter the boat, which was then cast adrift.

As the boat dropped astern, Mancillo ran up a flag of some description,
and the remaining mutineers gathered on the poop and jeered at Todd and
his companions; their insulting cries and mocking words reaching the
ears of the half-maddened Loftgreen in the cabin, and reminding him that
he was alone and at the mercy of utter scoundrels, with any one of whom
his life was not worth a moment's purchase.

But although they were not manacled, the second mate and his companions
in the boat were in little better plight, for their distance from the
nearest land they could hope to make was nearly six hundred miles. But
Todd was no faint-heart.

"Better the open sea, my lads," he said, "than the brig and those damned
Spanish cut-throats. We are at least free men. Poor Mr. Loftgreen, I
fear, will be murdered."

Then after dressing the steward's wound--a cutlass slash which had
severed the collar-bone-he ordered the sail to be hoisted and took the
tiller. This done he steered a due west course, which according to the
mate's chart would bring them to the easternmost of the Faumotus--a
group of low-lying islands almost unknown in th