friends had got him his seat. He was nodding to me
and smiling faintly. I nodded, too, and smiled back. I was going to show
them that I was not cowed. The voice of the barrister said:

"M'luds and gentlemen of the jury, that finishes the Spanish evidence,
which was taken on commission on the island of Cuba. We shall produce
the officer of H. M. S. Elephant, to whom he was surrendered by the
Spanish authorities at Havana, thus proving the prisoner to be the
pirate Nikola, and no other. We come, now, to the specific instance,
m'luds and gentlemen, an instance as vile..."

It was some little time before I had grasped how absolutely the Spanish
evidence damned me. It was as if, once I fell into the hands of the
English officer on Havana quays, the identity of Nikola could by no
manner of means be shaken from round my neck. The barrister came to the
facts.

A Kingston ship had been boarded... and there was the old story over
again. I seemed to see the Rio Medio schooner rushing towards where I
and old Cowper and old Lumsden looked back from the poop to see her come
alongside; the strings of brown pirates pour in empty-handed, and
out laden. Only in the case of the _Victoria_ there were added the
ferocities of "the prisoner at the bar, m'luds and gentlemen of the
jury, a fiend in human shape, as we shall prove with the aid of the most
respectable witnesses...."

The man in the wig sat down, and, before I understood what was
happening, a fat, rosy man--the Attorney-General--whose cheerful gills
gave him a grotesque resemblance to a sucking pig, was calling "Edward
Sadler," and the name blared like sudden fire leaping up all over the
court. The Attorney-General wagged his gown into a kind of bunch behind
his hips, and a man, young, fair, with a reddish beard and a shiny suit
of clothes, sprang into a little box facing the jury. He bowed nervously
in several directions, and laughed gently; then he looked at me and
scowled. The Attorney-General cleared his throat pleasantly...

"Mr. Edward Sadler, you were, on May 25th, chief mate of the good ship
_Victoria...._"

The fair man with the beard told his story, the old story of the ship
with its cargo of coffee and dye-wood; its good passage past the Gran
Caymanos; the becalming off the Cuban shore in latitude so and so, and
the boarding of a black schooner, calling itself a Mexican privateer. I
could see all that.

"The prisoner at the bar came alongside in a boat, with seve