ace of execution after the hanging of
the seven pirates; and he had come into Ramon's store at the moment
when Carlos ("a piratical devil if ever there was one," the little man
protested) had drawn me into the back room, where Don Balthasar and
O'Brien and Seraphina sat waiting. The men who were employed to watch
Ramon's had never seen me leave again, and afterwards a secret tunnel
was discovered leading down to the quay.

"This, apparently, was the way by which the prisoner used to arrive and
quit the island secretly," he finished his evidence in chief, and the
beetle-browed, portly barrister sat down. I was not so stupid but what
I could see a little, even then, how the most innocent events of my past
were going to rise up and crush me; but I was certain I could twist him
into admitting the goodness of my tale which hadn't yet been told. He
knew I had been in Jamaica, and, put what construction he liked on it,
he would have to admit it. I called out:

"Thank God, my turn's come at last!"

The faces of the Attorney-General, the King's Advocate, Sir Robert
Gifford, Mr. Lawes, Mr. Jervis, of all the seven counsel that were
arrayed to crush me, lengthened into simultaneous grins, varying at the
jury-box. But I didn't care; I grinned, too. I was going to show them.

It was as if I flew at the throat of that little man. It seemed to me
that I must be able to crush a creature whose malice was as obvious and
as nugatory as the green and red rings that he exhibited in his hair
every few minutes. He wanted to show the jury that he had rings; that
he was a mincing swell; that I hadn't and that I was a bloody pirate. I
said:

"You know that during the whole two years Nichols was at Rio I was
an improver at Horton Pen with the Macdonalds, the agents of my
brother-in-law, Sir Ralph Rooksby. You must know these things. You were
one of the Duke of Manchester's spies."

We used to call the Duke's privy council that. "I certainly know
nothing of the sort," he said, folding his hands along the edge of the
witness-box, as if he had just thought of exhibiting his rings in that
manner. He was abominably cool. I said:

"You must have heard of me. The Topnambos knew me."

"The Topnambos used to talk of a blackguard with a name like Kemp who
kept himself mighty out of the way in the Vale."

"You knew I was on the island," I pinned him down.

"You used to _come_ to the island," he corrected. "I've just explained
how. But you were n