ain and the wooden crucifix that was nailed below it.
A moment later and to a thundering roar of "Al-hamdolliah!" the green
crescent floated out upon the breeze.

Sakr-el-Bahr thrust his way through the press in the galleon's waist;
his corsairs fell back before him, making way, and as he advanced they
roared his name deliriously and waved their scimitars to acclaim him
this hawk of the sea, as he was named, this most valiant of all the
servants of Islam. True he had taken no actual part in the engagement.
It had been too brief and he had arrived too late for that. But his had
been the daring to conceive an ambush at so remote a western point, and
his the brain that had guided them to this swift sweet victory in the
name of Allah the One.

The decks were slippery with blood, and strewn with wounded and dying
men, whom already the Muslimeen were heaving overboard--dead and wounded
alike when they were Christians, for to what end should they be troubled
with maimed slaves?

About the mainmast were huddled the surviving Spaniards, weaponless and
broken in courage, a herd of timid, bewildered sheep.

Sakr-el-Bahr stood forward, his light eyes considering them grimly. They
must number close upon a hundred, adventurers in the main who had set
out from Cadiz in high hope of finding fortune in the Indies. Their
voyage had been a very brief one; their fate they knew--to toil at the
oars of the Muslim galleys, or at best, to be taken to Algiers or Tunis
and sold there into the slavery of some wealthy Moor.

Sakr-el-Bahr's glance scanned them appraisingly, and rested finally on
the captain, who stood slightly in advance, his face livid with rage
and grief. He was richly dressed in the Castilian black, and his velvet
thimble-shaped hat was heavily plumed and decked by a gold cross.

Sakr-el-Bahr salaamed ceremoniously to him. "Fortuna de guerra, senor
capitan," said he in fluent Spanish. "What is your name?"

"I am Don Paulo de Guzman," the man answered, drawing himself erect, and
speaking with conscious pride in himself and manifest contempt of his
interlocutor.

"So! A gentleman of family! And well-nourished and sturdy, I should
judge. In the sok at Algiers you might fetch two hundred philips. You
shall ransom yourself for five hundred."

"Por las Entranas de Dios!" swore Don Paulo who, like all pious Spanish
Catholics, favoured the oath anatomical. What else he would have added
in his fury is not known, for Sakr-el-Bah