ter him,
whirling the remaining ten feet of the broken oar, came Yusuf.

Sir Oliver confessed afterwards to knowing very little of what happened
in those moments. He came to a full possession of his senses to find
the fight at an end, a cloud of turbaned corsairs standing guard over a
huddle of Spaniards, others breaking open the cabin and dragging thence
the chests that it contained, others again armed with chisels and
mallets passing along the benches liberating the surviving slaves, of
whom the great majority were children of Islam.

Sir Oliver found himself face to face with the white-bearded leader of
the corsairs, who was leaning upon his scimitar and regarding him with
eyes at once amused and amazed. Our gentleman's naked body was splashed
from head to foot with blood, and in his right hand he still clutched
that yard of iron links with which he had wrought such ghastly
execution. Yusuf was standing at the corsair leader's elbow speaking
rapidly.

"By Allah, was ever such a lusty fighter seen!" cried the latter. "The
strength of the Prophet is within him thus to smite the unbelieving
pigs."

Sir Oliver grinned savagely.

"I was returning them some of their whip-lashes--with interest," said
he.

And those were the circumstances under which he came to meet the
formidable Asad-ed-Din, Basha of Algiers, those the first words that
passed between them.

Anon, when aboard Asad's own galley he was being carried to Barbary, he
was washed and his head was shaved all but the forelock, by which the
Prophet should lift him up to heaven when his earthly destiny should
come to be fulfilled. He made no protest. They washed and fed him and
gave him ease; and so that they did these things to him they might do
what else they pleased. At last arrayed in flowing garments that were
strange to him, and with a turban wound about his head, he was conducted
to the poop, where Asad sat with Yusuf under an awning, and he came to
understand that it was in compliance with the orders of Yusuf that he
had been treated as if he were a True-Believer.

Yusuf-ben-Moktar was discovered as a person of great consequence, the
nephew of Asad-ed-Din, and a favourite with that Exalted of Allah the
Sublime Portal himself, a man whose capture by Christians had been a
thing profoundly deplored. Accordingly his delivery from that thraldom
was matter for rejoicing. Being delivered, he bethought him of his
oar-mate, concerning whom indeed Asad-ed-Din