was the
difficulty to keep the number of those eager for the adventure within
the bounds he had indicated.

You are not to suppose that in all this Sir Oliver was acting upon any
preconcerted plan. Whilst he had lain on the heights watching that fine
ship beating up against the wind it had come to him that with such a
vessel under him it were a fond adventure to sail to England, to descend
upon that Cornish coast abruptly as a thunderbolt, and present the
reckoning to his craven dastard of a brother. He had toyed with the
fancy, dreamily almost as men build their castles in Spain. Then in
the heat of conflict it had entirely escaped his mind, to return in the
shape of a resolve when he came to find himself face to face with Jasper
Leigh.

The skipper and the ship conjointly provided him with all the means to
realize that dream he had dreamt. There was none to oppose his will,
no reason not to indulge his cruel fancy. Perhaps, too, he might see
Rosamund again, might compel her to hear the truth from him. And there
was Sir John Killigrew. He had never been able to determine whether Sir
John had been his friend or his foe in the past; but since it was Sir
John who had been instrumental in setting up Lionel in Sir Oliver's
place--by inducing the courts to presume Sir Oliver's death on the score
that being a renegade he must be accounted dead at law--and since it was
Sir John who was contriving this wedding between Lionel and Rosamund,
why, Sir John, too, should be paid a visit and should be informed of the
precise nature of the thing he did.

With the forces at his disposal in those days of his absolute lordship
of life and death along the African littoral, to conceive was with
Oliver-Reis no more than the prelude to execution. The habit of swift
realization of his every wish had grown with him, and that habit guided
now his course.

He made his preparations quickly, and on the morrow the Spanish
carack--lately labelled Nuestra Senora de las Llagas, but with that
label carefully effaced from her quarter--trimmed her sails and stood
out for the open Atlantic, navigated by Captain Jasper Leigh. The three
galleys under the command of Biskaine-el-Borak crept slowly eastward and
homeward to Algiers, hugging the coast, as was the corsair habit. The
wind favoured Oliver so well that within ten days of rounding Cape St.
Vincent he had his first glimpse of the Lizard.

CHAPTER IV. THE RAID

In the estuary of the Rive