epented him his unpremeditated act so far as she was concerned--she
returned no slightest answer, gave no sign indeed that she heard a
word of it. Baffled, he stood gnawing his lip a moment, and gradually,
unreasonably perhaps, anger welled up from his heart. He turned and went
out again. Next he had visited his brother, to consider in silence a
moment the haggard, wild-eyed, unshorn wretch who shrank and cowered
before him in the consciousness of guilt. At last he returned to the
deck, and there, as I have said, he spent the greater portion of the
last three days of that strange voyage, reclining for the most part in
the sun and gathering strength from its ardour.

To-night as he paced under the moon a stealthy shadow crept up the
companion to call him gently by his English name--

"Sir Oliver!"

He started as if a ghost had suddenly leapt up to greet him. It was
Jasper Leigh who hailed him thus.

"Come up," he said. And when the fellow stood before him on the poop--"I
have told you already that here is no Sir Oliver. I am Oliver-Reis or
Sakr-el-Bahr, as you please, one of the Faithful of the Prophet's House.
And now what is your will?"

"Have I not served you faithfully and well?" quoth Captain Leigh.

"Who has denied it?"

"None. But neither has any acknowledged it. When you lay wounded below
it had been an easy thing for me to ha' played the traitor. I might ha'
sailed these ships into the mouth of Tagus. I might so by God!"

"You'ld have been carved in pieces on the spot," said Sakr-el-Bahr.

"I might have hugged the land and run the risk of capture and then
claimed my liberation from captivity."

"And found yourself back on the galleys of his Catholic Majesty. But
there! I grant that you have dealt loyally by me. You have kept your
part of the bond. I shall keep mine, never doubt it."

"I do not. But your part of the bond was to send me home again."

"Well?"

"The hell of it is that I know not where to find a home, I know not
where home may be after all these years. If ye send me forth, I shall
become a wanderer of no account."

"What else am I to do with you?"

"Faith now I am as full weary of Christians and Christendom as you was
yourself when the Muslims took the galley on which you toiled. I am a
man of parts, Sir Ol-Sakr-el-Bahr. No better navigator ever sailed a
ship from an English port, and I ha' seen a mort o' fighting and know
the art of it upon the sea. Can ye make naught of me here?"