pondering how in his turn he might
perhaps serve Sir Oliver by a frank confession of all that he knew
of the influences that had gone to make Sir Oliver what he was. This
resolve uplifted him, and oddly enough it uplifted him all the more when
he reflected that perhaps he would be jeopardizing his own neck by the
confession upon which he had determined.

So through that endless night he sat, nursing his aching head, and
enheartened by the first purpose he had ever conceived of a truly good
and altruistic deed. Yet fate it seemed was bent upon frustrating that
purpose of his. For when at dawn they came to hale Sir Oliver to his
doom, they paid no heed to Jasper Leigh's demands that he, too, should
be taken before Sir John.

"Thee bean't included in our orders," said a seaman shortly.

"Maybe not," retorted Master Leigh, "because Sir John little knows what
it is in my power to tell him. Take me before him, I say, that he may
hear from me the truth of certain matters ere it be too late."

"Be still," the seaman bade him, and struck him heavily across the face,
so that he reeled and collapsed into a corner. "Thee turn will come
soon. Just now our business be with this other heathen."

"Naught that you can say would avail," Sir Oliver assured him quietly.
"But I thank you for the thought that marks you for my friend. My hands
are bound, Jasper. Were it otherwise I would beg leave to clasp your
own. Fare you well!"

Sir Oliver was led out into the golden sunlight which almost blinded him
after his long confinement in that dark hole. They were, he gathered,
to conduct him to the cabin where a short mockery of a trial was to be
held. But in the waist their progress was arrested by an officer, who
bade them wait.

Sir Oliver sat down upon a coil of rope, his guard about him, an object
of curious inspection to the rude seamen. They thronged the forecastle
and the hatchways to stare at this formidable corsair who once had been
a Cornish gentleman and who had become a renegade Muslim and a terror to
Christianity.

Truth to tell, the sometime Cornish gentleman was difficult to discern
in him as he sat there still wearing the caftan of cloth of silver over
his white tunic and a turban of the same material swathed about his
steel headpiece that ended in a spike. Idly he swung his brown sinewy
legs, naked from knee to ankle, with the inscrutable calm of the
fatalist upon his swarthy hawk face with its light agate eyes and bla