om
below sounds reached them of the orgy on the gun-deck: a rich male voice
was singing an obscene ballad to which the others chanted in chorus:

"Y estos son los usos de Castilla y de Leon!"

"From what I've seen to-day I can well believe it," said Mr. Blood, and
whispered: "Forward--after me."

Crouching low, they glided, noiseless as shadows, to the quarter-deck
rail, and thence slipped without sound down into the waist. Two thirds
of them were armed with muskets, some of which they had found in the
overseer's house, and others supplied from the secret hoard that Mr.
Blood had so laboriously assembled against the day of escape. The
remainder were equipped with knives and cutlasses.

In the vessel's waist they hung awhile, until Mr. Blood had satisfied
himself that no other sentinel showed above decks but that inconvenient
fellow in the prow. Their first attention must be for him. Mr. Blood,
himself, crept forward with two companions, leaving the others in the
charge of that Nathaniel Hagthorpe whose sometime commission in the
King's Navy gave him the best title to this office.

Mr. Blood's absence was brief. When he rejoined his comrades there was
no watch above the Spaniards' decks.

Meanwhile the revellers below continued to make merry at their ease
in the conviction of complete security. The garrison of Barbados was
overpowered and disarmed, and their companions were ashore in complete
possession of the town, glutting themselves hideously upon the fruits
of victory. What, then, was there to fear? Even when their quarters were
invaded and they found themselves surrounded by a score of wild,
hairy, half-naked men, who--save that they appeared once to have been
white--looked like a horde of savages, the Spaniards could not believe
their eyes.

Who could have dreamed that a handful of forgotten plantation-slaves
would have dared to take so much upon themselves?

The half-drunken Spaniards, their laughter suddenly quenched, the song
perishing on their lips, stared, stricken and bewildered at the levelled
muskets by which they were checkmated.

And then, from out of this uncouth pack of savages that beset them,
stepped a slim, tall fellow with light-blue eyes in a tawny face, eyes
in which glinted the light of a wicked humour. He addressed them in the
purest Castilian.

"You will save yourselves pain and trouble by regarding yourselves my
prisoners, and suffering yourselves to be quietly bestowed out of harm