"You shall have a chance to swim for it," Peter Blood continued. "It's
not above a quarter of a mile to the headland yonder, and with ordinary
luck ye should manage it. Faith, you're fat enough to float. Come on!
Now, don't be hesitating or it's a long voyage ye'll be going with us,
and the devil knows what may happen to you. You're not loved any more
than you deserve."

Colonel Bishop mastered himself, and rose. A merciless despot, who had
never known the need for restraint in all these years, he was doomed by
ironic fate to practise restraint in the very moment when his feelings
had reached their most violent intensity.

Peter Blood gave an order. A plank was run out over the gunwale, and
lashed down.

"If you please, Colonel," said he, with a graceful flourish of
invitation.

The Colonel looked at him, and there was hell in his glance. Then,
taking his resolve, and putting the best face upon it, since no other
could help him here, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his fine coat
of biscuit-coloured taffetas, and climbed upon the plank.

A moment he paused, steadied by a hand that clutched the ratlines,
looking down in terror at the green water rushing past some
five-and-twenty feet below.

"Just take a little walk, Colonel, darling," said a smooth, mocking
voice behind him.

Still clinging, Colonel Bishop looked round in hesitation, and saw the
bulwarks lined with swarthy faces--the faces of men that as lately as
yesterday would have turned pale under his frown, faces that were now
all wickedly agrin.

For a moment rage stamped out his fear. He cursed them aloud venomously
and incoherently, then loosed his hold and stepped out upon the plank.
Three steps he took before he lost his balance and went tumbling into
the green depths below.

When he came to the surface again, gasping for air, the Cinco Llagas
was already some furlongs to leeward. But the roaring cheer of mocking
valediction from the rebels-convict reached him across the water, to
drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul.

CHAPTER X. DON DIEGO

Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez awoke, and with languid eyes in aching
head, he looked round the cabin, which was flooded with sunlight from
the square windows astern. Then he uttered a moan, and closed his eyes
again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache in his head. Lying thus,
he attempted to think, to locate himself in time and space. But between
the pain in his head and the