gold-brown hair fluttered distractingly in the
morning breeze.

Captain Blood bared his head and bowed silently in a greeting which she
returned composedly and formally.

"What is happening, Lord Julian?" she enquired.

As if to answer her a third gun spoke from the ships towards which she
was looking intent and wonderingly. A frown rumpled her brow. She looked
from one to the other of the men who stood there so glum and obviously
ill at ease.

"They are ships of the Jamaica fleet," his lordship answered her.

It should in any case have been a sufficient explanation. But before
more could be added, their attention was drawn at last to Ogle, who came
bounding up the broad ladder, and to the men lounging aft in his wake,
in all of which, instinctively, they apprehended a vague menace.

At the head of the companion, Ogle found his progress barred by Blood,
who confronted him, a sudden sternness in his face and in every line of
him.

"What's this?" the Captain demanded sharply. "Your station is on the
gun-deck. Why have you left it?"

Thus challenged, the obvious truculence faded out of Ogle's bearing,
quenched by the old habit of obedience and the natural dominance that
was the secret of the Captain's rule over his wild followers. But it
gave no pause to the gunner's intention. If anything it increased his
excitement.

"Captain," he said, and as he spoke he pointed to the pursuing ships,
"Colonel Bishop holds us. We're in no case either to run or fight."

Blood's height seemed to increase, as did his sternness.

"Ogle," said he, in a voice cold and sharp as steel, "your station is on
the gun-deck. You'll return to it at once, and take your crew with you,
or else...."

But Ogle, violent of mien and gesture, interrupted him.

"Threats will not serve, Captain."

"Will they not?"

It was the first time in his buccaneering career that an order of his
had been disregarded, or that a man had failed in the obedience to which
he pledged all those who joined him. That this insubordination should
proceed from one of those whom he most trusted, one of his old Barbados
associates, was in itself a bitterness, and made him reluctant to that
which instinct told him must be done. His hand closed over the butt of
one of the pistols slung before him.

"Nor will that serve you," Ogle warned him, still more fiercely. "The
men are of my thinking, and they'll have their way."

"And what way may that be?"

"The way to make