oded.

"You have given those damned rascals in Tortuga this warning so that
they may escape! That is what you have done. That is how you abuse the
commission that has saved your own neck!"

Peter Blood considered him steadily, his face impassive. "I will
remind you," he said at last, very quietly, "that the object in view
was--leaving out of account your own appetites which, as every one
knows, are just those of a hangman--to rid the Caribbean of buccaneers.
Now, I've taken the most effective way of accomplishing that object. The
knowledge that I've entered the King's service should in itself go far
towards disbanding the fleet of which I was until lately the admiral."

"I see!" sneered the Deputy-Governor malevolently. "And if it does not?"

"It will be time enough then to consider what else is to be done."

Lord Julian forestalled a fresh outburst on the part of Bishop.

"It is possible," he said, "that my Lord Sunderland will be satisfied,
provided that the solution is such as you promise."

It was a courteous, conciliatory speech. Urged by friendliness towards
Blood and understanding of the difficult position in which the buccaneer
found himself, his lordship was disposed to take his stand upon the
letter of his instructions. Therefore he now held out a friendly hand to
help him over the latest and most difficult obstacle which Blood himself
had enabled Bishop to place in the way of his redemption. Unfortunately
the last person from whom Peter Blood desired assistance at that moment
was this young nobleman, whom he regarded with the jaundiced eyes of
jealousy.

"Anyway," he answered, with a suggestion of defiance and more than a
suggestion of a sneer, "it's the most ye should expect from me, and
certainly it's the most ye'll get."

His lordship frowned, and dabbed his lips with a handkerchief.

"I don't think that I quite like the way you put it. Indeed, upon
reflection, Captain Blood, I am sure that I do not."

"I am sorry for that, so I am," said Blood impudently. "But there it is.
I'm not on that account concerned to modify it."

His lordship's pale eyes opened a little wider. Languidly he raised his
eyebrows.

"Ah!" he said. "You're a prodigiously uncivil fellow. You disappoint me,
sir. I had formed the notion that you might be a gentleman."

"And that's not your lordship's only mistake," Bishop cut in. "You made
a worse when you gave him the King's commission, and so sheltered the
rascal from th