tween the courts of St. James's and the
Escurial, complaints emanating now from one and now from the other side.

Steed, however, after the fashion of most Colonial governors, was
willing enough to dull his wits to the extent of accepting the English
seaman's story, disregarding any evidence that might belie it. He shared
the hatred so richly deserved by arrogant, overbearing Spain that
was common to men of every other nation from the Bahamas to the Main.
Therefore he gave the Pride of Devon the shelter she sought in his
harbour and every facility to careen and carry out repairs.

But before it came to this, they fetched from her hold over a score of
English seamen as battered and broken as the ship herself, and together
with these some half-dozen Spaniards in like case, the only survivors of
a boarding party from the Spanish galleon that had invaded the English
ship and found itself unable to retreat. These wounded men were conveyed
to a long shed on the wharf, and the medical skill of Bridgetown was
summoned to their aid. Peter Blood was ordered to bear a hand in this
work, and partly because he spoke Castilian--and he spoke it as fluently
as his own native tongue--partly because of his inferior condition as a
slave, he was given the Spaniards for his patients.

Now Blood had no cause to love Spaniards. His two years in a Spanish
prison and his subsequent campaigning in the Spanish Netherlands had
shown him a side of the Spanish character which he had found anything
but admirable. Nevertheless he performed his doctor's duties zealously
and painstakingly, if emotionlessly, and even with a certain superficial
friendliness towards each of his patients. These were so surprised at
having their wounds healed instead of being summarily hanged that they
manifested a docility very unusual in their kind. They were shunned,
however, by all those charitably disposed inhabitants of Bridgetown who
flocked to the improvised hospital with gifts of fruit and flowers and
delicacies for the injured English seamen. Indeed, had the wishes of
some of these inhabitants been regarded, the Spaniards would have been
left to die like vermin, and of this Peter Blood had an example almost
at the very outset.

With the assistance of one of the negroes sent to the shed for the
purpose, he was in the act of setting a broken leg, when a deep, gruff
voice, that he had come to know and dislike as he had never disliked the
voice of living man, abrupt