ised a pale face which stern resolution had
already hardened into defiant manhood, and said "Dawes--Rufus Dawes."

* * * * *

His new life had begun already: for that night one, Rufus Dawes, charged
with murder and robbery, lay awake in prison, waiting for the fortune of
the morrow.

Two other men waited as eagerly. One, Mr. Lionel Crofton; the other, the
horseman who had appointment with the murdered Lord Bellasis under the
shadow of the fir trees on Hampstead Heath. As for Sir Richard Devine,
he waited for no one, for upon reaching his room he had fallen senseless
in a fit of apoplexy.

BOOK I.--THE SEA. 1827.

CHAPTER I. THE PRISON SHIP.

In the breathless stillness of a tropical afternoon, when the air was
hot and heavy, and the sky brazen and cloudless, the shadow of the
Malabar lay solitary on the surface of the glittering sea.

The sun--who rose on the left hand every morning a blazing ball, to move
slowly through the unbearable blue, until he sank fiery red in mingling
glories of sky and ocean on the right hand--had just got low enough to
peep beneath the awning that covered the poop-deck, and awaken a young
man, in an undress military uniform, who was dozing on a coil of rope.

"Hang it!" said he, rising and stretching himself, with the weary sigh
of a man who has nothing to do, "I must have been asleep"; and then,
holding by a stay, he turned about and looked down into the waist of the
ship.

Save for the man at the wheel and the guard at the quarter-railing,
he was alone on the deck. A few birds flew round about the vessel, and
seemed to pass under her stern windows only to appear again at her bows.
A lazy albatross, with the white water flashing from his wings, rose
with a dabbling sound to leeward, and in the place where he had been
glided the hideous fin of a silently-swimming shark. The seams of the
well-scrubbed deck were sticky with melted pitch, and the brass plate of
the compass-case sparkled in the sun like a jewel. There was no breeze,
and as the clumsy ship rolled and lurched on the heaving sea, her idle
sails flapped against her masts with a regularly recurring noise, and
her bowsprit would seem to rise higher with the water's swell, to
dip again with a jerk that made each rope tremble and tauten. On the
forecastle, some half-dozen soldiers, in all varieties of undress, were
playing at cards, smoking, or watching the fis