in my
dreams, the Petrel about to take the water, and Nancy Willett standing
very straight making a little speech and crashing a bottle of wine across
the bows. This was the content of the mysterious parcel; she had stolen
it from her father's cellar. But the number of uninvited spectators,
which had not been foreseen, considerably modified the programme,--as the
newspapers would have said. They pushed and crowded around the ship, and
made frank and even brutal remarks as to her seaworthiness; even Nancy,
inured though she was to the masculine sex, had fled to the heights, and
it looked at this supreme moment as though we should have to fight for
the Petrel. An attempt to muster her doughty buccaneers failed; the
gunner too had fled,--Gene Hollister; Ham Durrett and the Ewanses were
nowhere to be seen, and a muster revealed only Tom, the fidus Achates,
and Grits Jarvis.

"Ah, s'y!" he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing hordes. "Stand back,
carn't yer? I'll bash yer face in, Johnny. Whose boat is this?"

Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency? Here, in truth,
was the drama staged,--my drama, had I only been able to realize it. The
good ship beached, the headhunters hemming us in on all sides, the scene
prepared for one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had so
graphically related as an essential part of our adventures.

"Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar," proposed one of the
head-hunters,--meaning me.

"I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him," said Grits, and then resorted to
appeal. "I s'y, carn't yer stand back and let a chap 'ave a charnst?"

The head-hunters only jeered. And what shall be said of the Captain in
this moment of peril? Shall it be told that his heart was beating
wildly?--bumping were a better word. He was trying to remember that he
was the Captain. Otherwise, he must admit with shame that he, too, should
have fled. So much for romance when the test comes. Will he remain to
fall fighting for his ship? Like Horatius, he glanced up at the hill,
where, instead of the porch of the home where he would fain have been, he
beheld a wisp of a girl standing alone, her hat on the back of her head,
her hair flying in the wind, gazing intently down at him in his danger.
The renegade crew was nowhere to be seen. There are those who demand the
presence of a woman in order to be heroes....

"Give us a chance, can't you?" he cried, repeating Grits's appeal in not
quite such