mper. He swore,
with the utmost vehemence, that either he or John Scarfield would have
to leave the earth.

He had little suspicion of how soon was to befall the ominous
realization of his angry prophecy.

At that time one of the chief rendezvous of the pirates was the little
island of San Jose, one of the southernmost of the Bahama group. Here,
in the days before the coming of the _Yankee_, they were wont to put
in to careen and clean their vessels and to take in a fresh supply of
provisions, gunpowder, and rum, preparatory to renewing their attacks
upon the peaceful commerce circulating up and down outside the
islands, or through the wide stretches of the Bahama channel.

Mainwaring had made several descents upon this nest of freebooters. He
had already made two notable captures, and it was here he hoped
eventually to capture Captain Scarfield himself.

A brief description of this one-time notorious rendezvous of
freebooters might not be out of place. It consisted of a little
settlement of those wattled and mud-smeared houses such as you find
through the West Indies. There were only three houses of a more
pretentious sort, built of wood. One of these was a storehouse,
another was a rum shop, and a third a house in which dwelt a mulatto
woman, who was reputed to be a sort of left-handed wife of Captain
Scarfield's. The population was almost entirely black and brown. One
or two Jews and a half dozen Yankee traders, of hardly dubious
honesty, comprised the entire white population. The rest consisted of
a mongrel accumulation of negroes and mulattoes and half-caste
Spaniards, and of a multitude of black or yellow women and children.
The settlement stood in a bight of the beach forming a small harbor
and affording a fair anchorage for small vessels, excepting it were
against the beating of a southeasterly gale. The houses, or cabins,
were surrounded by clusters of coco palms and growths of bananas, and
a long curve of white beach, sheltered from the large Atlantic
breakers that burst and exploded upon an outer bar, was drawn like a
necklace around the semicircle of emerald-green water.

Such was the famous pirates' settlement of San Jose--a paradise of
nature and a hell of human depravity and wickedness--and it was to
this spot that Mainwaring paid another visit a few days after rescuing
the crew of the _Baltimore Belle_ from her shattered and sinking
wreck.

[Illustration: THE BUCCANEER WAS A PICTURESQUE FELLOW]