"I know not what you mean, sir!" he cried, "by
asking if I care to hear your news. At this moment I would rather have
news of that scoundrel than to have anything I know of in the world."

"Thou would? Thou would?" cried the other, with mounting agitation.
"Is thee in such haste to meet him as all that? Very well; very well,
then. Suppose I could bring thee face to face with him--what then?
Hey? Hey? Face to face with him, James Mainwaring!"

The thought instantly flashed into Mainwaring's mind that the pirate
had returned to the island; that perhaps at that moment he was
somewhere near at hand.

"I do not understand you, sir," he cried. "Do you mean to tell me that
you know where the villain is? If so, lose no time in informing me,
for every instant of delay may mean his chance of again escaping."

"No danger of that!" the other declared, vehemently. "No danger of
that! I'll tell thee where he is and I'll bring thee to him quick
enough!" And as he spoke he thumped his fist against the open log
book. In the vehemence of his growing excitement his eyes appeared to
shine green in the lanthorn light, and the sweat that had stood in
beads upon his forehead was now running in streams down his face. One
drop hung like a jewel to the tip of his beaklike nose. He came a step
nearer to Mainwaring and bent forward toward him, and there was
something so strange and ominous in his bearing that the lieutenant
instinctively drew back a little where he sat.

"Captain Scarfield sent something to you," said Eleazer, almost in a
raucous voice, "something that you will be surprised to see." And the
lapse in his speech from the Quaker "thee" to the plural "you" struck
Mainwaring as singularly strange.

As he was speaking Eleazer was fumbling in a pocket of his
long-tailed drab coat, and presently he brought something forth that
gleamed in the lanthorn light.

The next moment Mainwaring saw leveled directly in his face the round
and hollow nozzle of a pistol.

There was an instant of dead silence and then, "I am the man you
seek!" said Eleazer Cooper, in a tense and breathless voice.

The whole thing had happened so instantaneously and unexpectedly that
for the moment Mainwaring sat like one petrified. Had a thunderbolt
fallen from the silent sky and burst at his feet he could not have
been more stunned. He was like one held in the meshes of a horrid
nightmare, and he gazed as through a mist of impossibility into the
lineaments