cave.'

'Your secret is safe with me,' I answered. 'But if ye wish to murder me,
I shall meet my fate as a soldier should. I should have chosen to die on
the field of battle, rather than to lie at the mercy of such a pack of
water-rats in their burrow.'

'My faith!' said Murgatroyd. 'This is too tall talk for a gauger. He
bears himself like a soldier, too. It is possible that in snaring the
owl we have caught the falcon. Yet we had certain token that he would
come this way, and on such another horse.'

'Call up Long John,' suggested the Dutchman. 'I vould not give a plug of
Trinidado for the Schelm's word. Long John was with Cooper Dick when he
was taken.'

'Aye,' growled the mate Silas. 'He got a wipe over the arm from the
gauger's whinyard. He'll know his face, if any will.'

'Call him, then,' said Murgatroyd, and presently a long, loose-limbed
seaman came up from the mouth of the cave, where he had been on watch.
He wore a red kerchief round his forehead, and a blue jerkin, the sleeve
of which he slowly rolled up as he came nigh.

'Where is Gauger Westhouse?' he cried; 'he has left his mark on my arm.
Rat me, if the scar is healed yet. The sun is on our side of the wall
now, gauger. But hullo, mates! Who be this that ye have clapped into
irons? This is not our man!'

'Not our man!' they cried, with a volley of curses.

'Why, this fellow would make two of the gauger, and leave enough over
to fashion a magistrate's clerk. Ye may hang him to make sure, but still
he's not the man.'

'Yes, hang him!' said Dutch Pete. 'Sapperment! is our cave to be the
talk of all the country? Vere is the pretty _Maria_ to go then, vid her
silks and her satins, her kegs and her cases'? Are we to risk our
cave for the sake of this fellow? Besides, has he not schlagged my
kopf--schlagged your cooper's kopf--as if he had hit me mit mine own
mallet? Is that not vorth a hemp cravat?'

'Worth a jorum of rumbo,' cried Dicon. 'By your leave, Captain, I would
say that we are not a gang of padders and michers, but a crew of honest
seamen, who harm none but those who harm us. Exciseman Westhouse hath
slain Cooper Dick, and it is just that he should die for it; but as to
taking this young soldier's life, I'd as soon think of scuttling the
saucy _Maria_, or of mounting the Jolly Roger at her peak.'

What answer would have been given to this speech I cannot tell, for
at that moment a shrill whistle resounded outside the cave, and two
smug