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“Take this fellow to the gun room, clap him into irons, and set a man to watch him.”

“Yea, yea. Come, fellow, march along.”

And thus sending before them Boatswain Marsham, erstwhile of the Rose of Devon frigate, the corporal and his men departed from the cabin.

There were guns on the right hand and the left — ordnance of a size to sink the Rose of Devon with a broadside. There were sailormen thronging between-decks in numbers to appall the young prisoner who came down among them nearly naked from his swim. Though no greater of burthen than the Rose of Devon, the ship was better armed and better manned, and all signs told of the stern discipline of a man-of-war.

The alternatives that Phil Marsham faced, as he sat in shackles with no spirit to reply to the jibes of the sailors and watched men stripped to the waist and moving deftly among the guns, were not those a man would choose. If his old shipmates took this tall and hand-some ship, a blow on the head and a burial over the side was the kindest treatment he could expect of them. And if not — the gallows loomed beyond a Court of Admiralty. For hours the hum of voices went up and down the main deck and for hours Boatswain Marsham sat with the bolts upon his legs and wrists and saw the life of the ship go on around him. The men leaped here and there at a word, or lolled by their guns waiting for orders. The night wore on, and nodding, Phil thought of the two ships lying one on each side of the point of land and by all appearances two quiet merchantmen. Yet one, he knew to his sorrow, smelled devilishly of brimstone; and the other, in which he now sat a prisoner, though her ports were closed and her claws