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of her, he brought back a few more prisoners to join company with the luckless boarders he had sent down to be locked in irons below.

They were sad and angry gentlemen, for there are those to whom the laughter of a hundred sailors is worse than death by the sword. The first of them all to enter the gun room was Tom Jordan. His cheek was gashed and his hair was singed and blood smeared his shirt from shoulder to shoulder and one arm hung limp and broken; but though he was in great pain he smiled, and when they led him into the gun room and he saw Philip Marsham with bolts on wrists and ankles, he laughed aloud.

The fellow was a very mark and pattern of a scoundrel, but he had the courage and spirit of a hero, and had he first gone to sea under another king than James or Charles he might in some overwhelming danger have saved England. Great admirals are made of such timber — bold, resolute, utterly dauntless — and any bold man might have fallen into the same trap that had caught Tom Jordan. (Nay, had nothing warned Captain Winterton or aroused his suspicions, there was a fighting chance for Tom Jordan to have taken his ship from him even so.) But Tom Jordan had gone to sea in the days when the navy was going to the dogs, and, like many another lad of spirit who left the King’s service to join the pirates, he had adventured with the Algerians before he led the gentlemen of Bideford. And at last, hazarding a final effort to retrieve his luck, he had unwittingly thrust his head into the halter.

Yet, though they had broken his body, they had failed to touch his courage; despite his pain, he could smile and even laugh. Turning his great grief into a