tepid sunshine was very delightful.
At that time Eleazer was just home from an unusually successful

voyage to Antigua. Mainwaring found the family sitting under one
of the still leafless chestnut trees, Captain Cooper smoking his

long clay pipe and lazily perusing a copy of the National
Gazette. Eleazer listened with a great deal of interest to what

Mainwaring had to say of his proposed cruise. He himself knew a
great deal about the pirates, and, singularly unbending from his

normal, stiff taciturnity, he began telling of what he knew,
particularly of Captain Scarfield--in whom he appeared to take an

extraordinary interest.
Vastly to Mainwaring's surprise, the old Quaker assumed the

position of a defendant of the pirates, protesting that the
wickedness of the accused was enormously exaggerated. He declared

that he knew some of the freebooters very well and that at the
most they were poor, misdirected wretches who had, by easy

gradation, slid into their present evil ways, from having been
tempted by the government authorities to enter into privateering

in the days of the late war. He conceded that Captain Scarfield
had done many cruel and wicked deeds, but he averred that he had

also performed many kind and benevolent actions. The world made
no note of these latter, but took care only to condemn the evil

that had been done. He acknowledged that it was true that the
pirate had allowed his crew to cast lots for the wife and the

daughter of the skipper of the Northern Rose, but there were none
of his accusers who told how, at the risk of his own life and the

lives of all his crew, he had given succor to the schooner
Halifax, found adrift with all hands down with yellow fever.

There was no defender of his actions to tell how he and his crew
of pirates had sailed the pest-stricken vessel almost into the

rescuing waters of Kingston harbor. Eleazer confessed that he
could not deny that when Scarfield had tied the skipper of the

Baltimore Belle naked to the foremast of his own brig he had
permitted his crew of cutthroats (who were drunk at the time) to

throw bottles at the helplesscaptive, who died that night of the
wounds he had received. For this he was doubtless very justly

condemned, but who was there to praise him when he had, at the
risk of his life and in the face of the authorities, carried a

cargo of provisions which he himself had purchased at Tampa Bay
to the Island of Bella Vista after the great hurricane of 1818?

In this notable adventure he had barely escaped, after a two
days' chase, the British frigate Ceres, whose captain, had a

capture been effected, would instantly have hung the unfortunate
man to the yardarm in spite of the beneficent mission he was in

the act of conducting.
In all this Eleazer had the air of conducting the case for the

defendant. As he talked he became more and more animated and
voluble. The light went out in his tobacco pipe, and a hectic

spot appeared in either thin and sallow cheek. Mainwaring sat
wondering to hear the severelypeaceful Quaker preacher defending

so notoriously bloody and cruel a cutthroat pirate as Capt. Jack
Scarfield. The warm and innocentsurroundings, the old brick

house looking down upon them, the odor of apple blossoms and the
hum of bees seemed to make it all the more incongruous. And still

the elderly Quaker skipper talked on and on with hardly an
interruption, till the warm sun slanted to the west and the day

began to decline.
That evening Mainwaring stayed to tea and when he parted from

Lucinda Fairbanks it was after nightfall, with a clear, round
moon shining in the milky sky and a radiance pallid and unreal

enveloping the old house, the blooming apple trees, the sloping
lawn and the shining river beyond. He implored his sweetheart to

let him tell her uncle and aunt of their acknowledged love and to
ask the old man's consent to it, but she would not permit him to

do so. They were so happy as they were. Who knew but what her
uncle might forbid their fondness? Would he not wait a little

longer? Maybe it would all come right after a while. She was so
fond, so tender, so tearful at the nearness of their parting that

he had not the heart to insist. At the same time it was with a
feeling almost of despair that he realized that he must now be

gone--maybe for the space of two years--without in all that time
possessing the right to call her his before the world.

When he bade farewell to the older people it was with a choking
feeling of bitter disappointment. He yet felt the pressure of

her cheek against his shoulder, the touch of soft and velvet lips
to his own. But what were such clandestine endearments compared

to what might, perchance, be his-- the right of calling her his
own when he was far away and upon the distant sea? And, besides,

he felt like a coward who had shirked his duty.
But he was very much in love. The next morning appeared in a

drizzle of rain that followed the beautiful warmth of the day
before. He had the coach all to himself, and in the damp and

leathery solitude he drew out the little oval picture from
beneath his shirt frill and looked long and fixedly with a fond

and foolish joy at the innocent face, the blue eyes, the red,
smiling lips depicted upon the satinlike, ivory surface.

II
For the better part of five months Mainwaring cruised about in

the waters surrounding the Bahama Islands. In that time he ran
to earth and dispersed a dozen nests of pirates. He destroyed no

less than fifteen piratical crafts of all sizes, from a large
half-decked whaleboat to a three-hundred-ton barkentine. The name

of the Yankee became a terror to every sea wolf in the western
tropics, and the waters of the Bahama Islands became swept almost

clean of the bloody wretches who had so lately infested it.
But the one freebooter of all others whom he sought--Capt. Jack

Scarfield--seemed to evade him like a shadow, to slip through his
fingers like magic. Twice he came almost within touch of the

famous marauder, both times in the ominous wrecks that the pirate
captain had left behind him. The first of these was the

water-logged remains of a burned and still smoking wreck that he
found adrift in the great Bahama channel. It was the Water

Witch, of Salem, but he did not learn her tragic story until, two
weeks later, he discovered a part of her crew at Port Maria, on

the north coast of Jamaica. It was, indeed, a dreadful story to
which he listened. The castaways said that they of all the

vessel's crew had been spared so that they might tell the
commander of the Yankee, should they meet him, that he might keep

what he found, with Captain Scarfield's compliments, who served
it up to him hot cooked.

Three weeks later he rescued what remained of the crew of the
shattered, bloody hulk of the Baltimore Belle, eight of whose

crew, headed by the captain, had been tied hand and foot and
heaved overboard. Again, there was a message from Captain

Scarfield to the commander of the Yankee that he might season
what he found to suit his own taste.

Mainwaring was of a sanguinedisposition, with fiery temper. He
swore, with the utmostvehemence, 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 peacefulcommerce 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 notablecaptures, 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