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Captain Weaver was carrying out the instructions he had received at Old Harbour Town. He was chasing the Minorca. The recovery of Lucy had led to no change in those instructions. Though Captain Acton in his gratitude for the restoration of his child was willing to relinquish the pursuit and to leave the Minorca and the handsome piratical scoundrel who had sailed away with her and Lucy to their fate, he had not revealed his thoughts to Captain Weaver, nor to the Admiral, and the Aurora at this hour of daybreak on a day in June 1805, was steadily stemming in chase of the barque which she was to capture, Captain Weaver did not exactly know how. For the Aurora was unarmed, whilst the Minorca mounted four pieces of artillery, and was in command of a naturally desperate fighting and fearless spirit, one whose neck would certainly be broken by the hangman if he was taken: unless indeed his crew turned upon him, and backed their yards and stopped the ship, that her owner might come by his own, despite Mr Lawrence's levelled[Pg 390] pistol or any threats he might make use of in reference to the powder magazine. "But," Captain Weaver had thought to himself on several occasions, "time enough to know what's a-going to happen when we heave the Minorca into view or draw abreast of her, for who's to tell but that we are bound to miss her, in which case we shall receive her at Rio, providing her skipper hasn't got scent of us and shifted his hellum for another port, and then there can be no blazing away of carronades on one side and a trimming of sail to keep clear of shot on the other.",

"After she told me to put the tray on the deck, and looked at it and asked about the knife, she stares at me just as I was about to go, and then, your honour, her face changes as if she'd pulled off a mask. She smiled with so cunning a look, such a trembling of the eyelids, that I reckoned she'd got something hidden and was going to stab me with it, and she lifts her shoulders all the while, a-looking at me with a cunning smile and trembling eyes, till I supposed she was a-imitating of my figure; and then she whispers so soft[Pg 313] that I could just hear what she said, whilst she beckons to me, smiling: 'If I show it, swear you'll keep it a secret.' 'I don't know what you mean, ma'am,' I says. 'Here,' she says, with her cunning smile, and still a-beckoning. 'But if you don't keep the secret I'll kill you as sartin as that you was born in a forest.'",

"I am quite satisfied," exclaimed Captain Acton complacently; "but, as you know, I was mainly actuated by the desire to promote the trade of this decaying place. The inheritance of this property," said he, sending his gaze over the wide grounds agreeably wooded afar by orchards whose boughs in a season's yield supplied cider enough to keep a parish merry through several generations, "brought with it urgent obligations. I could not view Old Harbour going to pieces without a resolution to do something that might serve to keep it together.",

"And what else?"

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Just as the boys and girls were settling down in their seats and Jim Scroggie was glancing anxiously doorward Billy strode in. He was resplendent in his Sunday best and wore a wild thorn blossom in his button hole. He glanced quickly about the room and caught the glint and sunlight for which he hungered—a smile from the lips of Lou Scroggie. Then he seized Jack LaRose by the scruff of the neck, jerked him from the seat near the door and motioned Jim Scroggie over. "We'll set here," he whispered. "It's close to the outside in case we have to make a quick get-away.",

"No, my lord," shouted the Admiral, "I am very sorry to say we have not.",

"The nature of these instructions I can only guess at from several conversations which I have had with Captain Acton, who without being in any degree specific, yet seemed to suffer me to read between the sentences of his conversation. And now, sir," said Mr Lawrence with great austerity, "this is the communication you will preserve strict silence upon until the sealed instructions are read. My belief is—understand me: I say that the idea I have arrived at from Captain Acton's conversation—is that I should carry this ship to a port that certainly is not Kingston nor is it in Jamaica, though I am unable to say more, and that he wishes this vessel to be handed over to the representative of a South American merchant who does business in London. What the port may be I am as curious as you[Pg 243] undoubtedly now are to learn. I believe also that the whole of us from captain to boy will be paid off at this port and sent to England at Captain Acton's expense, and each man will receive treble the amount of the wages that he would have got for his voyage to Kingston and home. All this I infer from Captain Acton's language, and I may be violating his good faith in me in committing even these conjectures to the strict confidence which I am sure you will observe.",

It might be thought that the first person[Pg 420] in the group this gentleman's eyes fastened upon was Lucy. She would be held to appeal in her sweetness, colour, freshness, and youth to a sailor as a nosegay of lovely flowers to a lover of flowers who for months has lived forlorn in a desert of sand. But instead of looking at Lucy, the lieutenant stared at the Admiral with a very great deal of visible speculation in the screwed-up cock of his eye, till his face relaxed with these words: "Pray, sir, did you ever hear of Billy Lawrence?"