"You may be right," acknowledged the Governor. "Tell us more of your experience. Did you have sight of the ship which pursued you?"
"Sight? Marry, that I did; and uncomfortable close, your Excellency. She came up with a so'easter two days past, and at the first I made her out for a frigate by the top-hamper she carried."
"A frigate?" protested Master Colden. "So big as that?"
"Aye, sir, my master! And if I have any eye for a ship's lines and canvas she was none other than the Royal James that chased me three days together when I was home-bound from the West Indies in '43."
"That would be the vessel of the fellow known usually as Captain Rip-Rap," spoke up my father, and there was a quality in his voice which led me to regard him closely.
It was manifest that he labored in the grip of some strong emotion; but the only indication of this in his face was a slight rigidity of feature, and none of the others marked it. I was the more amazed because my father was a man of iron nerves, and also, though his earlier years had been starred with a series of extraordinary adventures, so far as I knew, he had had nothing to do with the sea.
"True for you, Master Ormerod," answered Captain Farraday; "and since Henry Morgan died there hath not lived a more complete rogue. One of my mates was taken by him off Jamaica ten years gone and cites him for a man of exquisite dress and manners that would befit a London macaroni, God save us! And moreover, is as arrant a Jacobite as ever was. Witness the name of his ship."
"I have heard he sails usually in company," remarked my father.
"He works with John Flint, who is no less of a rascal, albeit rougher, according to those unfortunates who have fallen in his path. Flint sails in the Walrus, a tall ship out of Plymouth that was on the Smyrna run before she fell into his hands. Betwixt them they are a pretty pair.
"Did you ever hear, gentles, how they sank the Portuguese line-ship off Madeira for naught but the pleasure o' destruction? Aye, so they did. They ha' the metal to hammer a brace of King's ships. But they are wary of such.