I laughed.
"Have you already learned to distrust history, at your tender age?" I mocked. "Isn't it all set down in the books?"
She turned large and disparaging eyes upon me.
"Of course you know well enough that all history is distorted; especially war history where the victors are the only source of information. The other people can't tell their side of it."
"True enough," I admitted. "I fancy old Sir Francis was a good bit more than half a pirate, if all the facts were known. That story about his burning of the Spanish galleon at Pirates' Hope, for example."
"I haven't heard it. Tell it to me," she urged.
I gave her the story as Van Dyck had given it to me, omitting—for no good reason that I could have offered—all mention of my own unnerving experiences on the island of the legend.
"Left those poor wretches to starve because they wouldn't buy their lives off him?" she commented, with a belated horror in her voice.
"It is only a legend, you must remember," I hastened to say. "Most likely there isn't a word of truth in it."
Her gaze was upon the distant merging line of sea and sky, and there was a dreamy look in her eyes.