"With all my heart. 'Twill be a drier bed than those villanous knaves yonder can boast."
"Poor wretches! How came it that the magazine blew up, think you?"
"I know not, sir. I will ask the knave you brought last from the vessel—a deed of merciful madness."
He spoke a few words to the wounded prisoner, while the maroons who had formed the wood-cutting party conveyed their sick comrades to the grove. The man replied in feeble accents.
"This was the manner of it, sir," said Amos, after a minute or two. "The captain being sore wounded, and two killed outright, the other knaves, seeing how that they stood in danger of being sliced by our bilbos, did incontinently call upon him to render up the vessel, hoping thereby to come off with their lives. But the captain, a tall man and of a good spirit, did resolutely refuse to yield to their entreaties, swearing that he would with his own hand blow up the vessel rather than deliver it to heretics and dogs of English. Straightway he passed into his own cabin, and made fast the door; which seeing, and knowing that what he had said, that would he perform, the knaves began to whoop and hallo for quarter. Then did the captain, as 'tis to be supposed, make into the after cabin and fire his pistol into the magazine, and so dealt the ship that mighty blow."
"And this man—who is he?"
"A man of Portingale, sir, not of Spain, and so somewhat nearer grace. He thanks you and all the saints that he remains alive, though his limbs be maimed withal."
"Let us convey him softly to the grove; on the morrow we will look to his wounds and bind them up with balsam and other salves from the wreck."
"Marry, you use him too gently. 'Tis like warming a snake in your bosom; and, since charity begins at home, we will look to our own hurts first."
When the party was settled as comfortably as possible in the grove, Dennis and the sailor disposed themselves side by side to sleep. But both were wakeful, for all their fatigue. They lay for a time in silence, each fearful of disturbing the other; but Dennis, hearing at last a long pent-up groan from his companion, asked what ailed him.