three of the Buccaniers would not be enough
to watch the Palace in the day, when the
six stoutest men of the prisoners were away
from it, the Pirate Captain offered his little
weazen arm to the American, and strutted
back to his castle, on better terms with
himself than ever.

As soon as he and the mate were gone,
Christian George King tumbled himself down
on the grass, and kicked up his ugly heels
in convulsions of delight.

"Oh, golly, golly, golly!" says he. "You
dam English do work, and Christian George
King look on. Yup, Sojeer! whack at them
tree!"

I paid no attention to the brute, being
better occupied in noticing my next comrade,
Short. I had remarked that all the while
the Pirate Captain was speaking, he was
looking hard at the river, as if the sight of
a large sheet of water did his sailorly eyes
good. When we began to use the axes,
greatly to my astonishment, he buckled to
at his work like a man who had his whole
heart in it: chuckling to himself at every
chop, and wagging his head as if he was in
the forecastle again telling his best yarns.

"You seem to be in spirits, Short?" I says,
setting to on a tree close by him.

"The river's put a notion in my head,"
says he. "Chop away, Gill, as hard as you
can, or they may hear us talking."

"What notion has the river put in your
head?" I asked that man, following his
directions.

"You don't know where that river runs
to, I suppose?" says Short. "No more don't
I. But, did it say anything particular to you,
Gill, when you first set eyes on it? It said
to me, as plain as words could speak, 'I'm
the road out of this. Come and try me!'—
Steady! Don't stop to look at the water.
Chop away, man, chop away."

"The road out of this?" says I. "A road
without any coaches, Short. I don't see so
much as the ruins of one old canoe lying
about anywhere."

Short chuckles again, and buries his axe
in his tree.

"What are we cutting down these here
trees for?" says he.

"Roofs and floors for the Pirate Captain's
castle," says I.

"Rafts for ourselves!" says he, with another
tremendous chop at the tree, which brought
it to the ground—the first that had fallen.

His words struck through me as if I had
been shot. For the first time since our
imprisonment I now saw, clear as daylight, a
chance of escape. Only a chance, to be sure;
but, still a chance.

Although the guard stood several paces
away from us, and could by no possibility
hear a word that we said, through the noise
of the axes, Short was too cautious to talk
any more.

"Wait till night," he said, lopping the
branches off the tree. "Pass the word on in
a whisper to the nearest of our men to work
with a will; and say, with a wink of your
eye, there's a good reason for it."

After we had been allowed to knock off for
that day, the Pirates had no cause to
complain of the work we had done; and they
reported us to the Pirate Captain as obedient
and industrious, so far. When we lay down
at night, I took the next place on the leaves
to Short. We waited till the rest were
asleep, and till we heard the Pirate Captain
snoring in the great hall, before we began to
talk again about the river and the rafts.
This is the amount of what Short whispered
in my ear on that occasion:

He told me he had calculated that it would
take two large rafts to bear all our company,
and that timber enough to make such two rafts
might be cut down by six men in ten days, or,
at most, in a fortnight. As for the means of
fastening the rafts—the lashings, he called
them—the stout vines and creepers supplied
them abundantly; and the timbers of both
rafts might be connected together, in this
way, firmly enough for river navigation, in
about five hours. That was the very shortest
time the job would take, done by the willing
hands of men who knew that they were
working for their lives, said Short.

These were the means of escape. How to
turn them to account was the next question.
Short could not answer it; and though I
tried all that night, neither could I.

The difficulty was one which, I think,
might have puzzled wiser heads than ours.
How were six-and-thirty living souls (being
the number of us prisoners, including the
children) to be got out of the Palace safely,
in the face of the guard that watched it?
And, even if that was accomplished, when
could we count on gaining five hours all to
ourselves for the business of making the
rafts? The compassing of either of these
two designs, absolutely necessary as they
both were to our escape, seemed to be
nothing more or less than a rank
impossibility. Towards morning, I got a wild
notion into my head about letting ourselves
down from the back of the Palace, in the
dark, and taking our chance of being able to
seize the sentinels at that part of the building,
unawares, and gag them before they could
give the alarm to the Pirates in front. But,
Short, when I mentioned my plan to him,
would not hear of it. He said that men by
themselves—provided they had not got a
madman, like Drooce, and a maundering old
gentleman, like Mr. Pordage, among them—
might, perhaps, run some such desperate risk
as I proposed; but, that letting women and
children, to say nothing of Drooce and Pordage,
down a precipice in the dark, with make-shift
ropes which might give way at a moment's
notice, was out of the question. It was
impossible, on further reflection, not to see
that Short's view of the matter was the right