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of being a servant at the beck and call of every rough customer who tottered in the door of the King’s Mercy, I would have had second thoughts. For days I ran my legs to stubs, fetching and carrying. Through it all, for my pains I got mainly curses and abuse, though at an odd time a sailor would toss a halfpenny piece my way. It was a small enough reward.
    But to top off my misery, Jessie Cochran had come to stay with her mother for a spell while Miss Fairfax was away visiting her cousins in Port Maria, away on the north shore of Jamaica. Now that girlhad ways of tormenting me that her mother would never dream of. Somehow she had yet to forgive me for having shown up months and months before at the front door, alone, orphaned, and friendless.
    On that occasion she had flung a basin of dirty water squarely into my face and had called me a thief and a runagate. Never mind that from the pity in my heart I had taught her to read, or that I had rescued her from captivity on the island of Tortuga. To be sure, I did have my uncle’s help in the rescue, and some from Captain Hunter as well, but to hear Jessie tell it, you would have thought she had planned the whole thing herself and that our coming with the very ship she had sailed away on was just part of her scheme.
    Be that as it may, as the owner’s daughter, she naturally outranked a mere potboy, and so she was forever ordering me to do this or that, to scrape and wash dishes, to mind the fire, to chop stove wood, to run to the market for more molasses, for four good fat chickens, for this or for that or for the other. Pillar to post it was, so that by the third day I began to dread the sun’s peeping in my window, for it brought with it sixteen hours of harderwork than I had ever known aboard ship.
    And the devil a word did I hear of Steele. Drunken sailors babble and yarn, much to Mrs. Cochran’s disgust, but none of them babbled of Steele or told stories of his whereabouts. They did speak now and again of Captain Hunter. For months after our escape from Port Royal, the King’s Mercy had suffered, for the honest sailors avoided the place where the notorious doctor-pirate Patrick Shea had lived.
    But somehow that had worn off with the passing of time, and now the drinkers at Molly Cochran’s tables seemed rather proud of the place’s reputation. “Aye,” one sailor had roared the first night I was waiting tables, “Bill Hunter’s a man, so he is! Snatched a neat sloop from under the guns of the fort, got clean away, and sinks Spaniards by the shipload! A health to him, says I!” No one joined in the toast, but I saw several men nod at the words.
    As the days and nights passed, I began to despair of learning any real news. On my trips to market, or whenever I could get away from the King’s Mercy for half an hour all together, I kept my ears open. For all I could tell, though, Steele had not yet leftenough derelicts with his vicious calling cards on them to make a very terrible impression at Port Royal. Nor did it seem likely that I would fulfill the second part of my mission and learn something of the hiding places that Steele might have in this part of the world.
    Finally, though, my luck changed on the unluckiest day of the week for sailors—a Friday. That was the first night that I was to sail out and rendezvous with the
Aurora,
at midnight. Long before then, however, a stumbling, grizzled old sailor blundered into the King’s Mercy, squalling for rum.
    He was bald on top, with a long, unkempt fringe of iron-gray hair. His face was all scarred and battered, his nose so broken that the tip of it almost touched his lower lip. He wore no shoes, pantaloons that might once have been blue, and a raggedy calico shirt with a blue-and-white pattern. He had lost all his teeth in front, and he spoke in a hoarse, mumbling roar. “Rum! Rum here for a sailor man! Be quick about it!”
    I got him seated, and it was then that I noticed all the tattoos on his sinewy arms.