"And we will fight the Spaniards together, shall we not? They must never get my gold—never!" "Indeed they shall not!" I replied. "And now let us go out into the open, and I will bathe your arm at a brook. ’Tis pity we did not remember each other sooner." "Ah, but it is such a long time!" said Captain Q. We went out together, and after I had bathed his arm (’twas bruised from elbow to wrist) the Captain invited me to his hut, and to a share of his dinner of herbs. Such was the strange beginning of a friendship that endured for near forty years. Though he was by so much my elder, he dealt with me as though I had been his brother. We roamed the shore together, together fished and snared animals in the woods, and would have shared the same lodging but that I preferred to keep my little hut on the shore, where I had fresher air and was within close call of any ship that should chance to pass in the night. Little by little I pieced together the story of the rock-girt galleon and of Captain Q. He could not talk in orderly sequence for long together, but whatsoever the subject of our discourse, he would break off to prattle of his childhood in the little village of Quimperlé, and of his youth and manhood to the time when destiny brought him to Tortuga. He was a Huguenot, and had fought under Condé at St. Denis, and under Admiral Coligny at Jarnac. After the dread day of St. Bartholomew he fled from France, and became a corsair in his own vessel, haunting the coasts of the Spanish Main. One day he fell in with the galleon _San Felipe_, and took it after a long fight. His own ship being small, he put his crew aboard the galleon, and the crew and company of the galleon upon his ship, and then sailed away for Tortuga, designing to land there and divide the spoil. And his little vessel, with the Spaniards on board, had gone down before his very eyes, having received sore damage in the action. Before the _San Felipe_ made Tortuga she was caught in a great storm, which swept upon her suddenly and sent her masts by the board. During a lull she was warped into a cove on the Tortuga coast, and there refitted. Then, as she was being towed out, all hands busy in the work, the sea was cast up by a great earthquake; the cliffs on either hand were upheaved and flung sheer upon the vessel, killing outright every man upon it and in the boats save only the Captain and two or three beside. The Captain was struck on the head by a fragment of rock, and thrown senseless to the deck. (And here, as he told the story, he lifted his long, grizzling locks and showed a great seam upon his skull.) When he came to himself all was at first mere blankness to him. He got upon his feet, lost in amaze to behold the galleon encompassed by a vault of rock, and tended the few men that had survived the cataclysm, but they lingered for a little and then all died, leaving him alone.