Of the hapless crew--men drawn from his own class--he would not allow himself to think. They always went, more or less, with their lives in their hands, and sooner or later a large proportion met a watery death. They must take their chance. It was not with them he was concerned. What he longed to do was to strike a blow at wealth, prosperity, and rank. He was unable to take any part in the turbulent scenes enacting in the country round; but if he could lure to its fate some great vessel with its freight of passengers--one of those new vessels which worked by steam-power, that were just beginning to make headway and to appear along the coasts, to the astonishment and superstitious terror of the fishermen--if he could lure one of these vessels, which always carried wealthy passengers, who could afford to pay for the extra advantages of speed and independence of contrary wind, he felt he should be striking a blow at the hated world of wealth and opulence; and little recked he of any personal peril he might run were the thing found out. As to his own fate, he was perfectly indifferent. A fierce despair mingled with his reckless hatred of his kind. He would willingly lay down his own life if he could by those means compass the ruin of his enemies. He would sometimes sit and ponder, with a fierce brooding envy, over the story of the death of Samson, with which Abner’s reading of the Scriptures to him in his childhood had made him familiar. If only he could achieve an act of vengeance like that! What a glorious death it would be! But there was no such way open to him of avenging his nameless wrongs against the world. He could only accomplish an isolated act of malevolent cruelty and destruction. But he brooded over that, and thought out its details, till he seemed in his feverish dreams to see the thing enacted over and over, till every detail was familiar. He used to dream that the vessel had struck, that she was going to pieces fast, that he and his comrades were out in their boats, listening to the cries and shrieks of the drowning wretches, always avoiding giving the help so agonisingly demanded, pushing savagely from the gunnel of their boat any frantic hand that might cling to it, and laughing with fiendish joy as the wretched victims sank with a gurgling cry, or were washed within the region of the treacherous quicksand. Such dreams might well work a sort of madness in a brain inflamed with hatred, and a mind all but unhinged by illness, and perpetual revolt against the conditions of life. Saul had every detail planned by this time with almost diabolical precision. All that was wanted now was the right moment and the right vessel. He had his scouts out along the coast. He knew they would receive warning of the approach of such a vessel as would afford a rich prey for plunderers and a rich vengeance for him. * * * * *