'Tut, man,' said Barnaby. 'We are not now in the season of the tornadoes, and there is no other danger upon these seas. I would as lief be in an open boat as in a brigantine. Sharks may follow us, but they will not attack a boat; calamaries they talk of, big enough to lay their arms round the boat and so to drag it under; but such monsters have I never seen, any more than I have seen the great whale of Norway or the monstrous birds of the Southern Seas. There is only one danger, Humphrey, my lad.' Here he laid his hand upon mine and became mighty serious. 'If we are taken we shall be flogged--all of us. Thirty-nine lashes they will lay on, and they will brand us. For myself, I value not their thirty-nine lashes a brass farthing, nor their branding with a hot iron, which can but make a man jump for a day or two. To me this risk against the chance of escape matters nothing. Why, when I was cabin-boy I got daily more than thirty-nine lashes--kicks, cuffs, and rope's-endings. Nay, I remember, when we sat over the Latin syntax together my daily ration must have been thirty-nine, more or less, and Dad's arm was stronger than you would judge, to look at him. If they catch me, let them lay on their thirty-nine and be damned to them! But you and Robin, I doubt, think otherwise.' 'I would not willingly be flogged, Barnaby, if there were any way of escape--even by death.' 'So I thought! So I thought!' 'And as for Robin, if he recovers--which I doubt--he too, if I know him, would rather be killed than be flogged.' 'That comes of Oxford!' said Barnaby. 'And then there is Sis. Humphrey, my lad, it goes to my heart to think of that poor girl, stripped to be lashed like a black slave or a Bristol drab.' 'Barnaby, she must never run that dreadful risk.' 'Then she must remain behind, and here she runs that risk every day. What prevents yon drunken sot--the taste of that cudgel still sticks in my gizzard!--I say, what prevents him from tying her up to-day, or to-morrow, or every day?' 'Barnaby, I say that she must never run that risk, for if we are caught----' I stopped. 'Before we are caught, you would say, Humphrey. We are of the same mind there. But who is to kill her? Not Robin, for he loves her; not you, because you have too great a kindness for her. Not I, because I am her brother. What should I say to my mother when I meet her after we are dead, and she asks me who killed Alice?' 'Barnaby, if she is to die, let us all die together.' 'Ay,' he replied, 'though I have, I confess, no great stomach for dying; yet, since we have got her with us, it must be done. 'Tis easy to let the water into the boat, and so, in three minutes, with no suspicion at all, and my mother never to know anything about it, she would have said her last prayers, and we should be all sinking together with never a gasp left.'