The culprit, whose age alone should have protected him, was stripped to the waist and dragged to the middle of the deck, where he stood weak, scarred, emaciated,--as pitiful an object as the sun ever shone upon. In a wide circle about him were crowded the unwilling prisoners, their faces scowling with a helpless rage; and behind these were posted the guards with levelled guns. While the warden knotted his lash, Peter and Richard, after a whispered consultation with those nearest to them, stepped forward and touched their caps. "If you please," said Peter, acting as spokesman, "we will all of us give something toward the price of the fruit, if you will spare this man." The warden wheeled suddenly upon them and struck out with his whip, barely missing Peter's head. "Back with you, an you want not the lash upon your own backs, hounds that you are! The first man of you who stirs again shall have his share of this pastime." The ferocity of his look and voice quelled any further attempt at conciliation, and the prisoners turned their faces sullenly away. "So it's delicacies your stomach craves, is it?" sneered the warden to the trembling man before him. "Well, does that taste like pears--or that--or that?" and the cruelly knotted lash swirled through the air, and fell again and again upon the quivering flesh of the helpless creature. The man staggered, screamed, reeled from place to place, and finally fell. A harsh laugh answered his cries for mercy, and the lash went on until the blood spurted from the livid welts upon his body, while his groans were horrible to hear; and the prisoners groaned in answer. But the warden's fury was aroused, and the blows fell until insensibility mercifully came, and the man lay still in a pool of his own blood. "So shall it fare with every thief among you!" cried the warden, throwing the whip down and facing around the scowling circle. But he saw there no intimidation, but a wrath that needed but a touch to burst into a storm, and he was quick to take the warning. "Dismiss the prisoners below," he thundered to the guards, and went swiftly to his own cabin. As Richard watched the cruel scene, something had stirred and then suddenly snapped within him; the inert, despairing stupor was gone, and in its place was a wild desire for action. Every nerve within him quivered with a savage impulse to give the brutal warden blow for blow--nay, two for one; that was what he wanted to do. His fingers closed in a fierce grip, and only Peter's firm hand held him in his place. "The guards would riddle you with bullets before you could get to him," the latter whispered, under cover of that other terrible noise of the flogging. "I have but once to die. Unhand me!" "Yes, but death here would be wasted. Wait." From that hour Richard was a changed man; the dulness of despondency was gone, and in its place there had come a recklessness, a demon of desperation, that nothing could still.