I declare I positively began to admire the dwarf. His cool courage was heroic. Captain Jem turned all manners of colours, whistled, grinned, then tried to appear stern; and at last stuck the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, looking rather sheepish than otherwise. Then there was a pause, which the dwarf broke by saying in the old jeering tone— ‘Well, captain, do you want a pilot?’ ‘Do you undertake to run the schooner through these shoals into the open sea to the northward?’ I replied. ‘Why, I told you from the first I would run you into the open sea,’ says the imperturbable Mr. Bedloe. ‘Take charge of the schooner, then,’ quoth the captain. ‘Unloose my arms,’ answered Bedloe. ‘I ought to have as good a chance as the others.’ The captain hesitated. ‘Wounds, man!’ cried the dwarf; ‘I give you my word of honour I am not going to take the schooner from you.’ The cool impudence of the fellow was amusing; and so, stepping forward, I cut the rope-yarns which bound him. ‘Now, then,’ quoth he to Bristol Tom and the captain, both of whom stood by the tiller, ‘look sharp for the pilot’s orders.’ The Manxman stepped to the weather-beam, looked earnestly to windward and then aloft; after which he walked back whistling. The schooner was labouring heavily upon the swells, and the sky getting wilder and wilder. All at once, the man at the mast-head shouted—‘A sail!’ We were all of us startled at the news. ‘Not the Spanish frigate, Johnson?’ said I. ‘No, no,’ returned the seaman. ‘It is a sort of boat—a big canoe. I can only see her when she lifts on the sea; but she carries a high mast forward, with a small mizen astern, and she is edging in for the side of the shoals. By God, sir, she is among them!’ I was standing by the dwarf as we heard this. He leaped upon the bulwarks, clambered a few feet into the rigging, and then dropped upon the deck, exclaiming:—‘The Piragua!’ ‘What!’ says the captain, ‘your Piragua with the Indians and the Welshman?’ ‘That and no other,’ answered Bedloe. ‘You see, gentlemen, I have told you no lies.’ ‘The canoe is running for the lee of the large rock, where the dwarf lived,’ cries the man in the rigging. ‘Then, by the Lord, they are more in love with coral reefs and sand-banks than I am!’ replied Captain Jem. ‘I don’t know that they bean’t right, captain,’ cries the boatswain. ‘That rock is big enough to make a good shelter under its lee; and there’s a little cove there, if they can make it, where the small canoe was, where an undecked craft will be much snugger in such weather as this than out in the open sea.’ I was of the same opinion as the boatswain, and so I could see was Bedloe. All this time we continued head to sea, thrashing away at the great surges, and just holding our own. ‘Pilot!’ cried the captain, ‘why do you not run through the channel at once, without waiting for the strength of the squall?’