“This morning was indeed the most gloomy I had ever experienced. There appeared hardly a ray of hope that my friend Brackett could return, seeing the boat was lost. Our provisions gone, our mouths parched extremely with thirst, our strength wasted, our spirits broken, and our hopes imprisoned within the circumference of this desolate island in the midst of an unfrequented ocean,--all these things gave to the scene the hue of death.” Later in this same day a sail was seen against the blue horizon. The sloop boldly tacked among the tortuous shoals and was evidently heading for the islet. Soon she fired a gun, and the castaways took her to be another pirate vessel. She dropped anchor and lowered a boat in which three men pulled to the beach. “Thinking it no worse to die by sword than famine,” Captain Lincoln walked down to meet them. As the boat drove through the surf, the man in the bow jumped out, waded ashore, and rushed to embrace the captain. It was none other than the Scotchman, Nikola Monacre, henceforth to be known by the reputable and rightful name of Jamieson! He had shorn off his ruffianly whiskers and abandoned his evil ways. The moment could have been no more dramatic, the coincidence any happier, if it had been contrived by a motion-picture director. To the modern reader it will come as an agreeable surprise, I fancy, for until now the character of Nikola, as conveyed in glimpses by Captain Lincoln, fails to win one’s implicit confidence. While among the pirates he seemed a bit mushy and impressionable, not quite the man to stand by through thick and thin and hew a way out of his difficulties; but this was an unfair judgment. He was leal and true to the last hair of his discarded mustachios. As though he surmised that Captain Lincoln might have formed the same opinion of him, the first words of this worthy hero were: “Do you now believe that _Jamieson_ is your friend? And are these all that are left of you? Ah, I suspected, and now I know what you were put here for!” Captain Lincoln explained the absence of the mate and the five sailors who had vanished from the waterlogged boat. Jamieson had heard nothing of them and ventured the conjecture: “How unfortunate! They must be lost, or some pirates have taken them.” He called to the two comrades who had come ashore with him, Frenchmen and fine fellows, who also embraced the castaways and held to their parched lips a tea-kettle filled with wine, and then fed them sparingly with a dish of salt beef and potatoes. The others of the sloop’s crew were summoned ashore, and while they all sat on the beach and ate and drank, the admirable Jamieson spun the yarn of his own adventures. The pirates had captured four small coasting-vessels and, being short of prize-masters, had put him in charge of one of them, with a crew which included the two Frenchmen. The orders were to follow the piratical _Mexican_ into a harbor.