"I know all about it, for I was there," replied Marcy. "It was I who ran up those flags, and although I didn't dream that you were on the brig, you can't imagine how delighted I was when I saw that she was bound to give us the slip. That privateer was Captain Beardsley's schooner, and I was aboard of her in the capacity of pilot." Sailor Jack settled back in his chair as if to say that that was the most astounding thing he had ever heard in his life. "_Pilot!_" he exclaimed, at length. "Lon Beardsley doesn't need a pilot on this coast. He has smuggled more than one cargo of cigars through these inlets." "I know that. But you are aware that Beardsley has been our enemy for years. He couldn't find any way to take revenge until this war broke out, and then he began troubling us. He knew, and he knows to-day, that I am Union all over, and down on secession and all who favor it, and when he offered me the pilot's berth and promised to do the fair thing by me, he was in hopes that mother would refuse to let me go; then, don't you see, he would have had an excuse to set our rebel neighbors against us on the ground that we were traitors to our State." "I always knew that Lon Beardsley was beneath contempt, but this rather gets ahead of me," said Jack hotly. "But it so happened that we saw through his little game. Mother never said a word, and I shipped as pilot aboard the privateer _Osprey_" continued Marcy. "And, Jack (here he got up, moved his chair close to the sofa on which his brother was sitting and lowered his voice to a whisper), I was on her when she made her first and only capture, and upstairs in my valise I have seventeen hundred dollars in gold, my share of the money the _Mary Hollins_ brought when she was condemned and sold in the port of Newbern." "That would be a nice little sum of money if it had been earned in an honorable way," observed Jack. "But it wasn't," said Marcy, "and consequently I don't intend to keep it. I'm going to give it back to the one to whom it belongs. Oh, you needn't laugh. I mean it!" "I know you do, and I hope that you will some day find the man; but I am afraid you won't. Where is Beardsley now?" "I left him at Newbern. The presence of the cruisers on the coast frightened him so that he gave up privateering--he didn't want to run the risk of being captured with guns aboard of him for fear that he might be treated as a pirate--and took to running the blockade. We made one successful trip, taking out cotton and bringing back an assorted cargo worth somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars, and it was while we were trying to make Crooked Inlet on our way home that we came the nearest to being captured. We ran foul of a howitzer launch, which turned loose on us with shrapnel and canister, and gave me this broken arm and Beardsley a black and blue shoulder." "I wish from the bottom of my heart that she had given him a broken head," said Jack. "Were you much hurt?"