Mrs. Wilkie’s heart waited. The clock ticked loudly. The widow Seaton paused with her potato-paring knife poised in midair. On the kitchen threshold merry-faced Anne stopped and gazed as though she were watching a stage play. “Sink me! What have I to do with Captain Drummond?” Bang came the tumbler on the table; the steward’s loose, foolish jaw was shoved forward defiantly. Yet what was there about him? Something--yes, the steward is in the grip of a great fear. Since frequenting the widow’s shop, George had heard quite a lot about this Captain Drummond, because the captain, young Andrew Wilkie, and doubtless many others of his crew had belonged in this city of Edinburgh, of which, as you know, Leith is the port and a suburb. Folk were always asking him about this Drummond till he was fair sick of it. He leaned over and stuck his fat lips against Jamie’s ear. “While we was on the coast of Malabar,” he began with solemn, nautical preface, “a Dutch ship told us that Captain Drummond, out o’ Scotland was turned--a pirate!” He leaned back and gazed at Jamie’s astonished face. Yes, he had achieved an effect; maybe he could get another. “Aye, sir, so we manned our sloop, we did, putting guns and patereroes aboard, and got ready to give the Scot a pound or two o’ lead.” Now the creeklet of his imagination went dry. “He never came” he ended rather ineffectively. Jamie was beaten. He drew off his artillery and departed to allow a light fire ship to come alongside. But all Anne got for her wiles and her work was, as she put it, “He found they had a design to pump him; but they should not be the wiser of him, though what he had said he had said.” He was no ship to be pumped, was George; but you see the implication that there was water in the hold. Among the patrons of the house was a jolly old gunner, Will Wood, who used to come down from the fort in all his splendid regimentals to drink toddy and tickle the chin of the laughing Anne. He got interested in the “pumping” of George Haines, steward of the seized ship which lay outside at the dock, and resolved to try the bluff, hearty, man-to-man approach. He loaded George up with whiskey until he “fell into a melancholy fit,” from the burnt-sienna depths of which he emitted this frightful croak: “It is a wonder that since we did not sink at sea, that God did not make the ground open and swallow us up when we are come ashore, for the wickedness that has been committed during this last voyage on board that old bitch _Bess_.” By the “old bitch Bess” he meant the _Worcester_, whose spars might be seen through the parlor window dripping in the mournful rain. Will Wood slapped the steward’s knee. “Come, my lad, take a turn on the links; you’ll feel better; what’s a bit of wet?” Dolefully George tottered out of the hot parlor. Behind him the genial artilleryman turned and winked portently at the watching company. “Now’s the time,” said the knowing wink; “we’ve almost got him.”