Jemmy, presumably again, was one of the stubborn eight who had refused, at the time of the mutiny, to be traitors to their sailor’s duty; at any rate, he had no stomach for a pirate’s perils and pleasures. Also, he was a clear-minded youth, old enough, however, to see that his company had now brought him within hailing distance of the king’s gallows. Jemmy had no appetite for the ceremonial that that instrument adorned, and so, in the late spring night, when the moon was dark and the moment persuasive, Jemmy slid whitely off the stern of the _Revenge_, without stopping to procure his honorable discharge as an able seaman, and with no more of a flop than a frog would make turning off a log. With his clothes tightly tarpaulined about him, he clove the circling tides smoothly to the beach. As he pulled on his breeches and stockings, he looked back, but all was quiet. One small yellow light rose and fell out yonder in the watery blackness; to Jemmy the eye of an evil beast of the sea from whose maw he panted in a buoyant freedom. He listened; there was no chump of oars, no hoarse calling afar off, only the wash of white waters among the pebbles at his feet, and, behind him, voices of the shore,--the sweet, sane sounds of a life which he had begun to think had never been. Dressed, he made for the village. In the middle of an unlighted roadway, a strangely accented tongue told him there was no magistrate there; to find His Honor one would have to push on to Kirkwall. And how far was Kirkwall? Kirkwall was a matter of four leagues. “I must get there to-night,” said Jemmy. “Which is the way?” “The nicht!” came back the buzzing bewilderment. “To the magistrate at Kirkwa’ the nicht? Mon, what’s upon ye?” Jemmy wished the fellow would not talk so loud, though reason told him lungs of brass would hardly reach the _Revenge_. Panic. “Do you know any one would show a man the way to Kirkwall for a bit of money?” asked Jemmy, inspired. The void answered not. Then, ponderously, “It would take a muckle o’ siller for a man wi’ bairns to go out the nicht.” “A half-guinea, supposin’.” Long pause. “Aye--supposin’ as ye say. Cam, lad.” Jemmy’s guide stopped a little while at a cottage to warn the guid wife he would be out making an honest penny, and then they were off on the shadowy leagues. Cicerone tried with rude probe to find out what Jemmy’s business with the magistrate might be, a fact which, perhaps as much as the coveted “siller”, had bought his services, but when daylight and Kirkwall appeared together, he left his queer employer at the house of the magistrate with all of his information unbroached.