“This is a funny cock to be crowing in my parlor the morn,” thought the magistrate as, with sleepy peevishness, he was compelled to journey to Santa Cruz, to provision at Porta Santa, to double Cape St. Vincent and what not by this boy with early manhood’s whiskers unshaven, drawn, sallow face, uncurbed hair and clad in a striking symphony of old sea clothes. “But sairtainly there has been an egg laid somewhere.” He sent for Mr. Honeyman, sheriff of the county, who dwelt between Kirkwall and the sea. After due deliberation, consultation and speculation, he issued his precepts to the constable and other peace officers, to call together the people “to assist in bringing those villains to justice.” Raised his posse, in plain Latin. While these matters transpired at Kirkwall, other things significant for Gow were occurring on the _Revenge_, or, rather, off it, for the defection of Jemmy was followed by a veritable landslide; ten men, no less, seized the longboat and made off for the mainland, where they coasted along till they came to Leith, the port of Edinburgh. Their hard journey was rewarded by imprisonment in the Tolbooth at that place as suspected pirates. A well-founded suspicion, if there ever was one. When John Gow took the next census of his crew only twenty-eight honest fellows answered “here.” Although it was obviously time to move on to uncropped pasturage, Gow first resolved to provision himself at the expense of the home folks by the violent means of robbing the wealthier residents alongshore. With that marked turn of his for a quaint joke, the first place that he selected for despoiling was that of our Mr. Honeyman, high sheriff. Ten men in charge of the bo’sun were detached for this job, and, slinging upon their persons everything in the way of a weapon they could struggle along with, they started off in the early evening. The high sheriff was flying about the country, compelling his posse, and it was Mrs. Honeyman, candle in hand, who answered the gently deceptive tapping on her front door. When she saw the bristling aggregation on the front steps, she thought for an instant that it was a party of neighbors stopping in on their way to a fancy-dress ball to show her their diverting make-up. Or she may have mistaken them for a part of her husband’s posse, and may have been about to assure them laughingly that they had made the funniest mistake in the world when one of the great beards cracked like a young earthquake and a gale-conquering noise boomed through the ancestral halls of the Honeymans. “Excuse us, marm, yer leddyship, but we’re the pirates and we’ve come to rob the house. Gi’ us the stuff and there’ll be no trouble.”