"You would none of you exercise yourselves much over the intimacy," said a third gossip, "had ye seen as I did the two brothers talking on deck after the row with Early. Ralph told Dick he was quit of him, tired of trying to make a gentleman of him, and wished they might never meet again. He did indeed--I heard it with my own ears." "That's the most wonderful part of it," said the first speaker; "most of the things you tell you've heard through the ears of some one else." Gossip number three turned red and opened her mouth to deliver a crushing retort, when she discovered that the attention of her hearers had been distracted by the arrival of a new-comer. It was Reuben Early, whose wife had bound as big a bandage as possible about his head. He came up to join the group, receiving on all sides gratifying commiserations upon the wound he had been dealt by Richard Ingle's hand; and though he had some difficulty in explaining why he had not returned it, nor made any defence after all his bold talk, he still continued to pose as a hero, and to make his townfellows feel that in his humiliation they had received an individual and collective insult. "When the villain struck me," he explained, "I was encumbered with the sack of grain I was bearing, and ere I could lay it down and reach my weapon, the fellow had disappeared down the hatchway." "Come, come, Reuben!" cried a sceptic near-by, "we all know you are readier with your tongue than with either sword or musket; and I for one am not sorry to have you taught a lesson, were it not that the blow was struck at a citizen of St. Mary's, and therefore at us all. I am for punishing Dick Ingle for the assault, yet lightly; but for the treason he spoke he should be hung at the yard-arm of his own ship." "Not hung perhaps; but surely put in custody of Sheriff Ellyson here," suggested another of the group, who stood in the morning sunlight outside the log cabin which served for a hostelry. "Aha!" laughed the man next him, "our innkeeper would not see the number of drinkers of his good ale diminished by one. How say you, Master Boniface, would it not be well to compel the traitor to drink himself to death at the expense of the Lord Proprietary?" All but two of the men laughed at this sally. The innkeeper naturally failed to see the fun of a jest of which he was the butt, and the sheriff took the suggestion into serious consideration. "By the Saints, it were a good scheme and has much to commend it. It may seem a pity to waste good wine on a bad man, when the one is so scarce and the other so plenty; but it would mightily relieve the authorities. 'Put him in the custody of the sheriff!' you say; and how, pray, am I to hold him when I have no jail save my two hands? Can I lie with him at night and eat and drink by day with my arm locked in his? I would he were at the bottom of the sea!"