"Ze sheep ahoy!" shouted the man from the schooner that lay to windward, tossing her bows and shaking the spray off her like any champing and curvetting steed angrily reined in and smoking his impatience through his nostrils. "What sheep air you?" Vanderdecken stepped his towering figure on to the bulwark; "The Braave," he cried, sending his majestic voice ringing like a note of thunder through the wind. "Vhat ees your country?" yelled the other. Vanderdecken did not apparently understand the question, but probably assuming that these sea-interrogatories followed in the usual manner, answered, "From Batavia to Amsterdam," speaking as the schooner's man did in English, but with an accent as strongly Dutch as the other's was French. Thought I, he will see that we are a Holland ship, and as France and their High Mightinesses are on good terms he may sheer off. But even as this fancy or hope crossed my mind, a sudden order was shouted out on the schooner and in a breath the vessel's hatches began to vomit men. They tumbled up in masses, blackening the white decks, and a gleam of arms went rippling among them. "Captain Vanderdecken!" I bawled, "that fellow is a pirate! Mind, sir, or she will be aboard of you in another minute!" And not stopping to heed the effect of my words, I grasped Imogene by the hand and ran with her off the poop. "Get you to my cabin, dearest, they are pirates and will be tumbling in masses over the rail directly." I pressed my lips to her cheek and she glided like a phantom down the hatch-ladder. What I relied on by advising her concealment I could not have explained; since those who rummaged the vessel were pretty sure to enter the cabins. But my instincts urging me to hide her away from the first spring of the men on to our deck, I took their counsel as a sort of mysterious wisdom put into me by God for her protection; it coming to this in short--that there might be a chance of their overlooking her if she hid below, whereas they were bound to see her if she remained on deck, to be ravished by her beauty, and, supposing them pirates, to carry her off as a part of their booty, according to the custom of those horrid villains.