Many suggestions were made, of various degrees of practical merit, some indeed so sieve-like that they would not hold the water of common-sense at all. Trefry soon found that, great burly brute as he was, Barbe Rouge had a strong following of staunch men on board; men who loved the skipper because their natures were coarse and rough, and who saw in him the beau-ideal of brute strength, stature, and power to command: his very courage and daring delighted them. Sentiment, and the wrongs of others, were nothing to such as they. Trefry found that, all told, he could only count on eleven others besides himself to help him in the contemplated carrying off of the two girls; but, to better equalize the numbers, he determined, after dark, to give leave to six or eight of the skipper’s staunchest men to take the long-boat, and pull across to Guernsey for a spree. This was agreed to as part of the programme; and it was also agreed, that at eleven o’clock that night he should go ashore alone to the stone house, and bring off the girls, while his eleven comrades should arm themselves (from the arm-chest, of which he had the key), and make themselves masters of the ship while he was ashore. The day passed slowly by, and the shades of night at length fell, draping its mantle of deepening blue over the pretty little island. At eleven o’clock Trefry, well armed, went ashore as arranged. The night was dark, for there was no moon, and calm, for there was but little wind. Quietly he crept round the side of the house, and taking off his boots went up the stone steps leading to the garden at the rear, where he quickly became aware of a faint glow of light rising from behind a tremendous mound of earth in the very centre of the garden. He paused and listened; then silently crept across the garden on all fours to the mound, up which he as noiselessly climbed, and peeped over. He beheld a great excavation several feet square, from which the light came, and peering over the edge, he saw on the opposite side of the wall of the hole, the shadow of Barbe Rouge’s great head and beard, projected by the light of a lantern placed on this side of the pit. The shadow moved but slightly, showing that the fiery skipper was deeply engrossed in some task or other of a weird nature, or he would not have chosen night for his work. Like a flash of light it entered Trefry’s brain that the old buccaneer had killed the girls, or at least one of them, and was now hiding the evidences of his guilt by burying the body in the garden.