"I wish you had bethought yourself to speak sooner," said the captain patiently. "’T is a thing for us to reflect upon deeply, but I can hear no more now. I must sleep, as you see, before I am fit for anything. Do not let the men disturb me; they may get down channel to their fishing. If they succeed as well as yesterday, we shall soon make the cost of this little adventure." He spoke drowsily, and drew the rough blanket over his head to keep the light away. Dickson mounted to the deck. If he had known how easy it would be to make things straight with the captain, how much suffering he might have spared himself! You must take him in the right mood, too. But the captain had an eye like a gimlet, that twisted into a man’s head. "Wallingford may never turn up, after all. I wish I had killed him while I was about it," said Dickson to himself uneasily. "It may be all a lie that he was sent to Plymouth; it would be such a distance!" There was something the matter with this world. To have an eye like Paul Jones’s fixed upon you while you were trying to make a straight story was anything but an assistance or a pleasure. The captain was shaking with laughter in the cabin as Dickson disappeared. "What a face he put on the smooth-spoken hypocrite! His race is run; he told me more than he needed," and Paul Jones’s face grew stern, as he lay there looking at the planks above his head. "He ’s at the bottom of the hill now, if he only knew it. When a man ’s character is gone, his reputation is sure enough to follow;" and with this sage reflection the captain covered his head again carefully, and went to sleep. Unaware of this final verdict, Dickson was comfortably reading his letter on the deck, and feeling certain that fortune had turned his way. His mind had been made up some days before to leave the Ranger as soon as he got back to France, even if he must feign illness to gain his discharge, or desert the ship, as others had done. He had already a good sum of money that had been paid him for information useful to the British government, and, to avoid future trouble, proposed to hide himself in the far South or in one of the West Indian Islands. "My poor wife would gain by the change of climate," said the scoundrel, pitying himself now for the loss of friendship and respect from which he felt himself begin to suffer, and for those very conditions which he had so carefully evolved.