"We ’re safe enough here from that mistaken ferret," he insisted, after briefly describing the ease with which he had carried out their evening plans. "You might have been cooling your heels here waiting for me the whole week long, and I waiting for my money, too, but for such a turn of luck! If I did n’t want to get to France, and get my discharge, and go back to America as quick as possible without suspicion, I’d tell you just where he landed, and put him into your hands like a cat in a bag, to be easy drowned!" "He ’s in Bristol to-night, if you must know," Dickson went on, after again refreshing himself with the brandy; "we set him ashore to ride there over Clifton Downs. Yes, I might have missed ye. He ’s a bold devil, but to-night the three of us here could bag him easy. I ’ve put many a spoke in his wheel. There was a young fellow aboard us, too, that had done me a wrong at home that I never forgave; and that night at Whitehaven I ’ve already told ye of, when I fixed the candles, after I got these papers that you ’ve come for, I dropped some pieces of ’em, and things that was with ’em, in my pretty gentleman’s locker. So good friends were parted after that, and the whole Whitehaven matter laid to his door. I could tell ye the whole story. His name’s Wallingford, curse him, and they say he ’s got a taste o’ your Mill Prison by this time that’s paid off all our old scores. I hope he ’s dead and damned!" "Who ’s your man Wallingford? I ’ve heard the name myself. There ’s a reward out for him; or did I hear he was pardoned?" asked one of the men. "’T was a scurvy sort o’ way to make him pay his debts. I’d rather ended it man fashion, if I had such a grudge," said the other listener, the man who had been drinking least. Dickson’s wits were now overcome by the brandy, hard-headed as he might boast himself. "If you knew all I had suffered at his hands!" he protested. "He robbed me of a good living at home, and made me fail in my plans. I was like to be a laughingstock!" The two men shrugged their shoulders when he next pushed the bottle toward them, and said that they had had enough. "Come, now," said one of them, "let’s finish our business! You have this document o’ one Yankee privateersman called Paul Jones that our principal ’s bound for to get. You ’ve set your own thieves’ price on it, and we ’re sent here to pay it. I ’m to see it first, to be sure there’s no cheat, and then make a finish." "The paper ’s worth more than’t was a month ago," said Dickson shrewdly. His face was paler than ever, and in strange contrast to the red faces of his companions. "The time is come pretty near for carrying out the North Sea scheme. He may have varied from this paper when he found the writing gone, but I know for a fact he has the cruise still in mind, and ’t would be a hard blow to England."