Having made a thorough search of the various state-rooms, the strangers--who were evidently Spaniards--hurried their prisoners on deck. Here a single glance sufficed to show Captain Leicester that his ship had been taken from him by a clever surprise, aided--or rather rendered possible--by terrible carelessness on the part of those left in charge of the deck. The crew, as he found on rapidly counting heads, were all present--with one exception--securely bound hand and foot, and huddled together under the bulwarks. The exception--the missing man-- was Ritson; and the overturned and broken chair, the blood-spattered deck in its immediate vicinity, and the heavy splash into the water alongside, which George had heard, rendered the whole story as plain and clear as the moon which rode so serenely in the heavens above. Poor Ritson! he had paid with his life the penalty of his disastrous lapse of duty. And the drowsy helmsman--who had obviously awakened in time to spring to the assistance of his superior--was lying near the skylight, white and ghastly in the moonlight, with his skull cloven, and a great black pool of blood slowly spreading on the planking beneath his head. The brig ahead, now hove-to and evidently awaiting the approach of the _Aurora_, told George from whence his enemies had sprung; and--now that it was all too late--he bitterly reproached himself for his lack of caution with regard to her. The individuals who had thus cleverly gained possession of the barque were as ruffianly a set of scoundrels as could well be met with on the high seas. Their leader, a brawny, thick-set Spaniard, with a skin tanned to the hue of well-seasoned mahogany, his ragged black locks bound round with a filthy red silk handkerchief, and surmounted by a broad-brimmed straw hat, his body clad in a red and yellow striped worsted shirt, confined at the waist by a cutlass-belt, into which a long-barrelled pistol was thrust, and his legs encased in sea-boots reaching nearly to the thigh, was a particularly truculent-looking ruffian; and a powerful negro, somewhat similarly clad, who seemed to be his chief _aide_, was little if anything better. That they were pirates there could be no possible doubt, and poor George Leicester expected nothing less than that he and his ship's company would all have their throats cut, and then be unceremoniously pitched overboard, to keep poor Ritson company. It soon appeared, however, that his career was not to be thus summarily brought to an end, for after a few words between the leader and the negro, George and his crew were, after their bonds had been looked to and made more secure, distributed about the deck, and chained to the ring-bolts in the bulwarks and elsewhere.