and that if this long-mourned relative had lived he felt he should have been a better man and not led away against his higher nature by the chance of falling in with bad companions.  Aunt Jane thought her resemblance to Chris’s aunt a remarkable coincidence and an opportunity for appealing to his better self which should be improved.  She wanted to improve it by untying his hands, because he had sprained his wrist in his childhood and it was sensitive.  He had sprained it in rescuing a little companion from drowning, the child of a drunkard who had unfeelingly thrown his offspring down a well.  This episode had been an example to Chris which had kept him from drinking all his life, until he had fallen into his present rough company.

Aunt Jane took it very hard that the Scotchman seemed quite unfeeling about Chris’s wrist.  She said it seemed very strange to her in a man who had so recently known the sorrows of captivity himself.  She said she supposed even suffering would not soften some natures.

As to Magnus, his state of sullen fury made him indifferent even to threats of punishment.  He swore with a determination and fluency worthy of a better cause.  For myself, I could not endure his neighborhood.  It seemed to me I could not live through the days that must intervene before the arrival of the Rufus Smith in the constant presence of this wretch.

More than all, it made Dugald and Cuthbert unwilling to leave the camp together.  There was always the possibility that the two ruffians might find means to free themselves, and, with none but Cookie and the women present, to obtain control of the firearms and the camp.  For the negro, once the men were free, could not surely be depended on to face them.  Loyal he was, and valiant in his fashion, but old and with the habit of submission.  One did not see him standing up for long before two berserker-mad ruffians.

What to do with the pirates continued for a day and a night a knotty problem.

It was Cuthbert Vane who solved it, and with the simplicity of genius.

“Why not send ’em down to their chums the way we do the eats?” he asked.

It seemed at first incredibly fantastic, but the more you thought of it the more practical it grew.  It was characteristic of Cuthbert not to see it as fantastic.  For him the sharp edges of fact were never shaded off into the dim and nebulous.  Cuthbert, when he saw things at all, saw them steadily and whole.  He would let down the writhing, swearing Magnus over the cliff as tranquilly as he let down loaves of bread, aware merely of its needing more muscular effort.  Only he would take immense care not to hurt him.

Dire outcries greeted the decision.  Aunt Jane wept, and Chris wept, and said this never could have happened to him if his aunt had lived.  Oaths flowed from Captain Magnus in a turgid stream.  Nevertheless the twain were led away, firmly bound, and guarded by Dugald, Cuthbert and the negro.  And the remarkable program proposed by Cuthbert Vane was triumphantly carried out.  Six prisoners now occupied the old cave of the buccaneers.