“As right as I might expect to be, thank you, after these rather remarkable experiences,” he said. “But you—what happened to you?”

“They hit me on the head,” replied Spendlove, simply.

“Don’t stand there. Sit down,” said Hornblower, and Spendlove collapsed beside him.

“Do you know where we are, My Lord?” he asked.

“Somewhere at the top of a cliff, as far as I can estimate,” said Hornblower.

“But where, My Lord?”

“Somewhere in His Majesty’s loyal colony of Jamaica. More than that I can’t say.”

“It will be dawn soon, I suppose,” said Spendlove, weakly.

“Soon enough.”

Nobody about them was paying them any attention. There was a great deal of chatter going on, in marked contrast with the silence—the almost disciplined silence—which had been preserved during their dash across country. The chatter mingled with the sound of a small waterfall, which he realised he had been hearing ever since his climb. The conversations were in a thick English which Hornblower could hardly understand, but he could be sure that their captors were expressing exultation. He could hear women’s voices, too, while figures paced about, too excited to sit down despite the fatigues of the night.

“I doubt if we’re at the top of the cliff, My Lord, if you’ll pardon me,” said Spendlove.

He pointed upwards. The sky was growing pale, and the stars were fading; vertically over their heads they could see the cliff above them, overhanging them. Looking up, Hornblower could see foliage silhouetted against the sky.

“Strange,” he said. “We must be on some sort of shelf.”

On his right hand the sky was showing a hint of light, of the palest pink, even while on his left it was still dark.

“Facing north-nor’west,” said Spendlove.

The light increased perceptibly; when Hornblower looked to the east again the pink had turned to orange, and there was a hint of green. They seemed immeasurably high up; almost at their feet, it seemed, as they sat, the shelf ended abruptly, and far down below them the shadowy world was taking form, concealed at the moment by a light mist. Hornblower was suddenly conscious of his wet clothes, and shivered.

“That might be the sea,” said Spendlove, pointing.

The sea it was, blue and lovely in the far distance; a broad belt of land, some miles across, extended between the cliff on which they were perched and the edge of the sea; the mist still obscured it. Hornblower rose to his feet, took a step forward, leaning over a low, crude parapet of piled rock; he shrank back before nerving himself to look again. Under his feet there was nothing. They were indeed on a shelf in the face of the cliff. About the height of a frigate’s mainyard, sixty feet or so; vertically below them he could see the small stream he had crossed holding the mule’s tail; the rope ladder still hung down from where he stood to the water’s edge; when, with an effort of will, he forced himself to lean out and look over he could see the mules standing dispiritedly below him in the narrow area between the river and the foot of the cliff; the overhang must be considerable. They were on a shelf in a cliff, undercut through the ages by the river below when in spate. Nothing could reach them from above, and nothing from below if the ladder were to be drawn up. The shelf was perhaps ten yards wide at its widest, and perhaps a hundred yards long. At one end the waterfall he had heard tumbled down the cliff face in a groove it had cut for itself; it splashed against a cluster of gleaming rocks and then leaped out again. The sight of it told him how thirsty he was, and he walked along to it. It was a giddy thing to do, to stand there with the cliff face at one elbow and a vertical drop under the other, with the spray bursting round him, but he could fill his cupped hands with water and drink, and drink again, before splashing his face and head refreshingly. He drew back to find Spendlove waiting for him to finish. Matted in Spendlove’s thick hair and behind his left ear and down his neck was a black clot of blood. Spendlove knelt to drink and to wash, and rose again touching his scalp cautiously.

“They spared me nothing,” he said.

His uniform was spattered with blood, too. At his waist dangled an empty scabbard; his sword was missing, and as they turned back from the waterfall they could see it—it was in the hand of one of their captors, who was standing waiting for them. He was short and square and heavily built, not entirely Negro, possibly as much as half white. He wore a dirty white shirt and loose, ragged blue trousers, with dilapidated buckled shoes on his splay feet.

“Now, Lord,” he said.

He spoke with the Island intonation, with a thickening of the vowels and a slurring of the consonants.

“What do you want?” demanded Hornblower, putting all the rasp into his voice that he could manage.

“Write us a letter,” said the man with the sword.

“A letter? To whom?”

“To the Governor.”

“Asking him to come and hang you?” asked Hornblower.

The man shook his big head.

“No. I want a paper, a paper with a seal on it. A pardon. For us all. With a seal on it.”

“Who are you?”

“Ned Johnson.” The name meant nothing to Hornblower, nor, as a glance showed, did it mean anything to the omniscient Spendlove.

“I sailed with Harkness,” said Johnson.

“Ah!”

That meant something to both the British officers. Harkness was one of the last of the petty pirates. Hardly more than a week ago his sloop, Blossom, had been cut off by the Clorinda off Savannalamar, and her escape to leeward intercepted. Under long-range fire from the frigate she had despairingly run herself aground at the mouth of the Sweet River, and her crew had escaped into the marshes and mangrove swamps of that section of coast, all except her captain, whose body had been found on her deck almost cut in two by a round shot from Clorinda. This was her crew, left leaderless—unless Johnson could be called their leader—and to hunt them down the Governor had called out two battalions of troops as soon as Clorinda beat back to Kingston with the news. It was to cut off their escape by sea that the Governor, at Hornblower’s suggestion, had posted guards at every fishing beach in the whole big island—otherwise the cycle they had already probably followed would be renewed, with the theft of a fishing boat, the capture of a larger craft, and so on until they were a pest again.

“There’s no pardon for pirates,” said Hornblower.

“Yes,” said Johnson. “Write us a letter, and the Governor will give us one.”

He turned aside and from the foot of the cliff at the back of the shelf he picked up something. It was a leatherbound book—the second volume of Waverley, Hornblower saw when it was put in his hands—and Johnson produced a stub of pencil and gave him that as well.

“Write to the Governor,” he said; he opened the book at the beginning and indicated the flyleaf as the place to write on.

“What do you think I would write?” asked Hornblower.

“Ask him for a pardon for us. With his seal on it.”

Apparently Johnson must have heard somewhere, in talk with fellow pirates, of ‘a pardon under the Great Seal’, and the memory had lingered.

“The Governor would never do that.”

“Then I send him your ears. Then I send him your nose,” said Johnson.

That was a horrible thing to hear. Hornblower glanced at Spendlove who had turned white at the words.

“You, the Admiral,” continued Johnson. “You, the Lord, The Governor will do that.”

“I doubt if he would,” said Hornblower.

He conjured up in his mind the picture of fussy old General Sir Augustus Hooper, and tried to imagine the reaction produced by Johnson’s demand. His Excellency would come near to bursting a blood vessel at the thought of granting pardons to two dozen pirates. The home government, when it heard the news, would be intensely annoyed, and without doubt most of the annoyance would be directed at the man whose idiocy in allowing himself to be kidnapped had put everyone in this absurd position. That suggested a question.