«So it was you!» he ejaculated.

«If ye mean it was I who took Pike's place when ye murdered him, ye're right. Ye'd had done better to have been honest with him. There's a maxim ye should have learnt at school, that honesty is the best policy. Though perhaps ye never were at school. But there's another maxim of which I made you a present years ago and which they tell me that ye're fond of quoting: Who seeks to grasp too much ends by holding nothing.»

He waited for a reply, but none came. Easterling, his great bulk sagging, glowered at him silently with those dark feral eyes.

Blood sighed, and moved towards the head of the accommodation ladder.

«Ye're no affair of mine. I leave ye to these men you have wronged, and whose leader you have murdered. It is for them to judge you.»

He went down to the boat that had brought Easterling aboard, and so back to the Arabella, his task accomplished, and his long duel with Easterling at last concluded.

An hour later the Arabella and the Valiant were running south together. Gallows Key was falling rapidly astern, and Galloway and his crew aboard the crippled Hermes imprisoned in the lagoon were left to conjecture what had happened outside and to extricate themselves as best they could from their own difficulties.