Page:Paine--Lost ships and lonely seas.djvu/64

38 This is how Captain Lincoln quoted it in his diary, but the mate of the schooner, sorely tried as he must have been, was more likely to exclaim:

"I can't fathom all their  tricks, but it looks to me as if the bloody rogues had made up their minds to scupper us, and may they sizzle in hell for a million years!"

The pirate chief and his officers held a whispered conference and then spent the last night ashore in gambling, the diminutive leader "in hopes of getting back some of the five hundred dollars he had lost a few nights before; which made him unusually fractious."

Before they were marooned. Captain Lincoln took pains to note down that the pirates were sporting new canvas trousers made from the light sails of the Exertion and that they had cut up the colors to make fancy belts to keep their money in, and he added this vivid little touch to the portrait of the chief, "The captain had on one of my best shirts, a cleaner one than I had ever seen him wear before."

At sunset the crew of the Exertion, with several prisoners taken out of a Spanish merchant prize, were put into a boat. At this lamentable moment, Nikola stepped to the front again and said to Captain Lincoln:

"My friend, I will give you your book," (a vol-