"Oh, who will join, jolly mariners all?
And who will join, says he, O!
To fill his pockets with the good red goold,
By sailing on the sea, O!"

"Who'll list?" cried the gaunt man again; "now's your time! We've got
forty men to Plymouth now, ready to sail the minute we get back, and we
want a dozen out of you Bideford men, and just a boy or two, and then
we'm off and away, and make our fortunes, or go to heaven.

"Our bodies in the sea so deep,
Our souls in heaven to rest!
Where valiant seamen, one and all,
Hereafter shall be blest!"

"Now," said Oxenham, "you won't let the Plymouth men say that the
Bideford men daren't follow them? North Devon against South, it is.
Who'll join? who'll join? It is but a step of a way, after all, and
sailing as smooth as a duck-pond as soon as you're past Cape Finisterre.
I'll run a Clovelly herring-boat there and back for a wager of twenty
pound, and never ship a bucketful all the way. Who'll join? Don't think
you're buying a pig in a poke. I know the road, and Salvation Yeo, here,
too, who was the gunner's mate, as well as I do the narrow seas, and
better. You ask him to show you the chart of it, now, and see if he
don't tell you over the ruttier as well as Drake himself."

On which the gaunt man pulled from under his arm a great white buffalo
horn covered with rough etchings of land and sea, and held it up to the
admiring ring.