Breathing hard, his face mottled, Bishop pondered him a moment.
Then: "Fetch him along," he said.

Down the long avenue between those golden walls of cane standing
some eight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black
captors in the Colonel's wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his
fellow-slaves at work there. Despair went with him. What torments
might immediately await him he cared little, horrible though he
knew they would be. The real source of his mental anguish lay in
the conviction that the elaborately planned escape from this
unutterable hell was frustrated now in the very moment of execution.

They came out upon the green plateau and headed for the stockade
and the overseer's white house. Pitt's eyes looked out over Carlisle
Bay, of which this plateau commanded a clear view from the fort on
one side to the long sheds of the wharf on the other. Along this
wharf a few shallow boats were moored, and Pitt caught himself
wondering which of these was the wherry in which with a little luck
they might have been now at sea. Out over that sea his glance ranged
miserably.

In the roads, standing in for the shore before a gentle breeze that
scarcely ruffled the sapphire surface of the Caribbean, came a
stately red-hulled frigate, flying the English ensign.

Colonel Bishop halted to consider her, shading his eyes with his
fleshly hand. Light as was the breeze, the vessel spread no canvas
to it beyond that of her foresail. Furled was her every other sail,
leaving a clear view of the majestic lines of her hull, from towering
stern castle to gilded beakhead that was aflash in the dazzling