I did not reply, for I had no heart to speak of what I had left behind.
"Cheer up, young one," he cried. "There was more lost at Flodden. A
gentleman-adventurer must live by the hour, and it's surprising how
Fortune favours them that trust her. There was a man I mind, in
Breadalbane...." And here he would tell some tale of how light came out
of black darkness for the trusting heart.
"Man, Ringan," I said, "I see your kindly purpose. But tell me, did
ever you hear of such a tangle as ours being straightened out?
"Why, yes," he said. "I've been in worse myself, and here I am. I have
been in a cell at Cartagena, chained to a man that had died of the
plague, with the gallows preparing for me at cock-crow. But in the
night some friends o' mine came into the bay, and I had the solemn joy
of stepping out of yon cell over the corp of the Almirante. I've been
mad with fever, and jumped into the Palmas River among the alligators,
and not one of them touched me, though I was swimming about crying that
the water was burning oil. And then a lad in a boat gave me a clout on
the head that knocked the daftness out of me, and in a week I was
marching on my own deck, with my bonnet cocked like a king's captain.
I've been set by my unfriends on a rock in the Florida Keys, with a keg
of dirty water and a bunch of figs, and the sun like to melt my brains,
and two bullet holes in my thigh.
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