CAPTAIN BLOOD

By Rafael Sabatini

CAPTAIN BLOOD HIS ODYSSEY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.   THE MESSENGER

CHAPTER II.   KIRKE'S DRAGOONS

CHAPTER III.   THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE

CHAPTER IV.   HUMAN MERCHANDISE

CHAPTER V.   ARABELLA BISHOP

CHAPTER VI.   PLANS OF ESCAPE

CHAPTER VII.   PIRATES

CHAPTER VIII.   SPANIARDS

CHAPTER IX.   THE REBELS-CONVICT

CHAPTER X.   DON DIEGO

CHAPTER XI.   FILIAL PIETY

CHAPTER XII.   DON PEDRO SANGRE

CHAPTER XIII.   TORTUGA

CHAPTER XIV.   LEVASSEUR'S HEROICS

CHAPTER XV.   THE RANSOM

CHAPTER XVI.   THE TRAP

CHAPTER XVII.   THE DUPES

CHAPTER XVIII.   THE MILAGROSA

CHAPTER XIX.   THE MEETING

CHAPTER XX.   THIEF AND PIRATE

CHAPTER XXI.   THE SERVICE OF KING JAMES

CHAPTER XXII.   HOSTILITIES

CHAPTER XXIII.   HOSTAGES

CHAPTER XXIV.   WAR

CHAPTER XXV.   THE SERVICE OF KING LOUIS

CHAPTER XXVI.   M. de RIVAROL

CHAPTER XXVII.   CARTAGENA

CHAPTER XXVIII.      THE HONOUR OF M. DE RIVAROL

CHAPTER XXIX.   THE SERVICE OF KING WILLIAM

CHAPTER XXX.   THE LAST FIGHT OF THE ARABELLA

CHAPTER XXXI.   HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR

CHAPTER I. THE MESSENGER

Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater.

Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite, but went disregarded. Mr. Blood's attention was divided between his task and the stream of humanity in the narrow street below; a stream which poured for the second time that day towards Castle Field, where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, had preached a sermon containing more treason than divinity.

These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with green boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands. Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there a sword was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives of every other of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war. Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously of its manhood to the service of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a papist.

Yet Peter Blood, who was not only able to bear arms, but trained and skilled in their use, who was certainly no coward, and a papist only when it suited him, tended his geraniums and smoked his pipe on that warm July evening as indifferently as if nothing were afoot. One other thing he