And
Bloody Bill, as they rudely called Mr. Gagg, a member of the crew,
looked up at the sky, and said that it was a windy night and looked
like hanging. And some of those present thoughtfully stroked their
necks while Captain Shard unfolded to them his plan. He said the time
was come to quit the _Desperate Lark_, for she was too well known to
the navies of four kingdoms, and a fifth was getting to know her, and
others had suspicions. (More cutters than even Captain Shard suspected
were already looking for her jolly black flag with its neat
skull-and-crossbones in yellow.) There was a little archipelago that
he knew of on the wrong side of the Sargasso Sea; there were but
thirty islands there, bare, ordinary islands, but one of them floated.
He had noticed it years ago, and had gone ashore and never told a
soul, but had quietly anchored it with the anchor of his ship to the
bottom of the sea, which just there was profoundly deep, and had made
the thing the secret of his life, determining to marry and settle down
there if it ever became impossible to earn his livelihood in the usual
way at sea. When first he saw it, it was drifting slowly, with the
wind in the tops of the trees; but if the cable had not rusted away,
it should be still where he left it, and they would make a rudder and
hollow out cabins below, and at night they would hoist sails to the
trunks of the trees and sail wherever they liked.
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