“As it turns out, no. But at the time, Peter Heston was an old and well-respected member of the community whom not a single person on that island would even think of doubting, while I and my crew had never been there before and could have been pirates for all they knew. We were found guilty before there was a trial. The actual trial was a mockery where Heston repeated his ghastly tale. No other witnesses were necessary for us to be sentenced to prison.”

“Prison!” she gasped, incredulous. “You were actually put in prison?”

“Yes,” he replied. “And with absolutely no hope of getting out of it, when we knew that the entire island thought us guilty.”

He shuddered unconsciously. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how horrible that experience must have been for him and his crew. He’d never been in jail before, never suffered any real physical hardship that she was aware of. Nor should he ever have experienced anything like that, when he was a good, honest man who would never do anything that might get him arrested, much less sent to prison.

Which was what she couldn’t help but point out. “But you didn’t do anything!”

“No, and our ship’s guns were quite cold to prove it,” he agreed.

She frowned, getting a bit confused now. “Then why were you even arrested, much less put to trial?”

“Because our proof of innocence required immediate clarification, which didn’t occur.”

“For someone to examine the guns?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t they?”

He chuckled again. She was surprised herself now that he could, especially after he replied, “Probably because we were about to be lynched on the spot. This was midmorning, you see. And quite a few people had noticed the town guard heading for the docks and followed them. There was a huge crowd by the time we docked, and everyone there was able to hear Heston’s accusations. Understandably, the magistrate wanted to break that up quickly, and could only do so by getting us off the dock and into his jail.”

“When it would only have taken a moment or two for verification?”

“It was a very tense situation, Rissa. There were other plantation owners in that crowd who were no doubt thinking it could have been their houses that we might have destroyed. And when an issue becomes personal like that, emotions can be quite heated. We really were in danger of that mob of angry islanders taking the law into their own hands. Frankly, we were rather glad to be put behind bars until the matter could be straightened out. Knowing ourselves innocent, we didn’t really doubt at the time that it would be straightened out, so we were more concerned with the angry crowd than with the charges being filed against us.”