a loathsome smell. Joe reported to the chief gunner and begged the
chance to sleep for a dozen hours on end. This was granted amiably
enough and the pirates clustered about to ask all manner of curious
questions, but the weary lads dragged themselves into the bows of the
ship and curled up in a stupor. There they lay as if drugged, all
through the night, even when the seamen trampled over them to haul the
head-sails and tack ship.

When, at last, they blinked at the morning sky, it dismayed them to find
the breeze blowing strong out of the southeast and the _Revenge_
standing in to the coast under easy sail. They looked aft and saw
Blackbeard at the rail with a long glass at his eye. The whole crew was
eager with expectation and the routine work went undone. The ship had
been put about several hours earlier, Joe learned, and was due soon to
sight the shore unless the reckoning was all at fault.

So cleverly had Blackbeard calculated the drift of the boys' raft that a
little later in the morning a lookout in the maintop called down:

"Land, ho! Two points off the starboard bow she bears."

"The maintop, ahoy!" shouted Blackbeard. "Can ye see a vessel's spars?"

"'Tis too hazy inshore. But unless my eyes play me tricks, a smudge of
smoke arises."

Jack Cockrell nervously confided to Joe:

"That would be Captain Wellsby's campfire on the beach."

"Trust him to douse it," was the easy assurance. "I feel better. Blow
me, but I expect to live another day."

"Answer me why," begged Jack. "I am like a palsied old man."

"Well, you know this bit o' coast, how low it sets above the sea.
Despite the haze, a man aloft could see a ship's masts and yards before
he had a glimpse of land."

"Then the wreck of the _Plymouth Adventure_ has slid off the shoal and
gone down, Joe?"

"Yes, when the wind veered and stirred a surf on the shoal. She pounded
over with the flood-tide and dropped into fifteen fathom."

"Then we are saved, for now?" joyfully exclaimed Jack.

"Unless we're unlucky enough to find some o' those plaguey pirates
afloat on a raft or makin' signals from the beach."

The _Revenge_ sailed shoreward until those on board could discern the
marching lines of breakers which tumbled across the shoal. The smudge of
smoke had vanished from the beach. The lookout man concluded that the
haze had deceived him. Blackbeard steered as close as he dared go, with
a sailor heaving the lead, but there was no sign of life am