of rope until it
trailed in the water beneath the railed gallery which overhung the huge
rudder. Joe belayed his end securely and slid over like a flash,
twisting the rope around one leg and letting himself down as agile as a
monkey. Without a splash he cast himself loose and Jack followed but not
so adroitly. When he plopped into the water the commotion was like
tossing a barrel overboard, but nobody sounded an alarm.

They clung to the rusty rudder chains and listened. The ship was all
quiet. Then out into the mist they launched themselves, swimming almost
submerged, dreading to hear an outcry and the spatter of musket balls.
But the veiling mist and the uncertain light of dawn soon protected the
fugitives. It was slow, exhausting progress, hampered as they were by
their breeches and shoes which could not be discarded. They tried to
keep a sense of direction, striking out for the mouth of the creek in
which the pirogue had been moored, but the tide set them off the course
and the only visible marks were the spars of the ship behind them and
the sloop's topmast off to one side.

[Illustration: JACK ALMOST BUMPED INTO THE DUGOUT CANOE]

Jack swam more strongly and showed greater endurance because he had the
beef and had been better nourished all his life than the scrawny young
powder boy who was more like a lath. Now and then Jack paused to tread
water while his shipmate clung to his shoulder and husbanded his waning
strength, with that indomitable grin on his freckled phiz. Of one thing
they were thankful, that the tide was bearing them farther away from the
pirates' camp, which was now as still as though the sleepers were dead
men.

"Blood and bones, but I have swum a league a'ready," gurgled Joe during
one of the halts.

"Shut your mouth or you'll fill up to the hatch and founder," scolded
Jack. "I see trees in the mist. The shore is scarce a pistol shot away."

"I pray my keel scrapes soon," spluttered the waterlogged Hawkridge as
he kicked himself along in a final effort.

Huzza, their feet touched the soft ooze and they fell over stumps and
rotted trunks buried under the surface. Scratched and beplastered with
mud, they crawled out in muck which gripped them to the knees, and
roosted like buzzards upon the butt of a prostrate live-oak.

"Marooned," quoth Joe, "to be eaten by snakes and alligators."

"Nonsense," snapped Master Cockrell, who had hunted deer and wild-fowl
on the Carolina coast. "We can pic