er than a slave. For all he knew, the girl wife
and child in London had been suffered to starve. He had never heard any
word of them. As a fugitive he had been taken aboard a pirate vessel.
There he found kindlier treatment than honest men had ever offered him,
and so grew somewhat reconciled to this wicked calling.

On one of the occasions when Jack left these entertaining companions to
visit his high sentry post in the tree, he surmised that all hands had
been summoned on the vessel and lifting out her mast. He could see two
boats plying back and forth and filled with men. He lingered because
something else caught his interest. A little boat was putting out from
the seaward side of the _Revenge_ and it fetched a wide circuit of the
harbor. This brought the ship between it and the sloop so that its
departure would be unobserved by the toiling crew.

Two men were at the oars and a third sat in the stern. At a distance,
Jack guessed they were bound to one of the nearest islands, perhaps in
search of oysters or crabs, but after making a long sweep which carried
the boat out of vision of the sloop and the beach, it swung toward the
shore, a little to the northward of the mouth of the creek. The errand
had a stealthy air. Jack Cockrell started and almost fell out of the
tree. He had been mistaken in his fancy that Blackbeard was in the
pinnace which had towed the prisoners out to be marooned. This was none
other than the grotesque fiend of a pirate himself, furtively steering
his cock-boat on some private errand of his own.

As soon as he was certain of this, Jack fairly scurried down the tree,
digging his toes in the bark like a squirrel, and tumbling head over
heels into the pirogue. Breathing rapidly, he stuttered:

"The--the devil himself,--in that little w-wherry of his,--c-coming
inshore. He must ha' seen the canoe. He is in chase of me."

"Go take a look, Bill," coolly remarked old Trimble Rogers, who was busy
slapping at mosquitoes. "A touch o' the sun has bred a nightmare in the
lad."

Bill Saxby swarmed up the live-oak like a limber seaman with fish-hooks
for fingers and he, too, almost lost his balance at what he saw. He
waved a warning hand at the canoe and then put his fingers to his lips.
Down he came in breakneck haste and urged the others to haul their craft
farther up into the sedge. He was plucking green bushes and armfuls of
dried grass to fling across the gunwales.

Satisfied that the canoe was en