the captain's chests
and a tub of hot water. And as soon as the grateful Master Cockrell had
made himself presentable, he was invited to sit down at table with the
captain and enjoy a meal of porridge and crisp English bacon and fresh
eggs from the ship's hen-coop in the long-boat and hot crumpets and
marmalade. And this after the pinched ration of mouldy salt-horse and
wormy hard-bread! Captain Bonnet lighted a roll of tobacco leaves, which
he called a _cigarro_, and puffed clouds of smoke while Master Cockrell
cleaned every dish and lamented that his skin felt too tight to begin
all over again.

He was now in a mood to relate his strange yarn, from its outset in the
ill-fated merchant trader, _Plymouth Adventure_. Eagerly he begged
information concerning her people after their shipwreck, but Captain
Bonnet had been cruising far offshore to intercept a convoy of rich
West Indiamen from Jamaica for the old country.

"I will make it my duty to set you ashore at Charles Town, Master Jack,"
said he, "and I pray you may find your good uncle alive and still vowing
to hang all rogues of pirates."

"But I must sail with you, sir, till you have saved Joe Hawkridge and
his shipmates and blown Blackbeard out of water."

"Rest easy on that," exclaimed Stede Bonnet. "Those affairs are most
urgent. My ship will drop down the river to-day, with the turn o' the
tide, and heave to long enough to land a party, six men, to go in search
of Trimble Rogers who is the apple of my eye. I shall not ask you to
join them, but you can give directions and pen a fair map, I trow."

"Gladly would I go," replied Jack, "but my poor legs wobble like your
valiant old buccaneer's. And my feet are raw."

"You have proved yourself," was the fine compliment. "I judged ye aright
when we first met."

Soon the deck above them resounded to the tramp of boots and the thump
of sheet-blocks as the brisk seamen made ready to cast the ship free.
She was in competent hands and so Stede Bonnet lingered below to enjoy
talking with the youth whose manners and breeding were like his own. In
a mood unusually confidential he confirmed Jack's earlier impressions,
that he was a pirate with a certain code of honor which reminded one of
Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest who robbed the rich and befriended the
poor. Touching on his mortal quarrel with Blackbeard, he revealed how
that traitorous ruffian had proposed a partnership while he, Stede
Bonnet, was a novice at the t