uddenly flying
over the town that the pirates were inside the capes. As the report
spread the people came running--men, women, and children--to the green
before the tavern, where a little knot of old seamen were gathered
together, looking fixedly out toward the offing, talking in low
voices. Two vessels, one bark-rigged, the other and smaller a sloop,
were slowly creeping up the bay, a couple of miles or so away and just
inside the cape. There appeared nothing remarkable about the two
crafts, but the little crowd that continued gathering upon the green
stood looking out across the bay at them none the less anxiously for
that. They were sailing close-hauled to the wind, the sloop following
in the wake of her consort as the pilot fish follows in the wake of
the shark.

But the course they held did not lie toward the harbor, but rather
bore away toward the Jersey shore, and by and by it began to be
apparent that Blueskin did not intend visiting the town. Nevertheless,
those who stood looking did not draw a free breath until, after
watching the two pirates for more than an hour and a half, they saw
them--then about six miles away--suddenly put about and sail with a
free wind out to sea again.

"The bloody villains have gone!" said old Captain Wolfe, shutting his
telescope with a click.

But Lewes was not yet quit of Blueskin. Two days later a half-breed
from Indian River bay came up, bringing the news that the pirates had
sailed into the inlet--some fifteen miles below Lewes--and had
careened the bark to clean her.

Perhaps Blueskin did not care to stir up the country people against
him, for the half-breed reported that the pirates were doing no harm,
and that what they took from the farmers of Indian River and Rehoboth
they paid for with good hard money.

It was while the excitement over the pirates was at its highest fever
heat that Levi West came home again.

III

Even in the middle of the last century the grist mill, a couple of
miles from Lewes, although it was at most but fifty or sixty years
old, had all a look of weather-beaten age, for the cypress shingles,
of which it was built, ripen in a few years of wind and weather to a
silvery, hoary gray, and the white powdering of flour lent it a look
as though the dust of ages had settled upon it, making the shadows
within dim, soft, mysterious. A dozen willow trees shaded with
dappling, shivering ripples of shadow the road before the mill door,
and the mill i