ill take your sword and pistols and come
upon a sand-bank with me, then the world will be rid of a damned
villain, whichever way it goes."

"Now, this is talking!" said Sharkey, jumping off the gun and holding
out his hand. "I have not met many who could look John Sharkey in the
eyes and speak with a full breath. May the devil seize me if I do not
choose you as a consort! But if you play me false, then I will come
aboard of you and gut you upon your own poop."

"And I pledge you the same!" said Copley Banks, and so the two pirates
became sworn comrades to each other.

That summer they went north as far as the Newfoundland Banks, and
harried the New York traders and the whale ships from New England.
It was Copley Banks who captured the Liverpool ship, _House of Hanover_,
but it was Sharkey who fastened her master to the windlass and pelted
him to death with empty claret-bottles.

Together they engaged the King's ship _Royal Fortune_, which had been
sent in search of them, and beat her off after a night action of five
hours, the drunken, raving crews fighting naked in the light of the
battle-lanterns, with a bucket of rum and a pannikin laid by the tackles
of every gun. They ran to Topsail Inlet in North Carolina to refit, and
then in the spring they were at the Grand Caicos, ready for a long
cruise down the West Indies.

By this time Sharkey and Copley Banks had become very excellent friends,
for Sharkey loved a whole-hearted villain, and he loved a man of metal,
and it seemed to him that the two met in the captain of the _Ruffling
Harry_. It was long before he gave his confidence to him, for cold
suspicion lay deep in his character. Never once would he trust himself
outside his own ship and away from his own men. But Copley Banks came
often on board the _Happy Delivery_, and joined Sharkey in many of his
morose debauches, so that at last any lingering misgivings of the latter
were set at rest. He knew nothing of the evil that he had done to his
new boon companion, for of his many victims how could he remember the
woman and the two boys whom he had slain with such levity so long ago!
When, therefore, he received a challenge to himself and to his
quartermaster for a carouse upon the last evening of their stay at the
Caicos Bank he saw no reason to refuse.

A well-found passenger ship had been rifled the week before, so their
fare was of the best, and after supper five of them drank deeply
together. There w