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      Chapter VII.

       The Mist of the Cherokee Swamp

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      The dark cloud of anxiety was lightened a trifle by the fact that Blackbeard displayed no ill temper toward the two young castaways. Having obtained such information as they chose to offer, he roughly told them to go forward and join the crew. Whether or no, Jack was impressed as a pirate and it may have amused Blackbeard to recruit by force the nephew of the honorable Secretary of the Provincial Council. For his part, Jack was grateful to be regarded no longer as a hostage under sentence of death. With Joe as an escort who knew the ropes, he went on deck and was promptly kicked off the poop by the mate.

      They first found food and quenched their raging thirst with water which had a loathsome smell. Joe reported to the chief gunner and begged the chance to sleep for a dozen hours on end. This was granted amiably enough and the pirates clustered about to ask all manner of curious questions, but the weary lads dragged themselves into the bows of the ship and curled up in a stupor. There they lay as if drugged, all through the night, even when the seamen trampled over them to haul the head-sails and tack ship.

      When, at last, they blinked at the morning sky, it dismayed them to find the breeze blowing strong out of the southeast and the Revenge standing in to the coast under easy sail. They looked aft and saw Blackbeard at the rail with a long glass at his eye. The whole crew was eager with expectation and the routine work went undone. The ship had been put about several hours earlier, Joe learned, and was due soon to sight the shore unless the reckoning was all at fault.

      So cleverly had Blackbeard calculated the drift of the boys' raft that a little later in the morning a lookout in the maintop called down:

      "Land, ho! Two points off the starboard bow she bears."

      "The maintop, ahoy!" shouted Blackbeard. "Can ye see a vessel's spars?"

      "'Tis too hazy inshore. But unless my eyes play me tricks, a smudge of smoke arises."

      Jack Cockrell nervously confided to Joe:

      "That would be Captain Wellsby's campfire on the beach."

      "Trust him to douse it," was the easy assurance. "I feel better. Blow me, but I expect to live another day."

      "Answer me why," begged Jack. "I am like a palsied old man."

      "Well, you know this bit o' coast, how low it sets above the sea. Despite the haze, a man aloft could see a ship's masts and yards before he had a glimpse of land."

      "Then the wreck of the Plymouth Adventure has slid off the shoal and gone down, Joe?"

      "Yes, when the wind veered and stirred a surf on the shoal. She pounded over with the flood-tide and dropped into fifteen fathom."

      "Then we are saved, for now?" joyfully exclaimed Jack.

      "Unless we're unlucky enough to find some o' those plaguey pirates afloat on a raft or makin' signals from the beach."

      The Revenge sailed shoreward until those on board could discern the marching lines of breakers which tumbled across the shoal. The smudge of smoke had vanished from the beach. The lookout man concluded that the haze had deceived him. Blackbeard steered as close as he dared go, with a sailor heaving the lead, but there was no sign of life among the sand-dunes and the stunted trees. And the Plymouth Adventure had disappeared leaving no trace excepting scattered bits of floating wreckage.

      The pirate ship headed to follow the coast to the northward, on the chance that Ned Rackham's prize crew might have made a landing elsewhere. To Jack Cockrell the gift of life had been miraculously vouchsafed him and he felt secure for the moment. Joe's theory seemed plausible, that the pirates had abandoned the Plymouth Adventure in time to avert drowning with her, and were driven away from the bight and the beach by Captain Wellsby's well-armed sailors.

      "Do they know Blackbeard's rendezvous in the North Carolina waters, Joe?" was the natural query. "Are they likely to make their way thither, knowing that honest men will slay them at sight?"

      "The swamps and the murderous Indians will take full toll of 'em, Jack. I believe we have seen the last of those rogues, but I'd rest better could I know for certain."

      "Meanwhile this mad Blackbeard may be taken in one of his savage frenzies and shoot me for sport," said young Master Cockrell, for whom existence had come to be one hazard after another.

      "He seems strangely tame, much like a human soul," observed Joe. "I ne'er beheld him like this. He plots some huge mischief, methinks."

      And now the ship's officers drove the men to their work but they were less abusive than usual. They seemed to reflect Blackbeard's milder humor and it was manifest that they wished to avoid the crew's resentment. Joe Hawkridge was puzzled and began to ferret it out among his friends who were trustworthy. They had their own suspicions and the general opinion was that Blackbeard was in great dread of encountering Captain Stede Bonnet in the Royal James. It seemed that the Revenge had spoken a disabled merchant ship just after the storm and her skipper reported that he had been overhauled by Stede Bonnet a few days earlier and the best of his cargo stolen. Blackbeard had been seized with violent rage but had suffered the ship to proceed on her way because of his own short-handed condition.

      With a prize crew lost in the Plymouth Adventure, including Sailing-Master Ned Rackham, and the two sloops of the squadron missing with all hands, the terrible Blackbeard was in poor shape to meet this Captain Bonnet who hated him beyond measure. As if this were not gloomy enough, there were men in the Revenge eager to sail under Bonnet's flag and to mutiny if ever they sighted the Royal James. It behooved Blackbeard to press on to that lonely inlet on the North Carolina coast and avoid the open sea until he could prepare to fight this dangerous foeman.

      It surprised Jack Cockrell to see how quiet a pirate ship could be. The ruffians were bone-weary, for one thing, after the struggle to bring the vessel through the storm. And the scourge of tropic fever had left its marks. Moreover, the rum was running short because some of the casks had been staved in the heavy weather and Blackbeard was doling it out as grog with an ample dilution of water. There was no more dicing and brawling and tipsy choruses. Sobered against their will, some of these bloody-minded sinners talked repentance or shed tears over wives and children deserted in distant ports.

      The wind blew fair until the Revenge approached the landmarks familiar to Blackbeard and found a channel which led to the wide mouth of Cherokee Inlet. It was a quiet roadstead sheltered from seaward by several small islands. The unpeopled swamp and forest fringed the shores but a green meadow and a margin of white sand offered a favorable place for landing. As the Revenge slowly rounded the last wooded point, the tall mast of a sloop became visible. The pirates cheered and discharged their muskets in salute as they recognized one of the consorts which had been blown away in the storm.

      Blackbeard strutted on his quarter-deck, no longer biting his nails in fretful anxiety. He had donned