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And she is deucedly like Blackbeard's brig." Scampering to the deck, Joe Hawkridge mustered his gun's crew as Jack Cockrell came running up to say: "Trapped on the very islet where he cast you and the other pirates! His chickens have come home to roost." "Call me no pirate or I'll stretch ye with a handspike," grinned Joe. "'Tis a plaguey poor word in this company.

"Blackbeard!" echoed the bedazed shipmaster and the others chimed it like a chorus. "Aye, old Buckets o' Blood hisself," grinned Joe Hawkridge. "We had him tamed proper when we parted company. First we chased him through a swamp till his tongue hung out and left him mired to the whiskers. Then for another lark we scared him in his own ship so he begged us on his knees to forbear.

They ate sparingly of flinty biscuit and leathery beef pickled in brine and stinted themselves to a few swallows of water from the wooden breaker or tiny cask. "Hunger and thirst are strange to ye, Jack," said young Hawkridge as they lay stretched side by side. "Hanged if I ever did get enough to eat till I boarded the Plymouth Adventure. Skin and bone I am.

It was the vigilant Joe Hawkridge who, at length, discovered what was very like a fleck of cloud on the ocean's rim, to the southward. Afraid that his vision tricked him, he displayed no emotion but held himself as steady as any stoic. Jack was wildly excited, blubbering and waving his arms about. His hard-won composure was broken to bits.

I have undertaken to deliver you to your esteemed uncle with arms and legs intact, and your head on your shoulders." "But I am lusty enough to poke about with a pike or serve at a gun tackle," protested the unhappy Master Cockrell. "I expect you to obey me," was the stern mandate. "You will have company. This Joe Hawkridge is to stay with you." "But he is a rare hand in a fight, Captain Bonnet.

He slouched aimlessly nearer the forecastle, stretching his neck to gaze up at the pirates as they footed the ratlines and squirmed over the clumsy tops. Joe Hawkridge joined him, as if by chance, and they wandered to the lee side of the forecastle. There they were screened from the sight of the sentries.

Granted this much, it was fair to conjecture that Captain Bonnet's ship was in some harbor not many leagues distant and that he knew where to find Blackbeard's rendezvous, at Cherokee Inlet. "'Tis your job to stand by the pirogue, Jack," suggested Hawkridge, "and I will make a sally toward the pirates' camp afore they rouse out." "Go softly, Joe, and don't be reckless.

We had best wait for day and then decide the voyage." "Nothing to eat and no water, Joe. All I can find is an empty pannikin." "You're a glutton," severely exclaimed young Hawkridge. "After the banquet I served in the hold!" What Master Cockrell said in reply sounds as familiar and as wistful to-day as when he spoke it two hundred years ago.

The tiller was shifted to bring it close aboard and soon Captain Bonnet exclaimed that it was, indeed, a merman a-cruising with a cask! Jack Cockrell scampered to the heel of the bowsprit to investigate this ocean prodigy. And as the cask drifted nearer he saw that Joe Hawkridge was clinging to it. There was no mistaking that dauntless grin and the mop of carroty hair.

For the moment they had captured the armed brig Royal James and as ferocious a crew of rascals as ever scuttled a merchantman. Joe Hawkridge glided to the taffrail and peered over the stern. A boat was towing behind the ship. It had been left there for taking soundings or pulling the brig's head around while she was still in the shoaler waters near the coast.