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The fate of the two seamen did not trouble him greatly. Those who lived by violence should rightly expect to die by it. The sea was their gaming table and it was their ill luck if the dice were cogged. Just then Bill Saxby stifled an ejaculation. He, too, had discovered the freightage in the cock-boat, the heavy burden which made it swim so low.

Puffing its way between these vessels is a little white cock-boat of a steamer, that seems tolerably well crowded with men, whose white sun-helmets and yellow silk coats give quite an Indian air to the scene. These persons are probably business men coming over in the ferry-boat from North Shore, where we can see some of their villas from the wharf.

All the same, that laboring-oar of his pulled nothing heavier than a cock-boat, and in waters no stormier than a duck-pond; and when his sheep had the rot he was too delicate about the hands to meddle with them. He preached to the living and he buried the dead surrounded by all the protective appliances that science has devised or money can supply.

In a race of it, the handy cock-boat could pull away from the clumsier pirogue manned by two paddles only, for Trimble Rogers was needed to steer and be ready with the musket. This was their only firearm, which Bill Saxby had snatched up during the flight from the camp. At the same time he had lifted a powder-horn and bullet pouch from a wounded pirate.

The squadron continued their depredations along the coast, till not a Russian vessel, or any craft larger than a cock-boat, remained afloat, and every storehouse and stack of corn or hay which could be got at by the British seamen had been destroyed.

"How now, young gentlemen!" he testily exclaimed; "are you the two midshipmen who sent me this note, informing me that you had captured yonder cock-boat of a felucca?" We respectfully intimated that we were. "Then how comes it, sirs, that you have presumed to come on board me in those 'longshore togs?

Sheridan and Francis exchanged glances behind the Prince's back. "She was flying her tricolour out there within sight of my pavilion windows. Never saw such monstrous impudence in my life! It would take a man of less mettle than me to stand it. Out I went in my little cock-boat you know my sixty-ton yawl, Charlie? with two four-pounders on each side, and a six-pounder in the bows." "Well, sir!

The paddles dipped with no more than a trickle of water and the canoe hugged the marsh. They were close to the next bend of the stream and the sound of the oars in the cock-boat was faintly audible. As the tallest of the three, the old man stood up after swathing his head in dried grass, and gazed across the curve of the shore.

"Their invincible and dreadful navy," said Drake, "with all its great and terrible ostentation, did not in all their sailing about England so much as sink or take one ship, bark, pinnace, or cock-boat of ours, or even burn so much as one sheep-tote on this land."

It breeds all the plagues of Egypt." They came to the tiny lagoon and rounded the bend beyond which the pirogue had capsized Blackbeard's cock-boat. There was nothing to indicate that any human being had visited this lonely spot since that sensational encounter. No trees had been cut down to serve as purchases for lifting the sea-chest from its oozy hiding-place.