"Where to, Jack?" I asked, bestirring myself. I could no more go back to Eli Kirke.
But little Jack Battle was squirming his wooden clogs into the sand as he used to dig his toes, and he answered not a word.
"'Tis early yet for the Grand Banks, Jack. Ben Gillam's ship keeled mast over hull from being ice-logged last spring. The spars were solid with frozen sleet from the crosstrees to the crow's nest. Your dories would be ice-logged for a month yet."
"It—it—it aren't the Grand Banks no more," stammered Jack.
His manner arrested me. The honest blue eyes were shifting and his toes at work in the sand.
"There be gold on the high seas for the taking," vouched Jack. "An your fine gentlemen grow rich that way, why mayn't I?"
"Jack," I warned, thinking of Ben Gillam's craft rigged with sails of as many colours as Joseph's coat, "Jack—is it a pirate-ship?"
"No," laughed the sailor lad sheepishly, "'tis a pirateer," meaning thereby a privateer, which was the same thing in those days.
"Have a care of your pirateers—privateers, Jack," said I, speaking plain. "A gentleman would be run through the gullet with a clean rapier, but you—you—would be strangled by sentence of court or sold to the Barbadoes."
"Not if the warden o' the court owns half the ship," protested Jack, smiling queerly under his shaggy brows.