"I thank you," replied my great-uncle. "We shall have no difficulty in finding our boat."
He did not speak again until we were pulling across the star-flecked waters of the anchorage.
"I think," he announced casually, "we need have no cause to worry over the defenseless condition of the James."
"A dozen shot under water—" I started to say, when Peter spoke up.
"He gets them all ashore, Bob. Ja, dot's it! All der time they work, andt so they don't think about der James."
"A singularly acute mind our Peter has," commented my great-uncle.
His strategy was completely successful. The building of the hilltop fort appealed to some boyish strain submerged beneath the surface villainy of Flint's scoundrels. They went to their task with positive enthusiasm, clearing the hillock of timber, sawing and squaring the logs and erecting a substantial house of the more massive logs and after that an open stockade or paling of sapling stakes six feet high. The house-walls were loop-holed for musketry, and Flint commenced to talk of a pair of bastions to hold six-pounders; but this was after the work had gone forward two months and his men were becoming weary of ax and saw.
Toward the end of our sojourn the Walrus' crew were committed to a serious effort to exterminate the goats of the island, and since this occupation was to be preferred to the extermination of one another, which was their favorite sport when their energies were not otherwise diverted, nobody was inclined to stop them, my great-uncle least of all.
His personal object was already accomplished. The Royal James was back upon an even keel, her bottom scraped clean, her hull fresh-painted inside and out, her rigging overhauled and canvas in order, spars tested and a weak top-mast replaced, guns varnished, stores checked and stowed, sufficient great-cartridge for three actions prepared by the gunner, ballast aboard and distributed with a careful eye for sailing trim.
"As sweet and proper as though she was just from the hands of the dockyard fitters at Portsmouth," was Murray's comment on an evening about the beginning of August.