I strove to redress my fault, and she lay for one precious moment in my arms.
"Are you sure ye will have meant it?" she asked shyly.
"Meant it! Since the morning I heard the lilt of your voice in——"
A low whistle came from over the side to larboard.
"'Tis Darby!" she cried. "He slid down the anchor-cable to get at one of the boats they will have lowered by the side ladder for the water-party was going ashore, and didn't."
Peter beckoned urgently from the rail.
"We don't talk," he ordered grimly. "We go."
There was a coil of spare cable handy, and we dropped it overside, sliding one by one into the jolly-boat which Darby held steady beneath the heft of the bowsprit. The Walrus had swung with the tide until her stern was toward the town, and Darby and I took the oars and rowed quietly along the mass of the pirate's hull in the direction of the scattered lights that represented Savannah. How beautiful they seemed to us, those tiny glimmers of rush-lights and lanthorns in a clearing in the wilderness! They spelled safety, perhaps home.
But we were none too sure of ourselves yet. The big vessel loomed over us, her gunports like a row of gouging tusks, her spars and rigging a monstrous net poised for casting. Her decks seethed with lawless men, fighting and running, with harsh outcries and the clashing of steel and an occasional pistol-shot.
We passed the cluster of boats moored by the side ladder, unwilling to risk the time it would take to cut them adrift. We passed the poop, where a particularly savage fray was going on. Men were battering at the door to the cabin companionway and one called to "roll up a chase-gun, and give the —— —— a round-shot in his belly."