"The —— knave's scooped us!"
"Boats, lads; boats!"
And presently the dick-dock of oars behind us caused Darby and me to redouble our labors. We drove ashore several rods down-stream from the town on the shallow bluff, and we dared not wait to seek shelter within its log walls. Truth to tell, we doubted now that the town itself spelled safety for us. The Walrus' carronades would make short work of such defenses as Savannah had to boast.
So we pelted up the bluff by a sandy path that debouched upon the cleared fields outside the stockade, urged on by that persistent oar-rattle and the shouts the pirates exchanged betwixt their several boats. Whether they were following us we could not discover, for the night was black as a cellar-vault; but we left nothing to chance, and ran hot-foot through the plantations of the citizens, overhearing, as we passed, the excited comments of the men on the firing-platforms of the stockade, who evidently anticipated an attack from their ugly visitor in the river. We never tarried for breath until we had gained the verge of the forest.
Peter was now in his element. He could find his way about a strange countryside by day or night as easily as a sailor could navigate the trackless wastes of the sea, and he led us in a beeline north and east in the general direction of the outlying settlements which intervened betwixt Savannah and the Carolinas. An hour or so after dawn we emerged upon a village in a clearing, whose inhabitants eyed us dubiously until Darby produced one of the golden doubloons from the store he had acquired during his reign as Flint's favorite.
These people had never before seen gold, and for a doubloon and an onza they sold us an old but serviceable musket with bullet-pouch, powder-horn and store of ammunition, and deerskin garments for all of us save Ben Gunn, who stoutly refused to don what he regarded as only another kind of a "livery-shuit." They also sold us a small quantity of salt and flour, and put us on the trail to Charleston in the Carolinas.
Of our journey thither I can say only that it was such an Odyssey as the frontier-dwellers of our provinces have long been accustomed to. To Peter and me its perils of forest and stream, red savages, and wild beasts, were far less formidable than those of the sea, and Moira and Darby thrived upon the experience—so much so that when at last, brier-torn and footsore, we entered Charleston's sedate streets and found awaiting us an ample choice of packet-ships to the north we four were unanimous for continuing our journey by land.
"Neen," said Peter. "I don't ever go to der sea again, Bob."
"Ah, who would be fool enough in his ignorance to be wandherin' wet and bedraggled on the salt waves of the sea when he might venture the forests and be shootin' at the red deer and the bears and the catamounts and it may be an Injun, if he was in the full tide o' his luck?" snorted Darby.
"I seem to remember one was all for the sea, and would wave the skull and crossbones in anybody's face," I jeered.