The pirate chief and his myrmidons were still on the beach, and occasionally fired a shot at us; but I perceived that we were fast gliding out of range. Not far from the spot where the desperadoes stood was a dark object, which I knew must be the corpse of Miguel.
As I gazed at the group, they suddenly ceased firing, and with a parting volley of angry shouts which came but faintly over the waters, they turned their backs on us, and started off at a sharp run across the sandhills in the direction of the interior.
I instantly drew my companions’ attention to this fact.
“We haven’t done with the rascals yet, I’m afraid,” said the gunner, glancing anxiously at their retiring forms. “They’re making for the creek on t’other side of the island, and will pursue us in the brig.”
“That will be their little game, no doubt,” observed Ned thoughtfully, “and we must do our level best to circumvent ’em. Having had the good-fortune, under Divine providence, to escape from the island, we may fairly hope that another little spell of good-fortune is in store for us.”
Ned was always very sanguine, and consequently was often disappointed; but his courage was indomitable.
I now felt so much better that I seized a spare oar—of which there were several in the boat—and began to pull, begging the negroes to give my shipmates each a cocoa-nut, as I felt sure that they must be suffering intensely from thirst.
“Good idea of yours, Mr. Darcy,” said Ned, who had overheard my remark. “I just about feel as if I could drink a brewery dry at this moment. I tell you what, though; I wish that there shegro warn’t in the starn-sheets. I reckon she’d turn the scale at sixteen stone!”
I glanced at “Mother Bunch.” Now that the pirates had turned tail, she no longer deemed it necessary to masquerade, and was sitting bolt upright, with one podgy hand grasping the tiller, and her full moonlike visage expansive with smiles, her blubber lips being so widely parted that you could see every tooth in her head. At her feet the pickaninny lay crowing and kicking, as if it thought there was something very comical in the whole adventure.
The negroes were now as busy as bees. One of them handed up cocoa-nuts to Mr. Triggs and Ned, while the other seized an oar and backed up my efforts to improve the speed of the craft.