That night, Nathaniel Bradley, William Black, James Stinger, and a man whose name we were able to insert into the warrant as Lemuel Croucher, and whose condition we discovered to be that of overseer on the aforesaid Bradley's plantation, found lodgings in the common calaboose of the Crescent City.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CONVICTION.
I shall not wear the patience of my reader with the details of the trial that followed. Enough for him to know that we succeeded in securing a conviction, against all four of the accused. They were convicted not only of piracy, but murder, of which we found the proofs, alas too clear!
In dragging the lagoon to strengthen our testimony with the scraps of cotton-bagging I had seen the pirate sinking below the surface, an appalling object was brought up on the prongs of the drag—the body of a negro that had been kept at anchor below by a bag of iron tied around the neck.
His face was disfigured by the slashes of a knife; but not so much as to hinder Walter Woodley from identifying him as one of the four who had been sent to assist in the navigation of the flat.
There was a bullet-hole through his breast, no doubt from the shot I had heard fired when half asleep, followed by that death shriek that so long rung in my ears.
We searched for the other three, dragging the whole lagoon, as well as the strait that led into it. They could not be found. In all likelihood their bodies had been sunk in the deep channel of the river—a safer place of concealment.
Why one had been brought up the lagoon we could not tell, unless it was that he had been killed outside, and allowed to lie upon the flat, for the want of time, while turning out of the current, to dispose of his body by flinging it overboard.