"Yes, when the wind veered and stirred a surf on the shoal. She pounded over with the flood-tide and dropped into fifteen fathom."
"Then we are saved, for now?" joyfully exclaimed Jack.
"Unless we're unlucky enough to find some o' those plaguey pirates afloat on a raft or makin' signals from the beach."
The Revenge sailed shoreward until those on board could discern the marching lines of breakers which tumbled across the shoal. The smudge of smoke had vanished from the beach. The lookout man concluded that the haze had deceived him. Blackbeard steered as close as he dared go, with a sailor heaving the lead, but there was no sign of life among the sand-dunes and the stunted trees. And the Plymouth Adventure had disappeared leaving no trace excepting scattered bits of floating wreckage.
The pirate ship headed to follow the coast to the northward, on the chance that Ned Rackham's prize crew might have made a landing elsewhere. To Jack Cockrell the gift of life had been miraculously vouchsafed him and he felt secure for the moment. Joe's theory seemed plausible, that the pirates had abandoned the Plymouth Adventure in time to avert drowning with her, and were driven away from the bight and the beach by Captain Wellsby's well-armed sailors.
"Do they know Blackbeard's rendezvous in the North Carolina waters, Joe?" was the natural query. "Are they likely to make their way thither, knowing that honest men will slay them at sight?"
"The swamps and the murderous Indians will take full toll of 'em, Jack. I believe we have seen the last of those rogues, but I'd rest better could I know for certain."
"Meanwhile this mad Blackbeard may be taken in one of his savage frenzies and shoot me for sport," said young Master Cockrell, for whom existence had come to be one hazard after another.
"He seems strangely tame, much like a human soul," observed Joe. "I ne'er beheld him like this. He plots some huge mischief, methinks."
And now the ship's officers drove the men to their work but they were less abusive than usual. They seemed to reflect Blackbeard's milder humor and it was manifest that they wished to avoid the crew's resentment. Joe Hawkridge was puzzled and began to ferret it out among his friends who were trustworthy. They had their own suspicions and the general opinion was that Blackbeard was in great dread of encountering Captain Stede Bonnet in the Royal James. It seemed that the Revenge had spoken a disabled merchant ship just after the storm and her skipper reported that he had been overhauled by Stede Bonnet a few days earlier and the best of his cargo stolen. Blackbeard had been seized with violent rage but had suffered the ship to proceed on her way because of his own short-handed condition.