"Bless him for a Christian knight of a pirate," said Jack, with tears in his eyes. "Was he hurt, did ye happen to note?"
"We hid ourselves till the prisoners were flung into the boats. I marked Joe as one of 'em, and he was sprightly, barring a bloody face."
"Marooned, Bill Saxby?" asked Jack. "What's your judgment on that score? It cannot be many leagues from here, or the ship would have transported them instead of the boats."
"These barren islands lie strung well out from the coast, Master Cockrell. Waterless they be, and without shelter. Blackbeard's fancy is to let the men die there——"
"An ancient custom of buccaneers and pirates," put in old Trimble Rogers, with an air of grave authority. "I mind me in the year of 1687 when I sailed in the South Sea with that great captain, Edward Davis,—'twas after the sack of Guayaquil when every man had a greater weight of gold and silver than he could lug on his back——"
Bill Saxby interrupted, in a petulant manner:
"Stow it, grandsire! At a better time ye can please the lad with your long-winded yarns,—of marching on Panama with Henry Morgan when the mother's milk was scarce dry on your lips."
"I cruised with the best of 'em," boasted the last of the storied race of true buccaneers of the Spanish Main, "and now I be in this cheap trade of piratin'. The fortunes I gamed away, and the plate ships I boarded! Take warnin', boy, and salt your treasure down."
"This Trimble Rogers will talk you deaf," said Bill Saxby, "but there's pith in his old bones and wisdom under yon hoary thatch. Cap'n Bonnet sent him along with me as a rare old hound to trail the swamps."
In a vivid flash of remembrance, Jack Cockrell saw this salty relic of the Spanish Main among the crew which had disported itself on the tavern green at Charles Town,—the old man sitting aside with a couple of stray children upon his knees while his head nodded to the lilt of the fiddle. And again there had been a glimpse of him trudging in the column which had followed Stede Bonnet, with trumpet and drum, to attack the hostile Indians. Jack's heart warmed to Trimble Rogers and also to young Bill Saxby. They would find some way out of all this tribulation.