And in this wise did Master Jack Cockrell set out to bear a message from comrades in dire distress. Moreover, in his hands were the lives of Joe Hawkridge and those other marooned seamen, as he had every reason to believe. It was a grave responsibility to be thrust upon a raw lad in his teens who had been so carefully nurtured by his fretful guardian of an uncle, Mr. Peter Arbuthnot Forbes. Jack thought of this and said to himself, with a smile:
"A few weeks gone, and I was locked in my room without any dinner for loitering with Stede Bonnet's pirates at the Charles Town tavern. My education has been swift since then."
He was expectant of meeting no end of peril and hardship and he fought down a sense of dread that was not to his discredit. But it was so decreed that he should pass secure and unmolested. At first he went too fast, without husbanding his strength, and loped along like a hound whenever the country was clear of brushwood. This wore him down and he failed to watch carefully enough for his landmarks. Toward the end of the day he became confused because he could not discern the sea even by climbing a tree. But he tried to keep bearing to the northeast until the sun went down. Afraid of losing himself entirely and ignorant of the lay of the land by night, he made his bivouac in a grove of sycamore saplings and imagined Indians were creeping up whenever the leaves rustled.
This fear of roaming savages troubled him next day as he wearily trudged through this primeval wilderness unknown to white settlers. It spurred him on despite his foot-sore fatigue and he was making the journey more rapidly than old Trimble Rogers, for all his cunning woodcraft, had been able to accomplish it. Almost at the end of his endurance, the plucky lad discerned the sheen of a broad water in the twilight and so came to the Cape Fear River.
He had worried greatly lest he might have veered too far inland but there was the wooded bay and the fore-land crowned with dead pines which had been swept by forest fire. And out beyond it was the island, of the size and shape described by Trimble Rogers, making a harbor from the sea which rolled to the horizon rim.
But no tall brig, nor any other vessel rode at anchor in this silent and lonely haven. Jack had been told precisely where to look for it. He had made no mistake. Some emergency had caused Captain Stede Bonnet to make sail and away.
A king's ship or some other hostile force might have compelled him to slip his cable in haste, reflected Jack as he descended to the shore of the bay. It was most unlike the chivalrous Stede Bonnet to abandon two of his faithful seamen without an effort to succor them. Endeavoring to comfort himself with this surmise, the sorely disappointed boy paced the sand far into the night and gazed in vain for the glimmer of a fire or the spark of a signal lantern in a ship's rigging. He could not bear to think of the dark prospect should no help betide him.
Some time before day he was between waking and sleeping when a queer delusion distracted him. Humming in his ears was the refrain of a song which was both familiar and hauntingly pleasant. It seemed to charm away his poignant anxieties, to lull him with a feeling of safety. He wondered if his troublesome adventures had made him light-headed. He moved not a muscle but listened to this phantom music and noted that it sounded louder and clearer instead of fading away. And still he refused to believe that it was anything more than a drowsy mockery.
At length a vagrant breeze brought him a snatch of this enjoyable chorus in deeper, stronger volume and he leaped to his feet with a shout. It was no hallucination. Lusty seamen were singing in time to the beat of their oars, and Jack Cockrell knew it for the favorite song of Stede Bonnet's crew. He could distinguish the words as they rolled them out in buoyant, stentorian harmony:
"An' when my precious leg was lopt,
Just for a bit of fun
I picks it up, on t'other hopt,
An' rammed it in a gun.
'What's that for?' cries out Ginger Dick,
'What for? my jumpin' beau?
Why, to give the lubbers one more kick,'
Yo, ho, with the rum below!"