"Well," said the Delaware boy, still chuckling, "you know most of my story already. My father is Clarke Curtis of New Castle. My own name is Bob. Father owns some ships in the East India trade and has a plantation up on the Brandywine creek. Last night I was at our warehouse by the wharves. Father was inside talking to one of his captains who had just come to port. I wanted to see the ship—she's a full-rigger, three or four times as big as this, and fast too for her burden. Well, I went down on the dock where she was moored. There was nobody around and no lights and she stood up above the wharf-side all dark and big—her mainmast is as high as our church steeple, you know—and I was just looking up at her and wondering where the watchman was, when four men came along down the wharf. I thought perhaps 'twas Father and some of his men. When they were quite close that biggest one, Herriot, stepped up to me and before I could shout he put his hand over my mouth and held me. They gagged me fast and then one of them gave a whistle, long and low. Pretty soon a boat came up to the dock and they grabbed me and put me in, spite of all I could do. They paddled along to another wharf and took aboard some more men and then started to row out as fast as they could. I guess those boats that came after us were from Father's ship. He must have missed me right away. So now old Bonnet or Thomas or whatever his name is thinks he's going to get a fat sum out of me. That's all of my story, so far. But there'll be another chapter yet!" Jeremy, for both their sakes, sincerely hoped that there might.
At sunset of that day the Royal James cleared Cape Henlopen and held her course for the open sea, while behind her in the gathering dusk the coast grew hazy—faded out—was gone. The two boys, sitting late into the first watch, shivered with that fine ecstasy of adventure that can come only in the shadowy mystery of star-lit decks and the long, whispering ripple of a following sea.
Jeremy, who twenty-four hours before had thought of the ship as a place of utter desolation, would not now have changed places with any boy alive. He knew, perhaps for the first time, the fulness of joy that comes into life with human companionship. That night two lads at least had golden dreams of a youthful kind. Ducats and doubloons, princesses and plum-cake, swords awave and cannon blazing, great galleons with crimson sails—no wonder that they were smiling in their sleep when George Dunkin held a lantern over the bunk at the change of the watch.
CHAPTER XIV
The day came in dark with fog, which changed a little after noon to driving scud. The wind had gone around to the northeast and freshened steadily, driving the waves in from the sea in steep gray hills, quite different from anything Jeremy had before experienced. The sloop, under three reefs and a storm jib, began to make rough weather of it, staggering up and down the long slopes in an aimless, dizzy fashion that made Jeremy and Bob very unhappy. The poor young New Englander had to perform his regular tasks no matter how he felt within, but once the work was done he stumbled forward miserably and lay upon his bunk. Bob was too wretched to talk all day, and for the time at least cared very little whether he was rescued or keel-hauled.
Near nightfall Jeremy went aft to serve the Captain's supper, and as he returned along the reeling wet deck in the gathering dark, he stopped a moment to look off to windward. The racing white tops of the waves gleamed momentarily and vanished. He was appalled at their height. While the little vessel surged along in the trough, great slopes of foam and black water rose on either beam, up and up like tossing hillsides. Then would come the staggering climb to the summit, and for a dizzy second the terrified lad, clinging to a shroud, could look for miles across the shifting valleys. Before he could catch his breath, the sloop pitched down the next declivity in a long, sickening sag, and rocked for a brief instant at the foot, her masts swaying in a great arc half across the sky. Then she began to ascend. Shivering and wide-eyed, the boy crept to his bunk, where he fell asleep at last to the sound of screaming wind and lashing water.
At dawn and all next day the gale swept down from the northeast unabated. The fo'c's'le was thick with tobacco smoke and the wet reek of the crew, for only the steersman and the lookout would stay on deck. Bob, somewhat recovered from his seasickness, lay wide-eyed in his bunk and heard such tales of plunder and savagery on the high seas as made his blood run cold. When Jeremy came dripping down the ladder, early that afternoon, he found the Delaware lad staring at Pharaoh Daggs with a look of positive terror. The buccaneer's evil face was lit up by the rays of the smoky lantern, hung from a hook in one of the deck beams. He sat on the edge of the fo'c's'le table, his heavy shoulders hunched and a long clay pipe in his teeth. "That night," he was saying, "four on us went an' cut Sol Brig down from where they'd hanged him. We got away, down to the sloop an' out to sea with him. I didn't have no cause to love the old devil, but I'd ha' hated to have a ghost like his after me, so I lent a hand. We wrapped him up decent an' gave him sea-burial from his own deck, as he'd paced for thirty year. An' then," he said with a snarl and half-turning to face Jeremy, "we got them two boys on deck! Both of 'em said 'twas the other as told, so we treated 'em fair an' alike. We stripped 'em an' laid in deep with the cat till there wasn't no white skin left above the waist. Then we sluiced 'em with sea water. When they could feel pain again, we stretched 'em with rope an' windlass till one died. T'other was a red-headed, tough young devil, an' took such a deal of it that we had to brain him with a handspike at the last."
Even the crew were silenced for a little by this recital. Jeremy and Bob shivered in their places, hardly daring to breathe. Then a Portuguese spoke from the corner, his greedy little black eyes glittering in his swarthy face.
"Where wass da Cap'n's money—da gold 'e 'ada-not divide', eh?"