The Royal James and her consorts held a slow course along the shore for several hours. The strip of sand was gradually widening and in places stretched inland for a mile in dunes and hillocks, traversed by little tidewater creeks. At last there showed a narrow inlet between two dunes, and Bonnet, who had now taken the helm, headed the sloop cautiously for this opening. One of the men constantly heaved the lead and cried the soundings as the ship progressed. The pirate chief kept to the left of the channel and finally passed through into a wide lagoon, with a scant fathom to spare at the shallowest place. The Fortune entered without difficulty, but the deeply-laden Francis grounded midway in and had to wait several hours for the tide to float her.
Listening to the talk of the crew, Bob heard them say they had come into the mouth of the Cape Fear River in Carolina. From what he knew of the nearby coast he believed that it was a very wild region, almost unsettled, and that there would be slight chance of getting to safety, even if they were able to effect an escape. This fear seemed justified later in the day, when Bonnet said to one of his men that there was no need of shackling the boys as had been done in the Chesapeake. Turning so that they could hear, he added, "Too many Indians in these woods for the lads to try to leave the ship." Jeremy, who had seen enough of both pirates and Indians to last him a lifetime, remarked to his friend that personally he would risk his neck with one as soon as the other, but Bob had heard terrible stories of the red men's cruelty and did not agree with him. "We'd best stay aboard and wait for a better chance," he argued.
All three of the sloops were leaky and needed a thorough overhauling in various ways. As soon as the Francis was off the bar, therefore, they proceeded up the estuary for a distance of nearly two miles and secured their vessels in shallow water, where they could be careened at low tide.
Next morning and for many hot days thereafter the pirates and their prisoners toiled hard at the refitting of the ships. Lumber was not easy to come by in that desolate region and when they had used up all their spare planking, Bonnet took the Royal James out over the bar to hunt for the wherewithal to do his patching. After a cruise of a day and a night to the southward they sighted a small fishing shallop which they quickly overtook, and captured without a fight. The two men in the shallop jumped overboard and swam ashore when they saw the black flag, and Bonnet was too much occupied in getting the prize back to the river-mouth to give chase. It was an unfortunate thing for him that he did not do so, but of that presently. The shallop was run into the river-mouth and broken up the next day. With the fresh supply of lumber thus secured, the work of repair went forward undelayed, and within a few weeks the sloops were almost ready for sea again.
CHAPTER XX
It had been about the beginning of September when the pirate fleet had sighted the live oaks on the bars of the Cape Fear River. To Bob and Jeremy those first days were uneventful but hardly pleasant. Through the long still afternoons a pitiless sun blazed into every corner of the deck. Wide flats and hot-looking white dunes stretched away on either hand. Only the line of woods half a mile distant offered a suggestion of green coolness. When the sun had set the fo'c's'le held the heat like a baker's oven. One long, tossing night of it sufficed for the two boys, and after that they sought a corner of the deck away from the snoring seamen and lying down on the bare planks, contrived to sleep in reasonable comfort.
The days were spent in hard work for the most part. A good deal of washing and cleaning had to be done aboard all three vessels, and as labor requiring no special skill, it fell frequently to the lot of Jeremy and Bob. It was small matter to them whether they toiled or were idle, for the blistering sun allowed no respite and it seemed preferable to sweat over something useful than over nothing at all.
On the third day after the return of the James from her foraging trip, Jeremy, who had been scraping and tarring ropes for hours on end, straightened his back with a discontented grunt and looked away to the edge of the woods, his eyebrows puckered in a frown. "Bob," he said in a voice too low for any of their shipmates to hear, "Bob, I'm going to run away if something doesn't happen soon."
"You'll be shot, like as not," answered the Delaware boy.