The Black Buccaneer

by Stephen W. Meader

But in that second of illumination they had seen framed in the torchlit cleft a pair of gleaming light eyes and a cruelly snarling mouth set in a face made horrible by the livid scar that ran from chin to eyebrow across its broken nose.

Jeremy clutched at Bob and his father. "This way!" he gasped through the hissing rain, and plunged along the black chasm toward the southern end, where it debouched upon the hillside. They clambered over some boulders and emerged in the undergrowth, a score of yards from the point where the barrel had been found.

"Come on," whispered Jeremy hoarsely, and started eastward along the slope. Burdened as they were, they ran through the woods at desperate speed, the noise of their going drowned by the descending flood.

In the haste of flight it was impossible to keep together. When Jeremy had put close to half a mile between himself and the chasm, he paused panting and listened for the others, but apparently they were not near. He decided to cut across the ridge, and started up the hill, when he heard a crash in the brush just above him. "Father?" he called under his breath. To his dismay he was answered by a startled oath, and the next moment he saw a tall figure coming at him swinging a cutlass. The pirate was a bare ten feet away. Jeremy aimed his pistol and pulled the trigger, but only a dull click responded. The priming was wet.

A sudden red glare on the walls of the chasm.

At that instant the cutlass passed his head with an ugly sound and Jeremy, desperate, flung his pistol straight at the pirate's face. As it left his hand he heard it strike. Then as the man went down with a groan, he doubled in his tracks like a hare, and ran back, heading up across the hill.

It was not till he was over the ridge and well down the slope toward home that he dropped to a walk. His breath was coming in gasps that hurt him like a knife between his ribs, and his legs were so weak he could hardly depend on them. He had run nearly two miles, up hill and down, in heavy clothes drenched with rain, and carrying a dozen pounds of gold besides the flintlock fowling-piece which he still clutched in his left hand. Somewhere behind him he had dropped the box, found amid the treasure, but he was far too tired to look for it. More dead than alive he crawled, at last, up to the door of the cabin and staggered in when Tom opened to his knock.

While he gasped out his story, the older brother looked more closely to the barring of the window-shutters and put fresh powder in the priming-pans of the guns.