Two willing hearts together.”
Every word of this paragraph remained like an impression from types of fire upon his melancholy brain.
“Doctor,” said Fitzgerald, throwing down the paper, while the blood oozed from his scarcely-healed wound,—“tell your leaders that henceforth I am with them body and soul. The victim of circumstance—the sport of the world—a cork floating upon the stream of time.—I will be dreaded, if I cannot be loved.”
The morning came, and Fitzgerald was introduced to the bucaniers in their strong hold. Bold and generous, two qualities that always sail in company, he became a universal favorite at the melee, and o’er the bowl; and in the course of a short time, he paced along the weather quarter of the gun brig, King Fisher,—“the monarch of her peopled deck.”
It was a beautiful summer’s night. The sun had sunk in a dense cloud bank behind the Bahamas; and the small red bow in the northwest, accompanied by a hollow sound, as though cannons had been fired far down beneath the surface of the ocean, gave evidence of the near approach of a norther.
The brig was soon prepared for the war of the elements, whose signal guns had been heard wakening the lowest echoes of the deep. Her head was brought so as to receive the first burst of the tempest’s fury; conductors were rigged aloft, and their chains of steel rattled sharply as they descended into the sea along side. The light spars were sent down, her storm stay-sail was set, and she rode the heaving billows like a duck.
A tall merchantman, bound apparently to the Havana, now swept along to the windward of the islands under a press of canvass. Fitzgerald saw that she was crowded with passengers, and his soul sickened at the thought, that ere the morning dawned that gallant bark would be a wreck upon an iron-bound coast, and her host of human beings would lie the play things of the shark, and the lifeless sport of the thunder-pealing waves. A sudden throb of sympathy moved his heart, a tear—the first, he had shed for months—started to his eye. He grasped his trumpet—his topsails were unfurled and in less than an hour he occupied a station to the windward of THE DOOMED SHIP. His canvass was now reduced as before, and under the smallest possible sail, he stretched ahead of the merchantman.
The norther now came on in its fury—from the red bow that had reached the zenith, a bright flash of blinding lightning darted in a long bright stream and parted into a thousand forks, and then came a crash of thunder with the almost resistless wind. The King Fisher was borne down to her bearings, and then righted again, and gallantly faced the blast. Not so with the crank merchantman. Her tall masts were whipped out of her in a twinkling; the ocean surges swept her deck fore and aft: and she lay tossing in the trough of the sea a helpless wreck.
At midnight the fury of the blast died away, and the sea that had rolled in terrific waves began to go down. The brig under a reefed foresail and maintopsail now danced again from billow to tasseled-tipt billow, and gained rapidly upon the sea washed wreck. As the King Fisher drew near the once gallant vessel, Fitzgerald heard a voice crying in agony for help. He looked over the head and saw a female floating upon a spar, a short distance before him. To brace round his topsail-yard, lay to, and lower the life boat, was but the work of a moment, and with six trusty fellows he launched out upon the midnight deep.
In a few moments he caught the almost lifeless female by the hair, and wrapped her in his sea-cloak—“To the wreck,” said he, in a voice of thunder, as his starboard oars backed water to return to their craft. The crew gave way with a will, and immediately the life boat made fast to the loose rigging of the wreck. Preceded by Fitzgerald, two of his men mounted the vessel’s side. Fitzgerald as he sprang upon the deck started back with astonishment. Colonel Howard stood before him in a long robe of white flannel, apparently as free from the gout as the youngest of the party.