ted away. The few pirates who
had been left aboard of the schooner had jumped overboard and were now
holding up their hands. "Quarter!" they cried. "Don't shoot!--quarter!"
And the fight was over.

The lieutenant looked down at his hand, and then he saw, for the first
time, that there was a great cutlass gash across the back of it, and
that his arm and shirt sleeve were wet with blood. He went aft, holding
the wrist of his wounded hand. The boatswain was still at the wheel. "By
zounds!" said the lieutenant, with a nervous, quavering laugh, "I didn't
know there was such fight in the villains."

His wounded and shattered sloop was again coming up toward him under
sail, but the pirates had surrendered, and the fight was over.

Chapter VI. BLUESKIN THE PIRATE

I

CAPE MAY and Cape Henlopen form, as it were, the upper and lower jaws of
a gigantic mouth, which disgorges from its monstrous gullet the cloudy
waters of the Delaware Bay into the heaving, sparkling blue-green of
the Atlantic Ocean. From Cape Henlopen as the lower jaw there juts out a
long, curving fang of high, smooth-rolling sand dunes, cutting sharp and
clean against the still, blue sky above silent, naked, utterly deserted,
excepting for the squat, white-walled lighthouse standing upon the crest
of the highest hill. Within this curving, sheltering hook of sand hills
lie the smooth waters of Lewes Harbor, and, set a little back from the
shore, the quaint old town, with its dingy wooden houses of clapboard
and shingle, looks sleepily out through the masts of the shipping lying
at anchor in the harbor, to the purple, clean-cut, level thread of the
ocean horizon beyond.

Lewes is a queer, odd, old-fashioned little town, smelling fragrant of
salt marsh and sea breeze. It is rarely visited by strangers. The people
who live there are the progeny of people who have lived there for many
generations, and it is the very place to nurse, and preserve, and care
for old legends and traditions of bygone times, until they grow from
bits of gossip and news into local history of considerable size. As in
the busier world men talk of last year's elections, here these old bits,
and scraps, and odds and ends of history are retailed to the listener
who cares to listen--traditions of the War of 1812, when Beresford's
fleet lay off the harbor threatening to bombard the town; tales of the
Revolution and of Earl Howe's warships, tarrying for a while in the
quiet harbor befo