land was very near home;
Blueskin might come sailing into the harbor at any minute and then--! In
an hour Sheriff Jones had called together most of the able-bodied men
of the town, muskets and rifles were taken down from the chimney places,
and every preparation was made to defend the place against the pirates,
should they come into the harbor and attempt to land.

But Blueskin did not come that day, nor did he come the next or the
next. But on the afternoon of the third the news went suddenly flying
over the town that the pirates were inside the capes. As the report
spread the people came running--men, women, and children--to the green
before the tavern, where a little knot of old seamen were gathered
together, looking fixedly out toward the offing, talking in low voices.
Two vessels, one bark-rigged, the other and smaller a sloop, were slowly
creeping up the bay, a couple of miles or so away and just inside the
cape. There appeared nothing remarkable about the two crafts, but the
little crowd that continued gathering upon the green stood looking
out across the bay at them none the less anxiously for that. They were
sailing close-hauled to the wind, the sloop following in the wake of her
consort as the pilot fish follows in the wake of the shark.

But the course they held did not lie toward the harbor, but rather bore
away toward the Jersey shore, and by and by it began to be apparent that
Blueskin did not intend visiting the town. Nevertheless, those who stood
looking did not draw a free breath until, after watching the two pirates
for more than an hour and a half, they saw them--then about six miles
away--suddenly put about and sail with a free wind out to sea again.

"The bloody villains have gone!" said old Captain Wolfe, shutting his
telescope with a click.

But Lewes was not yet quit of Blueskin. Two days later a half-breed from
Indian River bay came up, bringing the news that the pirates had sailed
into the inlet--some fifteen miles below Lewes--and had careened the
bark to clean her.

Perhaps Blueskin did not care to stir up the country people against him,
for the half-breed reported that the pirates were doing no harm, and
that what they took from the farmers of Indian River and Rehoboth they
paid for with good hard money.

It was while the excitement over the pirates was at its highest fever
heat that Levi West came home again.

III

Even in the middle of the last century the grist mill, a couple o