r but trust Cap'n Bonnet to outwit him,"
said Joe Hawkridge, who stood at the brig's rail with Jack at his elbow.

"It will be mighty hard waiting," was the tense reply. "We shall know
when they find the _Revenge_. They are not apt to miss her, with a
compass in the captain's boat."

"Aye, there'll be noise enough. Plaguey queer, eh, Jack, to be a-loafin'
with nothing to see, like your head was wrapped in a blanket. They ought
to fetch alongside Blackbeard in a half-hour. Go turn the sand-glass in
the cabin."

They fidgeted about in aimless fashion and fell into talk with the
navigator, or artist, as he was called, a middle-aged man who had been a
master mariner in the slave trade. He told them a yarn or two of the
Guinea coast but he, too, was restless and left them to stump up and
down the deck and peer toward the shore. Jack dodged into the cabin to
watch the sand trickle into the bottom of the glass. Never was a
half-hour so long in passing.

A yell from Joe Hawkridge recalled him to the deck. He listened but
heard no distant pistol shots or the hoarse uproar of men in mortal
combat. Joe raised a warning hand and told him to stand still. There
came a faint splash. It might have been a fish leaping but Joe insisted
that it was made by a careless oar. Jack heard it again and then fancied
he caught the softened beat of muffled oars close at hand.

"They lost the course. The fog confused 'em," said he, in great disgust.

"But why come back to the ship?" demanded Joe. "They could lay and wait
for the fog to lift a little. And I told Cap'n Bonnet to bear to the
north'ard if in doubt and find the shore of the swamp. Then he could
coast back to the beach and so strike the _Revenge_."

"Well, here they come, Joe, and there is sure to be a good reason.
Mayhap the fog cleared to landward and they intend to tow the brig in,
after all."

Just then the foremost boat became visible and behind it was the vague
shape of another. The puzzled lads stared and stared and the hair
stiffened on their scalps for sheer horror. These were not the boats
from the _Royal James_. They were filled with Blackbeard's own pirates
from the _Revenge_!

The explanation was simple enough. Joe Hawkridge read it at a glance.
Blackbeard was not the drunken chuckle-head that Stede Bonnet had
assumed him to be. He, too, had taken advantage of the fog to attempt to
carry the enemy by stealth. The wit of the one had been matched by the
other. And th