e 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 before they sailed up the river to
shake old Philadelphia town with the thunders of their guns at Red
Bank and Fort Mifflin.

With these substantial and sober threads of real history, other and
more lurid colors are interwoven into the web of local lore--legends
of the dark doings of famous pirates, of their mysterious, sinister
comings and goings, of treasures buried in the sand dunes and pine
barrens back of the cape and along the Atlantic beach to the
southward.

Of such is the story of B