Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/140

866 over," but it was Sharkey who fastened her master to the windlass and pelted him to death with empty claret bottles.

Together they engaged the king's ship, "Royal Fortune," which had been sent in search of them, and beat her off after a night action of five hours, the drunken, raving crews fighting naked in the light of the battle-lanterns, with a bucket of rum and a pannikin laid by the tackles of every gun. They ran to Topsail Inlet in North Carolina to refit, and then in the spring they were at the Grand Caicos, ready for a long cruise down the West Indies.

By this time Sharkey and Copley Banks had become very excellent friends, for Sharkey loved a whole-hearted villain and he loved a man of metal, and it seemed to him that the two met in the captain of the "Ruffling Harry." It was long before he gave his confidence to him, for cold suspicion lay deep in his character. Never once would he trust himself outside his own ship and away from his own men.

But Copley Banks came often on board the "Happy Delivery," and joined Sharkey in many of his morose debauches, so that at last his misgivings were set at rest. He knew nothing of the evil that he had done him, for of his many victims, how could he remember the woman and the two boys whom he had slain with such levity so long ago? When, therefore, he received a challenge to himself and to his quartermaster for a carouse upon the last evening of their stay at the Caicos bank, he saw no reason to refuse.

A well-found passenger ship had been rifled the week before, so their fare was of the best, and after supper five of them drank deeply together. There were the two captains, Birthmark Sweetlocks, Ned Galloway, and Israel Martin, the old buccaneersman. To wait upon them was the dumb steward, whose head Sharkey split with his glass because he had been too slow in the filling of it.

The quartermaster had slipped Sharkey's pistols away from him, for it was an old joke with him to fire them cross-handed under the table, and see who was the luckiest man. It was a pleasantry which had cost his boatswain his leg; so now when the table was cleared they would coax Sharkey's weapons away from him on the excuse of the heat, and lay them out of his reach.

The captain's cabin of the "Ruffling Harry" was in a deckhouse upon the poop, and a stern-chaser gun was mounted at the back of it. Round shot were racked round the wall, and three great hogsheads of powder made a stand for dishes and for bottles. In this grim room the five