coming aboard, and even as he spoke the pirate sloop came

drifting out from the cloud of smoke that enveloped her, looming
up larger and larger as she came down upon them. The lieutenant

still crouched down under the rail, looking out at them.
Suddenly, a little distance away, she came about, broadside on,

and then drifted. She was close aboard now. Something came
flying through the air--another and another. They were bottles.

One of them broke with a crash upon the deck. The others rolled
over to the farther rail. In each of them a quick-match was

smoking. Almost instantly there was a flash and a terrific
report, and the air was full of the whiz and singing of broken

particles of glass and iron. There was another report, and then
the whole air seemed full of gunpowder smoke. "They're aboard of

us!" shouted the boatswain, and even as he spoke the lieutenant
roared out, "All hands to repel boarders!" A second later there

came the heavy, thumping bump of the vessels coming together.
Lieutenant Maynard, as he called out the order, ran forward

through the smoke, snatching one of his pistols out of his pocket
and the cutlass out of its sheath as he did so. Behind him the

men were coming, swarming up from below. There was a sudden
stunning report of a pistol, and then another and another, almost

together. There was a groan and the fall of a heavy body, and
then a figure came jumping over the rail, with two or three more

directly following. The lieutenant was in the midst of the gun
powder smoke, when suddenly Blackbeard was before him. The pirate

captain had stripped himself naked to the waist. His shaggy black
hair was falling over his eyes, and he looked like a demon fresh

from the pit, with his frantic face. Almost with the blindness of
instinct the lieutenantthrust out his pistol, firing it as he

did so. The pirate staggered back: he was down--no; he was up
again. He had a pistol in each hand; but there was a stream of

blood running down his naked ribs. Suddenly, the mouth of a
pistol was pointing straight at the lieutenant's head. He ducked

instinctively, strikingupward with his cutlass as he did so.
There was a stunning, deafening report almost in his ear. He

struck again blindly with his cutlass. He saw the flash of a
sword and flung up his guard almost instinctively, meeting the

crash of the descending blade. Somebody shot from behind him, and
at the same moment he saw some one else strike the pirate.

Blackbeard staggered again, and this time there was a great gash
upon his neck. Then one of Maynard's own men tumbled headlong

upon him. He fell with the man, but almost instantly he had
scrambled to his feet again, and as he did so he saw that the

pirate sloop had drifted a little away from them, and that their
grappling irons had evidently parted. His hand was smarting as

though struck with the lash of a whip. He looked around him; the
pirate captain was nowhere to be seen--yes, there he was, lying

by the rail. He raised himself upon his elbow, and the
lieutenant saw that he was trying to point a pistol at him, with

an arm that wavered and swayed blindly, the pistol nearly falling
from his fingers. Suddenly his other elbow gave way and he fell

down upon his face. He tried to raise himself--he fell down
again. There was a report and a cloud of smoke, and when it

cleared away Blackbeard had staggered up again. He was a terrible
figure his head nodding down upon his breast. Somebody shot

again, and then the swaying figure toppled and fell. It lay
still for a moment--then rolled over-- then lay still again.

There was a loud splash of men jumping overboard, and then,
almost instantly, the cry of "Quarter! quarter!" The lieutenant

ran to the edge of the vessel. It was as he had thought: the
grappling irons of the pirate sloop had parted, and it had

drifted 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.

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 lighthousestanding 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 Blueskin, the pirate.
II

It was in the fall and the early winter of the year 1750, and
again in the summer of the year following, that the famous

pirate, Blueskin, became especially identified with Lewes as a
part of its traditional history.

For some time--for three or four years--rumors and reports of
Blueskin's doings in the West Indies and off the Carolinas had

been brought in now and then by sea captains. There was no more
cruel, bloody, desperate, devilishpirate than he in all those

pirate-infested waters. All kinds of wild and bloody stories were
current concerning him, but it never occurred to the good folk of

Lewes that such stories were some time to be a part of their own
history.

But one day a schooner came drifting into Lewes