The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes

CHAPTER XXX
THE ATTEMPT

IT was a chill and drizzly morning, five or six weeks after the pirates had gone off on their cruise; Jack had been out-of-doors to fetch in some firewood, and he now sat near the chimney-place, drying his coat before the crackling fire, holding out the shaggy garment, and watching it steam and smoke in the heat. Dred was lying stretched out on the bench with his eyes closed, though whether or not he was asleep Jack could not tell. His fever had left him, and he was now growing stronger every day. During his sickness he had grown into a habit of indolence, and he spent a great deal of his time lounging inertly thus upon the bench in the kitchen. The young lady had not been down that morning. Betty Teach was moving about up-stairs, and presently Jack, as he sat thus drying his coat, heard her tap on the door of Miss Eleanor Parker’s room; then, after an interval of waiting, tap again; then, after another interval, open the door and go into the room.

Suddenly there came the sound of her feet running – then of a window flung up. Then she called out, “Dred! Dred!” Her voice was shrill with a sudden keen alarm, and Jack started up from where he sat, still holding his coat in his hand. His first thought was that something had happened to the young lady, and then, with a thrill, a second thought came to him, he knew not why, that maybe she was dead.

Dred raised himself upon his elbow as Betty Teach came running down-stairs. The next moment she burst into the kitchen. “O Dred!” she cried, her voice still high and keen with excitement, “she’s gone!”

“Gone!” said Dred, “who’s gone?” He asked the question, though he knew instantly whom she meant.

“The young lady!” cried Betty Teach, wringing her hands. “She’s run away. I went to her room just now, to see if she was up. I knocked, but she wouldn’t answer. Then I went in and I found she’d gone – there was her bed, as empty as could be.”

“Why,” said Jack, “I remember, now, I saw this morning that the door was unbolted, but I didn’t think anything of it then. She must just have opened it for herself and walked out.”

Neither Dred nor Betty Teach paid any attention to what he said. “O Dred!” cried Betty, “won’t you try to do something? Won’t you come up-stairs, and see for yourself?” She had begun to weep, now, and was wiping the tears from her face with her apron. “Oh,” she wept, “what will Ned say? He’ll kill me if he finds this out.”

“Well, well,” said Dred, “’tis no use making such a hubbub about it. That won’t do any good. Let’s go up and take a look at her room. She can’t be far away.” He arose heavily and laboriously from the bench as he spoke, and led the way up-stairs to the young lady’s room. He went to the bed and laid his hand upon it. “Ay,” he said, “she’s gone sure enough, and what’s more, she’s been gone some time, for the bed’s dead cold.” He looked about the room as he spoke. “Why, look yonder!” he cried out; “the pore young thing ain’t even took her shoes with her. I dare say she was afeard of making a noise, and so she’s gone off without ‘em – gone in her stocking-feet, and on this cold, wet day, too. Have you told Hands yet?” he asked, turning to the pirate’s wife.

“No, I haven’t,” she said.

“Then come along and let’s tell him, and see what he has to say about it.”

As they went along the passageway Betty Teach continued wringing her hands: “Oh, lacky, lacky me!” she wailed. “What’ll Ned say when he finds this out? He’s like enough to be back at any time, now, and he’ll kill me, he will, if he finds out we’ve let her get away.”

“Well, he don’t know anything about it as yet,” said Dred, roughly, “and till he does, ’tis no use crying for it.”

Hands was still bedridden with his broken knee. As Dred, followed by Jack and Betty Teach, entered the room, they found him lying propped with his elbow on the pillow, and his head on his hand, smoking the pipe that now seemed never to leave his lips. He had heard the stir and the sound of voices below, and almost as soon as Dred opened the door he asked what was the ado. Dred told him, and he listened, sucking every now and then at his pipe, nodding his head at intervals, as though he had already surmised what had occurred. “In her stocking-feet!” he repeated, as Dred concluded. “Well, well! to be sure! In her stocking-feet! Why, then, she can’t go far.”

“In course not,” said Dred.

“I don’t know why she ran away,” cried Betty Teach. “She didn’t make no sign of running away last night. I took her supper up to her, and she talked for a long while with me. She asked me then if there’d been any news from Virginia, and then she wondered whether Ned couldn’t take her back without waiting to hear news, but she didn’t seem to think anything of running away.”

They listened to her with a sort of helpless silence as she spoke.

“Well,” repeated Hands, after a while, “she can’t have gone far in her stocking-feet. I tell you what ’tis, Dred, I believe she be gone up toward the town. ’Tis most likely she’d think first of going there. If she didn’t go there she’d go down to Jack Trivett’s or Jim Dobbs’s, they being the nighest houses t’other way. And then, if she goes that way, why they knows all about her, and they’ll send her back or send word back. If she goes up toward the town she can’t go no furder than the little swamp. If I was you, I’d go up that there way on the chance of finding her.”

Dred sat for a while on the edge of the bed in thoughtful silence. “Well,” he said, “I reckon you be about right, and I’d better go and look for her.” Then he groaned. “This be ill weather for a fever-struck man to be out in,” he said, “but summat’s got to be done. If for no other reason, we can’t let the pore young lady stay out to be soaked in the rain. You’ll have to go with me, Jack.”

The misty drizzle had changed to a fine, thin rain when Jack and Dred started out upon their quest. They walked along together, side by side, Dred lagging somewhat with the dregs of his weakness. “We’ll strike along the shore,” he said, panting a little as he walked, “and then, from the mouth of the branch, we’ll beat up along the edge of the swamp. If we don’t find her ag’in’ we get up as far as the cross branch, we’ll skirt back into the country and see if she’s at Dobbs’s or Trivett’s plantation-houses. As for going to the town, why, what Hands says is true enough; she couldn’t cross the swamp with her shoes on, let alone in her stocking-feet.”

Jack’s every faculty was intent upon the search, but, by a sort of external consciousness, he sensed and perceived his surroundings with a singular clearness. The bank dipped down rather sharply toward a narrow strip of swamp, threaded midway by a little sluggish, lake-like stream of water. Oaks and cypress-trees grew up from the soft, spongy soil. The boles of the trees were green with moss, and here and there long streamers of gray moss hung from the branches. Fallen trees, partly covered with moss, partly buried in the swampy soil, stretched out gaunt, lichen-covered branches like withered arms, also draped with gray hanging filaments. Here or there little pools of transparent, coffee-colored water caught in reflection a fragment of the gray sky through the leaves overhead, and gleamed each like a spot of silver in the setting of dusky browns of the surrounding swamp.

Dred walked upon the border of the drier land, Jack closer down, along the edge of the swamp. His feet sucked and sopped in the soft, wet earth, and now and then he leaped from a mossy root to a hummock of earth, from a hummock of earth to a mossy root. The wet wind rushed and soughed overhead through the leaves, and then a fine, showery spray would fall from above, powdering his rough coat with particles of moisture. The air was full of a rank, damp, earthy smell.

“D’ye keep a sharp lookout,” called Dred to him.

“Ay, ay,” answered Jack.

They again went on for a little distance without speaking. “I’m a-going to stop awhile, till I light my pipe,” Dred called out presently; “the damp seems to get into my nose; ’tis like a lump of ice.” He had filled his pipe with tobacco, and now he squatted down and began striking his flint and steel while Jack went on forward through the swamp.

He had gone, perhaps, thirty or forty paces when he suddenly caught sight of a little heap of wet and sodden clothes that lay upon the ground, partly hidden by the great ribbed roots of a cypress-tree. It looked like some cast-off clothing that had been thrown away in the swamp. He wondered dully for a moment how it came there, and then, with a sudden start – almost a shock – realized what it must be. He hurried forward, the branches and roots hidden by the mossy earth crackling beneath his feet. “Dred!” he called out, “Dred – come here, Dred!”

“Where away!” called Dred, his voice sounding resonantly through the hollow woods.

“Here!” answered Jack, “come along!”

The next moment he came around the foot of a cypress-tree, and found himself looking down at the fugitive – almost with a second shock at finding what he had expected.

She did not move. Her face was very white, and she looked up at him with her large, dark eyes as he stood looking down at her. A shudder passed over her, and then presently another. She said nothing, nor did he say anything to her. Her skirts were soaked and muddy with the swamp water through which she must have tried to drag herself. She sat with her feet doubled under her, crouched together. Her hair was disheveled, one dark, cloudy lock falling down across her forehead. Somehow Jack could not bear to look at her any longer; then he walked slowly away toward Dred, who now came hurrying up to where he was. “Where is she?” said Dred to Jack when the two met.

“Over yonder,” said Jack, pointing toward the tree. He was profoundly stirred by what he had seen. She had not looked like herself. She had looked like some forlorn, hunted animal. When Jack came back with Dred they found her still sitting in the same place, just as he had left her. Dred stood looking down at her for a moment or two. Perhaps he also felt something of that which had so moved Jack. Then he stooped and laid his hand upon her shoulder. “You must come back with us, mistress,” he said. “You shouldn’t ha’ tried to run away; indeed, you shouldn’t. How long have you been out here?”

Her lips moved, but she could not speak at first. “I don’t know,” said she presently, in a low, dull voice. “A long time, I think. I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t get through the swamp; then I was afraid to go back again.” She put her hand up to her eyes nervously, and pressed it there, and her lips began to quiver and writhe. And again she shuddered, as though with the cold.

“In course you couldn’t,” said Dred, soothingly, “and indeed you shouldn’t ha’ tried, mistress. ’Tis enough to kill the likes of you to be out in this sort of weather, and in your stocking-feet. There, don’t you take on so, mistress. Come, come, don’t cry no more. You come back to the house with us, and get some dry clothes on you, and you’ll feel all well again. Why, she’s cold to the marrow,” he said, as he helped her to rise. “Lend her your coat, Jack.”

Jack instantly began stripping off his coat, eager to do something to show his sympathy. She made no resistance, but stood with her hands pressed to her eyes as Jack put the coat over her shoulders and buttoned it under her chin.

Betty Teach opened the door and stood waiting as they came up the pathway to the house. “You’ve found her, have you?” she said, and she trembled visibly with joy. “Oh! what would Ned say if he was to find all this here out?”

“Why, he needn’t know anything about it,” said Dred, roughly, as he and Jack assisted the young lady into the house. “Just you say nothing about it to the captain, you too – d’ye hear, Jack? I’ll see Hands myself and ask him that he don’t say anything.”

Jack had walked all the way back from the swamp in his shirt-sleeves. He was damp and chilled with the fine rain, and he sat himself close to the fire, and began warming his hands, hardly knowing that he was doing so. He had been most profoundly moved by what he had seen, and his mind was full of thinking about it. He was glad that he was wet with the rain for her sake. Presently Betty Teach returned from taking the young lady to her room, and he roused himself from his thoughts to hear the pirate’s wife tell Dred that she had put her to bed. “You’d better take something warm up to her,” Dred said, and Betty Teach replied: “Yes, I will. D’ye think she’d drink a tumbler of grog if I mixed it?” “Ay, she’ll have to,” said Dred. “‘Twas enough to kill the likes of her to be setting out in the wet swamp like that.” Jack listened for the moment, and then his thoughts went back to her again. He recalled how she had pressed her hands over her eyes, and how her lips had quivered and writhed as he buttoned the coat at her throat. His hand had touched her cold wet chin, and there was a strong pleasure in the recollection. Then he again aroused from his thoughts to hear Dred saying, “Take care what you’re about! You’re making it too strong,” and then he saw that Betty Teach was busy mixing a hot drink for the young lady, pouring rum from the pirate’s case-bottle into the hot water, and stirring it round and round.

CHAPTER XXXI
THE RETURN

IT was at the dead of the same night when Jack began to be disturbed in his sleep by iterated poundings upon the floor overhead. He heard the noise, and for some time it mingled in his dreams before he began recognizing it with his waking thoughts. He raised himself upon his elbow where he lay upon the floor. Dred, too, was sitting up, and there was the sound of stirring overhead. They could hear the patter of bare feet, and presently Betty Teach came running down-stairs. The next moment she burst into the room, clad in a blanket which she had wrapped around her. “The sloop’s come back!” she cried. “Hands heard ‘em, and he’s been pounding on the floor with his shoe for a deal of a while, but ye slept like ye were dead.”

Even before she had ended speaking, Jack was pulling on his shoes. He tied the thongs hurriedly and then slipped on his coat and hat. He looked up at the clock as he ran off out of the house, leaving Dred dressing more slowly and deliberately, and he saw that it was half-past twelve.

The rain was still driving in fine sheets, and there was the constant sound of running water, and every now and then the dropping and pattering of many drops from the trees as they bowed gustily before the wind. There were lights moving about down at the landing-place, and there were two other lights twinkling out over the harbor, where the sloop evidently lay, the bright sparks reflected in long, restless trickles of light across the broken face of the water. Jack could see that there were figures moving about the landing wharf, and he started to go thither.

He was still dazed and bewildered with the sudden waking, and everything seemed to him to be singularly strange and unreal; what he saw took on the aspect of night-time, but things that had happened the day before mingling oddly with those of the present – the spitting of the fine, chill rain blending with a recollection of Miss Eleanor Parker as she crouched at the foot of the cypress-tree. A cock crew in the rainy night, and the sound was singularly pregnant of the wet darkness of the unborn day.

He had gone only a little distance when he suddenly met two dark figures walking up toward the house through the long, wet, rain-sodden grass. One was Captain Teach, the other was Morton, the gunner. They stopped abruptly as they met him, and the pirate captain asked him where he was going. Jack could tell by the sound of his voice that he was in one of his most savagely lowering humors. “I’m going down to the landing,” Jack answered.

“You’re going to do nothing of the sort,” said the pirate captain’s hoarse husky voice from out of the darkness. “You’re going straight back to the house again.” And then, as Jack hesitated a moment, “D’ye hear me?” he cried out, with a sudden savage truculence, “you go back to the house again,” and Jack did not dare to disobey.

Betty Teach met them at the door, and they all went directly into the kitchen, where a freshly-laid bunch of faggots crackled upon the fire, dispelling the chill dampness of the night. The pirate captain, without offering any word of greeting to Dred, turned to his wife and asked her if she had heard anything from Virginia concerning the young lady.

“No,” she said, “not a word.”

“What!” cried out the pirate, “are you sure? Nothing yet? Why, to be sure there must be something. It has been nigh six weeks since I left.”

“There’s nothing come yet,” said his wife.

Blackbeard’s face lowered at her as though he thought it was somehow her fault that no letter had come, but he said nothing. All this while Dred was standing before the fire as though waiting, and Jack knew it must be that he could hardly contain his desire to learn something about the fortune of the expedition. But however great was his desire to know, he asked no immediate question.

“How be you, Dred?” said Morton at last.

“I’m better now,” said Dred, “and able to be about a bit.” He opened his mouth as though to speak, when the pirate captain cut in:

“How’s Hands getting on?”

“He’s still abed,” said Dred, “but he’s a deal better than he was. He stood on his leg yesterday for nigh an hour.” Then at last he asked, “What luck did you have?” The question was directed at Blackbeard, and Jack and Betty Teach stood waiting breathlessly for the reply, but, in his sullen, evil humor, the pirate captain did not choose to answer. He turned away, flung his hat down upon the bench, and began slowly peeling off his rough coat, wet and heavy with the fine rain. Dred eyed him for a second or two, and then he turned to Morton. “What luck did ye have, Morton?” he asked.

Morton was a slow, heavy, taciturn man, very unready of speech. The reply came almost as though reluctantly from him, but he could not hide the triumphant exultation that swelled his heart. “‘Twere good enough luck, Chris Dred” – a pause – “ay, ‘twere good luck. You lost the chance of your life for a big prize this time, when you stayed ashore – that’s what you did, Chris Dred.”

“Did you, then, come across the packet?” asked Dred, impatiently; and again Jack and Betty waited breathlessly for the reply. Morton was filling his pipe. “‘Twere better than that,” he said, slowly. “‘Twere better than any packet betwixt here and Halifax. ‘Twere a French bark loaded full of sugar and rum from Martinique; that’s what it were, Chris Dred.”

Then, with many pauses in his slow narrative, and every now and then a few quick, strong puffs at his pipe, he told how the two pirate sloops – the sloop from Bath Town and the other from Ocracock – had captured the French bark with its – at that time – precious cargo of sugar and rum; that prize that afterward became so famous in the annals of the American pirates; that prize so valuable that it was impossible that Blackbeard should be allowed to keep it for his own without having to fight the law for it.

The pirate captain, in his sworn statement made before Governor Eden a few weeks later, said that the two sloops had found the bark adrift in the western ocean; and Governor Eden had then condemned it, as being without an owner and belonging to those who had brought it in.

It was a very different story that Jack listened to that night as Morton told it in his slow sentences, sitting in the red light of the crackling faggot fire. Morton said that the Frenchman had fought for over half an hour before he had surrendered. Two of the pirates had been killed and four wounded, and the Frenchman had lost thirteen in killed and wounded. He said that there were a number of Englishmen aboard – castaways, whom the Frenchmen had picked up off a water-logged bark that had been driven out of its course to the southward in a storm off the Bermudas. The Frenchmen, he said, would have surrendered a deal sooner than they did, only that the Englishmen had lent a hand in the fighting. He said that the English captain and a passenger from the English bark were the only men on deck when they came aboard, and it was the English captain who had informed them of the precious nature of the Frenchman’s cargo. Dred asked incidentally what had been done with the prisoners, and Morton said that Blackbeard had, at first, been all for throwing the Englishmen overboard, because they had fought against their own blood, but that he (Morton) and the boatswain of the other sloop had dissuaded him from his first intention, and that finally the crew and passengers of the prize had all been set adrift in three of the Frenchman’s boats, though without compass and with only provisions and water for three days. This was the story that Morton told, and it was very different from Blackbeard’s statement made before Governor Eden.

Jack listened most intently. It all sounded very strange and remote – that savage piracy upon a poor merchantman, – and yet it was all singularly real as Morton told it. He wished very strongly that he had been along. What a thing it would have been to remember in after years! What a thing to have talked about if he should ever get back again to Southampton!

Dred asked who of their own men had been hurt.

“Swigget was killed nigh the first fire the parleyvoos gave us,” Morton answered, “and Robinson was shot a while later and died whiles they were carrying him below. T’others’ll all get well like enough, unless it be black Tom, who was shot in the neck.”

Jack did not know Robinson, but he recollected Swigget very distinctly as being one of the crew that had made the descent upon Marlborough. He had not seen him since those days, but it seemed very strange, almost shocking, to think that he who had been so strong and well at that time, who had snapped his finger in time to the captain’s guitar music and who had been so exultant when he had won at cards, that he should now be suddenly dead!

“‘Twere a hot fight while it lasted,” Morton was saying. “But, oh, Chris, you should just ha’ seen that there bark – full, chock up to the hatches, with sugar, and twenty hogsheads of rum in the forehold besides. ‘Twas the chance of your life you missed, Chris Dred.”

There was a long pause, and then Dred asked, “Where is she now?”

“She’s lying down below Stagg’s Island,” said Morton.

What, during that little pause, was the intangible cause that should have so suddenly have recalled to Jack’s memory the scene of yesterday – the swamp, and the poor fugitive girl crouching at the foot of the cypress-tree? Some expression of Dred’s face, perhaps; some indefinable motion of his hand. His mind rushed back to that other event, and a recollection of the young lady’s white, woeful face – a remembrance of the touch of her cold chin upon his hand, stood out very strongly upon his memory.

All the while Morton had been talking, Blackbeard had sat at the table in sullen silence, taking no part in, and not even seeming to hear, what was said. Morton still smoked his pipe, and now the kitchen was pungent with rank tobacco smoke. Meantime Betty Teach had been bustling about, and had brought out a bottle of rum and some glasses, half a ham, and a lot of corn bread. Then she set a couple of pewter plates with knives and forks upon the table. Blackbeard cut himself a slice of ham and helped himself to a piece of bread, and by and by Morton took his place at the table also, drawing up his chair with a noisy scrape upon the floor.