Part 12

"Most of the people believed it, or they wouldn't have hidden their valuables, and so many of them run away," said Jack.

"Oh, yes, they believed it," assented Mr. Felton. "And I guess the governor is thoroughly out of temper with most of us. But as a matter of fact he didn't need any militia to protect us from a raid."

That was the truth of the situation, as Philadelphia found out a few days later. The governor had laid a plot to find out what the people would do if their town were threatened with attack by an enemy. He thought that the Delaware River was insufficiently protected. He wanted to form a strong militia. His ruse had worked; but to his disgust he found that the more respectable and wealthy part of the community, the Quaker portion, had no wish either to strengthen the defenses of the Delaware or to enroll in a militia. His stratagem had at least taught him that much about them.

The Quakers brought the goods they had hidden back to town; those who had gone into the country returned to their homes as soon as it was known that the French frigates had sailed down the Delaware to the sea instead of up it to Philadelphia. They did not like Governor Evans for the trick he had played on them. As the governor himself said, "For weeks afterward they would stand on the other side of the street and make faces at me as I passed by."

As a result of the governor's stratagem most of the Quakers in Philadelphia signed a petition to William Penn, who was then in England, urging him to remove Evans from the governorship. William Penn did not like to do this. He had appointed Evans at the suggestion of some very powerful men at the English Court, and he did not want to antagonize them, or Evans himself for that matter, for so slight a cause. He wrote a letter to Evans, however, mildly reproving him for the trick he had played, and making it clear that he himself was no more in favor of warlike measures than were the Quakers in his colony. Governor Evans held his office for almost three years after this event, and was finally called back to England for very different reasons.

Penn's province did have less warfare than the neighboring colonies, partly because of the just way in which Penn and his settlers dealt with the Indians, partly by good fortune. No enemy attacked Philadelphia. But as men pushed out into the country west of the Delaware they began to come into conflict with the Indians. Often these settlers were able to protect themselves, but sometimes they felt that the men living securely in Philadelphia ought to help them in their effort to enlarge the province. After the defeat of the English General Braddock by French and Indians in western Pennsylvania the settlers found the Indians more difficult to handle. So the men of the frontier formed independent companies of riflemen and fought in their own fashion. They demanded, however, that the governor and General Assembly at Philadelphia should aid them with supplies, if they were unwilling to furnish soldiers.

The Assembly in Philadelphia refused to send the supplies. The news spread along the border, and the settlers, the mountaineers and trappers, set out for the Quaker city on the Delaware. Four or five hundred of them marched into town, men clad in buckskin, their hair worn long, armed with rifles, powder-horns, bullet-pouches, hunting-knives, and even tomahawks they had taken from Indians. Philadelphia was used to seeing a few of such hunters on her streets, but the good people grew uneasy at the appearance of so many of them at one time. The mountaineers swaggered and blustered as they passed the quiet Quakers. They let it be known that if the Assembly refused to vote them the supplies they wanted they would take supplies wherever they could find them.

Pressed by the frontiersmen, the Assembly finally voted the supplies. Then the men in buckskin went back to hold the borders against the Indians.

Later, however, Philadelphia received another visit from much more unruly mountaineers. A large number of these men, known as the Paxton boys, met a battalion of British regulars at Lancaster, demanded the latter's horses and ammunition wagons, and told them that "if they fired so much as one shot their scalps would ornament every cabin from the Susquehanna to the Ohio."

The regulars didn't fire, and the mountaineers helped themselves to everything they wanted and set out for Philadelphia. Some Indians were being held as prisoners in the town, and the Paxton boys, growing insolent with power as they saw British regulars and Quaker farmers yielding to their orders, determined to make the people of Philadelphia give the Indians to them. The mountaineers marched to the high ground of Germantown, north of the town, nearly a thousand in number, and sent their envoys to the town officers. The officers knew, quite as well as Governor Evans had known before, that there was no militia sufficient to take the field against the frontiersmen, and that the citizens would never arm against them. The leading people of the town went to talk with the Paxton boys, trying to persuade them to leave peacefully. Finally by agreeing to give the mountaineers everything they asked, except only the opportunity to massacre the captive Indians, the townspeople succeeded in persuading their unwelcome visitors to leave. For long, however, the men of the frontiers and the mountains looked on the people who dwelt along the Delaware as a cowardly race, who had to be bullied before they would do their share in protecting the province.

The governors of Pennsylvania were not always as fair in dealing with their neighbors as the people were. When John Penn, grandson of William Penn, held the office of governor he sent a gang of rascals to attack men from Connecticut who had settled in the Wyoming Valley, which was claimed by Penn as part of his province. The settlers had built homes and planted crops in the Wyoming Valley, and they had no intention of letting John Penn's mercenary troopers despoil them without a fight. They built a fort, and defied the governor's soldiers. John Penn's men had finally to retreat before their stubborn resistance.

The attack on the Wyoming settlers was in 1770, and only five years later the men of Lexington and Concord fired the shots that were to echo from New Hampshire to Georgia. In the war that followed Pennsylvania did her part. Philadelphia, then the leading city of the colonies, became the home of the new government. In the very street where Governor Evans had urged the townsfolk to organize a militia to fight a few French frigates, men went to Independence Hall to proclaim a Declaration of Independence against the king of England. No one could have accused Philadelphia in July, 1776, of a lack of patriotic spirit. The Liberty Bell rang out its message to all, to the Quaker descendants of William Penn's first settlers as well as to those of other faiths who had come to his province since, and all alike responded to its appeal to proclaim liberty throughout the world.

VIII

THE PIRATES OF CHARLES TOWN HARBOR

(_South Carolina, 1718_)

I

Antony Evans was rowing slowly round the southern point of Charles Town, the bow of his boat pointing out across the broad expanse of water that lay to the east. It was early morning of a bright summer day, and the harbor looked very inviting, the breeze freshening it with little dancing waves of deep blue, tipped with silver, and bringing the salt fragrance of the ocean to the sunlit town. Deep woods ringed the bay; here and there tall, stately palmettos standing out on little headlands, looking like sentries stationed along the shore to keep all enemies away.

Antony loosened his shirt at the throat and rolled his sleeves higher up on his sunburned arms. He had finished school a few days before, and was to have a fortnight's holiday before starting work in his father's warehouse. He loved the water, the two rivers that held his home-town in their wide-stretched arms; the little creeks that wound into the wilderness, teeming with fish and game; the wide bay, and the open ocean. His idea of a holiday was to fish or swim, row or sail, and he meant to spend every day of his vacation on the water. In the bow of his boat was a tin box, and in that box were bread and cold meat and cake, and a bottle of milk--his lunch, and possibly his supper too.

Slowly the town receded across the gleaming water. It grew smaller and smaller as Antony watched it from his boat, until it looked to him like a mere handful of toy houses instead of the largest settlement in His Majesty's colony of South Carolina. He half-shut his eyes and rested on his oars, letting the wind and the waves gently rock his boat. Now Charles Town became a mere point, a spot of color on the long, level stretch of green. He opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder at the wide expanse of blue. Then he pulled toward the southern shore, planning to follow it for a time. There would be more shade there as the sun grew warmer.

The depths of the woods looked very cool and inviting as he rowed along close to them. Great festoons of gray moss hung from the boughs of the live-oaks, festoons that were pink or pale lavender where the sun shone on them. He paddled along slowly, letting the water drip from the blades of his oars, until the town had disappeared around the curve of the forest and he was alone with the waves and the trees.

The sun, almost directly overhead, and his appetite, presently suggested to him that it was time for lunch. He chose a little bay with a sandy beach, and running his boat aground, landed, carrying the precious tin box with him. There was a comfortable mossy seat under a big palmetto, and here he ate part of his provisions, and then, rolling his coat into a pillow, prepared to take a nap. The air was full of spices from the woods, warm and sleep-beguiling; he had slept an hour before he waked, stretched his rested muscles, and went back to the boat.

He had a mind to do a little exploring along this southern shore. The water was smooth, and he felt like rowing. Rapidly he traveled along the shore, peering into bays and inlets, covering long stretches of thick forest, while the sun made his westward journey, the air grew cooler, and the shade stretched farther across the sea. There would be a moon to see him home again, and he was weatherwise enough to know that he had nothing to fear from the wind.

The sun was almost setting when the rowboat rounded a wooded point and swung into a bay. Antony was following the shore-line, so he did not bother to look around, but pulled steadily ahead, keeping about the same distance from the bank. Then, to his great surprise, a voice directly ahead hailed him. "Look where you're going, son! Ease up a bit on your oars, and you'll get to us without bumping."

He looked around and saw three men fishing from a boat. They must have kept very quiet not to have attracted his attention. He slowed the speed of his boat by dragging his oars in the water, but even so he swept pretty close to the fishermen, and one of them, with a quick turn of his own oar, brought the larger boat side-on to Antony's.

"Pull in your oar," the man ordered. To avoid a collision Antony obeyed. The man caught the gunwale of Antony's boat, bringing the two side by side.

All three of the men were grinning. "Well, now, lad," said the man at the oars, "where were ye bound at such a pace? Going to row across the ocean or down to St. Augustine? Bound out from Charles Town, weren't ye?"

Antony smiled. "I was doing a little exploring," he answered. "I didn't know there were any fishermen down along here."

The man's grin widened. "Ye didn't, eh? Well, there's quite a lot of us fishermen down along here. Take a look." He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. Antony turned and saw that at the other end of the bay were a number of boats, men on the beach, and that the hull and spars of a good-sized ship stood out beyond the trees of the next headland.

The man in the bow of the other boat, a slim, dark fellow with a straggling black mustache, pulled in his fishing-line. "An' now you've done your exploring, you'll make us a little visit. It wouldn't do to go right back to Charles Town to-night." He stood up, and with the agility of a cat stepped from his boat to Antony's and sat down on the stern-seat.

Antony had plenty of nerve, but somehow neither the words of the man at the oars nor the performance of the dark fellow was altogether reassuring. The two men now in the other boat were big swarthy chaps, with many strange designs tattooed on their brawny arms; and the one who sat in the stern wore gilded earrings and had a good-sized sheath-knife fastened to his belt. They didn't look like the men he was used to seeing about Charles Town.

They weren't disagreeable, however. The man at the oars gave Antony's boat a slight shove, which sent them some distance apart, and then dropped his fishing-line into the water again. "See you two later," he said, still grinning. "Keep an eye on the lad, Nick."

Nick sat leaning forward, his arms on his knees, his black eyes twinkling at Antony. "Don't you be feared of this nest," said he. "I don't say that some mightn't well be, but not a lively young limb like you. What's your name?"

Antony told him. "And why might some be afraid?" he asked, his curiosity rising.

"Because," said Nick, "that sloop round the point belongs to old man Teach, and she flies a most uncommon flag at her masthead."

"Blackbeard!" exclaimed the boy, his eyes wide with surprise and sudden fear.

"Now don't be scared," said Nick. "Some do call him Blackbeard, but he don't make trouble if he's handled right."

"They said he was down around the Indies, after Spanish ships," said Antony.

"He's been in a good many places," said the other. "Spanish galleys pay well, but trade's trade, wherever you find it."

This Nick was a pleasant fellow, with nothing piratical-looking about him, unless you considered the skull and crossbones tattooed on his right forearm as a sign of his trade. He smiled in a very friendly fashion. "We've got a little matter on hand now that brings us up to Charles Town. Some of the crew's sick, and we want drugs and other things for 'em." He chuckled, as though the notion was amusing. "Pirates get sick just like other folks sometimes," he added. He pointed to the beach ahead of him. "Row us up there, Tony."

There was nothing for Antony to do but obey, and somewhat assured by the mild manner of Nick, he pulled at his oars until the boat grounded in shallow water. "Don't mind a little wetting, do ye?" said Nick, stepping over the side. Antony followed, and they drew the boat high and dry on the shore. "Come along," said Nick, and he turned to lead the way.

Men were working on a couple of overturned skiffs, men were lounging about doing nothing, men who looked nowise different from the fellows Antony saw in his own town. They paid no particular attention to him, and Nick led him along the shore through the woods that covered the headland, and out on the other side. Here was a snug harbor, with a good-sized ship at anchor, men on the shore and more men on the ship's deck.

Nick shoved a small boat into the water, motioned to Antony to climb in, and with a few strokes brought them to the ship's side. He made the boat fast, and climbed a short rope-ladder to the deck. "Don't be scared," he muttered; "he don't eat boys." He led the way to where a stocky man with a heavy black beard sat in a chair smoking a long pipe.

"Here's a lad," said Nick, nodding to the chief, "we picked up as he was rowing down along the coast from Charles Town. He wanted a taste of salt air, and something better to do than what he'd been doing. And we didn't want him to go back home and tell what he'd seen down here."

Blackbeard was certainly black, and there was a scar on one side of his face that didn't add to the beauty of his appearance, but he wasn't ferocious-looking, not as fierce in fact as several men Antony knew at home. He puffed at his pipe a minute before he spoke.

"We're going up to the town to-morrow morning," he said. "What's the talk about us there?"

"They thought you were chasing Spanish ships from Cuba and St. Augustine," answered Antony, "and I think they were pretty glad you were doing it."

"They were, eh?" snorted Blackbeard. "That's always the way of it! Fight the enemy and you're a hero, but don't for the love of Heaven come near us. Smooth-faced rascals all! Keep an eye on him, Nick," and he jerked his head to show that the audience was over.

"Not so terrible, was he?" said Nick, as they went aft. "Now I'll show you some folks you know." They came to the window of the cabin, and he indicated that he wanted Antony to look inside. Half a dozen men and a couple of small boys were in the cabin, a most disconsolate-looking lot. To his great surprise Antony recognized the nearest as Mr. Samuel Wragg, a prominent merchant of Charles Town. The faces of all the others were familiar to him. "What's Mr. Wragg doing there?" he demanded. "He isn't a pirate, too?"

"No, he's no pirate," chuckled Nick. "He's what you might call a hostage. You see, all that merry-looking crowd sailed from your town a few days ago, bound for England, but we met their ship when she reached the bar and we asked 'em to come on board us. Thought we might be able to accommodate 'em better, you see. We overhauled eight ships within a week out there, and that's pretty good business, better than what we've done with your Spanish Dons lately. But there's no denying the Dons do carry the richer cargoes."

"And what are you going to do with them?" asked Antony.

"That's for old Teach, the chief there, to make out. I've a notion your friend Mr. Wragg and the others in there are going to help us get that store of drugs and supplies I was telling you of. Let's be going ashore. I don't want those mates of mine to eat all the fresh fish before we get back to 'em."

Blackbeard's men--pirates and desperadoes though they were--seemed no rougher to Antony than any other seafaring men he had met at Charles Town. They carried more pistols and knives perhaps than such men, but though he listened eagerly he heard no strange ear-splitting oaths nor frightening tales of evil deeds they had committed. Nick looked after him almost like an older brother, saw that he had plenty to eat, helped him gather up wood for the fire they lighted on the shore after supper. There were a number of these small fires, each with a group of swarthy-faced men round it. As Big Bill, the man who had first hailed Antony and caught the gunwale of his boat, explained, "Blackbeard's men were glad to stretch their legs ashore whenever they got the chance."

Their pipes lighted, the pirates sat about the campfires as the moon flooded the sea with sparkling silver. Nick told Antony how he had run away from his English home in Devon when he was a boy, and had shipped on board a merchantman out of Bristol. He had followed the sea year in, year out, until one day the captain of his ship had suddenly given up being a peaceful merchantman and had begun to hold up and rob any well-laden vessels he happened to meet. There was more profit in such a life, he said, and a great deal more excitement. Then he went on to tell Antony that many great sea-captains had really been pirates, and that both the people in England and the American colonists really liked the pirates as long as they preyed on Spanish commerce and the ships of enemies. King Charles the Second of England, he said, though he pretended to frown on piracy, had actually made Morgan, the greatest pirate of them all, a knight, and appointed him governor of his island of Jamaica. "In most seaport towns," said Nick, "the townsfolk are glad enough to have us walk their streets, spend our Mexican doubloons, and sell them the silks and wine we bring in, without asking any questions about where we got 'em. We're as good as any other traders then; maybe better, because we don't haggle so over a bargain. But when we hold up one o' their own precious ships they sing a song about us from t'other side their mouths."

So he talked on, boastfully enough, about the doings of the sea-rovers; but the boy, listening intently, thought that every now and then it sounded as if the dark man were making excuses for himself and his mates.

The fires burned down, and most of the men hunted soft beds under the forest trees. The summer night was warm, and the air was fresher here than in the close bunks on the ship. Big Bill and Nick and Antony found a comfortable place for themselves. "You might take it into your head to run away," said Nick, "but Big Bill and I always sleep with one eye open, and there's a couple of men by the boats that'll see anything stirring, and there's a big marsh through the woods, so you'll do better to stay where you be. And if they should catch you trying to take French leave, I'm afraid they'd put you in that stuffy cabin along with your friend Mr. Wragg and the others. So my advice to ye is, get a good night's sleep."

Antony took the advice so far as lying still went, though it was not nearly so easy to fall asleep. He watched the moon through the tree-tops, he listened to the lapping of the water on the shore, and he thought how strange it was that he should actually be a prisoner of the pirates. He thought of his father and mother and hoped they weren't worried about him; he had stayed away from home overnight before, camping out in the woods, and probably they wouldn't begin to worry about him until next day. Then he fell asleep, and when he woke the sun was rising over the water, and the woods were full of the early morning songs of birds.

"Yeo ho for a swim!" cried Nick, jumping up. He and Antony plunged into the water, swam for half an hour, came out and lay in the sun, drying off, put on their clothes, and went on board the ship, where, in the galley, they found the cooks had breakfast ready.

Soon afterward there was work to be done preparatory to weighing anchor. The small boats were brought on board, the crew set the sails, orders rang from bow to stern. Blackbeard was no longer a quiet man smoking a pipe in a chair. He was very alert and active, overseeing everything, and when he snapped out a word, or even jerked his thumb this way or that, men jumped to do his bidding. The anchor was hoisted aboard, the ship slowly turned from her harbor and sought the channel.

With a fresh favoring wind the ship set in toward Charles Town. Antony, on the forward deck with Nick, watched the shore-line until the bright roofs of the little settlement began to stand out from the green and blue. Farther and farther on Blackbeard sailed until they were in full view of the town. Then he called a half-dozen men by name, among them Nick, and gave them his orders. "Man the long-boat," said he, "and row ashore. Send this note to the governor. It's a list of drugs I want for my crew. And tell the governor and Council that if the drugs don't come back to me in three hours I'll send another boat ashore with the heads of Samuel Wragg and his son and a dozen other men of Charles Town. Their heads or the drugs! Look to the priming of your pistols." Blackbeard was a man of few words, but every word he spoke told.

As the others swung the long-boat overboard Nick stepped up to the chief. "I'll take the boy along," said he. "He might help us ashore, as he knows the people there." Blackbeard nodded.