“They are edging away,” said the boatswain.  “I think they smell us.”

“That’s soon set right,” said Sharkey, turning his filmy eyes upon Craddock.  “Stand there, you—­right there, where they can recognise you, with your hand on the guy, and wave your hat to them.  Quick, or your brains will be over your coat.  Put an inch of your knife into him, Ned.  Now, will you wave your hat?  Try him again, then.  Hey, shoot him!  Stop him!”

But it was too late.  Relying upon the manacles, the quartermaster had taken his hands for a moment off Craddock’s arm.  In that instant he had flung off the carpenter, and, amid a spatter of pistol bullets, had sprung the bulwarks and was swimming for his life.  He had been hit and hit again, but it takes many pistols to kill a resolute and powerful man who has his mind set upon doing something before he dies.  He was a strong swimmer, and, in spite of the red trail which he left in the water behind him, he was rapidly increasing his distance from the pirate.  “Give me a musket!” cried Sharkey, with a savage oath.

He was a famous shot, and his iron nerves never failed him in an emergency.  The dark head appearing on the crest of a roller, and then swooping down on the other side, was already half-way to the sloop.  Sharkey dwelt long upon his aim before he fired.  With the crack of the gun the swimmer reared himself up in the water, waved his hands in a gesture of warning, and roared out in a voice which rang over the bay.  Then, as the sloop swung round her head-sails, and the pirate fired an impotent broadside, Stephen Craddock, smiling grimly in his death agony, sank slowly down to that golden couch which glimmered far beneath him.

III

HOW COPLEY BANKS SLEW CAPTAIN SHARKEY

The Buccaneers were something higher than a mere band of marauders.  They were a floating republic, with laws, usages, and discipline of their own.  In their endless and remorseless quarrel with the Spaniards they had some semblance of right upon their side.  Their bloody harryings of the cities of the Main were not more barbarous than the inroads of Spain upon the Netherlands—­or upon the Caribs in these same American lands.

The chief of the Buccaneers, were he English or French, a Morgan or a Granmont, was still a responsible person, whose country might countenance him, or even praise him, so long as he refrained from any deed which might shock the leathery seventeenth-century conscience too outrageously.  Some of them were touched with religion, and it is still remembered how Sawkins threw the dice overboard upon the Sabbath, and Daniel pistolled a man before the altar for irreverence.