So cleverly had Blackbeard calculated the drift of the boys' raft that a little later in the morning a lookout in the maintop called down:
"Land, ho! Two points off the starboard bow she bears."
"The maintop, ahoy!" shouted Blackbeard. "Can ye see a vessel's spars?"
"'Tis too hazy inshore. But unless my eyes play me tricks, a smudge of smoke arises."
"That would be Captain Wellsby's campfire on the beach."
"Trust him to douse it," was the easy assurance. "I feel better. Blow me, but I expect to live another day."
"Answer me why," begged Jack. "I am like a palsied old man."
"Well, you know this bit o' coast, how low it sets above the sea. Despite the haze, a man aloft could see a ship's masts and yards before he had a glimpse of land."
"Then the wreck of the _Plymouth Adventure_ has slid off the shoal and gone down, Joe?"
"Yes, when the wind veered and stirred a surf on the shoal. She pounded over with the flood-tide and dropped into fifteen fathom."
"Then we are saved, for now?" joyfully exclaimed Jack.
"Unless we're unlucky enough to find some o' those plaguey pirates afloat on a raft or makin' signals from the beach."
The _Revenge_ sailed shoreward until those on board could discern the marching lines of breakers which tumbled across the shoal. The smudge of smoke had vanished from the beach. The lookout man concluded that the haze had deceived him. Blackbeard steered as close as he dared go, with a sailor heaving the lead, but there was no sign of life among the sand-dunes and the stunted trees. And the _Plymouth Adventure_ had disappeared leaving no trace excepting scattered bits of floating wreckage.
The pirate ship headed to follow the coast to the northward, on the chance that Ned Rackham's prize crew might have made a landing elsewhere. To Jack Cockrell the gift of life had been miraculously vouchsafed him and he felt secure for the moment. Joe's theory seemed plausible, that the pirates had abandoned the _Plymouth Adventure_ in time to avert drowning with her, and were driven away from the bight and the beach by Captain Wellsby's well-armed sailors.
"Do they know Blackbeard's rendezvous in the North Carolina waters, Joe?" was the natural query. "Are they likely to make their way thither, knowing that honest men will slay them at sight?"