"No sense in breaking our backs at these oars," grumbled Joe. "We go ahead like a crab, with a sternboard. Think ye we can swing the raft to fetch the ship?"
"After Captain Wellsby turns the pirates loose and quits her?" scoffed Jack.
"I am a plaguey fool," cheerfully admitted Joe Hawkridge. "'Twould be out of the frying-pan into the fire, with a vengeance."
"And no way to signal our friends," sadly exclaimed Jack. "We forgot flint and steel. It looks much like another voyage."
"Straight for the open sea, my bully boy," agreed Joe. "And I'd as soon chance it on a hen-coop."
THESE sturdy youngsters were not easily frightened, and Jack Cockrell, the landsman, was confident that wind and tide would change to send the little raft shoreward. So tranquil was the sea that they rode secure and dry upon the cabin hatch which was buoyed by the two short spars. Joe Hawkridge was silent with foreboding of a fate more bitter than the perils which they had escaped. He had seen a lone survivor of a crew of pirates picked off a raft in the Caribbean, a grisly phantom raving mad who had gnawed the flesh of his dead comrades.
They drifted quietly before the land breeze, beneath a sky all jeweled with bright stars. The fire on the beach dimmed to a red spark and then vanished from their wistful ken. They could no longer see the light on the wreck of the _Plymouth Adventure_. Now and then the boys struggled with the heavy oars and rowed until exhausted but they knew they could be making no headway against the current which had gripped the derelict raft. They ate sparingly of flinty biscuit and leathery beef pickled in brine and stinted themselves to a few swallows of water from the wooden breaker or tiny cask.
"Hunger and thirst are strange to ye, Jack," said young Hawkridge as they lay stretched side by side. "Hanged if I ever did get enough to eat till I boarded the _Plymouth Adventure_. Skin and bone I am. I'll not call this a bad cruise unless we have to chew our boot-tops. A pesky diet is leather. I've tried it."
"Truly, Joe?" cried Jack in lugubrious accents. "We may have more heart when morning comes. A piping easterly breeze, such as is wont to come up with the sun in Charles Town, and we can steer for the coast all taut and cheery."