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The others were very unwilling to begin without the three captains, but in the end the sight of the meal that Peggy and Susan spread out on the saloon table was too much for them. They were very hungry. They had been taking sips of water and bits of biscuit that happened to be broken, and small rations of chocolate while the kettle was being boiled. That sort of thing is all very well on an ordinary day, but it hardly counts when people have had practically nothing to eat since the day before. What was wanted aboard the Wild Cat that night was a meal that should be breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all in one. At last Susan asked Peter Duck what they had better do about waiting, and he said the skipper would be none too pleased to come back and find his crew all hanging about with empty bellies. So they sat down and fell to, Roger, Titty, Peggy, and poor Bill, who had to cut everything up into small bits, because, with a bruised face and three teeth gone, he could not do any serious biting.

As for Peter Duck, he said he was on anchor-watch and could not leave the deck. But Susan cut a big hunk of pemmican, and, instead of vegetables, made a sandwich of two ship’s biscuits with a lot of butter in between them. Before sitting down with the others, she took the beef and the sandwich and a huge mug of boiling tea and carried them up to the old sailor, who thanked her for it, but never for a moment took his eyes off that dim, shadowy shore.

Down below, the first few mouthfuls and the first round of tea made a tremendous difference. The meal had begun in silence, almost as if each one of them were alone or not able to see the others very well. The silence suddenly turned into loud, eager talking. There was still so much to say. Bill had not heard half enough of how they had found the treasure. The others had a hundred things still to ask about the Wild Cat’s adventures in the storm, about the boarding of her by Black Jake’s pirate gang, and about the short, disastrous battle on her decks. And Bill untied the knot in his handkerchief, into which he had put his teeth for safe-keeping, and passed them round for the others to see, and told how he had run his head into the middle of Mogandy, and how the big negro had said that he would kill that boy. “I reckon he’d like to,” said Bill, and, for a moment or two, felt almost as if he had driven the pirates off the deck instead of being collared and bound and tossed into Gibber’s cage. Then he remembered other things. “I thought he’d killed Mr. Duck,” he said.

Titty looked at Susan.

“Susan,” she said. “Susan, is it all right about Captain Flint?”

“He started before they did, and he’d go much faster,” said Susan. “He’s sure to be all right.”

She was going to say more, but she caught Peggy’s eyes on her, questioning, afraid. She fell suddenly silent. Was it all right, really? Susan swallowed something and looked away.

“I wish he’d come,” said Titty.

“It’s as dark as dark, outside,” said Roger.

Peter Duck, on deck, stared through the darkness towards the island. Darkness had fallen fast. They had been only just in time. The riding-light those two had taken with them to Duckhaven was glimmering away there on shore. The wind was still out of the west, but so little of it, so little indeed that he doubted if it would last the night before it came again from the east. There was a dreadful heaviness in the air, even at sea. With this weather anything might happen. “If it comes east we must be away out of this,” he said to himself, munching his pemmican and his biscuit sandwich and drinking his hot tea. Why was the skipper so long? He should have been across by now. If those others were to catch him. . . . Peter Duck thought angrily of the little teak box lying in the bunk in the deckhouse. Ah, he should never have told that yarn. If he’d had the sense to keep his mouth shut they’d be cruising in the Channel now, or looking into Strangford Lough, or in some of them places up the Clyde, or away there in the Baltic, or lying in Lisbon or Vigo, anyway in some sensible place instead of here on the wrong side of Crab Island, with the skipper ashore, and half a dozen cut-throats loose from gaol and after him with guns. And just then he heard the crack of a rifle, and that light on shore was gone.

His mug dropped to the deck and broke there. Peter Duck hardly noticed it. He listened. No other shot. But the light? Had they put it out for fear of showing a target? But how was the skipper to find them in the dark? Had they rowed off without him? They would never do that. But what could they do? If he had thought for a moment that Black Jake and his gang could get across the island before the skipper, he would never have let those two go in alone. Sound the foghorn to bring them off? He went into the deckhouse, and found the old bull-roarer, one of the few things still in its place, slung up under the roof. He heard Bill’s mumbling, toothless talk going on below. What could he say to those children if? . . . He went out again with the bull-roarer. He put it to his lips, and then leant sharply forward. What was that? He could not be mistaken in that noise anyhow. The creak and knock of oars somewhere between the Wild Cat and the shore.

Yes. There was no doubt about it. Somewhere out there in the dark there was a rowing boat without a light, coming out to the Wild Cat. For one moment Peter Duck was for getting the lantern out of the deckhouse to show more of a light than came through the deckhouse windows. Then another thought came to him. That rifle shot? What if the two captains, John and Nancy, had gone ashore and been surprised there, and the boat coming off was full of the cut-throats from the Viper? Or could it be one of the Viper’s own boats? Well, they had boarded the Wild Cat last time easily enough, while her crew were lying asleep. But not again, anyhow, not unless they had more than one boat. Even children could use a belaying-pin on pirate knuckles as they showed along the rail. He hurried round the deckhouse and called down the companion, “All hands on deck!”

“All hands on deck!”

Peter Duck called down quietly enough, but there was something in his voice that stopped spoons full of tinned pear half-way between plate and mouth, and even cut a sentence of Roger’s off short in the middle. For one second, down in the saloon, there was a dead silence. In the next second, everybody was rushing for the companion.

Bill was on deck first, with Titty and Roger close after him. Susan and Peggy had been just a little more careful not to sweep things off the table as they got up. They were last, but even so they came tumbling up on deck almost on Roger’s heels.

“Boat coming off,” said Peter Duck. “Don’t know who’s in it, but we’re not going to be caught twice. Don’t go showing yourselves with the light behind you. Aye, that’s right. Close that galley door. Get hold of a belaying-pin apiece, from that rack by the starboard shrouds. And don’t think about the paint when you bring them pins down to pulp the first hand you see getting a grip of the rail. . . . Where’s Bill?”

“He was here just now,” said Titty. “What is it? Not the pirates?”

“They ain’t coming aboard here if it is,” said Peter Duck. “Not twice in one day. They can’t, neither. Not without they’ve two boats. And I can’t hear but one out there. Listen!”

Just then the light from one of the deckhouse windows lit up Bill’s toothless grin, as he came aft trailing with him one of the capstan bars which he had gone forward to fetch.

“This’ll do proper for one of them,” he said.

“Less lip,” said Peter Duck. “Listen!”

“ ’Sh, ’sh,” whispered the others.

It was coming nearer now, and everybody could hear it, the sharp knock as the oars swung across the rowlocks at the end of each stroke, and the squeaking of a rowlock that needed oiling.

“It sounds awfully like Swallow,” said Peggy, speaking very low. “John said he meant to give some oil to the rowlocks, but I don’t believe he did.”

“Why don’t they show their lantern?” whispered Roger.

“Aye. It’s Swallow, all right,” said Peter Duck. “But who’s in her?”

“You don’t think anything’s gone wrong with John and Nancy?” said Titty. “. . . And Captain Flint?”

Peter Duck grunted. The crack of that rifle-shot was still in his ears, but he did not want to tell them of it if he could help it. “Best be ready for anything,” he said.

But just then, from close by the bows of the schooner, as she lay across the current, in the wind that was still coming light off the shore, there rose a loud, eager shout.

“Ahoy there, Wild Cat! Show us a light!”

Peter Duck straightened himself in the dark. He had been stooping to listen, a little, bent old man, bowed down perhaps by the weight of his fears. Now he threw up his head with a cheerful “Aye, aye, sir!” “It’s the skipper,” he said, bustling into the deckhouse for the lantern. He was back with it in a moment. “Throw the ladder over there, Bill. Now then, Miss Susan, have you got a cup of hot tea for him? Ladder’s over on the port side.” He was shouting now, swinging the lantern to and fro above the rail. Already it lit up the faces below, and everybody aboard the Wild Cat, peering eagerly down into the darkness, had seen that all three captains were there, two at the oars, and another in the stern. Bill dropped a rope over and carried it forward to the main shrouds, while somebody below there in Swallow made it fast. A moment later Captain Flint, ragged, bruised and scratched, was coming up the ladder one rung at a time. He flung a tired leg over the rail.

“Well, that’s that,” he said. “And better luck than I deserve after getting you all into this mess.”

The others were not in a hurry to come aboard.

“Hi! Mr. Duck,” called Nancy, “do just pass us down that lantern.”

“Where’s your own?” asked Peggy.

“We’d be using it if we had it,” said Nancy. “Thanks. Are you sure you’ve found it, John?”

“I can feel it all right. Have you got the lantern?”

The next moment the two of them, down there in the boat, made sure, with the lantern to help them, and the little group on deck heard Nancy’s delighted yell. “So she has. Do you hear? Swallow’s got a bullet in her. John’s found it. We’ll never take it out.”

“But how?” said Roger.

“The bullet that smashed the lantern,” said John.

“When?”

“We never heard any shooting.”

“Didn’t we?” said Peter Duck. “Well, better the lantern than what I thought it might have been. Come along with you now, and let’s have that lantern. We’re in the dark up here.”

Nancy passed up the lantern. Then she and John climbed aboard, and John took the rope from Bill, and carried it aft and made fast there, to let the Swallow lie astern.

“Have you told Captain Flint about the treasure?” asked Titty, following Nancy into the deckhouse.

But Captain Flint would not look at the treasure at that moment. He just glanced across the deckhouse at it, where it lay in his bunk. “A box,” he said. “I thought it would be. Did you find the bag?” And then, before they had time to tell him about it, while Roger was still feeling in his pocket for one of those old greenish metal eyelet rings, Captain Flint had turned away, almost as if he were ashamed. He would not look toward his bunk again. “No, no!” he said. “We must get out of this first. A dozen times to-day I’ve wished that treasure at the bottom of the sea. What anchor have you got down, Mr. Duck?”

“Only the kedge,” said Mr. Duck. “I thought to slip it if the wind changed sudden.”

“That’s good,” said Captain Flint. “Let’s have it up and be off. If we can we’ll put Crab Island hull down before dawn. I never want to see the place again.”

“My way of thinking,” said Peter Duck.

And so, while everybody was bursting to hear something or to tell something, while the story of the taking of the Wild Cat by the pirates from the Viper, and the story of the rescue, and of the finding of the treasure, and of Captain Flint’s crossing of the island, and of Swallow’s wait at Duckhaven in the dark, and of the rifle-shot that had smashed the lantern and left a bullet in the gunwale, were still waiting to be told, the whole ship’s company turned to. Capstan bars were fitted, sails were set, mainsail and staysail, an old spare jib instead of the one that had been blown away, a trysail instead of the foresail that had been split from top to bottom in the storm, the anchor was raised, and the Wild Cat, in the light wind that was still coming fitfully out of the west, sailed away from Crab Island in the dark.

“There’s very little wind,” said Captain Flint. “I’ll have a go at starting the motor.”

“You’ll never do that by lantern light, sir,” said Peter Duck. “And you may make him worse. Leave the little donkey to sleep and maybe you’ll have him running in the morning. But it’s a donkeyman’s job and not a sailor’s to be working them things.”

Susan had a fresh lot of tea going in the saloon, and Captain Flint, John, and Nancy, sat in there hungrily eating and drinking. The others finished their own supper, and then leaned on the table, watching them. There was so much to say that they could have talked all night, or rather they thought they could. But Roger’s head fell slowly forward, and Susan got up and hauled him off to bed. When she got back to the saloon she found a strange scene. The whole lot of them were sleeping, some pillowing their heads on their arms among the supper things, others hunched down where they sat. Captain Flint sat up with a start, stared at Susan, tried to take a drink from his empty mug, and staggered across the saloon to the companion ladder.

“Well, I don’t know what to do,” said Susan to herself. “Perhaps I’d better not wake them.”

She left the others sleeping as they were, and went quietly up the companion ladder.

“North-east it is,” Peter Duck was saying. “We’ll not do better than that. If we want a quick passage we must work up north till we get into the westerlies. There’s no sense butting into a trade wind. No, Cap’n, there’s nothing wrong with me. Knocked out I was, and maybe I was lucky. No, no. I can carry on till dawn, and then we’ll see better what’s coming to us.”

Susan heard the faint slop-slop of the water on the bows of Swallow, towing astern. The Wild Cat was sailing. She slipped quietly down below once more, in time to see Titty moving, more than half asleep, across the saloon and into her cabin. The others were still sprawling about the table. Titty, groping in the dark, found her berth and fell into it. Susan listened to Titty’s even breathing. She then climbed as quietly as she could into the upper berth, and a moment later was as fast asleep as Titty.