So, steadily sailed the corvette Badger up the long Atlantic coast, and she passed the capes of the Delaware while Captain Bonnet was examining the queer pulpit in the little bay-side town where his ship had stopped to take in water.
At the various ports of the northern coast where the Revenge had sailed back and forth outside, the Badger boldly entered, and the tales she heard soon turned her back again to sail southward down the long Atlantic coast. But the heart of Christopher Vince never failed. The vision of Kate Bonnet as he had seen her, standing with glorious eyes denouncing him; as he should see her when, with bowed head and proffered hand, she came to him; as all should see her when, in her clear-cut beauty, she stood beside him in his ancestral home, never left him.
Off the port of Charles Town, South Carolina, the Badger lay and waited, and soon, from an outgoing bark, the news came to Captain Vince that several weeks before the pirate Bonnet of the Revenge had taken an English ship as she was entering port, and had then sailed southward.
Southward now sailed the Badger, and, as there was but little wind, Captain Vince swore with an unremitting diligence.
It was a quiet morning and the Badger was nearing the straits of Florida when a sail was reported almost due south.
Up came Captain Vince with his glass, and after a long, long look, and another, and another, during which the two vessels came slowly nearer and nearer each other, the captain turned to his first officer and said quietly: "She flies the skull and bones. She's the first of those hellish pirates that we have yet met on this most unlucky cruise."
"If we could send her, with her crew on board, ten times to the bottom," said the other, "she would not pay us what her vile fraternity has cost us. But these pirate craft know well the difference between a Spanish galleon and a British man-of-war, and they will always give us a wide berth."
"But this one will not," said the captain.
Then again he looked long and earnestly through his glass. "Send aft the three men who know the Revenge," said he.
Presently the men came aft, and one by one they went aloft, and soon came the report, vouched for by each of them: "The sail ahead is the pirate Revenge."
Now all redness left the face of Captain Vince. He was as pale as if he had been afraid that the pirate ship would capture him, but every man on his vessel knew that there was no fear in the soul or the body of the captain of the Badger. Quickly came his orders, clear and sharp; everything had been gone over before, but everything was gone over again. The corvette was to bear down upon the pirate, her cannon--great guns for those days, and which could soon have disabled, if they had not sunk, the smaller vessel--were muzzled and told to hold their peace. The man-of-war was to bear down upon the pirate and to capture her by boarding. There was to be no broadside, no timber-splitting cannon balls.