The work of weeks had now to be punched up into the fleet hours of one night, for when the dawn should come the _Royal James_ must be a warrior harnessed and prepared. All night the men of the _Henry_ and the _Sea Nymph_ lay at watch. Sun-up began the day of fate. Beyond the headlands which sheer above the river, the east was bannered with yellow and purple and rose-pink; a strong breeze blew directly from the land. The sails of the _Royal James_ went up with the sun, the blocks and tackle creaking like a flock of hungry gulls; the chains rattled with the hoisting of the anchor. Bonnet had to fight two to one. His chance--and it was an approved method of pirate strategy--was to get to open water and battle on the run, broadsiding one or the other of his enemies but never permitting both to get at him at once. The major had become quite a sailor now. He gathered all his men on the _Royal James_ and left the two captured sloops with only Mr. Killing and the other prisoners on board of them. The refusal of these latter to aid him in his fight with Rhett was allowed to pass without punishment. “Here they come!” Beyond the hummock the Charles Town men could see the masts of the pirate, fully freighted with sail, running swiftly toward the point. Bonnet was making a break for the sea. Rhett’s ships quivered with action. As the _Royal James_ thrust her bowsprit into sight, the _Henry_ and the _Sea Nymph_ crowded down on either of her quarters. They made it in time; Bonnet, dodging, was elbowed into the shore. If the channel had been deep there, he might still have made it; but the channel was shallow, and his ship thudded into the sandy bottom, and there she lay, with her full suit of canvas tugging at the sticks until they promised to snap. Rhett grinned and swung about, but he could not make it sharply enough, and his satisfaction waned with the bump of his ship into the same bottom that gripped his enemy. The _Sea Nymph_, also turning, likewise found herself hard and fast ashore. Here then was the situation. The _Henry_ was grounded on the pirate’s bow within pistol shot; the _Sea Nymph_ struck the sand out of range, and there she stayed for the greater part of the fight, a spectator of the struggle, unable to bear a part or give any help to the _Henry_. And Rhett’s flagship needed help. When she hit she slanted, but in the same direction as the pirate had tilted, with the result, of course, that she presented her unprotected deck squarely to Bonnet’s broadsides, while the latter’s position offered more of his hull and less of his deck to Rhett’s ordnance.