Colonel Rhett had again been the fate of Major Bonnet. After Bonnet’s flight from the marshal’s home, Rhett went after him and ran him down on a little island near the city. Heriot, sometime shipmaster for the major, was shot in the short scrimmage, and his employer again brought to Charles Town in manacles. They tried Stede Bonnet in the same court and the same fashion and with the same evidence as they had his crew. He was tried on two indictments, one for taking the _Francis_ and the other for taking the _Fortune_. To both he pleaded not guilty and was first tried on the affair of the _Francis_. He stood up for himself in good shape; but the facts, as well as the court, crushed him. He claimed, as Captain Kidd had claimed some years before in a similar fix, that a mutinous crew drove him protesting into these criminal courses. He explained that the only piracy he had ever been in was when with Captain Thatch. One wonders how much the mutinous crew, as alleged, had to exert themselves to persuade an old Blackbeard man to steal a fat ship or two. A curious little circumstance comes up in this trial. Pell, the boatswain, in answer to a question, said Bonnet was in command of the ship, “but the quartermaster had more power than he,” adding that the quartermaster took charge of the loot and sometimes divided it. One wonders if the crew did not have a great deal more to say about things than would be supposed, tolerating Bonnet as a business manager. Bonnet might have come down as a somewhat romantic person, but the nerve he had always shown, even in his trial, broke at the last; and when on December 18 he was hanged in the same place as his followers had been, he was almost senseless from fear. Thus in a miserable huddle he left a stage on which he had not been too modest, on which he had even swaggered. This is all the story of one summer. The blockade of Charles Town by Blackbeard had happened in May of 1718, and December of the same year saw the end of Stede Bonnet. And to Bonnet, as to his men, there came a spark of joy before he went to the rope--and that was the news that his old superior, Blackbeard, had died upon the cutlass on November 22. VII Abdicating the high estate of admiral and breaking up his fleet, leaving a part of it, as we have seen, to roll as wreckage on the tides of Topsail Inlet, Blackbeard came back to Ocracoke and a lazy summer.