“What’s that sound?” gasped the steersman to his officer, leaning full weight to his work. Forward they could see nothing but the black void and a white wash of sea where their decks and bowsprit should ordinarily be, nor could look in that direction long for the whips of rain with which the screaming winds lashed them. “The wind,” hollered Richards, bending close to be heard. The steersman shook his head. “No--that!” he shouted. The gale paused in one of those lulls by which it seems to recover for a effort of fresh fury. And in the second of quietness there rose and fell a long, horrible scream of inhuman defiance. Richards grinned and pointed with his finger below. Blackbeard was wrestling with the principalities and powers of darkness. “Who’s that?” bellowed the steersman, his momentary reassurance flown. His face was turned with a gaze of inexpressible fear at the gleaming, plunging masts. “There--there--” Richards peered in the rain-whipped night; peered and shrank back, his mouth open wide and his eyes protruding. He rallied, pulled out a heavy wooden pin from the ship’s side and started forward. Within ten paces of the main-mast he stopped, and gathering his strength, hurled the pin with all his force crashingly against the mast. The pin fell into an invading sea and was whirled overboard. But the Thing stood, dark and sinister. Richards felt the ship getting beyond control of the cowering helmsman. He rushed back in time to save them from ruin; the man had dropped to the deck, a bundle of abject fright. While the mate was still calling for help, the boatswain crawled up on hands and knees and turned an ashen face to his superior. “There’s a strange man,” he shouted as loudly as a quavering voice would permit, indicating with a backward jerk of his thumb. “Aloft--” The Thing was moving about the yards; there was a sort of solid blackness to It that somehow made It visible even against its somber background. Turning the helm over to the boatswain, the mate rushed below for his pistol, but when he came back to the deck the Thing was gone. Richards laughed thinly. “The Devil’s signed on with us, boys!” “Then that’s the end o’ us,” groaned the boatswain. But the fact that a New Hand was on the ship if not on her articles was not immediately disastrous. For very shortly after that vivid night, Blackbeard, recovered now of his bout, met and took a very fine French ship, which was in so excellent a condition that to call it “salvage” was indeed the very subtlest of piratical jokes. And the joke was made good, too, when, taking her at once into Ocracoke, His Excellency, with little hesitation, gave her captor a certificate of salvage, accepting as his fee for the certificate some sixty hogsheads of sugar. What the Governor did not use, Toby Knight obligingly allowed to be stored in the Knight barn.