The Sea Wolves/Chapter 4
The rain fell in torrents—pitiless summer rain, which the quivering ground swallowed greedily, and the hurned and seared leaves drank up with unquenchable greed. For a month or more the consuming drought had settled heavily upon the city and the south, leaving to the intolerable sun the green of the earth and the fuller ripeness of the fields; but on that July afternoon the westerly gale had come to lave all things with its refreshing gifts, and to pour upon London that torrent-like draught which alone made life in her streets possible at such a season.
Toward evening the downpour, which had been gathering strength for some hours, burst with a new intensity, sweeping in rivers of water from the higher roofs, and swirling into dust-brown eddies at the choked grating of the sewers. The sky, which had presented a face of leaden cloud since midday, darkened almost as at the touch of night; the air seemed to exude an enervating heaviness; the wind swept from corner to corner, and from nook to nook, bending the younger plants like whips, and scattering the full blossoms from the gardens in showers of perfuming leaves. It was a night, verily, to shame summer—a night breeding thoughts of books and of the blessings of the lemon-tree and the cheapness of ice.
Sydney Capel, standing moodily at his window in the court of Danes Inn, arrived at these reflections, and at more, as the clock struck five, and an aged charwoman condescended to set his tea upon the table, and to make a delightfully vague remark, which served her for all weathers.
"Here's an everning agen," said she; and with that she withdrew as quietly as she had come, and left her special charge to the last meal he would get before setting oat on his long journey—ostensibly to the Russian frontier, in reality to some distant shore of whose situation he was but vaguely conscious.
It has been said by those who saw Capel at this time that he was vastly changed from the man who had taken life so flippantly on the shores of the Mediterranean three months before. His face had lost its colour; his eyes were ringed about with purple hollows; he had a hacking cough, which rarely left him; he had lost much of his old spruceness in dress; he had become blasé and effeminate. Such a change was easy to account for by those who knew the inner pages of his life during those months when Messenger had wound the coils of his rope about him stealthily, until he held him on that day as a vaquero holds quarry in a lasso. It had been a quick fall; but the seeds which breed the tares of life bad been in Capel from his birth, and he proved plastic as clay in the hands of a man who moulded him with all the ready skill of an adventurer and a rogue. On that night the end had come, the parting of the ways—from a career, from friends, from his old world to the paths of danger, of darkness, and of doubt. Had it been possible he would have turned back even then; but the web was too closely woven, the meshes of the net had ensnared him beyond hope.
A clock in the Strand struck the first quarter after five when he turned away from the sight of the relentless rain, and gathered his baggage together with a mechanical effort. He had prepared himself just that outfit which used to serve him on these trips when he took ingots across the Continent, and was fêted in St. Petersburg; but it seemed rather a mockery now to look upon a portmanteau with a dress suit in it, or those other fripperies which were so purely ornamental. Nevertheless they lay there in bulky confusion; and he went to work mechanically, waiting every moment to hear the sound of Messenger's steps upon the stairs and the knock upon bis oak which was the very last he might expect to hear.
As the thing went it was half-past five before Messenger appeared, a smile upon his face and an unusual colour in his cheeks. He was dressed in a short black jacket, with a white vest beneath, and carried no visible equipment, save a light mackintosh, for the long journey before him. But he spoke with an unusual rapidity of utterance, and could not check his uneasiness.
"Well," said he, the moment the door had shut behind him, "you're ready, I see."
"Yes," replied Capel coldly; "I wish to Heaven I were not!"
Messenger looked at him fiercely, but stopped the exclamation upon his lips, and said in a gentler voice:
"I've been young myself; I know the feeling, though I've lost it years since. Have a glass of brandy. Why, man, think of to-morrow!"
"It's just what I'm thinking of," answered Capel. "Tomorrow—and the years after."
Messenger laughed a little harshly, but said no more, and they went together to the Strand, where a cab was waiting for them. In ten minutes' time they were passing down Queen Victoria Street to the Bank; and at the doors of the latter they prepared to separate, the Prince going straight to Tilbury, Capel to the office of his firm, where he was to meet his fellow in the business, and to find the bullion. A very brisk Au revoir was all that came from Messenger's lips as he jumped from the cab to the pavement, but he turned again as Capel was closing the door, and said—
"Oh, by-the-bye, when we get aboard Kenner's yacht, you'll find young Fisher there. He knows nothing of this, of course, and we must make a tale before we meet him. He'll take any story you give him, as you know."
Capel looked up sharply at the intelligence, and asked—
"Is that all right? Don't you think there's a risk?"
The question was not answered, for the cab drove off at some pace down Lombard Street, and Messenger made his way quickly to the Tilbury and Southend Railway. At half-past seven he reached the dock station; five minutes later he was on board the tug Admiral. He found her aft deck untenanted save by a great retriever dog, who had curled himself up near the trigger-hook; but three seamen in oilskins were working at the moorings, and the skipper, Kess Bobinson, a little bullet-headed, red-haired man, who wore a kind of leather jerkin and a peaked cap, stood by them, swearing many strange oaths in many tongues. So occupied was he with his verbal fireworks that Messenger's coming escaped him for a moment. And when he did see him, he proved that he was in a very poor humour.
"You've come aboard, have you?" said he; "and time, too, time, too!"
"What's wrong?" asked the Prince. "You don't seem exactly in a fête-and-gala temper. Is any thing amiss?"
"Amiss enough," replied the fellow gruffly. "This cursed warping's fouled, for one thing, and there's another—but I'll tell you aft."
In the small cabin or state-room which serves the skipper's needs on a deep-sea tug they sat down to have the few words possible before the final act in their laboriously built drama began. Robinson closed the cabin-door carefully after them, and went on to speak at once, while he helped himself to an elaborate potation from a bottle of Hollands gin.
"Fact is," said he, "this chap, our mate, Mike Brennan by name, doesn't go as easy to it as I should like. Not exactly that he scents we out, but he wants to know a long sight too much. He's ashore, and I'm looking for two of our new hands to soak him. If he comes aboard sober, there's wind to blow afore morning, as sure as we're sitting here,"
"What about the others?" asked Messenger.
"There's six of 'em answering to their names, and three new. I booked 'em in the docks yesterday, and they're our sort. Then there's three old hands fit to work with me right through it, and the mate. But it's a swinging job, guvner!"
The Prince lighted a big cigar and lay back on the cushions to think. He could not disguise from himself the fact that he had then embarked upon the greatest venture of his adventurous life, and even at the ultimate moment he could scarce believe that success could attend such a mighty coup. Yet he knew that he had given long nights to the framing of his plan; and if he alone had borne the responsibility, no second thought of its result would have come to him. But the burden was shared by many—it was impossible otherwise that the enterprise could have been set afoot—and the great coup once accomplished, the danger from babblers' tongues was indisputable. He knew well enough that success, full and unchecked, meant years of banishment to all of them; and while each man embarked had a stake big enough to make him hold his tongue, it was more than possible that failure might come—and then!
These reflections passed through his mind quickly as he heard Kess Robinson's tale; but whatever were his own qualms, he did not show them. Rather he maintained a bantering humour as he answered:
"Pooh, man! where's the trouble come in? This isn't the time to wear your heart on your sleeve. You're going to act now; and that reminds me—you've got a Colt on you?"
"Not me," said the skipper; "fire-irons ain't much in my line, and I don't see as we'll be wanting them."
"But this mate—what is to be done with him?"
"What the time and this handspike tell me."
More he did not say, for a seaman entered with the intelligence that the others had come; and the two men went on deck together with expectant haste. The tide was now full and the rain had ceased—a glorious night following upon the tempest. From the docks of Tilbury the masts of many ships were pointed with fire, and the great red globe of the sun sent crimson light upon the swirling waters of the river and the roofs of the unpicturesque town. Full in this red light, upon the edge-of the quay, stood Sydney Capel and his fellow, Arthur Conyers, guardians of a load of large well-bound kegs and sealed cases in which the colossal treasure lay. In ten minutes the bullion had been stowed in the aft cabin ; and when the clerks had shouted: "All right!" to those ashore, the tug passed from the docks and steamed quickly up the river—Kess Robinson upon the bridge; a band named George White at the wheel; the mate, Mike Brennan, fuddled and sleeping in his berth in the fo'castle.
The money had been stowed, as I have written, in the cabin aft; but a few words as to the form of this golden cargo will not come amiss to those who know little of the way in which our great financial houses ship bullion to the Continent. There are many methods. Sometimes the gold takes the shape of ingots, weighing two hundred ounces each; sometimes it is sent in sovereigns, packed in iron-bound cases. A million sovereigns weigh a little more than ten tons. Upon this occasion it had been sent, the larger part in ingots, which were in kegs, the smaller part in sovereigns, which were in the iron-bound chests. Both cheats and kegs were stacked in the one cabin of the tug, and it was upon a chest that Sydney Capel, wearing a light travelling coat and cap, sat at the moment the tug passed Gravesend, and began to enter the broader reaches of the river. His fellow-worker, Arthur Conyers—who invariably accompanied him on these occasions—had managed to accommodate himself upon the edge of the captain's bunk; while Messenger, who was talking with expressive animation, leaned upon the table beneath the lantern. Looking at the group as a mere spectator, you would have been hard put to imagine it as other than a group of contented idlers, anticipating in the laziness of sea life a pleasure trip to Flushing. Nor elsewhere on the tug was there the slightest indication of the holocaust so shortly to be offered. The forward lookout chanted his observations with ample briskness; the bullet-headed skipper paced the bridge with a perpetual motion which warranted vigilance; the funnel emitted a dull haze of smoke which would have been a cloud of blackness but for the good Welsh coal. There was not even an episode until the dark fell, and the Chapman light, shining with a great glow for two minutes to leave a void of darkness for one, gave promise of the more open sea at the river's mouth; and of the beginning of that long night of hazard and of death.
As the Admiral came opposite to Sheerness, Messenger passed up the companion with a quick look at Capel, and joined the skipper on the bridge.
"Well," he said, "do you make out anything of Kenner's ship?"
"I'm not saying I do," muttered the skipper.
the Prince bit his lip.
"Kenner never was quick," said he. "Light a flare."
""'YE'RE BUSY UP THERE, BEDAD'" (p. 55)
He had more to say, but it remained upon his lips, for when he looked to the deck below, he saw the mate, Mike Brennan, standing there, his eyes winking in the powerful rays of the flare, but a strange curiosity holding him stiff as he glanced from the men upon the bridge to the distant signal, and again from the signal to the men upon the bridge.
The mate was as yet half-sober, but a glimmer of crazy intelligence lighted up his brain, and he stammered out with reckless simplicity—
"Ye're busy up there, bedad!"
This was his remark, and he went to his cabin again with a pretence of stupor and of sullenness which for a moment turned the others from all suspicion of him. For their part, they were too much engrossed in observation of Kenner's yacht, which lay a couple of miles or more ahead of them, to give him much of their thought; and elsewhere upon the tug all was silence, broken only when the look-out hailed the wheel or the bells rang in the engine-room below. The moon had now risen, and was lighting gloriously the white face of the coast of Kent and the dismal marshes of Canvey Island. There was not a cloud in the great silver arc of the heavens; the surface of the river itself was cut by the shadows into rippling, scintillating lakes of light, which showed the black hulls of innumerable barges and the silhouetted shapes of great steamers. And away out towards the coast of France and Belgium the long line of lanterns, revolving, flashing, stationary, marked the path of the deeper Channel, the great water-way to the mighty city which few of those upon the tug were to see again.
When they had passed the Nore, leaving the light a cable's length on the starboard bow, it became evident that Kenner was acting with a good deal of discretion. he has run his yacht well past the lightship to wait for the tug, and then had seemed to steer for the North Foreland. This was a mere subterfuge, a precaution which assumed the very unlikely possibility that other ships would observe him and sin some measure connect him with the tug. The intention of the menœuvre was not lost either upon Messenger or upon Kess Robinson; and they had scarcely come at the Mouse before the skipper of the tug expressed his satisfaction.
"He's layin' as if for Margate," said he; "and I don't know that he could better it. He'll pick up we in the open fast enough, and the wind's going to hold nor'-west and quiet, or I ain't fit for this job."
"He's certainly standing rather far down Channel," replied Messenger, as he leaned upon the rail and watched the disappearing hull of the American yacht; "but he's got the legs of us at any time, and it's wiser as it is. It wouldn't do to come near him or speak him till we're past Spurn Heas, any way; and he's not likely to lose us in a mist this watch, if I'm any judge of weather."
He spoke with some slight quaver of anxiety in his voice, for he was thinking of that curious play of chance which had so ordained it that the Gargantuan emprise of his life was not to be his own work, but that he must rely in some part upon others. Had it been possible that he could have gathered into his own hands the many reins which controlled so ill-assorted a team of rogues and vagabonds no quake of unpleasant apprehension would have moved him. But he was well aware that the ultimate success of the hazard hung upon the fidelity, the common sense, and the courage of many. And who could answer either for the men in the fo'castle of the tug or for the cutthroats that Kenner had shipped under his flag?
As he minded these things, watching the play of light from the North Foreland, and the twinkling lamps in the distant hamlets of Kent, the tug, under the skipper's direction, began slowly to alter her course. She had been laying with her head almost full east; but now she gradually came round, standing for a couple of hours well beyond the remoter shallows of the Maplin Sands, and soon was following a track which brought her far out in the North Sea. The movement was not lost upon the crew, looking to make straight for Flushing, and three of them came from the fo'castle to wait and watch with some expectancy. Even the engineer looked up from his hatchway as though something would mark the departure at the outset, and the whole company maintained a curious silence, lingering for an opening of the drama in which they played such very minor rôles.
It was no matter for surprise that the first words of the play were spoken ultimately by one who had been forgotten altogether by this company in the larger interest which the watching of the yacht promoted. Mike Brennan had gone down to his cabin again after the moment of the flare; but now, of a sudden, when all aboard were gazing over the starboard bow at the evolutions of the Semiramis, the mate appeared at the foot of the bridge, armed with a great bludgeon of iron; and behind him there stood Arthur Conyers, the elderly clerk, who had drawn his revolver and wore the aspect of a man puckered up for great emergencies. And it was the voice of the mate, then raised in a clear and unmistakably meaning tone, which awakened the others to the situation.
"Skipper," said the man, with one foot upon the ladder and a hand upon the rail, "I've a question to ask av ye concerning the course. Will ye hear it now, or will I be waiting?"
At the first sound of the mate's voice the skipper glanced down to the scene below. Temper and fear alike held him as the moment of the spectacle dawned upon him. Yet he spoke with some command, even before Messenger—who had reckoned up the danger at a look—could give counsel or take action.
"Mike Brennan," said he, "it's not the first time ye're concerning yourself with my affairs. Put yer dirty body in bed before I kick it there!"
The contempt of this was keen enough, but far from judicious, for it sent hot blood coursing through the Irishman's veins, and the skipper's lips were scarce shut before the mate had sprung up the ladder, and with one blow from the bar had sent him hurtling over the paddle-box into the sea, where he sank as a bag of rock, and left almost unruffled the long wave that engulfed him.
From that moment—as the scant record bears witness—the deck of the tug became a shambles. The greed of blood consumed the Irishman until he raved uncontrollably, and, making a mighty cut at Messenger, he missed his aim, and fell headlong to the deck below, where now the crack of Conyers' revolver was heard. The man, with his eyes open to the trap he had fallen into, had lost all self-restraint, and fired haphazard, the bullets singing above the heads of the tug's crew, who lay huddled together by the fore hatch, or skimming the deck, or burying themselves in the bulwarks, or ringing upon the cowls. And through it all he did not cease to cry out with all his voice, so that the tug rang with his shouts, and, believing that Capel was with him in the work, he appealed to him, and to Messenger upon the bridge.
"Capel," he cried, "for God's sake, shoot, man! There's murder done here—murder, I tell you! They're killing the mate! Do you hear me? We're in a trap, I tell you! in a trap, by Heaven!"
But Capel made no answer—he was cowering and sobbing aft, and when bis honest fellow had cried himself hoarse and emptied the chambers of his revolver, a new sound of firing burst up by the forecastle, where two of the crew were using their pistols at the mate, but to small purpose. Brennan, staggering with the dizziness of his fall, had got what shelter he could under the shadow of the paddle-box; but presently he ran with his bar at the three forward, and the skull of one cracked like a globe, while the other two fell howling down the hatchway. In that moment this man and Conyers were masters of the deck, and only Messenger, who had watched the whole scene from the bridge, was powerful to raise a hand.
Unto this point there had been little danger from Conyers, who, in his wild blundering and haphazard suspicion, had left Messenger alone, scarce understanding whether he were friend or foe. But when he had emptied his revolver and stood fumbling to refill the chambers in the black patch of shade which the wheel cast. Messenger sprang down lightly from the bridge and appeared before him as a swift apparition from the dark.
"Come," said he in that peculiarly stern voice he could command on occasion, "I think you've done enough for one night. Put down that pistol!"
Conyers obeyed him, as the weak ever obey the strong, even in the moment of danger.
"Now," continued the other in the same tone, "march aft, and don't come up again until I call you unless you want a body full of holes!"
The man, weary of the butchery, and suffering the terrors of reaction, went to the companion without a word and descended it, when the other locked the cabin-door upon him and turned round to see Capel's pallid face and trembling form.
"Capel," said he, "I'm thinking you're a big man in a difficulty. How came it that this cub got loose?"
"It was the mate," whimpered the other, "the mate, upon my word; he came down to the cabin when you had gone and swore he'd shoot me if I moved. Then he told Conyers—you know what—and they went forward together."
"Just as I thought. Well, some one's got to make it level with that mate, and there's no time to be drivelled away either; I'm going forward, and you're coming with me."
Capel had little relish for the job, but he was nigh as much afraid to stay as to advance, and he hid himself in Messenger's shadow and skulked forward with the new master of the ship. The mate, now scared and giddy, had thrown down his bar and was sitting upon a ballast chest; but he looked up at the soft sound of the footsteps, and sprang to his feet with a ferocious cry.
"Houly saints!" said he, grasping his weapon, "it's yerself, ye mouldy scounthrel, that I've been waitin' to be at—may the Lord giye me strength!"
He stood now full upright, the fine picture of a man in the moonlight; and at the sound of his voice the crew in the fo'castle showed for a moment at the hatch again. Had Messenger been alone with him he would have ended the business then and there with his revolver, but he feared the crew, to whom the mate was even then something of a hero; and he knew that the sound of repeated firing might bring ships upon the tug. In this, however, was his mistake; and even as he stood, with the irresolution of an instant, the Irishman whirled the great bar round and made a mighty stroke at his head. But the blow had been dealt with too great a vigour; the smooth iron slipped from the man's grasp; the bar hurtled through the air with terrible force. It passed above the shoulder of Messenger, who had dropped upon one knee, and, missing him, struck Sydney Capel so full across the face that the bones of his forehead cracked at the blow, and he fell, with the life out of him, prone upon the deck. For a moment the horrid tragedy held the others speechless; the mate shivered as though intense cold had gripped him; the crew crouched backward as from a madman. Messenger alone kept his wits, and, before the now unarmed Irishman had got his courage again, he hit him with his fist and felled him, striking him again and again with heavy blows until the man had no more sense in him than a log of wood. Then he called for a length of rope, and, binding him hand and foot, left him as he lay and went back to the bridge.
The moment was one of the most critical in this strange man's history. The most trivial curiosity of a drunken sailor had in one half-hour threatened the giant superstructure of design he had created with so much labour. Here he was almost full in the track of ships plying to the Scheldt and to Holland, by no means ready for the transfer of the bullion to the yacht, lacking the animal cleverness of the dead Kess Robinson, with the deck of the tug bloodstained, and his partner in the felony no longer living either to participate in success or to share the shames of failure. Indeed, his predicament was one of vast dangers, for the crew of the Admiral had become paralyzed with the precipitancy of the fight, and crouched in their hammocks daft with terror; the engineer went to his work mechanically; the man White, who had come back to the wheel, muttered and crooned like a hag at a distaff. Not one of them had the veriest suggestion of action or any thing but fearsome languor in him; not one but shuddered every time he turned his eyes toward the spot where the dead man lay. Messenger, even with his wire-knit nerves, suffered for some time the contagion of the terror. He found himself pacing the bridge with nervous strides, or pausing in keen thought, or gazing out seaward, where the sweep of the horizon gave him sparse encouragement. Kenner's yacht still lay a couple of miles away from them; but there was a fleet of North Sea smacks upon the port quarter, and a couple of steamers stood out clear some three miles away in their course. Under other circumstances that was not the time to have acted. The danger of remark and observation was too palpable. The sinking of the tug might even be reported in London before the morning watch. Yet the man had a haunting wish to quit the scene of the deadly brawl at the first moment possible. He gained a new terror from the want of talk, and at last he called the engineer, a Scotchman, by name Alec Johnson, and set upon his questioning.
"Well," said he, "this is pretty work for a beginning."
"Ay, it's a sorra spectacle, man, and yer no cutting a fine appearance, may I tell ye," replied Johnson, as he stood at the foot of the ladder and hesitated to mount it.
"I don't want your opinions," said Messenger testily, "but your notions, if you've got any. Do you think it's time to be moving from this ship?"
The engineer shrugged his shoulders, suggesting his indifference.
"Well," said he, "you're dawdlin' in queersome company. I've no stomach myself to jawk wi' the dead, but the sea's muckle full of ships for what ye were thinking of."
"That's true. You've some glimmer of intelligence, any way," answered Messenger, as he resumed his sentry-like perambulation, pausing only at the second turn to continue his argument.
"Is all right below when the time comes?" he asked with some anxiety. "We've got to see this hulk out of sight five minutes after we leave her, any way."
"Man, ye can rest on that!" said the Scotchman; "she'll just flichter and go down like a bag wi' a stone in her; and look ye: there'll be mist afore the morn, and it may give ye shelter."
"So there will," cried the other, as he turned away, leaving the engineer to go below. And for a couple of hours the tug steamed onward, the thud of her paddles the only sound, her decks untenanted save for the solemn, wakeful man upon the bridge, and the moody, inert, sullen fellow who took the wheel. Day had now broken, with cold grey light and piercing white mist, which settled humidly upon ship and watchers, and hid the near sea so that neither the yacht of the American nor such packets or smacks as lay by them could be seen. But anon a great wave of dull red light split the vapour through, floating it on wings of radiant colour, or dissolving it so that at last the waste of green water, all capped with playing flecks of foam, lay clear to the view, and the invigorating freshness of morning seemed to call nature anew to the labours of the day. That hour, so superb in its breath of strength, so life-giving to him who rises from long sleep, was an hour of new fear to those that remained in the shambles of the tug. As the sun rose it seemed to lighten the face of the dead man, who lay as he had fallen, with a hideous, ghastly glare upon him, so that the crew, coming with a new courage a little way aft, shrunk back and implored to be set free, or cried out that they would all be taken, yet feared to touch the dread thing and send it to the sea, which engulfs the dead in so sure a resting-place. Messenger himself understood with his usual perception that the tension could not be long endured, and at the change of the watch (there being but one steamer other than the yacht in their wake, and she many miles on their port bow) he suddenly gave the order to go about, and stood boldly for the ''Semiramis',' though all the risk of the action was apparent to him.
The men, raving with delight at the thought of release from the unendurable prison, now came scampering up their ladder, though they did not venture abaft the foredeck; and in a moment all was activity. There were but five of the crew remaining, and of these one was almost a boy, who was called "Billy," and reckoned half dolt, half idiot. As for the mate, who had lain near the fore hatch apparently insensible, and bound since the fray, he was forgotten by all in the thirst for change at whatever risk or price. The new course was, it may be imagined, at once observed by those on the Semiramis who fell to signalling; and in a run of ten minutes the tug had come alongside the big yacht, and, being grappled, twenty hands hoisted the bullion to the crane, and guided it over the aft hatchway. It was no time for greeting, no time for any thing but a babel of voices, a quick pumping of donkey-engines, a bustle, a confusion, and a riot when the men from the tug tumbled pell-mell upon the yacht, and the dead were forgotten, and the bound man below had no mercy from the hungry wolves who clustered about the gold.
The exciting work occupied some twenty minutes in performance, and having been accomplished, Roger Burke, upon the bridge of the Semiramis roared the order: "Let her go!" The tug swung away from the hull of the greater vessel almost with his words, and a few powerful strokes from the twin screws separated the doomed ship and the other by several cables' lengths. At the distance they waited for the end, but before the end could be there was an apparition upon the bridge of the Admiral which sent pallor to the faces of the exultant crew, and drew from the men cries of rage and of apprehension. For suddenly, as the tug drifted, the man who had been bound and forgotten, Mike Brennan, the mate, appeared by the wheel, and with frenzied imprecations called threats from Heaven upon the watchers and their ship. During one moment he stood, and then there came a great dull roar as of a mighty explosion in the engine-room below him; and the little steamer, heeling to the shock, cocked her stern above the playing waves, and in the next instant had plunged below them.
With the gurgle of the hull the mate disappeared; but as he went the voice of Billy, the daft boy, was heard in triumphant exclamation—
"I cut him free, I did it; who'll hear Billy, oh, dam clever, dam clever!"
The tug sank with his words, and while many of the crew called upon the skipper to search the waters for the spectre of the bridge, others observed that the strange steamer, which had been an hour ago but a speck on the horizon, loomed large on their starboard quarter, and Burke would wait for no man.
"Mate or no mate," said he, "I'm getting, and I guess ez there'll be a tight run as it is. If that ship's took the bearings of this business, there'll be half the cruisers floating on our track afore night, and that ain't my particular fancy, not much."
And at his command the Semiramis bounded forward to her doom.