"She'll be the fattest prize we have ever boarded," rejoined Murray. "You may tell all hands as much."
There was no formal mustering of the James' crew; but Martin evidently had his own means of circulating information, for the polyglot seamen had shaken off their lethargy and sullen quiet within a glass of the sloop's departure. All around the decks men were oiling pistols, sharpening cutlasses and whispering in secret. Coupeau was busier than ever about the battery, testing breech-ropes, pinning tighter carriage-wheels, filing glassy-smooth a pile of shot for the chase-guns that might be called upon to lop a vital spar at extreme range.
But nothing happened that day or the next. And so three more days passed with increasing tension. The lookouts in the crosstrees were relieved every two hours, that the men's vision might be fresh and unstrained. The sight of a sail anywhere on the horizon sent the crew scampering to the guns and swung the ship's bows in that quarter; and four times in those five days the James boomed down upon Spanish fishermen, a Martinico brig, a Yankee schooner and a Plymouth snow, tacking away again the moment she identified each one as impossible to be her prey.
The sixth day was like its predecessors, blazing hot, bubbling the pitch out of the deck-seams, a gentle sou'east breeze barely sufficient to keep the sails drawing. The swell, which had bothered us for several weeks, had almost disappeared, and the Caribbean might have been a land-locked lake. Daylight found us farther to the south than we usually plied, since Murray feared the Spaniard might have missed his reckoning and shifted the designed course he was to follow.
For the first time in days we could descry the shadowy hills of Porto Rico as we wore around and beat north again. As the sun rose higher a haze danced along the horizon's rim. Porto Rico was swallowed up; Hispaniola's soaring peaks were buried before we had come within normal view of them.
Noon observation saw us returned to our customary station, and to guard against the possibility that the Santissima Trinidad had passed us in the heat-haze whilst we were beating up from the south my great-uncle ran down the wind into the mouth of the passage for several glasses. We encountered a fishing-periagua then, and the Indians of its crew shouted back to Murray's question that no great ship had entered the passage that day. So back again we beat to windward the whole weary afternoon.
Night brought rest to nobody. Even my great-uncle paced the poop by the hour, snatching an occasional nap upon a pallet which Ben Gunn laid for him where it would catch the breeze. Peter and I dozed on the deck-planks with the crew.
In the shadowy hour that precedes the dawn the hail came from the mast-head——
"Lights ho!"
Murray was on his feet as quickly as any of us.