"I think it all right; he not been near Wellington," she pronounced at last. "Alliti! How her head?"
"Sou'-west by south," answered the mate from the wheel.
"Keep her so."
"Ay, ay, sir!" laughed the mate.
* * * * *
Every one in the South Pacific knew that the Sybil was a marvel of speed, and that she had not been originally built for trading, though nobody could tell exactly how Saxon had acquired such a clipper. It was a popular theory that she was a millionaire's yacht from San Francisco, which he had stolen and subsequently disguised. He was known, however, to have possessed her for more than twenty years, and was now as completely identified with her as her own mainmast; so that any doubts as to the honesty of the way by which he might originally have obtained her were now of a purely academic nature.
Famous as she was for speed, the record of her passage from the Delgadas to Wellington fairly astonished the Islands, when it came to be told. They had a fair wind almost all the way, with two or three lively nights when the little vessel, hard driven under the utmost pressure of the canvas, piled up the knots like a liner. Saxon continued delirious, but was fortunately quiet. Harris, and Gray the boatswain, though unenlightened as to the cause of the Sybil's sudden southward flight, fully understood that the possession of the pearl lagoon hung in the balance, and worked like half-a-dozen to supplement the efforts of the scanty Kanaka crew.
Vaiti interfered little with the working of the ship, but she kept a look-out that hardly left her time for sleep or food; although the Sybil, like most Pacific ships, was allowed, under ordinary circumstances, to chance it, day and night. Hour after hour she sat cross-legged on deck, watching the unbroken rim of the black horizon, or paced up and down the poop, silent and grave, in her lace and muslin fripperies, as a naval officer on the bridge. What she was looking for no one knew, but during that wild ten days of foam and smother, cracking sails and straining sheets, her silent watchfulness infected the men themselves, and eyes were constantly turned to scan the empty, seething plain over which they flew.
It was drawing on towards dusk of the tenth day, and the sky was beginning to light fires of angry copper-purple, high in the storm-driven west, when Vaiti, of a sudden, stopped dead in her endless walk, and looked with lips apart and eyes narrowed deep beneath her brows over the weather rail. All this time they had not sighted a single sail or a solitary funnel. They had been well off the track of New Zealand bound ships, and the Pacific waters are wide. But now they were drawing near to Wellington, and there was nothing to be astonished at in the sight of another sail creeping up over the horizon, except, indeed, the fact that it was momentarily growing larger and gaining on the Sybil. There was scarce another schooner afloat from New Guinea to the Paumotus that could have done as much.
The mate came up behind Vaiti, and handed her a glass. She looked through it, lowered it, raised it, and looked again with a steady gaze, and suddenly flung it out of her hand across the deck.