At that Gideon North sternly said, "If she's a government vessel, gentlemen, I can assure you that we will not run from her. We have committed no crime; we carry no contraband. It is not government vessels I fear."
"There's reason in that, too!" Gleazen muttered. "Yes, I'd as soon swing, as go over the side with my throat slit." Then, caustically, he added, "No! Oh, no! We've no contraband, you say. So we haven't. But we have enough water-casks for three hundred men, and lumber for extra decks, and shackles and nigger food."
Gideon North flamed red and started to respond angrily; but Matterson, with a sly smile, turned the argument off by saying lightly, "If she's the Shark she's sailing under false colors. See! She's broken out the flag of Spain."
"Humph," Captain North grunted, "she's a trader at best—"
"In either case, Captain North, she is outsailing us, for all our Baltimore bow and grand spread of canvas," Matterson interposed. "But never fear, Captain North, Gleazen and I have a way with us. We have no wish to meet with any ships of war, but from mere pirates and slavers we are not, I beg to assure you, in any great danger."
"Humph! The devil looks well after his own."
"The devil," Matterson retorted with an ironical smile, "is not so bad a master as some men would make him out to be."
Leaning on the rail, we silently watched the swift, strange schooner. Above the horizon, so perfectly did the bright canvas with the sun upon it blend into the background of sky, we could see only the black shadows that appeared on the sails just abaft the masts and stays; but her hull made a clean, bright line against the vivid blue of the sea, and against that same blue the foot of her mainsail stood out as sharp and white as if cut from bone. She continued to gain on us surely all that afternoon, but our apprehensions, which grew keener as she drew nearer, were allayed when she stood out to sea and gave us as wide a berth as we desired. She was a rarely beautiful sight, when, in the early evening, still far out at sea, she passed us; and remembering the Merry Jack and Eleanor in Havana harbor, I could not bear to think that so graceful a craft might carry sordid sights and smells.
After a time, as the light changed, her sails turned to a slate-gray touched with dull blue, and with a great blotch of purple shadow down the middle, where mainsail merged into staysail and foresail, and foresail into jib. So grim, now, did she appear in the gathering darkness, that I could have believed almost anything of her. And now she was gone! Lost to sight! Vanished into the distant, almost uncharted waters of the great gulf! Only the memory of her marvelous swiftness and of the changing light on her sails was left to us—that and the memory of one more angry encounter with Gleazen and Matterson.
That night, while we lay in those long slow seas which roll in upon the African coast, the two spent hours by the taffrail in low-voiced conversation, and Gideon North sat below over his charts and papers, and Arnold and I strolled about the deck, arm in arm, talking of one project and another. But my uncle, Seth Upham, the man who owned the Adventure, paced the deck alone in the moonlight, now with his head bent as if under the weight of a heavy burden, now with his head erect and with an air of what seemed at some moments wild defiance. An odor of tobacco drifted back to us on the wind from where the carpenter and the sailmaker were smoking together, and we heard the voices of men in the forecastle.