But fortune had not finished with Code. Half an hour later there came a great sound of tearing like the volley of small arms, and the Lass’s balloon jib ripped loose and soared to heaven like some gigantic wounded bird.
“Let it go, curse it,” growled Code. “Anyway, I didn’t take it down.”
The loss of her big jib was the only thing that saved the Lass from being hove down completely, for two hours later the gale had reached its height, and she was laboring like a drunken man under her staysail, topsail, and four lowers.
Twenty miles from home and the two schooners were abreast, tacking together on the long leeward reaches and the short windward ones, as they made across the Bay of Fundy.
“Look at her comin’ like a racehorse!” cried Ellinwood again, and this time Code recognized the vessel that was pursuing them. It was the mystery schooner, and in all his life at sea Code had never seen a ship fly as that one was flying then.
“Wonder what she’s up to now?” he asked vaguely. But he gave no further thought to the matter, for the Nettie B. claimed all his attention. Suddenly from between the masts of the Burns schooner a great flutter of white appeared as though some one had hung a huge sheet from her stay.
“Ha, I told you he was yellow!” shouted Code in glee. “Somebody’s cut away one edge of the stays’l. Now we’ve got ’em!”
And they had; for within a quarter of an hour they left the Nettie B. astern, finally defeated, Nat Burns’s last act of treachery gone for nothing.
But the mystery schooner would not be denied. Though the Lass made her seventeen knots, the wonderful Mallaby schooner did her twenty, with everything spread in that gale; and when the white lighthouse of Swallowtail Point was in plain sight through the murk, she swept by like a magnificent racer and beat the Charming Lass to moorings by twenty minutes.