“Will you have the pivot-gun up too?”
“Yes, I think so; if we have to fight, we may as well fight as hard as we can. When we get it mounted we can put a few barrels along each side of it, cover the whole over with a sailcloth, and stow one of the gigs at the top of all. No one would have a suspicion that there was a gun there then, and if we wanted to use it we could clear it in a minute.”
“The Turkish custom-house officers will stare in the morning when they see the brig gone,” Miller said, “and will wonder what has become of her.”
“If they think of her at all, Miller, they will think she has got up sail at daylight and gone up the Bosphorus on her way to Varna or one of the Black Sea ports.”
“It would require a good deal more breeze than there is now.”
“Yes, I did not think of that. Well, then, perhaps they will suppose that we made a try to go up to the anchorage as soon as the day began to break, but simply drifted back. You see another half a mile astern would take us round that point there and out of sight of them. However, we don’t care much what they think. They are not likely to be interested enough in the matter to bother themselves about it one way or the other, and certainly not likely to do the only thing that would be of any consequence to us, I mean send down a messenger to Gallipoli telling them to overhaul us if we came down the straits. Now, then, the watch on deck; the others turn in. I am sure, Mr. Beveridge, you will be all the better for a quiet night’s rest. You have certainly not slept much for the last month, and you have been getting thinner and thinner daily, while you have also long arrears in the way of food to make up. It has been quite pitiful to see the faces of the Greeks as you sent away plate after plate untouched.”
“I shall soon be myself again, Martyn, and even one good night’s rest will, I am sure, do wonders for me.”
“We have been getting quite uneasy about your father,” Miller said as he and Horace went up on deck for the middle watch.
“Yes, he looks sadly broken down, Miller. Directly he had taken off that beard I was quite shocked; he looks years older.”
“We have been really anxious about him. He would turn up three or four times during the night watches and walk the deck for an hour or two talking to one or other of us as if he could not stop alone in his cabin. Neither Martyn nor I ever had the slightest idea of finding you were alive when we got here, and still less of getting you out. But when Tarleton proposed disguising the schooner and coming up, he caught at the idea so eagerly that we fell in with it at once. It seemed to us both rather a mad sort of business, but we should not have cared what it was so that it would but rouse him up; for from the time when we first got word that you had been taken to the Turks, till Tarleton made that proposal at Tenedos, he had scarcely spoken a word. He cheered up for an hour or two when Marco brought news that at any rate you had not been killed at Ali Pasha’s camp, but had been sent on to Constantinople; but that lasted for a very short time, for he soon saw that so far from improving your chances, it had lessened them. Ali might have taken a handsome sum for your ransom, or your guards might have been bribed; anyhow, there would have been a much better chance of getting you away from his camp than from a prison in Constantinople.