"Oh yes," continued Browne. "You can keep your eye on the warship, and warn us when she gets too close to be pleasant. By the way, I must confess I should like to know where Jimmy Foote is. It's not like him to be out of the way, when there's trouble in the wind."
Without waiting for a reply, he ran down the companion-ladder and made his way along the saloon in the direction of Katherine's cabin. On reaching it he rapped upon the panel of the door, and bade Katherine dress as quickly as possible, and come to him in the saloon. The girl must have gathered from his voice that something very serious had occurred, for it was not long before she made her appearance with a scared look upon her face.
"What has happened?" she asked. "I can see something is the matter. Please tell me everything."
"Something very unpleasant," Browne replied. "In the first place, some evilly-disposed person has tampered with the engines so that we cannot go ahead for the present; but, worse than that, a man-o'-war—presumably a Russian—has come up over the horizon, and is steaming towards us."
"A Russian man-o'-war?" she exclaimed, with a look of terror in her eyes. "Do you mean that she has come after us?"
"I cannot speak positively, of course," said Browne, "but since she is here, it looks very much like it."
"Oh, Jack, Jack," she cried excitedly, "what did I tell you at the beginning? This is all my fault. I told you I should bring trouble and disgrace upon you. Now my words have come true."
"You have done nothing of the kind," Browne answered. "There is treachery aboard, otherwise this would never have happened."
Afterwards, when he came to think it all over, it struck Browne as a remarkable fact that on this occasion her first thought was not for her father, as was her usual custom, but for himself. What did this mean? Had she been disappointed in her parent, as he had half-expected she would be? Her quick womanly intuition must have told her what was passing in his mind, for her face suddenly flushed scarlet, and, clenching her hands together, she said slowly and deliberately, as if the question were being wrung from her, and she were repeating something she had no desire to say:—
"But if it is a Russian man-o'-war, what will become of my poor father?"