“It can hardly be the ‘Monongahela,’” said Ben, “though p’raps she took more of a breeze to wind’ard, off the island.”
Still the schooner glided on noiselessly over the sea, until, a minute later, Harry Greenfield sang out,
“Port, sir! or we’ll be plump into a vessel here ahead.”
The helm was put down, and the “Rosalie” sheered off to starboard within a biscuit-toss of a large brig.
“By my grandmother’s wig!” said Ben, “that’s the old ‘Martha Blunt!’”
“Henri,” said Paul Darcantel, in French, in his deep voice, “the last request I shall ever make is to keep on. There is not a moment to lose!”
“Give way, men!” shouted the officer, in a decided tone, as the words came with a stifled gasp from his heaving breast, while the sigh that followed was drowned in the splash of the sweeps in the water as they again chafed in their gromets, and the foam flashed away from the blades astern.
But there was another splash. A white object sprang with a bound over the brig’s quarter, dipping below the surface of the calm sea, and when it came up, two great flippers, with a large black head between them, struck out like the paws of an alligator, breasting the water with a speed that soon brought him within a few fathoms of the schooner’s low counter. Then, seizing hold of the slack of the main sheet, which was thrown to him, he came up, hand over hand, as if he could tear the stern frame out of the schooner. A vigorous grasp caught him by one paw, and, with the other laid on the taffrail, he leaped on deck as if his feet had pressed a springboard instead of the yielding water.
Again, as in the olden time, he held his little Henri aloft in his giant arms; but this time it was Banou who was dripping from a souse, and not his little master.
“Give way, my souls! Another thousand dollars if we get up to the Key before dark!” said the deep, low tones of the tall doctor.