Unhappy man, he was soon to find out.
At eight o’clock next morning, in perfect weather, Ginnell, standing by the steersman and casting his eyes around, saw across the heaving blueness of the sea a smudge of smoke on the western horizon. A few minutes later, as the smoke cleared, he made out the form of the vessel that had been firing up.
Captain Keene had left an old pair of binoculars among the other truck in his cabin. Ginnell went down and fetched them on deck, then he looked.
The stranger was a torpedo boat; she was making due south, and, like all torpedo boats, she seemed in a hurry.
Then, all at once, and even as he looked, her form began to alter, she shortened mysteriously, and her two funnels became gradually one.
She had altered her course; she had evidently sighted, and was making direct for, the Tamalpais. Not exactly direct, perhaps, but directly enough to make Ginnell’s lips dry as sandstone.
“Bad cess to her,” said Ginnell to himself; “there’s no use in doin’ anythin’ but pretendin’ to be deaf and dumb. And, sure, aren’t I an honest trader, with all me credentials, Capt’in Keene, of Frisco, blown out of me course, me mate washed overboard? Let her come.”
She came without any letting. Shearing along through the water, across which the hubbub of her engines could be distinctly heard, and within signalling distance, now, she let fly a string of bunting to the breeze, an order to heave to, which the Tamalpais, that honest trader, disregarded.
Then came a puff of white smoke, the boom of a gun, and a practice shell that raised a plume of spray a cable length in front of the schooner, and went off, making ducks and drakes for miles across the blue sea.