“About midnight, perhaps, if this wind holds.”
“Then look out for fun,” exclaimed Waters, striking his open palm with his clenched hand. “We’ve all got two revolvers apiece; we’ve got all the muskets belonging to the schooner piled up in the cabin, where we can get our hands upon them at a moment’s notice; and,” he added, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the twenty-four pounder, “Brown says you’re the best fellow to work these guns that he ever saw.”
“I have had some experience with them,” said Frank.
“We’ll give the man-hunters a lively tussle,” added the convict.
“What will be the use of that?” asked Frank. “If you beat off her boats when she sends them out to board us, she’ll open on us with her big guns and sink us.”
“No matter. We’d sooner she’d do that than take us back. But ’spose now, captain, that you knew that steamer was a war vessel, and that you was a smuggler or something, who had reasons for keeping out of her way, what would you do?”
“I should wait until it was pitch dark, and then I’d put out all lights, come about, and sail right back to meet her,” said Frank, who had already made up his mind that it would be better to put this plan into operation than to risk a battle with the steamer if she should prove to be a man-of-war. He knew that the convicts would fight desperately before they would permit themselves to be taken back. Of course they would be beaten and overpowered, as they deserved to be, but what would become of himself and Archie in the meantime? How would the beautiful little Stranger look after a broadside from the man-of-war? “I should, of course, pass her at such a distance that she wouldn’t discover me,” added Frank, “and at daylight we would be out of sight of each other.”
“That’s a regular Yankee trick,” exclaimed Waters. “Don’t you think you had better try it?”
The young captain thought he had, and he did. The ruse was entirely successful. They passed the steamer a little after eleven o’clock. They could see the lights at her catheads, and hear the pounding of her paddle-wheels, but their own vessel was invisible in the darkness. There were no lamps to betray her to the watchful eyes of the steamer’s lookout, for those in the cabin were shut out from view by a tarpaulin which was thrown over the skylights, and the one in the binnacle threw out only sufficient light to show the face of the compass. Waters questioned the sailors, and they told him that the vessel was undoubtedly a man-of-war. She showed too few lights for a passenger steamer. Waters breathed easier when she was out of sight.
“Captain,” he exclaimed, taking Frank’s hand in his own, and giving it a hearty gripe and shake, “if I had a thousand pounds of my own I’d as soon give it to you as not. It takes Yankees to do things, after all.”