Meanwhile the cloud bank continued steadily to overspread the heavens, and at length obscured the moon, shutting off so much of her light that it immediately became difficult in the extreme to discern the chase any longer, even with the assistance of the telescope; and I was not in the least surprised when, a minute or two later, the look-out aloft hailed to say that he had lost sight of her. But I had not; I could still see her through the glass, although with momentarily increasing difficulty as the pall of cloud crept onward across the sky, ever cutting off more and still more of the moon’s light; and at length the moment arrived when I also was compelled to admit to myself that I could no longer see her. I removed the telescope from my eye for a minute or two to give my strained and smarting eyeballs a rest, and closed my eyelids in order to completely exclude from them even such dim and uncertain light as still remained; then, knowing exactly where to look for the stranger, I once more pointed the instrument in that direction, searching the horizon closely and carefully for the smallest blur that might betray her. But the effort was useless; she had vanished.
Chapter Twelve.
An exciting chase.
Now arose the question: What has become of the chase; had we simply lost sight of her in the growing obscurity, and was she still steering the same course as when last seen, or had her captain availed himself of that obscurity to put in practice some trick in order to give us the slip?
I brought the telescope to bear upon the Doña Inez, in the hope of gathering from her actions some clue as to whether or not she still held the chase in view; she was carrying on, holding to her original course, and the inference to be drawn from this was that those aboard could still see the stranger. But, even as I looked, a string of lanterns soared up to her peak, from which position they were hidden from the chase by the intervention of the brig’s head-sails, and when the signal was at length complete I found, as I had quite expected, that it was a question as to whether we still held the stranger in view. This signal I answered in the negative, by means of a whip from the lee lower yard-arm, keeping the lanterns quite low, in the hope that they would thus escape the observation of the chase, and I then got a second signal from the commodore, which read:
“Steer as at present for one hour, then, failing further orders, haul wind to north-east.”
This signal I acknowledged in like manner as the first, and, while doing so, saw that the brig had taken in her studding-sails and hauled her wind. I noted the time, and found it to be close upon seven o’clock. Half an hour later, while Keene and I were below at dinner, the faint boom of a distant gun came floating down the open skylight to our ears, and Simpson, who had charge of the deck, poked his head down through the opening to make the report:
“Commodore signalling again, sir!”