“Sail he! A large schooner just comin’ out o’ the river, sir.”
“Ay, ay,” answered the first lieutenant, whose watch it happened to be. “Just keep your eye on her, my lad, and let me know how she steers when she is clear of the bar.”
We were heading to the southward at the time, and were about three miles south of the river entrance, and some sixteen miles off the land; by pretending therefore not to see her for the next quarter of an hour or so, and keeping the Psyche still heading to the southward, we should afford the stranger an excellent opportunity to secure a sufficient offing to make good her escape. Then we would heave about, make sail in chase, drive her off the coast, and work in as close to the river’s mouth as we dared venture, when the ship was to be brought to an anchor, and the boats manned, armed, and dispatched into the river.
Meanwhile, as previously arranged, Captain Harrison was aroused, and informed of the fact that the decoy schooner, or what was assumed to be such, had made her appearance and was now fairly at sea, steering a little to the northward of west under a heavy press of sail; and close upon the heels of the returning messenger the worthy skipper himself appeared. He sprang upon a gun-carriage and peered intently shoreward under the shade of his hand; but only the upper canvas of the stranger was visible from our deck; and he impatiently hailed the look-out aloft to give him a detailed description of the vessel. The fellow in the cross-trees happened, however, to be a poor sort of unintelligent fellow, and could say very little about the craft beyond stating the fact that she was a schooner, painted black; that she sat deep in the water, showed an immense spread of canvas, and appeared to be very fast.
“I have no sort of doubt that yonder schooner is the craft whose duty it is to draw us off the coast and leave the way clear for the other fellows to get out to sea,” he said. “But I should like to have a somewhat better description of her than that ‘sodger’ up aloft there seems able to give.”
He glanced round the deck and his eye fell upon me.
“Ah, Mr Fortescue,” he exclaimed, “you will doubtless be able to do what I want. Just slip down into my cabin; you will find my glass hanging above the head of my bunk. Throw the strap of it over your shoulder, and shin up alongside that fellow in the cross-trees; take a good look at the stranger; and report to me any peculiarities that you may detect in her, will ye.”
“Ay, ay, sir,” I replied, touching my hat; and five minutes later I was sitting in the main-topmast cross-trees, with the long barrel of the telescope steadied against the topmast-head, and my eye glued to the eye-piece. From this elevation I commanded a complete, if distant, view of the low land about the river entrance, with its fringe of mangrove trees running away inland, the sand hummocks, sparsely clothed with coarse, reedy grass and trailing plants, and the endless line of the surf-beaten African beach. Also through the skipper’s powerful lenses I obtained a most excellent view of the strange schooner, from her trucks to her water-line, including such details as I could have discerned with the naked eye at a distance of about half a mile. I saw, for example, that, as the look-out had already reported, she was a large schooner—I estimated her to be one hundred and eighty tons burthen at the least; I verified the statement that her hull was painted all black from the rail to the top of her copper; that she showed an enormous spread of canvas; and that she sat very low in the water. But I noticed a few other peculiarities as well; I saw that her bowsprit was painted black, while her jib-booms were scraped and varnished; that her foremast, fore-topmast, and fore-topgallant and royal-mast were varnished, while the mast heads were painted black, and that the whole of the mainmast, from the cap down, was painted white, which was a peculiarity that ought to have been sufficient to identify her as far as one could see her. And so it was; for the moment that I reported it the skipper hailed—
“Thank you, Mr Fortescue; that will do; you may come down. Or—hold on a minute. Is the stranger far enough out of the river to enable her to get clear away, think ye?”
“She is fully a mile from the mouth of the river, sir,” I answered.