Chapter Seventeen.
The Recapture of the Minerva.
The camp being in complete darkness, Dick took his station just inside the tent-flap and, with the aid of his night-glass, maintained a close watch upon the barque. Hitherto there had been something very much in the nature of a carouse carried on aboard her every night since her arrival, the revel usually lasting up until nearly midnight. But on this particular night there was a difference, the singing and shouting coming to an end before four bells, or ten o’clock, a circumstance that further confirmed Dick in his impression that the mutineers meditated some step of a more or less decisive character. Yet when, by the carefully screened lamp in the tent, he consulted his watch and found that the hour of midnight was already past, he had entirely failed to detect any sign of life or movement on board the Minerva.
He now called Nicholls, and when the latter appeared he said to him—
“If you will sit here, where I have been sitting, you will be able, by using the night-glass, to keep a very perfect watch upon the barque without being yourself seen, and the moment that you detect anything like the appearance of a boat coming ashore, please wake me. And be especially careful not to light your pipe where you can be seen, as I am particularly anxious not to scare those fellows from coming ashore. And, in their present state of mind, I am afraid that anything which might excite within them the suspicion that they are being watched would suffice to scare them back to the ship again.”
Then he, in his turn, stretched himself out and was presently sound asleep.
It seemed as though he had been asleep scarcely five minutes, although it was really more than an hour when Nicholls shook him by the shoulder and said—
“Mr Leslie, wake up, sir, please. There’s a boat of some sort coming ashore from the barque. She’s been in sight for the last quarter of an hour, but she’s coming along very slowly, and I expect it’ll be quite another quarter of an hour before she reaches the beach.”