As Milsom had foreseen, they reached their destination with some hours of daylight in hand, and the moment that the anchor was down all hands went to work and routed out from the secret recesses of the ship a heterogeneous assortment of light iron rods, bars, angles, and sheets; wood framing and planking; and great rolls of canvas, painted a light, smoky-grey tint, which Milsom asserted would render a vessel practically invisible at a distance of three miles, and the precise composition of which had cost him weeks of anxious thought and study. Then the crew were divided into three gangs; and while one party busied itself, under Macintyre, in sorting out, bolting together, and fixing in position those portions which were to effect a transformation in the appearance of the yacht’s bows, another party, under Milsom, was similarly employed in altering the appearance of the vessel’s handsome stern, and the third party, under Perkins, was clothing the brightly varnished masts in tight-fitting canvas coats, painted in the all-pervading grey which was to be the colour of the vessel when the work of disguising her should be complete; fixing a bogus fighting top on the ship’s foremast; enclosing the chart-house in a casing which should give it the semblance of a conning tower; getting a couple of light signalling yards aloft; and painting the several boats grey. When the men knocked off work at sunset, a great deal had been done; but it was not until six bells in the forenoon watch next day that the work of transformation was finally completed to Milsom’s satisfaction, and then the Thetis—temporarily re-christened the Libertad—so strongly resembled a modern two-funnelled torpedo gunboat that she might easily have deceived even a professional eye at a distance of half a mile; and when, further, a long pennant flaunted itself from the main truck, and the flag of Cuba Libre waved from the ensign staff, the gallant skipper, critically surveying his transmogrified ship from the dinghy, confidently announced that he would defy anybody to trace the most remote resemblance between the vessel upon which his eyes rested and the trim English yacht which had steamed out of Havana harbour on the previous day.
On the following Monday morning at daylight the furnace fires were lighted on board the disguised yacht, and at the same time a man with sharp eyes was sent aloft to the fore-masthead to watch the offing over the tops of the low mangrove trees, and give notice of the passage of the Marañon, should she happen to heave in sight; but hour after hour passed with no sign of her, unless one of the eastward-going trails of smoke that showed on the horizon during the forenoon happened to emanate from her. They waited patiently until noon, and then, nothing having been seen of the convict ship, Jack and Milsom agreed that it was quite useless to wait any longer; and half an hour later the fishermen outside the Boca de Maravillas were astonished to see a craft, which some of them described as a cruiser, while the others spoke of her as a gunboat, sweep through the passage and head away north-east, as though to clear the eastern extremity of Cay Sal Bank on her way northward through the Santaren Channel. The vessel showed no colours, but was flying a pennant, and the general opinion was that she was an American man-o’-war; though what she had been doing in Sagua la Grande harbour, or how she had got there, nobody seemed able to guess.
But although, to the unsophisticated fishermen of Sagua la Grande, the mysterious warship appeared to be bound north, she was really bound south-east through the Nicholas and Old Bahama channels: and when the yacht had made an offing of some fifteen miles—by which time she was of course out of sight of the fishermen’s boats, Milsom ordered the helm to be ported and the engines sent full speed ahead, she having by that time run on to a line which the ex-Navy man had pencilled on his chart as the probable course of the convict steamer; and if that craft had left Havana at the hour arranged, and were steaming at the rate which the harbour-master had anticipated would be her pace, she must now be nearly sixty miles ahead. That was a fairly long lead, certainly; but there is a big difference between a speed of eight knots and that of twenty-four, and Milsom calculated that, if the Marañon were really ahead of them, they ought to overtake her in something like three hours. As a matter of fact, they sighted the craft dead ahead about five bells in the afternoon watch, identified her to their entire satisfaction about half an hour later, and passed her, some sixteen miles to the southward, about one bell in the first “dog.”
“Now,” said Milsom, when he came down from aloft after personally satisfying himself as to the identity of the great, dirty-white, rust-streaked hull crawling along in the northern board, “let me make a little calculation. Our plan is to appear ahead of her, steaming to the northward and westward—to meet her, in fact, instead of overtaking her; and the proper time to do this will be about a quarter of an hour before sunset. I take it that she is steaming at about the pace which my friend the harbour-master allowed her—that is to say, about eight knots. At that rate she will be about eight miles farther to the eastward at a quarter of an hour before sunset. That means that—um—um—yes, that will be about right. Now, Jack, my hearty, cheer up! for unless something goes very radically wrong with our scheme, our friends ought to be safe and snug aboard this dandy little hooker in a couple of hours’ time. Now, it is you, my friend, who are going to play the giddy pirate and wrest our friends, at the sword’s point, out of the hands of the oppressor, so cut away down below, my lad, and get into your disguise; and while you are doing that the deck hands can be doing the same, so as to render it impossible for them to be identified at any future time, should they be met in the streets of Havana, or elsewhere, by anybody belonging to the Marañon.”
Half an hour later Jack re-appeared on deck, his already well-bronzed face and hands stained to the darkness of a mulatto’s skin, and his corpus arrayed in an old, weather-stained, and very-much-the-worse-for-wear Spanish naval lieutenant’s uniform, which Don Ramon had caused one of his servants to procure for him at a second-hand wardrobe dealer’s in Havana; his disguise being completed by the addition of a black wig and a ferocious moustache and whiskers, obtained through the same channel at a theatrical wig-maker’s shop. To say that his own mother would not have known him in this get-up is to put the matter altogether inadequately; and his appearance on deck was the signal for a roar of mingled admiration and mirth from all hands. Meanwhile, the crew had pinned their faith to burnt cork and their working slops as a disguise, except the five who were to form Jack’s boat’s crew; these having discarded their working slops and donned dungaree overalls, ancient cloth trousers, rusty with salt-water stains, and stiff with tar and grease, big thigh-boots, and worsted caps. A cutlass belted to the waist, and a knife and brace of revolvers in the belt gave the finishing touch of realism to the get-up, and obviated any possibility of doubt as to the seriousness of their mission.
By this time the moment had arrived when, according to Milsom’s calculations, the yacht ought to be turned round to meet the Marañon, now out of sight astern; the helm was accordingly put hard over, and the nimble little craft swept round until she was heading direct for the spot where it had been calculated that the two ships should meet. No combination of circumstances could possibly have been more favourable for the adventure than were those at that moment prevailing. There was no craft of any description in sight as far as the eye could see; the trade wind was blowing quite a moderate breeze; and the sea was not sufficiently formidable to render the task of transferring the rescued people from one ship to the other by means of an open boat at all difficult or dangerous. Moreover, the sun, fast dropping toward the horizon, was quickly losing his intensity of light, and as rapidly plunging all objects into a delicious soft golden haze, in which all detail was lost; it was therefore in the highest degree unlikely that even the keenest eye on board the convict steamer would be able to detect the imposition that was being practised upon them.
Presently, a smudge of brown smoke soaring above the horizon broad on the port bow showed that the unsuspecting quarry was approaching; and a minute or two later her masts, fine as spiders’ webs, began to rise against the warm, golden glow of the western sky, then her funnel appeared, and finally her bridge and chart-house—appearing as completely detached and isolated objects in the rarefied atmosphere—suddenly showed themselves on the horizon, alternately appearing and disappearing with the rise and fall of the ship over the swell. Then Milsom rang down to the engine-room for half speed; and a little later, when the Marañon was hull-up and the two vessels were closing fast, he ordered the forward port twelve-pound quick-firer to be loaded with a blank charge. Then, when the two craft were about a mile apart, he ordered the Cuban flag to be run up to the main gaff-end, and the gun to be fired as a polite invitation to the other craft to heave-to, at the same time stopping his own engines.
Apparently the skipper of the Marañon did not know what to make of it; for, beyond hoisting Spanish colours, he took no notice of the summons, making no attempt to stop his engines.
“Mr Perkins,” shouted Milsom, “just heave a shot across that chap’s fore-foot, will ye? and we will see whether he understands that language. But for goodness’ sake take care that you don’t hit him by mistake. We don’t want to have the destruction of that vessel on our consciences.”
Bang! barked the twelve-pounder for the second time, and there was now a vicious tone in the bark which said unmistakably that the gun was shotted; while, if anybody on board the Marañon had any doubt about it, that doubt was a moment later dispelled by the sudden up-leaping of a fountain of foam some twenty fathoms ahead of the vessel. That proved conclusively that the mysterious gunboat flying the Cuban flag was in no humour to be trifled with; and the Spanish captain, objurgating vehemently, rang down for his engines to stop. Thereupon the “gunboat”, which by this time had swung round, presenting a view of her stern, with the name Libertad emblazoned upon it in gold letters, lowered a boat, into which four seamen, a coxswain, and a big, black-bearded officer dropped. When the frail craft, propelled by the four sturdy oarsmen, pushed off, and went dancing, light as an empty eggshell, over the purple swell toward the convict ship, the officers on the bridge of which did not fail to note that the crew of the stranger had carefully trained two long, beautifully polished guns and a couple of Maxims on them, “as a gentle hint that there was to be no nonsense,” as Milsom put it.