“And yet you don’t take much account of the brig, stranger?”
“She seems a good enough little craft of her kind,” admitted Lance, “and as a mere trader I have no doubt she would answer well enough. But it strikes me that, to gentlemen of your profession, a really fast and powerful vessel is an absolute necessity if you would insure your own safety. In weather like this I daresay you would manage tolerably well; but if a frigate were by any chance to fall in with you in a fresh breeze, or, worse still, in heavy weather, I fear you would find yourselves in a ‘tight place;’ she would have you under her guns in less than an hour.”
“That’s so, stranger; yes, I reckon that’s so,” conceded Johnson with evident reluctance. “There are ships as can outsail us, I know, for we’ve fallen in with some half a dozen clippers, and we couldn’t do nothing with ’em; they just walked away from us. And though I don’t calculate that there’s ever a frigate afloat as could get alongside them tea-ships if the tea-ships didn’t want ’em to, yet I guess there’s frigates as could overhaul us in heavy weather. And so you’re a yachtsman, eh? Then I reckon you know something about quick sailing. How fast, now, do you calculate a yacht would sail in this breeze?”
“That depends entirely upon the build and model of the craft. If she were a racing schooner of, say the tonnage of this brig, I daresay her speed under such circumstances as these would be thirteen or perhaps fourteen knots; if, however, she were merely a cruising yacht, such as my own, I do not imagine she would average more than eleven.”
“Eleven knots! Jeosh—I say, stranger, how many knots do you reckon we are making just now?” exclaimed Johnson.
Lance looked over the side for a moment, marked a piece of weed floating past, and then answered—
“About eight, I should think; certainly not more.”
“I guess you’re wrong, stranger,” returned the pirate skipper with animation, “she’s going ten if she’s going an inch.”
“You can easily test it by heaving the log,” suggested Lance.
“Aft here, two of you, and heave the log,” shouted Johnson.