The Angamos, vibrating from stem to stern under the rapid revolutions of her screw, plunged along through the black night, while, three miles ahead, the guiding-lights shone out clearer and clearer every moment. Half an hour passed and the cruiser was very, very near; so near, indeed, that Jim could plainly hear the throbbing of the gun-runner’s machinery; and they must also have caught the sound of his, for he suddenly saw another rocket rush up into the still night air, and directly afterwards a red glow began to hover over the tops of their funnels, showing that they were trying to increase their speed by coaling up furiously.
But it was of no use. The gun-runners only gained a very few minutes’ grace. The Angamos was much too fast a ship for them; and a few minutes later she ranged up on the starboard side of the sternmost steamer, while Jim, seizing a speaking-trumpet, hailed at the top of his voice: “What ship is that? Heave-to! I wish to speak to you!”
Chapter Eleven.
Captain Villavicencio catches a Tartar.
For the space of quite half a minute there was no reply; and then, in response to Jim’s repeated summons, both steamers, as if by previous arrangement, began to send blue rockets flying into the air; while both set up a most unearthly shrieking on their steam-whistles. They had by this time recognised that the suspicious stranger was not the Union; but, knowing that she must be somewhere in the vicinity, they determined to attract her attention by some means or other, should she be anywhere within sight or hearing.
But Jim smiled grimly to himself as he saw and heard their despairing efforts, for he had kept a man at the masthead for the express purpose of ascertaining whether the Peruvian corvette was anywhere in the vicinity, and the last report, received less than five minutes before, assured him that she was nowhere to be seen.
He waited patiently, therefore, until the discordant blasts on the sirens had ceased, and then hailed again for the skipper to heave-to, vowing that he would fire into him if he did not do so. The young Englishman had imagined that he saw, by the light of the rockets, a number of men scampering about the decks, but he concluded that it was merely the effect of terror and astonishment, and he was totally unprepared for the gun-runner’s next move. The fellow had, when he saw that there was no hope of escape, hastily prepared his ship for action; and the last words were hardly out of Jim’s mouth when a perfect storm of machine-gun fire broke out aboard the flying steamer, and the bullets whistled round Douglas like hail, killing the quartermaster at the wheel, and several other seamen who were not under shelter.
The cruiser immediately yawed wildly, and in another minute would have crashed into the gun-runner, probably sending both craft to the bottom, had not Jim seized the wheel, as it spun out of the dead man’s fingers, and brought the Angamos back to her course just in the nick of time. At the same moment he saw the leading steamer circle round in a wide curve and head directly for him, evidently with the idea of helping her consort in the fight against the Chilian.