Again the hail was repeated. This time the captain waved his hand denoting complete understanding. Then he turned as if he was giving some orders aloud to the crew, but instead he told the steersman to luff a little, and spoke quietly to the first mate:
“Two minutes more and we’ll be out of it, Mr. Jarvis,” he said; “she will never fire at us.”
The cutter still held on, and was by this time well astern. The officer who had hailed was standing with his companion expectantly leaning against the shrouds.
Conyngham whipped the trumpet from under his coat, as if it had just been handed him, and bellowed something back over the taffrail. Then he waved his hand cheerfully and went on smoking his pipe.
The two men on the English vessel were evidently perplexed. But the Charming Peggy, now having gone back to her course again, and having the weather-gage, was rapidly leaving. At last, as if her suspicion had been satisfied, the cutter wore, let go her sheets, and went off free to the southeast.
The men on the Charming Peggy were all in a broad grin, and Mr. Jarvis was almost hugging himself in sheer delight and relief.
“I thought you spoke no Dutch, sir,” he said, laughing. “What was it you said to him?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” was Conyngham’s rejoinder, “but I think it had some Irish in it.”
He did not appear amused, however, and a moment or two later he stopped suddenly in the pacing that he had taken up again. With a stern look on his face he ordered that the two men he had told to go below should be sent up to him at once.
If the crew had been surprised at what they had just witnessed, they were soon to be more so. The two men appeared and, hat in hand, stood at the mast. Higgins carried in one hand a bundle of iron nails and in the other the ax, one side of which was flat like a hammer.