The lieutenant remarked that there was no hope of a calm for the next twenty-four hours at least.
“No,” said Captain Vincent, “and in about an hour it will be dark, and then he may very well give us the slip. The coast is not very far off and there are batteries on both sides of Fréjus, under any of which he will be as safe from capture as though he were hove up on the beach. And look,” he exclaimed after a moment’s pause, “this is what the fellow means to do.”
“Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant, keeping his eyes on the white speck ahead, dancing lightly on the short Mediterranean waves, “he is keeping off the wind.”
“We will have him in less than an hour,” said Captain Vincent, and made as if he meant to rub his hands, but suddenly leaned his elbow on the rail. “After all,” he went on, “properly speaking, it is a race between the Amelia and the night.”
“And it will be dark early to-day,” said the first lieutenant, swinging the speaking-trumpet by its lanyard. “Shall we take the yards off the backstays, sir?”
“No,” said Captain Vincent. “There is a clever seaman aboard that tartane. He is running off now, but at any time he may haul up again. We must not follow him too closely, or we shall lose the advantage which we have now. That man is determined on making his escape.”
If those words by some miracle could have been carried to the ears of Peyrol, they would have brought to his lips a smile of malicious and triumphant exultation. Ever since he had laid his hand on the tiller of the tartane every faculty of his resourcefulness and seamanship had been bent on deceiving the English captain, that enemy whom he had never seen, the man whose mind he had constructed for himself from the evolutions of his ship. Leaning against the heavy tiller he addressed Michel, breaking the silence of the strenuous afternoon.
“This is the moment,” his deep voice uttered quietly. “Ease off the mainsheet, Michel. A little now, only.”
When Michel returned to the place where he had been sitting to windward, the rover noticed his eyes fixed on his face wonderingly. Some vague thoughts had been forming themselves slowly, incompletely, in Michel’s brain. Peyrol met the utter innocence of the unspoken inquiry with a smile that, beginning sardonically on his manly and sensitive mouth, ended in something resembling tenderness.
“That’s so, camarade,” he said with particular stress and intonation, as if those words contained a full and sufficient answer. Most unexpectedly Michel’s round and generally staring eyes blinked, as if dazzled. He too produced from somewhere in the depths of his being a queer, misty smile from which Peyrol averted his gaze.