“What is the use when no one is near to hear you?”
“I shall be heard some day, sir.”
“Some day—that’s a long way off. However, shout as much as you please.”
And with this ironical advice, Engineer Serko leaves me to my own reflections.
Towards four o’clock a big ship is reported about six miles off to the east, coming in our direction. She is moving rapidly and grows perceptibly larger. Black clouds of smoke pour out of her two funnels. She is a warship, for a narrow pennant floats from her main-mast, and though she is not flying any flag I take her to be an American cruiser.
I wonder whether the Ebba will render her the customary salute as she passes.
No; for the schooner suddenly changes her course with the evident intention of avoiding her.
This proceeding on the part of such a suspicious yacht does not astonish me greatly. But what does cause me extreme surprise is Captain Spade’s way of manoeuvring.
He runs forward to a signalling apparatus in the bows, similar to that by which orders are transmitted to the engine room of a steamer. As soon as he presses one of the buttons of this apparatus the Ebba veers off a point to the south-west.
Evidently an order of “some kind” has been transmitted to the driver of the machine of “some kind” which causes this inexplicable movement of the schooner by the action of a motor of “some kind” the principle of which I cannot guess at.