He meant that we were already upon the point of being within gunshot of the pursued, and he rang down for “half-speed” as he spoke. The order was not obeyed a minute too soon. A heavy gun thundered at us presently, and a shell fell impotently into the sea not a furlong from the starboard bow. The effect of this upon my crew was such as words can express with difficulty. It may be that the scene had been unreal to them until this time; a vision of which they could make little. But powder and shot! The poorest intellect of them all understood that, while as for my genial Irishman, he ducked his head like an old woman who believes that a tile is falling.
“Ach, divil take them, Fabos! Am I wounded anywhere?”
“It would be somewhere about the pit of the stomach, Timothy.”
“But ’tis shell they’re firing!”
“I will complain about it, Timothy, when we go aboard.”
He was very white—I forgave him for that. Like the others, he, too, had but little realised what the pursuit of this unknown ship might cost us, and what pages it might write in the story of crime. The crashing sound of a great gun ringing out in the silence of the night brought the truth to his ears as no words could have done.
“Faith, ’tis little stomach I have for it at all.”
“Would you turn back, Timothy?”
“Not for a thousand sovereigns upon the cabin table.”
The men heard him and gave a great cheer. It was answered distantly from the racing gunboat, echoed again by a low sobbing sound as of winds, given back to us by a murmur of the sea, which already fretted as though at the far voice of tempest. A storm had crept upon us unseen. We had no eyes for anything but the black shape of the gunboat.