So a commonplace chatter went on, and yet the mad intoxication of that interval of suspense had come upon us all as a fever. No man might measure his words, be sure. There we were, sagging in the trough of the seas some three hundred yards, it may be, from the great ship’s guns, our crew muttering in deep whispers, the steam hissing from our valves, the smoke drifting to the north in a dense suffocating cloud. Aware of the few moments of grace possible to us, we had given the word down to Mr. Benson to go full speed astern; and running thus for the half of a mile, we then swung the yacht round and headed due south at all the speed of which we were capable.
Now, indeed, the tense hour of our doubt began. We counted the very minutes until the beams of the monster searchlight should ensnare us once more. Brief exclamations, cheery words of hope flashing from man to man gave passage to that current of human electricity which burned up as a flame. Would the light never fall? Ay, yonder it strikes the sea, and yonder and yonder—compassing the horizon around in a twinkling, a blind glory, a very pharos of the unknown world. And now it falls upon us, and man can look upon the face of man as though he stood beneath the sun of day; and all is stillness and silence, and the unspoken question.
Far away as we were, a roar of triumph could be heard across the sea when the Jew’s ship discovered us, and the great beams of the searchlight rested upon us exultingly. In turn, the smoke from our funnel forbade us any longer to locate the enemy or to form an opinion as to his movements. Certainly, no gunshot followed immediately upon his achievement; and when a little gust of the south wind, veering a point or two, carried the loom from our furnaces away, we espied the two ships drifting as before, and even boats passing from one to the other. From this time, moreover, the darkness failed us somewhat, and a great moon tempered the ocean with its translucent beams of silvery light. Our safety lay in our speed. We burned the precious coal without stint, since our very lives were in the furnace’s keeping.
“What stops them, Larry—what are they waiting for?” I asked him presently. He had deserted the bridge and stood aft with me to watch the distant steamers. McShanus, meanwhile, paced the decks like a lion at the hour of feeding. It was his way of saying that he found the suspense intolerable.
“I don’t think we shall have to wait long, sir,” Larry rejoined presently. “You see, they would hardly be ready to fire their guns, and not overmuch discipline among them, I suppose. If they hit us, it will be something by way of an accident.”
“And yet one that might happen, Larry. Well, here it comes, anyway. And a wicked bad shot I must say.”
It was odd that they should have fired at the very moment I replied to him; yet such was the fact and such the coincidence. Scarcely had I uttered the words when a monstrous yellow flame leaped out over the bows of the Diamond Ship (which now had put about to chase us), and spreading itself abroad upon the waters left a heavy cloud of black smoke very baffling to their gunners. As for the shell, I know not to this day where it fell. We heard neither explosion nor splash; saw no spume or spray upon the hither sea, and were, not a man of us, a penny the worse for their endeavour. A second attempt achieved no better result. True, we detected the shell this time, for it fell plump into the sea, near the fifth part of a mile from our starboard quarter; but the wretched shooting, the long interval between the shots and the speed at which we travelled, inspired confidence anew, and so surely that my men began to cheer the gunners ironically, and even to flash a signal to them across the sea.
“It’s as I thought, Larry,” said I, “they carry a gun and have no more idea how to use it than a lady in charge of a boarding school. The Jew has been living as near to a fool’s paradise as such a man is ever likely to get to paradise at all. I think we need waste no more coal. Let us lie to and take our chances. The risk is too small to think about.”
“Yon man would never hit cocoanuts at a fair,” chimed in McShanus, who had come up. “What will ye be flying over the ocean for? Is it coal we have to steam to China and back? Sure, the docthor is wise entirely, and be hanged to them. We lie here as safe as a babe in a mother’s lap.”
We laughed at his earnestness, but the order was rung down nevertheless, and presently the yacht lay rolling to the swell and we could hear the stokers drawing a furnace below. Who is justly to blame for the accident which followed I do not dare to tell myself. Sometimes I have charged myself with it and complained bitterly of the opinions I had ventured. I can only tell you that the yacht had scarcely been slowed down when the rogues’ ship fired at us again, and the shot, crossing our forward decks at an angle of some fifty-five degrees, struck a fine young seaman of the name of Holland and almost annihilated him before our very eyes. The tragedy had a greater significance because of the very mirth with which we had but a moment before regarded the Jew’s gunners and their performance. Death stood there upon the heels of laughter; a cry in the night was the answer to an honest man’s defiance and my own bravado. As for poor Holland, the shot took him about the middle and cut him absolutely in two. He could have suffered no pain—so instantaneously was he hurled into eternity. One moment I saw him standing at the bulwarks watching the distant searchlight; at the next, there remained but a dreadful something upon the deck from which men turned their eyes in horror and dare not so much as speak about.