"Heave to, or I'll fire at you, by Jupiter!" roared Don Felix.
The stranger still did not deign to look round, occupying himself in bailing out the water that the skiff had taken in the shove through the surf.
Flamingo repeated the threat, levelling his fowling-piece; at which our friend slowly held up a bright-barrelled article, that he took from the bottom of the boat, more like a swivel than a blunderbuss. At sight of this, Don Felix dropped his gun as if the barrel had burned his fingers, whipped both hands under the skirts of his coat, wheeling round on one leg at the same time, and drawing himself up to his full height, and grinning and shutting his eyes, and slewing his head on one side, as if he had been trying to present the smallest possible surface to the pelting of a hail shower. The stranger, at this, slowly replaced the weapon, and in a twinkling was out of gun-shot, pulling towards a schooner lying becalmed outside of the keys.
"I say, Brail, did you see that glancing affair in his hand? Was it a carronade, think you, or a long eighteen-pounder? Why, it might have doodled our whole party as regularly as Rory Macgregor did his own ducks."
On returning, we went on board the prize brig, from which we had startled our friend, and found the arm-chest on the poop broken open, and the contents scattered all about the deck, as if the party had been picking and choosing.
"So, so, I see what our honest man has been after," said I.
There was no prize-keeper on board; and, knowing this, the visit of the skiff had unquestionably been for the purpose of purloining arms.
*****
"Jackson," said a gentleman at dinner, at the house where I dined that day, "any further accounts from windward?"
"No; there are two schooners, the Humming Bird and Sparkle, on the look-out; but no tidings of the infernal little felucca."