"What's de game, I wunner?" asked Martin. "Tryin' to starve deyselves?"
"Dunno," answered Elisha, with a serious expression. "They're not doin' it for nothin'. They're wavin' their hats at us. Somethin' on their minds."
"We'll jes let 'em wave. We'll go 'long 'bout our business."
So they went at eight knots an hour; for, try as he might, Amos could get no more out of the engine. "She's a divil to chew up coal," he explained; "we may have to burn the boat yet."
"Hope not," said Elisha. "'Tween you an' me, Amos, this is a desperate bluff we're makin', an' if we go to destroyin' property we may get no credit for savin' it. We'd have no chance in the English courts at all, but it's likely an American judge 'ud recognize our original position—our bargain to steer her in."
"Too bad 'bout that tarred cable of ours," rejoined Amos; "three days' good fuel in that, I calculate."
"Well, it's gone with the codfish, and the fact is properly entered in the log as barratrous conduct on the part of the skipper. Enough to prove him insane."
And further to strengthen this possible aspect of the case, Elisha found a blank space on the leaf of the log-book which recorded the first meeting and bargain to tow, and filled it with the potential sentence, "Steamer's commander acts strangely." For a well-kept logbook is excellent testimony in court.
Elisha's knowledge of navigation did not enable him to project a course on the great circle—the shortest track between two points on the earth's surface, and the route taken by steamers. But he possessed a fairly practical and ingenious mind, and with a flexible steel straight-edge rule, and a class-room globe in the skipper's room, laid out his course between the lane-routes of the liners,—which he would need to vary daily,—as it was not wise to court investigation. But he signaled to two passing steamships for Greenwich time, and set his watch, obtaining its rate of correction by the second favor; and with this, and his surely correct latitude by meridian observation, he hoped to make an accurate landfall in home waters.
And so the hours went by, with their captives waving caps ceaselessly, until the third day's sun arose to show them an empty deck on the schooner, over a dozen specks far astern and to the southward, and an east-bound steamship on their port bow. The specks could be nothing but the dories, and they were evidently trying to intercept the steamship. Elisha yelled in delight.