She supposed that he intended merely to rob, and she did not know that, once having fired a gun from his deck, and thereby actually menacing another vessel on the high seas, he was just as amenable to capital punishment for his crime as if he had murdered the entire crew of the Goalong in cold blood.
Her ideas concerning his really harmless intention, so far as physical violence was concerned, seemed to be supported by the fact that after those six shots, some of which had found their way aboard Kane’s yacht, he did not again resort to his gun.
It was plain, however, that he had discovered that Kane did not mean to stop until he was compelled to do so; and that the rover had figured out a way to force him to stop his engines became more and more apparent as the moments passed.
It was a pretty sight, too, which Bessie Harlan and the others were watching. The long, low, narrow hull of the Shadow, funnelless, and with no deck housings of any kind save the sunbonnet-shaped turret forward, and the larger one amidships, from which the gun had been fired; and with the two masts, devoid of spars and sails, shining like silver and pointing like fingers into the air, had more the appearance of a living monster of the deep, to her eyes, than the look of a modern vessel.
The Shadow had been approaching the Goalong from a direction which was a few points off the starboard bow, but now she had altered her course so that it somewhat resembled the shape of an inverted interrogation point, and which, if pursued, would eventually swing her around so that she would come up in a parallel course with the yacht, and on the starboard side of her.
She would be running in the same direction, also, and as she was much fleeter than the Goalong, she would then have no difficulty in maintaining her position alongside and performing one of the acts which the skipper, Manning, had suggested—that is, either her men would board the yacht or they would pour in upon her the contents of that deadly machine gun.
And now, as the Shadow came about, a rod shot up from the interior of one of the steel masts, and from it there presently floated out to the breeze a blood-red flag; and at the same moment, from the amidships turret, a figure came out on the convex, turtle-back deck and stood there with folded arms, facing the yacht.
There was no mark of any kind upon the red field of the flag, and it was not more red than the costume of the pirate himself, who seemed to have taken the pattern of his costume from the tragedy of “Hamlet.”
A mask of the same color as his costume covered his face, and his left hand rested upon the gold-mounted hilt of a rapier at his side. And he stood there, calmly watching the yacht, which, although it was struggling through the water at its utmost speed, might as well have stopped its engines and waited, for the Shadow was overhauling her as swiftly and as surely as a greyhound would have overtaken a terrier.