“I have had no doubt of that from the first moment we discovered the Shadow,” replied Kane, with a grimace.
The bell in the engine-room rang at that moment, and the engines of the Goalong were slowed down. Then another bell, and they stopped altogether; and, although there was no sound of a bell from the pirate craft, she kept pace with the yacht in coming to a stop, so that after a moment they were forging ahead, side by side, with only their natural momentum to give them steerage way.
And after a moment this was also lost, and the two vessels were rolling almost side by side on the gentle rise and fall of the dead swell of the ocean. Then, as if by prearrangement, rather than as the result of an order just given, half a score of men suddenly appeared on the deck of the rover, beside their chief.
Either they knew exactly what they were expected to do, or their orders were already given them, for they took their places along the rail of the Shadow with the precision of automatons and waited.
A group of them went forward, another group aft, and a third remained almost amidships, near their chief. In the possession of each group there were two stout lines with grappling-irons attached to them, and Kane and his party, on the deck of the yacht, could see that the men stood ready to heave them when the proper moment should arrive.
It was then that Kane’s skipper, Manning, shook his head doubtfully.
“The Shadow is a much heavier craft than we are, Mr. Kane,” he said. “If they make fast to us with this dead swell a-running under us, and heaving our bows into the air with every rise, she’ll swamp us in no time; but——”
He paused in his pessimistic prognostication, for at that moment the grappling-irons were thrown aboard. They caught, too, as if they had been cast by well-practised hands, and then, as the men of the Shadow made fast their own ends of the lines, power was given her and she forged ahead until, with the lines drawn taut, the two vessels were brought as safely side by side as if the act had been performed on the bosom of a mill-pond.
And from that moment, too, the wheel of the Shadow was kept moving, so that the yacht to which she had made fast was towed slowly through the water, and in that way the bows of the two vessels were kept headed toward the swell with sufficient steerageway to keep them so.
“That pirate feller is a sailor, all right,” muttered Manning. “I couldn’t have done any better myself.”