CHAPTER I
PREPARING TO OUTWIT THE ENEMY
"Only one great mistake has been made, Louis Belgrave," said Captain George Scott Fencelowe.
He was a young man of eighteen; but the title by which he was addressed was genuine so far as his position was actually concerned, though it would hardly have passed muster before a court of admiralty of the United States, whose flag was displayed on the ensign-staff at the stern. The vessel was a small steam-yacht, only forty feet in length, but furnished in a miniature way with most of the appliances of a regular steamer.
She had a cabin twelve feet long, whose broad divans could be changed into berths for the four principal personages on board of her. Abaft this apartment was a standing-room with seating accommodations for eight persons, or twelve with a little crowding, with luxurious cushions and an awning overhead when needed.
Her pilot-house, engine-room, galley, and forecastle were as regular as though she had been an ocean steamer of a thousand tons. Her ordinary speed was ten knots an hour; but she could be driven up to twelve on an emergency, and had even made a trifle more than this when an extraordinary effort was required of the craft.
She had been built for a Moorish Pacha of the highest rank and of unbounded wealth, who had ordered that no expense should be spared in her construction and outfit. She was built of steel as strong as it was possible to build a vessel of any kind; and in more than one heavy gale on the Mediterranean she had proved herself to be an unusually able and weatherly craft.
Though she had formerly been called the Salihé, her name had been changed by her later American owners to the Maud. Everything about her was as luxurious as it was substantial. She had a ship's company of seven persons, only two of whom had reached and passed their majority, the other five varying in age from fifteen to eighteen.
The principal personages were boys, three of them having attained the mature age of eighteen, while the fourth was only fifteen. This quartet sometimes called themselves the "Big Four," though it was a borrowed designation, meaning something entirely different from its present signification. Captain Scott had been the first to apply the term; and he had done so simply because it tickled the tympanum of his ear, and it really meant nothing at all.
The Maud was the consort, or more properly the tender, of the Guardian-Mother, a steam-yacht of over six hundred tons' burden, now engaged in making a voyage around the world. In a preceding volume it was related in what manner Louis Belgrave became a millionaire, with fifty per cent more than money enough to entitle him to this rather indefinite appellation. How he happened to be the proprietor of one of the finest steam-yachts that ever floated on the ocean was also explained, through a somewhat complicated narrative, and the details of a cruise to Bermuda, the Bahama Islands, and Cuba, followed by a voyage across the Atlantic and up the Mediterranean, the steamer and her tender having just sailed from Alexandria after the tour of Egypt.