"Thank you, my dear fellow. I hope I shall get out of this bay without forfeiting your generous approval," added Scott.
"Here we are, Captain, as you say, and it looks as though we were in a bad scrape. All we have to do is to turn our attention to the manner of getting out of it. If there were any reason to reproach yourself or anybody else, we have no time to attend to that matter. What can be done next?" demanded Louis, rousing his energies to face the difficulty.
"What we do next depends mainly upon what the Fatimé does; and she isn't doing anything," replied Captain Scott, apparently roused to new exertion by the burst of energy on the part of his companion in the pilot-house. "I have no doubt Mazagan intends to make an effort to get possession of our millionaire as soon as he has the opportunity; but he will never succeed unless he knocks the Maud all to pieces with his twelve-pounders, which I don't believe he can do, Louis. You have comforted me so effectually, my dear fellow, that I begin to think it is time for me to do something of the same sort for you."
"I don't feel the need of comfort and consolation yet," said Louis quite merrily. "I am not at all alarmed; and what I say is not braggadocio."
"If the Maud is wrecked by the guns and sent to the bottom, we still have the whole island of Cyprus open to us," added the captain.
"To come down to the hard pan of business, allow me to ask a foolish question or two, and you may laugh at them if you please. What is the Fatimé waiting for? Why doesn't Mazagan proceed to carry out his threat to capture me?" asked Louis.
"For the simple reason that he cannot; and the question calls for a review of the situation," replied the captain, as he took from his pocket a paper on which he had drawn a diagram of the position of both vessels, with the shape of the bay, the ledge, and the soundings so far as they were known. "Here is the Maud," he continued, making a small cross on the paper at the point in the inside channel where she had come to the shoal water. "There is no way to get out of this place except that by which we came in."
"I understand all that; for we have the shore on one side of us and the ledge on the other, and the channel is not deep enough to permit us to go ahead," added Louis.
"That is our position. The Fatimé lies in deep water at least a mile from us. She is a steamer of four hundred tons, and she must draw at least fifteen feet of water; for both of these steamers were built where they put them down deeper in the water than they do in our country. The pirate would take the ground anywhere near the ledge, and she could not come into the channel by which we reached this point. Therefore, she can do nothing; and her guns would not hit us a mile distant, if they would carry a ball as far as that. You can see why she can do nothing yet a while."
"But the tide is rising, and we now have an hour of the flood," suggested Louis.