Toward nightfall the Fearless reduced speed and loafed along over a smooth sea at a distance of perhaps thirty miles from the coast. The crisis of the voyage had come. O’Shea must run his ship into a trap and get her out again.
As soon as darkness was at hand the Fearless began the final dash for the coast. Johnny Kent had crawled from his bunk and wearily set himself down in the engine-room doorway to await orders.
“If anything goes wrong to-night, it’ll happen all of a sudden,” he grumbled to his first assistant. “Takin’ chances of getting bottled up in a bay don’t please me a mite.”
“There is nothing in sight, chief. It looks like an easy landing. The skipper knows his business.”
“But it would be just our fool luck to run into trouble with these two ladies aboard. Women complicate every game they draw cards in. But that Miss Hollister is certainly a queen, ain’t she, Jim?”
“She’s old enough to be my mother,” ungallantly observed the youthful assistant.
“And I’m ’most old enough to be your grand-daddy, you godless, disrespectful sculpin,” was the angry retort of Johnny Kent. “And I’m man enough to break you in two across my knees.”
The rash young man wisely held his tongue, and the chief engineer murmured to the world at large:
“Refinement and culture do make a heap of difference in folks. Now, if I had chased after refinement and culture when I was young, instead of incessantly pursuin’ rum, riot, and rebellion on the high seas—but what’s the use?”
Thereupon this pensive pirate turned to survey his chanting engines and wondered what the night might bring forth. The Fearless maintained an even gait until the coast was no more than five miles distant. Then she drifted idly while Captain O’Shea swept the horizon with his night-glasses. His eyes and ears were acutely alert, but there was neither sight nor sound of Spanish blockading craft cruising to intercept him. Astern were piled six large flat-bottomed surf-boats, in nests, as fishermen’s dories are carried. These were now launched and towed, ready to be ranged alongside and filled with cargo.