“I can’t do it, Jack, old boy,” he said. “I can’t swim ten strokes without my heart hammering like a threshing-machine. You go, and I’ll stay. You can tell them what’s doing aboard here, and they’ll hunt Haley down and get me.”
Harvey shook his head, while he ground his teeth with chagrin.
“No, no,” he said. “I won’t go, if you can’t. They’d kill you if I got away, and they didn’t get caught. We’ll try it another time. Get out of here, forward, now, quick. If Haley catches you up here, you’ll get hurt.”
Jack Harvey stood resolutely at the wheel, and held the bug-eye to her course. He saw, with some hope, the Folly creep up through the night upon the fleeing Brandt. He heard the commands for them to come to, and surrender. Bullets whizzed past him, from the shore and from the pursuing schooner. They went through the canvas of the bug-eye and did no other harm.
He saw, next, with a great sinking of heart, the fast craft upon whose deck he stood gather headway rapidly and eat its way through the night, gaining on its pursuer. The wind came sharp in flaws from the bank. The Brandt heeled over till the deck was awash. Hamilton Haley, springing to the wheel and displacing Harvey, uttered a cry of exultation.
“Get along for’ard; you’ve done well, boy,” was his way of bestowing praise.
The Folly fell astern, and the chase was lost.
That was a night never to be forgotten by Jack Harvey; the sudden flush of hope; its swift vanishing, amid the thin fire of rifles; the cries of disappointed men, and the quick flaws of wind upon the sails. There was a thrill—even if one laden with disappointed hopes—in the rapid flight of the poacher, Brandt, and its wild course down the river, past the black, shadowy shores.
Dazed and disheartened, however, with the passing of the hours, Jack Harvey and his comrade, by whom he had stuck manfully, turned in, at the word, and laid their weary bodies down in the forecastle bunks. The bug-eye, laden with its spoils, sailed away out of the Patuxent, heading across the bay for the shelter of the Eastern Maryland shore.
Doomed to disappointment, then. Doomed to disappointment even more bitter, on a day soon succeeding.