It was a sorry crew aboard the Spray as the little craft silently followed in the wake of the Nancy Jane. They might have been in dreamland as they sailed all that day, for scarcely a word was spoken; and when night dropped down and the boys, all but George Warren, piled into the cabin to sleep, it was scarcely more quiet than by day.
Very late that night, as the Spray and the Nancy Jane ran into Southport harbour and brought up for a few moments alongside the wharf, to let a serious-looking man, and a tearful woman aboard, the boys were still sleeping soundly; and George Warren and his father and mother sat alone together till the sun rose, while the Spray, following the Nancy Jane, ran along up the island and then stood across to Mayville, where Judge Ellis would hold his court that morning.
“I don’t need you to make any denial about the fire,” Mr. Warren had said, when he stepped aboard the Spray and put his hand on his eldest son’s shoulder. “I know you boys would not do such a thing as that; but I fear your recklessness has gotten you into serious trouble, and Colonel Witham seems inclined to press the matter to the extreme. So I want to hear everything from beginning to end.”
And George Warren told him all.
There was another boat coming sluggishly up the bay that night, far astern of the Spray, a handsome big sloop, beautifully modelled and with finely tapered, shining yellow spars. But she carried little sail, was reefed, in fact, though the breeze was very light; and she moved through the water so like a dead thing, or like a creature crippled by a wound, that a sailor would have seen at once that there had been some mishap aboard, some injury to hull or spars that held her back.
The youth at the wheel of this strange, big sloop bore a striking resemblance to Jack Harvey, though the yacht was not the Surprise, but bigger and far more elegant. And the crew—yes, they were surely Harvey’s crew—George and Allan and Tim and Joe,—and they addressed the boy at the wheel as “Jack.”
And the Surprise—where was she?
Four days had passed since, on that morning following the fire, the Surprise had turned the point of the island that marked an entrance to the thoroughfare where, a half-mile to leeward, a big black sloop was coming fast up the wind.
“There he is!” Harvey had cried. “Come, boys, get into shape now; but stay below till I give the word,—all but you, Joe,—and when I yell you pile out and get aboard that sloop the quickest you ever did anything in all your lives. He will fight, and we have got to act quick.”
If the thick-set, ill-visaged man who sat at the wheel of the black sloop felt any concern at the sudden appearance of this new craft, dead ahead and coming down the narrow thoroughfare toward him, his alarm must have abated as on its near approach the apparent number of its occupants became disclosed.