Martin nodded his head gravely, and drew a knife in pantomime.
"Consequently," resumed Ducie, "I want you to catch _La Belle Rose_. She has got a long start. Can you come up with her?"
"Master, I will try. The _Demoiselle_ has never failed me yet when I've put her to the proof, and I don't think she will fail me to-day. We must steer more easterly, and not as if we were following the other boat; and then when she tacks, as she must do soon, we shall have gained a full half mile on her."
Ducie was steering, and he saw that by following the sailor's advice, the _Demoiselle_ would cut off a large slice of the angle which must necessarily be made by the _Belle Rose_ before she could touch the nearest part of the French coast. Besides which, such a course would divert suspicion from their real intentions, and in a stern chase that goes for something.
Ducie lighted a cigar, and passed his flask forward to the young sailor. "We shall have rain and more wind, sir, before the day is three hours older," said the latter.
"So much the better," answered Ducie, quietly. "A gloomy deed should have a gloomy day. Martin! either the man in yonder boat or I will never see another sunrise. Perhaps neither of us may."
The young sailor gave his companion a look that was not unmixed with admiration. There was something that touched his wild notions of Justice in the idea of a man being his own Avenger.
Captain Ducie really meant what he said. He was thoroughly impressed with the belief that either for himself or Cleon that would be the last of earthly days. There was an element of gloom at the bottom of his nature--a dark abyss that had never been thoroughly sounded till a few hours ago. But the loss of his Diamond, preceded as it was by the unaccountable desertion of Mirpah Van Loal--Love and Fortune both gone in a few short hours--had served to raise a demon in his soul of which he had heretofore been thoroughly master. Now it mastered him, and he gave himself up to it without a struggle. But the grand calm of a thoroughbred Englishman did not desert him even now. The young sailor discerned no change in him from the Captain Ducie who had gone out fishing but four days before, save, perhaps, that his eyebrows seemed to come down a shade lower, and that the eyes themselves were a shade darker, and that his voice was somewhat graver than common. Otherwise there was no outward sign to tell of the change within, and yet Jean Martin had an instinctive sense that he had a desperate man aboard his tiny craft--one determined to carry out his own will to the end, however terrible that end might be.
Captain Ducie sat in the stern and steered the _Demoiselle_, taking the word occasionally from Jean Martin. His glass was beside him, and now and then he took a peep at the chase. The different tacks on which the two boats were steering would have seemed, in a landsman's eye, to be hopelessly widening the distance between them, but when the _Belle Rose_ suddenly yawed round and began to steer nearly due east of her previous course, Ducie saw the wisdom of Martin's advice. The two boats had, so to speak, been sailing down the opposite sides of a triangle. The Belle Rose had completed her side, and having turned the corner, was now sailing along the line of the base. But before she could reach the opposite end of the base, she would be intercepted by the _Demoiselle_.
Up to this time the progress of the _Demoiselle_. seemed to have been unheeded by the people in the _Belle Rose_. But as soon as it became evident to those in the latter that the two boats were rapidly nearing, and must in a few minutes cross each other's line within speaking distance, a slight commotion was visible on board the _Belle Rose_. Suddenly Martin, who had Ducie's glass to his eye, cried out, "They are getting suspicious of us. They are taking stock of us through their glasses--and--no--yes, by the nightcap of St. Jaques! there's a black man on board the _Belle Rose!_"