When he was full three miles out from shore again, and perhaps eight miles from the Dart, he set off another red light, giving it, as before, a long fuse. He was hardly fifty feet away from it when there came another crash from the cruiser—a deep boom this time from one of her heavy guns, followed by a shower of bullets from the Gatling; he heard them whistling and shrieking through the air, but he was not struck. The red light had not even begun to burn yet; the cruiser's watchful men had seen the spark burning at the end of the fuse.
"All right, Spaniard!" Benito exclaimed. He had never been under fire before, and his lips were set firm, and his free hand involuntarily closed into a tight fist. "All right, Spaniard! I've got you waked up, anyhow. You're chasing a party of insurgents, ain't you! I wish I dared tell you that you're chasing a boy, while the insurgents are getting ready to land ten miles up the coast!"
He stood in for the shore again, still beating to the eastward as close as the wind would allow; and when the fuse's spark blazed up into a bright red light the cruiser was heading towards it.
"A little careful about showing this light; that's what I'll have to be; a little careful," he said to himself, as he struck a match to set off his second green light close to shore. He kept the sharpie between the spark of fuse and the cutter's lights as long as he could to hide the fire, and then stood out seaward to the northeast again.
As the green light blazed up he turned his head a moment to look at it, and in that instant a strange thing happened. When he looked towards the cruiser again she had disappeared! Save for the green fire burning there was not a spark of light on all that black sea.
"I thought she'd do that!" Benito exclaimed. "She's trying my own game, and has put out all her lights. Well, I'll give her a white light in a few minutes, and that will be something new for her to think about."
He was still running out seaward and eastward, and the sharpie was bending down to her work, and cutting the waves like a knife, when suddenly he heard the throbbing of an engine and the splash of a propeller. Before he had time to think a great black wall of iron, looming twenty feet above his head, was right on top of him.
The cruiser was accidentally running him down in the darkness! He could see nothing on the water, but there was light enough in the sky to make out her great black form towering over him. His first impulse was to cry out; but he shut his teeth tight and waited for the blow.
But the blow did not come. The next instant the black mass was shooting past him, her iron side hardly six feet from the sharpie's stern.
"Good sharpie! Good old girl!" he exclaimed; and in the excitement he patted the boat on the gunwale. "If you hadn't been a flier, we'd been goners that time."