"From the schooner Flyaway, taking in sand over at Black Rocks."
Then Mr. Gabriel spoke again, as they drew near,—but whether he spoke so fast that I couldn't understand, or whether he spoke French, I never knew; and Dan, with some kind of feeling that it was Mr. Gabriel's acquaintance, suffered the one we spoke to pass us.
Once or twice Mr. Gabriel had begun some question to Dan about the approaching weather, but had turned it off again before anybody could answer. You see he had some little nobility left, and didn't want the very man he was going to injure to show him how to do it. Now, however, he asked him that was steering the Speed by, if it was going to storm.
The man thought it was.
"How is it, then, that your schooner prepares to sail?"
"Oh, wind's backed in; we'll be on blue water before the gale breaks, I reckon, and then beat off where there's plenty of sea-room."
"But she shall make shipwreck!"
"'Not if the court know herself, and he think she do,'" was the reply from another, as they passed.
Somehow I began to hate myself, I was so full of poisonous suspicions. How did Mr. Gabriel know the schooner prepared to sail? And this man, could he tell boom from bowsprit? I didn't believe it; he had the hang of the up-river folks. But there stood Mr. Gabriel, so quiet and easy, his eyelids down, and he humming an underbreath of song; and there sat Faith, so pale and so pretty, a trifle sad, a trifle that her conscience would brew for her, whether or no. Yet, after all, there was an odd expression in Mr. Gabriel's face, an eager, restless expectation; and if his lids were lowered, it was only to hide the spark that flushed and quenched in his eye like a beating pulse.
We had reached the draw, it was lifted for the Speed, she had passed, and the wind was in her sail once more. Yet, somehow, she hung back. And then I saw that the men in her were of those with whom Mr. Gabriel had spoken at noon. Dan's sail fell slack, and we drifted slowly through, while he poled us along with an oar.