I snatched the glass from his hand, and sure enough made out the Batavian horizontal tricolour streaming from the peak signal halliards like a fragment of rainbow against the lustrous curve of the mainsail.
‘Wilfrid,’ I shouted, addressing him as he stood right aft, Miss Laura and I and the skipper being grouped a little forward of the main rigging, ‘they’ve hoisted Dutch colours. She’s a Hollander, not the “Shark!”’ and I fetched something like a breath of relief, for it was a condition of suspense that you wanted to see an end to one fashion or another as quickly as possible.
He approached us slowly, took the glass from my hand in silence, and after a steady inspection turned to Finn.
‘She’s the “Shark,”’ he said, with a fierce snap in his manner that was like letting fly a pistol at the skipper.
‘Your honour thinks so?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Them Dutch colours, Sir Wilfrid——’
‘A device, a trick! What could confirm one’s suspicions more than yonder display of a foreign ensign? She’s the “Shark,” I tell you, and that colour’s a stratagem. What do you say, Charles?’
‘I’m blest if I know what to think,’ said I. ‘If she’s the “Shark,” why has she taken it so leisurely, only just now setting her squaresail and gaff topsail though we have been in sight for a long time, crowding down upon her under a press that should awhile since have excited their suspicions? No need for them to hoist Dutch colours. If Fidler thinks he is chased, why don’t he haul his wind instead of keeping that fore-and-aft concern almost dead before it, as if he didn’t know on which side to carry his main boom?’
‘She’s the “Shark”!’ thundered Wilfrid, ‘the flag she is flying is a lie. Finn,’ he cried in a voice so savagely imperious, so confoundedly menacing, that I saw Miss Laura shrink, whilst the poor skipper gave a hop as though he had touched something red-hot; ‘are we overhauling that vessel?’