“We had a narrow escape, then,” observed Jack. “If we had remained, we should, long before this, have been food for the sharks in the bay.”
“I guess that we shall be lucky if we are not down the throats of some of them before night,” pleasantly observed Captain Willock.
Madame Dubois did not understand him, or it would have set her off screaming again. She willingly enough lay down in the bottom of the boat, and Jack in his choicest French begged she would keep quiet; her daughter followed her example; and as the sea had gone down, the oars were laid in, and the rest of the party placed themselves under the thwarts out of sight. As, however, the junks were steering almost directly for them, they had little expectation of escaping notice. Jack had great difficulty, he confessed, in refraining from jumping up every instant to watch the progress of the junks.
“What do you say, Alick?” he exclaimed, suddenly. “Suppose we arm ourselves with the boat’s stretchers, and the moment a junk runs up to us jump on board and capture her? It’s the best thing I can think of to do.”
“We should probably be knocked on the head, and be sent overboard again,” answered Alick. “We must stay quiet, and wait the course of events.”
“I suppose it is the wisest thing, but I should like to have a fight for life,” said Jack, with a sigh.
The boat kept slowly turning round and round, and just then, by lifting his head up a little, he saw the mast-heads and sails of two junks, which were bearing close down upon them. There seemed now an impossibility of their escaping detection.
“We are in for it,” whispered Jack. “Let’s have a fight.”
“I guess it would be a short one,” answered Captain Willock; “stay quiet, Mr Rogers, if you don’t want all our throats cut.”
Two minutes more elapsed, and the high sides of two large junks, crowned by big round shields and numberless hideous grinning faces looking down on them, appeared, one on either hand. A couple of grapnels were hove into the boat, which was nearly crushed between the two vessels, and a dozen or more pirates, armed to the teeth, looking more like demons than men, sprang into her. Before Jack, or Murray, or Captain Willock, or indeed any of the party, could offer any resistance, they had passed running nooses over their shoulders, by which those on deck hauled them up without power of resistance. Jack, Alick, the American skipper, and Jos were fished up on board one junk, and they saw, to their great regret, the Frenchwoman and her daughter hoisted up on the other, poor madame half dead with terror, shrieking out vain petitions to be set on her feet.