Beside us, on his own broad white deck, he stood scanning the low-built, rapidly disappearing Carlo Alberta through his binoculars.
"Guess they'll be able to travel some! We'll have all our work cut out if we mean to keep touch with them. Never mind. We'll see what the old Viking can do."
Then he shouted another order to his captain, a red-whiskered American, urging him to "hurry up and get a move on!"
As we stood there, three ladies, his wife and two daughters, the latter respectively about twenty-two and twenty, all of them in yachting costumes, came and joined us, eagerly inquiring whither we were bound.
"Don't know, Jenny," he replied to his wife. "We're just following a couple of crooks who've got slick away in that two-funnelled boat yonder, and we mean to keep in touch with them till they land. That's all."
"Then we're leaving Algiers!" exclaimed the younger girl regretfully.
"Looks like it, Sadie," was his reply. "The police have requested our aid, an' we can't very well refuse it." Then turning to me he exclaimed, "Say, I wonder where they're making for?"
"They are the most elusive pair of thieves in Europe," I replied. "They are certain to get away if we do not exercise the greatest caution."
The ladies grew most excited, and as the vessel began at last to move through the water, the chief officer shouting at her men, the girl whose name was Sadie, a smart, rather good-looking little person, though typically American, exclaimed to me, as she fixed her grey eyes on the fleeing vessel—
"Do you think they are faster than we are?"