"Give 'em a broadside!" he roared. "Let 'em have it. They can't strike us out here in the mist. Blaze away!"
All the port guns of the brig, five in number, were of small account against earth and stone works; but they could express warlike feeling, and they immediately did so, and they did one thing more.
"Good!" said Captain Avery, as he heard them. "Now I know jest where she is. Wish I knew how she's headed. We've all sail on. Keep still, all! We can slip past her."
As quietly as so many ghosts, the men went hither and thither about their duties. They had not very much to do, for every square yard of the schooner's canvas was already taking that fair light wind. The brig, on the other hand, was by no means under full sail, for some reason, and she was tacking now that she might run deeper into the fog and out of the way of harm from the fort batteries. These were not wasting any more ammunition upon her, or rather upon the mist and the sea. Only her topsails had been seen, in the first place, and these had been quickly hidden again. The two vessels were, nevertheless, drawing nearer to each other, unawares. There was no carefully kept silence on board the Boxer; on the contrary, her crew were every now and then doing something to send out notice to any ears near enough to hear. At close quarters she would have been a dangerous antagonist for the Yankee schooner. There was nothing at all to be made in a fight with her, and Captain Avery was strongly averse to the idea of having his vessel crippled or worse at the very outset of his voyage.
A wonderful thing is a curtain of sea fog. Sometimes it may be beautiful, but it is never at all under human control. The Noank was running swiftly along and the very breeze which made her do so was getting its grip upon the banks of vapor. It tore one of these in the middle, suddenly. A great rift was opened, and clear water showed across one short half-mile of the tossing sea.
"There she blows!" sang out an old harpooner of the Noank's crew, as if the Boxer had been a whale.
"Luff! Luff!" shouted the British commander. "Bring your guns to bear! We have her! Hurrah!"
"Whoo-oop! Up-na-tan!" came fiercely from behind the breech of the Noank's long eighteen, and the Manhattan's warwhoop was closely followed by the roar of his gun.
"Hard a-lee!" called out Captain Avery. "Sam! Run her into the fog. All hands, to go about. We must get under cover ag'in."
Short range and a good aim, with the Boxer's masts nearly in line, had been bad for the Englishman's triumph. Down came his foretopmast, splintered at the cap, dragging with it enough of spars and hamper to assure that anything like racing condition had been knocked out of the brig. She obeyed her helm, at first. She swung around and her port broadside was delivered; but it was a mere waste of powder and round iron. Not a shot touched the saucy Noank, speeding away through a fog bank.