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"Now let me see if I can hit the fellow," exclaimed Hanks, growing impatient at our want of success; and stooping down and taking a steady look along the gun, he fired. A fearful shriek was the answer sent back from the lugger's deck. She was standing on as before, her rigging untouched, and her hull apparently unharmed. That sound must have been the death-cry of some of her crew.
The skiff which Raoul, having found it lying on the beach, had made free with without leave, he anchored, in the full expectation that its right owner might find it some day or other; while its cargo was transferred to the yawl, which was one of the lugger's own attendants.
Order was quickly restored, the lashings cast off, and the lugger's crew returning to her, the two vessels pursued their course as before. The Frenchmen now saw that all hope of escape was gone, and quietly submitted to their fate. The night was sufficiently light to enable the cutter and her prize to make their way up Plymouth harbour.
Raoul did as the other desired, and after a short trial he found that the coaster had no perceptible motion ahead, while it was certain she was drifting down with the current directly athwart the lugger's hawse. This satisfied him that she must have drags astern; a circumstance that at once denoted a hostile intention.
"I should think there would be but little danger of the lugger's departing in the night, Signor Tenente, her commander rather expressing an intention of passing several days with us; and it is this ease and confidence of his which cause me to think that he cannot be the person you take him for. Why should Raoul Yvard and le Feu-Follet come into Porto Ferrajo at all?"
Had it not been for Ithuel's very positive knowledge of the ship his entire certainty of her being his old prison, as he bitterly called her it is not improbable that the lugger's crew might have been the dupe of so much well-acted ingenuity; and as it was, opinions were greatly divided, Raoul himself being more than half disposed to fancy that his American ally, for once, was wrong, and that the ship in sight was actually what she professed to be a cruiser of the republic.
The former was travelling the faster, but a gun was fired from the cutter's bow, and the shot struck splinters from the lugger's quarter. The crew were on deck again now. "Train that gun over the stern," the skipper said. "If we can knock her mast out of her, we are saved. If not, they will have us yet." He had scarcely spoken when there was a crash.
He swung me lightly off the ledge into the lugger's bows. "Now, come," he said; "you're not going to cry. I'm going to make a man of you. Here, you must put on this suit of wrap-rascal, and these here knee-boots, or you'll be cold to the bone,'specially if you're sick. Put 'em on, son, before we sail."
There it all was, the soft murmur of the sea he could almost fancy he heard it lap the lugger's sides; and certainly as he gazed more intently down, there was a dark break in the line of foam. That, then, must be the lugger.
The felucca fell broad off, and came down almost in a direct line for the lugger's bows before the wind and current, moving fast enough now to satisfy all Ithuel's scruples. "Call all hands to repel boarders!" cried Raoul, springing aft to the capstan and seizing his own arms "Come up lively, mes enfans! here is treachery!"
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