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It is probable some new impression was made on him by this inquiry, for, hailing Mulford, he ordered him to loosen the sails, and to sheet home, and hoist the foretopsail. In a word, to "see all ready to cast off, and make sail on the brig at the shortest notice." With this command he disappeared by the schooner's companion-way.
He ordered more of his men aboard, and had all the canvas clewed up and furled snugly away. While this was being done, the boat plied back and forth between the two vessels, passing a heavy hawser, which was made fast to the great towing-bitts on the schooner's forecastle-head. During all this work the sealers stood about in sullen groups.
Marcy Gray was the only one aboard who carried a light heart. After the schooner's course was changed there was a good deal of suppressed excitement among the crew, for Captain Beardsley was about to take what some of them thought to be a desperate risk.
"She has either run hard and fast aground, or else she is amusing herself with them buoys of our'n," said Beardsley, when he became satisfied that the launch was no longer following in the schooner's wake. "Now, where's that good-looking son of mine who fired the lucky shot that tumbled that Yankee officer overboard? Whoever he is, I'll double his wages.
Captain Watts had swung her broadside on to the entrance, boarding nettings were already triced up from stem to stern, and on the schooner's decks were fifty determined natives, in addition to the usual crew of twenty men, all armed with muskets and cutlasses.
He had become enigmatical and touching, in virtue of that mysterious cause that had driven him through the night and through the thunderstorm to the shelter of the schooner's cuddy. Not one of us doubted that we were looking at a fugitive, incredible as it appeared to us. He was haggard, as though he had not slept for weeks; he had become lean, as though he had not eaten for days.
Consequently, no essential injury had been done the vessel in thus laying her on her screw-dock. "If a body could get the craft off as easily as she was got on," observed Daggett, as he and Roswell Gardiner stood looking at the schooner's situation, "it would be but a light job. But, as it is, she lies on ice at least twenty feet thick, and ice that seems as solid as flint!"
The moment that the boats shoved off from the schooner's side I saw that the spirit of emulation had seized upon the two crews, for they both went away at a racing pace, and their actions throughout were evidently inspired by this same spirit; the result of which was that the two batteries were destroyed within five minutes of each other, while the whole affair, from the moment when the boats shoved off to the moment when they arrived alongside again, was accomplished within an hour and a quarter, and that, too, without any loss whatever on our side, or even a wound severe enough to disable the recipient.
Meanwhile we were precluded from returning the barque's fire lest we should injure or kill any of the unhappy wretches pent up in her hold. At length a round-shot entered the schooner's bows, traversed the decks, and passed out over the taffrail, glancing hither and thither as it went, and, although it did no material damage, affording several of the men a very narrow escape.
On deck we are nearly as badly littered, though in more orderly fashion. Two nests of dories, a row boat, five water tanks, a gunning float, and an exploring boat, partly well fill the Julia's spacious decks. The other exploring boat hangs inside the schooner's yawl at the stern.
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