Chapter 6

but the banner of law and right flying from her topmast yet showed in the dusk. Forgetful as before of his own danger, he began to have a fear that the pirate would escape. Under his breath he entreated the avenging sloop to come on, to sail faster and faster, he begged her gunners to aim aright despite the darkness, to rake the decks of the schooner with grape and to send the heavy round shot into her vitals.

The sloop kept up a continuous fire with her bow guns. The heavy reports crashed through the darkness, the sounds rolling sullenly away, and not every shot went wild. There was a tearing of sails, a splintering of spars, a shattering of wood, and now and then the fall of a man. Under the insistent and continuous urgence of the captain the men on the schooner replied with the Long Tom in her stern, and, when one of the shots swept the deck of the sloop, the fierce, dark sailors shouted in joy. Robert saw with a sinking of the heart that the gap between the two vessels was still widening, while almost the last star was gone from the heavens, and it was now so dark that everything was hidden a few hundred yards away.

"We'll lose her! We'll lose her yet!" cried the captain. "Winds and the night fight for us. See you, Peter, we must be the chosen children of fortune, for this can hardly be chance!"

Robert said nothing, because it seemed for the time at least that the captain's words were true. A sudden and tremendous gust of wind caught the schooner and drove her on, ragged and smashed though she was, at increased speed, while the same narrow belt of wind seemed to miss the sloop. The result was apparent at once. The gap between them became a gulf. The flag flying so proudly on the topmast of the sloop was gone in the dusk. Her spars and sails faded away, she showed only a dim, low hulk on the water from which her guns flashed.

The schooner tacked again. A new bank of blackness poured down over the sea, and the sloop was gone.

"It was a trap and we sailed straight into it," exclaimed the captain, "but it couldn't hold us. We've escaped!"

He spoke the truth. They drove steadily on a long time, and saw no more of the sloop of war.