"Man the relieving tackles, Mr. Hubbard. Jib sheet, there! Haul out to starboard."
The Delaware was rapidly gathering sternway; Peabody could hear the bubble of water under the counter in the eerie silence which had settled on the ship. It seemed to take a strangely long time to work the ship's head round and get her under control again.
"Jib sheets, there! Are you asleep?"
"Tiller rope's jammed with the helm a bit to starboard, sir," reported Hubbard.
"Clear it, then. Jib sheets! Haul out to port!"
That was better; the Delaware was coming round again into control, but she was circling away from the Racer, which was barely visible as a dark mass a full half-mile away. It would take some time to work to windward and close with her again.
"Tiller rope's cleared, sir."
"Keep her on the wind on this tack, then."
The Racer was a disabled wreck, as helpless as the Calypso. She would be able to do nothing tonight to protect the convoy. Peabody searched the darkness to leeward. There was the brig! She had given up the attempt to join the battle, and was heading away with the wind on her quarter to evade the Delaware and rejoin the convoy. He might have guessed that she would.
"Hard up, the helm!" said Peabody.
There was not time to destroy the Racer and still be able to head off the Bulldog; he put the Delaware before the wind again and went charging down upon the brig in the darkness. The stars were already out, gleaming over the dark sea, and the moon was lighting a wide path over the waves, and the two battered wrecks were being left far behind. Five minutes later Peabody saw the brig abruptly alter course to avoid being intercepted, and he brought the Delaware round in pursuit, staring after her amid the clatter and racket of the working party who were busy rigging a jury wheel. An hour later there came a hail from aloft.
"Deck there! There's a light way off on the starboard beam. Might be a burning ship, sir."
It must have been a burning ship — two minutes after the hail the light was visible from the deck, reflected in a yellow glow from the clouds in the sky, lighting a quarter of the heavens. Evidently Gooding and Curtis were in among the convoy — that blaze meant that they were destroying a worthless capture. So the brig could go on holding that course until she ran aground in Cuba, if she wanted to. The Delaware had achieved what she had set out to do. All that remained to be done was to lay her on such a course as would be likely to keep the escort ships from rejoining the convoy, and give a chance of picking up stragglers; then to go round the ship and give whatever orders were necessary to make her as efficient a fighting unit as possible; and after that there would be a chance of finding out what had happened to Jonathan.
Chapter VI
CAPTAIN PEABODY looked over the side of the Delaware as she crawled along in the hot sunshine with bare steerageway.
"Mr. Atwell," he said, harshly.
The young third lieutenant came running across to him.
"You're not attending to your duty, Mr. Atwell. What is that floating there?"
Atwell followed with his gaze Peabody's gnarled forefinger.
"An orange, sir," he said, haltingly. The orange rose on a little wave against the ship's quarter and drifted astern.
"Did you see anything about that orange which interested you?" asked Peabody.
"N-no, sir," said Atwell.
"Then either your eyesight or your wits aren't as good as they should be," said Peabody. "That orange had a piece bitten out of it. And its sides were hollow instead of rounded. What does that tell you?"
"Someone has been sucking it, sir," said Atwell, a little bewildered at all this fuss over a mere orange already a hundred yards back in the ship's wake.
"Yes," said Peabody, and he was about to continue with his Socratic questioning when his expression changed and he pointed again to something floating past the ship.
"And what's that?" he snapped.
"Coconut shell, sir," said Atwell, and a light dawned upon him. "Some ship's emptied her slush bucket overside."
"And not merely that, Mr. Atwell. Oranges and coconuts — where does that ship hail from?"
"The West Indies, sir!" said Atwell.
"Yes," said Peabody. "That means we're in the track of some part of the convoy. Now do you understand why you should have seen it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Don't neglect your duty again, Mr. Atwell," said Peabody, turning away.
Atwell was a "good officer," thought Peabody. There was never any slackness about the men when he had charge of the deck, and the sails were always properly set, and the helmsman was always on his course. But there was another side of the picture. Officers of that sort were so engrossed in the details of their routine duties that they had no thought to spare for anything else. And not merely that; years of routine duties had a stunting effect upon their imaginations and logical faculties. Atwell ought to have made deductions from the sight of that floating rubbish instantly. Peabody was afraid that Atwell would never develop into a great commander, into a Truxtun or a Decatur.
But the sight of that rubbish confirmed Peabody in his conclusions as to the movements of the convoy. He had acted correctly in taking the Delaware through the Caicos Passage. The convoy, scattering like sheep before the wolves of privateers, must have headed for the Atlantic by the first route open to them. A dozen rich prizes probably lay only just over the horizon ahead. He looked keenly aloft to make sure that the Delaware was getting every possible yard out of the feeble three-knot breeze which was wafting her lazily along. He would maintain the pursuit for seven days — or until he had taken ten prizes — before he put his ship about again to see what further trouble he could make in the West Indies. He and the Delaware were like a farmer and his money on market day. He had to find the best value he could for her, lay her out to the best advantage in the sure and certain knowledge that sooner or later she would be expended. Lawrence in the Chesapeake had chosen badly; even if he had captured the Shannon a captured British frigate would have been a poor exchange for the cutting up and crippling of an American one. Porter had the better notion when he headed for the Pacific instead of making a dash for home — Peabody wondered how the cruise of the Essex in the Pacific was succeeding.
A sorry procession was coming on deck. The wounded and sick were returning from their morning visit to the surgeon. Jonathan was leading them, his left arm in a sling — a flying fragment of iron from the burst cannon had gone through the muscles above the elbow — and behind him followed men with bandaged heads, with bandaged legs, and after them came the sick bay attendants carrying in canvas slings the men who were too injured to walk. Downing, the surgeon, and Hoyle, the surgeon's mate, followed, and supervised the laying of the wounded against the spars in the shadow of the mainsail. They were a couple of surgeons from New York, obsessed with fantastic ideas; they had the notion that sick men should not be kept in a comfortably dark 'tween-decks. They were perfectly convinced that sunshine did sick men good, and they even declared that there was no danger for them in night air at sea. Downing was most emphatic on the point that once-breathed air had a deleterious effect upon the system, in defiance of the common knowledge that air thoroughly warmed and humanized was far better than raw fresh stuff. Peabody himself could not sleep if there was a suspicion of a draught in his cabin, and as a New Englander born he was innately suspicious of Yorkers, but he had not been able to enforce his ideas upon the two mad doctors. By virtue of their warrants from the Secretary of the Navy they were independent of him in the matter of the sick, and they traded upon the fact quite shamelessly, littering the neat deck with sick men, and always willing to argue with their captain.