– to a tale he had read. Stretched out on the locker under his stern window, Jack revolved this in his mind, revolved it again more slowly, and again, and so sank far down and away.
He woke suddenly, refreshed, cool and perfectly aware that the Sophie had been running easily for a considerable time, with a breeze that leant her over a couple of strakes, bringing her heels higher than his head.
‘I am afraid those damned youngsters woke you, sir,’ said Mr Marshall with solicitous vexation. ‘I sent ’em aloft, but I
fear it was too late Calling out and hallooing like a pack of
baboons. Damn their capars.’
Although he was singularly open and truthful, upon
the whole, Jack at once replied, ‘Oh, I was not asleep.’ On deck he glanced up at the two mastheads, where the midshipmen were peering anxiously down to see whether their offence was reported. Meeting his eye, they at once
stared away, with a great demonstration of earnest duty, in the direction of the snow and her accompanying settee,
rapidly closing with the Sophie on the easterly breeze.
‘There she is,’ said Jack inwardly, with intense satisfaction. ‘And he picked up the settee.
Good, active fellow
capital seaman.’ His heart warmed to Dillon – it would
have been so easy to let that second prize slip away while
be was making sure of the crew of the snow. Indeed, it must
have called for extraordinary exertions on his part to pin the
two of them, for the settee would never have respected her surrender for a moment.
‘Well done, Mr Dillon,’ he cried, as James came aboard, guiding a figure in a tattered, unknown uniform over the side. ‘Did she try to run?’
‘She tried, sir,’ said James. ‘Allow me to present Captain La Hire, of the French royal artillery.’ They took off their hats, bowed and shook hands. La Hire said, ‘Appy,’ in a low, pénétré tone: and Jack said, ‘Domestique, monsieur.’
‘The snow was a Neapolitan prize, sir: Captain La Hire was good enough to take command of the French royalist passengers and the Italian seamen, keeping the prize-crew
under control while we pulled across to take possession of
the settee. I am sorry to say the tartan and the other settee were too far to windward by the time we had secured her,
and they have run down the coast – they are lying under the guns of the battery at Almoraira.’
‘Ah? We will look into the bay when we have the prisoners across. Many prisoners, Mr Dillon?’
‘Only about twenty, sir, since the snow’s people are allies. They were on their way to Gibraltar.’
‘When were they taken?’
‘Oh, she’s a fair prize, sir – a good eight days since.’
‘So much the better. Tell me, was there any trouble?’
‘No, sir. Or very little. We knocked two of the prize-crew on the head, and there was a foolish scuffle aboard the settee
– a man pistolled. I hope all was well with you, sir?’
‘Yes, yes – no one killed, no serious wounds. She ran away from us too fast to do much damage: sailed four miles to our three, even without her royals. A most prodigious fine sailer.’
Jack had a notion that some fleeting reserve passed across James Dillon’s face, or perhaps showed in his voice; but in the hurry of things to be done, prizes to survey, prisoners to be dealt with, he could not tell why it affected him so unpleasantly until some two or three hours later, when the impression was reinforced and at least half defined.
He was in his cabin: spread out on the table was the chart of Cape Nao, with Cape Almoraira and Cape Ifach jutting out from its massive under-side, and the little village of Almoraira at the bottom of the bay between them: on his right sat James, on his left Stephen, and opposite him Mr Marshall.
what is more,’ he was saying, ‘the Doctor tells me the Spaniard says that the other settee has a cargo of quicksilver hidden in sacks of flour, so we must handle her with great care.’
‘Oh, of course,’ said James Dillon. Jack looked at him sharply, then down at the chart and at Stephen’s drawing:
it showed a little bay with a village and a square tower at the bottom of it: a low mole ran twenty or thirty yards out into the sea, turned left-handed for another fifty and ended in a rocky knob, thus enclosing a harbour sheltered from all but the south-west wind. Steep-to cliffs ran from the village right round to the north-east point of the bay. On the other side there was a sandy beach all the way from the tower to• the south-west point, where the cliffs reared up again. ‘Could the fellow possibly think I am shy?’ he thought.
‘That I left off chasing because I did not choose to get hurt and hurried back for a prize?’
The tower commanded the entrance to the harbour; it stood some twenty yards to the south of the village and the gravel beach, where the fishing-boats were hauled out. ‘Now this knob at the
end of the jetty,’ he said aloud, ‘would you say it was ten foot high?’
‘Probably more. It is eight or nine years since I was there,’ said Stephen, ‘so I will not be absolute; but the chapel on it withstands the tall waves in the winter storms.’
‘Then it will certainly protect our hull. Now, with the sloop anchored with a spring on her cable so’ – running his finger in a line from the battery to the rock and so to the spot – ‘she should be tolerably safe. She opens as heavy a fire as she can, playing on the mole and over the tower. The boats from the snow and the settee land at the Doctor’s cove’
– pointing to a little indentation just round the south-west
point – ‘and we run as fast as ever we can along the shore
and so take the tower from behind. Twenty yards short of
it we fire the rocket and you turn your guns well away from the battery, but blaze away without stopping.’
‘Me, sir?’ cried James.
‘Yes, you, sir; I am going ashore.’ There was no answering the decision of this statement, and after a pause he went on to the detailed arrangements. ‘Let us say ten minutes to run from the cove to the tower, and. . .’
‘Allow twenty, if you please,’ said Stephen. ‘You portly men of a sanguine complexion often die suddenly, from un
considered exertion in the heat. Apoplexy – congestion.’
‘I wish, I wish you would not say things like that, Doctor,’ said Jack, in a low tone: they all looked at Stephen with some reproach and Jack added, ‘Besides, I am not portly.’
‘The captain has an uncommon genteel figgar,’ said Mr Marshall.
The conditions were perfect for the attack. The remains
of the easterly wind would carry the Sophie in, and the breeze that would spring up off the land at about moon-rise would carry her into the offing, together with anything they managed to cut out. In his long survey from the masthead, Jack had made out the settee and a number of other vessels moored to the inner wall of the mole, as well as a row of fishing-boats hauled up along the shore: the settee was at the chapel end of the mole, directly opposite the guns of the tower, a hundred yards on the other side of the harbour.
‘I may not be perfect,’ he reflected, ‘but by God I am not shy; and if we cannot bring her out, then by God I shall burn her where she lies.’ But these reflexions did not last long.
From the deck of the Neapolitan snow he watched the Sophie round Cape Almoraira in the three-quarter darkness and stand into the bay, while the two prizes, with the boats in tow, bore away for the point on the other side. With the settee already in the port there was no possibility of surprise for the Sophie, and before she anchored she would have to undergo the fire of the battery. If there was to be a surprise it would lie with the boats: the night was almost certainly too dark now for the prizes to be seen crossing outside the bay to land the boats in Stephen’s cove beyond the point -‘one of the few I know where the white-bellied swift builds her nest’. Jack watched her going with a tender and extreme anxiety, torn with longing to be in both places at once: the possibilities of hideous failure flooded into his mind – the shore guns (how big were they? Stephen had been unable to tell) hulling the Sophie again and again, the heavy shot passing through both sides – the wind falling, or getting up to blow dead on shore – not enough hands left aboard to sweep her out of range – the boats all astray. It was a foolhardy attempt, absurdly rash. ‘Silence fore and aft,’ he cried harshly. ‘Do you want to wake the whole coast?’