They had flung themselves with a will into the labour of warping out of the bay, and not one of them looked back with regret to the refuge which alone had made their homeward voyage possible. They had chattered and played antics like a crew of monkeys when they dashed aloft to set sail, and the watch below had danced and set to partners through the warm evening while the Lydia bowled along with a favourable breeze over the blue Pacific. Then during the night the wind died away with its usual tropical freakishness, from a good breeze to a faint air, and from a faint air to a slow succession of fluky puffs which set the sails slatting and the rigging creaking and kept the watch continually at work at the braces trimming the sails.
Hornblower awoke in his cot in the cool hour before dawn. It was still too dark to see the tell-tale compass in the deck over his head, but he could guess from the long roll of the ship and the intermittent noises overhead that calm weather had overtaken them. It was almost time for him to start his morning walk on the quarterdeck, and he rested, blissfully free of all feeling of responsibility, until Polwheal came in to get out his clothes. He was putting on his trousers when a hail from the masthead lookout came echoing down through the scuttle.
“Sail ho! Broad on the larboard beam. It’s that there lugger again, sir.”
That feeling of freedom from worry vanished on the instant. Twice had that ill-omened lugger been seen in this very Gulf of Panama, and twice she had been the bearer of bad news. Hornblower wondered, with a twinge of superstition, what this third encounter would bring forth. He snatched his coat from Polwheal’s hands and put it on as he dashed up the companionway.
The lugger was there, sure enough, lying becalmed some two miles away; there were half a dozen glasses trained on her — apparently Hornblower’s officers shared his superstition.
“There’s something about that craft’s rig which gives me the horrors,” grumbled Gerard.
“She’s just a plain Spanish guarda-costa,” said Crystal. “I’ve seen ’em in dozens. I remember off Havana —”
“Who hasn’t seen ’em?” snapped Gerard. “I was saying — hullo! There’s a boat putting off.”
He glanced round and saw his captain appearing on the deck.
“Lugger’s sending a boat, sir.”
Hornblower did his best to make his expression one of sturdy indifference. He told himself that commanding, as he did, the fastest and most powerful ship on the Pacific coast, he need fear nothing. He was equipped and ready to sail half round the world, to fight any ship up to fifty guns. The sight of the lugger ought to cause him no uneasiness, but it did.
For long minutes they watched the boat come bobbing towards them over the swell. At first it was only a black speck showing occasionally on the crests Then the flash of the oar blades could be seen, as they reflected the rays of the nearly level sun, and then the oars themselves, as the boat grew like some great black water beetle creeping over the surface, and at last she was within hail, and a few minutes after for the third time the young Spanish officer in his brilliant uniform mounted to the Lydia’s deck and received Hornblower’s bow.
He made no attempt to conceal his curiosity, nor the admiration which blended with it. He saw that the jury mizzen mast had disappeared and had been replaced by a new spar as trim and as efficient as any set up in a navy yard; he saw that the shot holes had been expertly patched; he noticed that the pumps were no longer at work — that in fact during the sixteen days since he last saw her the ship had been entirely refitted, and, to his certain knowledge, without any aid from the shore and in no harbour save perhaps for some deserted inlet.
“It surprises me to see you here again, sir,” he said.
“To me,” said Hornblower, with perfect courtesy, “it is a pleasure as well as a surprise.”