each shot.'
No. The broadside speckled the sea in the Spartan's wake, short and poorly grouped.
'House your guns,' he said, and they did so, looking at him nervously. But this was no time for recrimination with the Spartan already making better than five knots -. a cable's length farther away every minute - and the breeze, the true, the steady breeze this time, spreading south to reach the Surprise. He studied the course of the wind with the keenest attention, unaware of the towel, the dry shirt and coat that Killick held out, mute for once, and he called 'Man the fore clew-garnets.'
His mind was wholly concerned with making up these lost miles, for not only had the Spartan gained this flying start, but all the Surprise's former gain was now so much handicap. The first high gusts reached the frigate's royals and skysails: she swung round: she gathered steerage-way, and as the sun went down, turning her nascent wake blood-red, he began to make sail. Hitherto she had been beating up, with an array of sharply-braced square sails and staysails reaching almost to the sky; now she was -to have the breeze on her quarter, or very near, and he set studdingsails aloft and alow, with a ringtail to the driver, bonnets, of course,, and save-ails under the studdingsails and even the driver-boom, brought the foretack to the cathead with a passaree, cast off the maintack and hauled the weather-clew of the maincourse to the yard.
All the hands, from the miserable Davies to the wholly irreproachable Bonden, seemed to be suffering from a sense of collective guilt, and his cold, impersonal, objective orders, with never an oath or a hasty word, designed solely to get the last ounce of thrust out of the breeze, quite daunted them. They hurried about in dead silence, with anxious faces; and when he ordered the fire-engine into the tops so that the sails, being wetted, might draw better, they pumped with such force that the jet reached beyond the royals, which ordinarily called for buckets, sent up with a whip.
In the darkening twilight he concentrated all his powers on the exact trim of sails and braces and presently the ship began to speak: her cutwater split a distinct bow-wave and innumerable small bubbles ran down her side with a continuous hiss, while the slightly increasing wind hummed and sang in the rigging. The moon rose directly ahead, and in her path he saw the Spartan, a magnificent wide-winged spread of canvas, like a distant bird; a distant bird, but no more distant than she had been a little while ago. She was no longer obviously gaining.
He loosened his very strong grip of the fife-rail, yawned from hunger, and glanced fore and aft. Over to leeward' he was aware of Stephen and Martin smiling at him, as though willing to be spoken to.
'You are too late for the clock-calm,' he said, remembering that he had sent to them long ago. 'There is a light air from the west at present, and with any luck it may grow into a breeze.'
'We are sorry about the calm,' said Stephen, 'but we thought you might like to view our beetles. They are now fully set out for the first time, a most gratifying sight, covering the entire table and the floor. It cannot last however, the gentlemen of the gunroom being so impatient for their supper.'
'That would give me great pleasure,' said Jack, with a last searching look under the mainsail to the fully- drawing forecourse. 'And if the gunroom - after the bugs, of course - would invite me to take a bite of bread and cheese, how happy I should be. Mr Mowett, pray have the hands piped to supper at last, watch by watch, and tell Killick to rouse me up an elbow-chair, my broad night-glass and a boat-cloak. The dew is falling, so the engine may leave off.'
In this chair, wrapped in his cloak, he spent the long moonlit night, rising at every bell to walk along the gangway to the forecastle and out along the bowsprit to peer at the Spartan with his night-glass between the spritsail course and its topsail. She was maintaining her lead, possibly increasing it, and she was obviously a flyer, commanded by a very able man; but Jack had the feeling that she would not be so happy in heavy weather, and if only the west wind would come on to blow as it sometimes did in these waters, he believed the Surprise would close with her. Apart from anything else he had a way of enabling her to bear an extraordinary press of sail, particularly with the wind abaft the beam: he sent light hawsers and cablets to the mastheads, and although they made the ship look barbarously ugly they did keep her masts standing, where in another ship with the same thrust acting on her they would have carried away shrouds, backstays, preventer-backstays and all.
The moon sailed across the pure sky, and the pale stars in their due sequence; the ship followed her nightly routine with the same kind of ordered regularity. The log was heaved - five knots to five knots two fathoms, no more - the log-board marked by the glow of the binnacle - the depth of water in the well reported - the glass was turned, the bell struck, the helm relieved, and all round the ship the lookouts cried 'All's well'.
At four bells in the middle watch the breeze hauled a little forward, so that Jack filled the mainsail, but apart from that both ships raced over the sea with never a change, as though they were running in a timeless dream.
A little before dawn, with the moon right low astern, Mars blazing in the east, and the head-pump already setting the forecastle awash for the swabbers, the sharp scent of coffee pierced through his reflexions. He walked into his lit cabin, and with half-closed eyes he looked at the quicksilver in the glass: it had not actually gone down, but the top of the column was concave rather than the other way about - there was at least a reasonable hope of wind. Killick brought him the pot and some very old rye bread toasted and asked in a subdued, dutiful tone whether there was anything else he would like. 'Not for the moment,' said Jack. 'I suppose the Doctor is not about?'
'Oh no, sir.' Stephen was a bad sleeper, but he disapproved of the habitual use of soporifics on medical and moral grounds and he usually delayed the taking of his pill or draught until two in the morning, so that he was rarely to be seen before eight or nine o'clock.
'When he is up, say that I should be happy to see him and Mr Martin to dinner, wind and weather permitting. And pass the word for the officer of the watch.' 'Mr Allen,' he said to that officer, 'I shall turn in for a few hours, but I am to be called at the slightest change, either in the weather or the chase.'
A few hours, he said, and they carefully refrained from any noise abaft the mizenmast, cleaning the deck only with silent swabs; but at the changing of the watch there he was, stalking forward to stare at the chase in the brilliant morning. She was almost exactly the same, only sunlit rather than moonlit; she had perhaps drawn a little ahead, but she had not altered her sails - there was indeed very little she could add - and, what was more important, she had not deviated half a degree from her course, northeast by east.
The night's chase had been dreamlike; the day's was scarcely less so, for although there was the prevailing sense of urgency and even crisis and although there was the engine in the tops, squirting with all its might, while the brass long nines stood ready on the forecastle, trained right forward, with their garlands of smooth shot beside them, there was remarkably little to do. With the perfect steadiness of the breeze, it was like rolling down the trades to the Cape, never touching sheet or brace for days and even weeks on end; but whereas in the trades there was always cleaning, painting ship, washing clothes, making and mending, and the many forms of exercise, to say nothing of church and divisions, here nothing was appropriate but the making of wads and the chipping of roundshot. And so to the click-click of fifty or sixty hammers the Surprise ran on, going as fast as the most careful attention to brace and helm could drive her, pursuing a chase that lay perpetually half way to a horizon that perpetually receded before them both.
