hide his emotion, he turned his face towards the sea-line, opposite the
hazy streak that meant land.

"There she is again.... She is following us!" he said.

"What?" cried the Spanish captain.

"There is a vessel," muttered the General.

"I saw her yesterday," answered Captain Gomez. He looked at his
interlocutor as if to ask what he thought; then he added in the
General's ear, "She has been chasing us all along."

"Then why she has not come up with us, I do not know," said the General,
"for she is a faster sailor than your damned _Saint-Ferdinand_."

"She will have damaged herself, sprung a leak--"

"She is gaining on us!" the General broke in.

"She is a Columbian privateer," the captain said in his ear, "and we are
still six leagues from land, and the wind is dropping."

"She is not _going_ ahead, she is flying, as if she knew that in two
hours' time her prey would escape her. What audacity!"

"Audacity!" cried the captain. "Oh! she is not called the _Othello_ for
nothing. Not so long back she sank a Spanish frigate that carried thirty
guns! This is the one thing I was afraid of, for I had a notion that she
was cruising about somewhere off the Antilles.--Aha!" he added after a
pause, as he watched the sails of his own vessel, "the wind is rising;
we are making way. Get through we must, for 'the Parisian' will show us
no mercy."

"She is making way too!" returned the General.

The _Othello_ was scarce three leagues away by this time; and although
the conversation between the Marquis and Captain Gomez had taken place
apart, passengers and crew, attracted by the sudden appearance of a
sail, came to that side of the vessel. With scarcely an exception,
however, they took the privateer for a merchantman, and watched her
course with interest, till all at once a sailor shouted with some energy
of language:

"By Saint-James, it is all up with us! Yonder is the Parisian captain!"

At that terrible name dismay, and a panic impossible to describe, spread
through the brig. The Spanish captain's orders put energy into the
crew for a while; and in his resolute determination to make land at all
costs, he set all the studding sails, and crowded on every stitch
of canvas on board. But all this was not the work of a moment; and
naturally the men did not work together with that wonderful unanimity
so fascinating to watch on board a man-of-war. The _Othello_ meanwhile,
thanks to the trimming of her sails, flew over the