ty clearly toward the presumption of
tragedy. A quarter of an hour later the catspaws were ruffling the
surface of the water here and there all round us, and stirring our
canvas at rapidly decreasing intervals, with the true breeze coming fast
and close behind them; we, therefore, laid in our sweeps, put the helm
up, trimmed our sheets on the port tack, took a long pull and a strong
pull upon the halliards all round, and paid off just in time to receive
the first of the true breeze into the hollows of our canvas, when,
heeling over to the extent of a strake or so, away we too went, with a
merry buzzing and seething of water under our bows and along our bends.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

THE WASP FIGHTS THE PIRATE SCHOONER.

The pirate schooner--a craft of apparently two hundred tons or more,
very long and low on the water, painted dead black, with immensely tall,
wand-like masts, and an enormous spread of canvas--was now slipping
along fast through the water, heading to the northward, and some six
miles dead to windward of us. It was a long start, and I foresaw that,
fast as the little _Wasp_ undoubtedly was, unless something quite
unforeseen occurred, a good many things might happen before we could get
alongside the enemy. Why such a big powerful vessel--she showed seven
ports of a side, and there was something suspiciously like a long
32-pounder on her forecastle--should turn tail so ignominiously and run
from a little shrimp of a craft like the _Wasp_ I could not imagine,
though I was to receive enlightenment upon that point before long. Our
immediate business, however, was not with her, but with the big ship
that was coming yawing down the wind toward us.

She was now about five miles distant, and as she came driving along, now
stem-on, with her square canvas full, and anon sweeping round until she
presented one or the other of her broadsides to us, with only her
fore-and-aft canvas drawing, we were enabled to get a very good view of
her. She was a big craft, of from nine hundred to a thousand tons,
perhaps, and at a distance might very well have been mistaken for a
man-o'-war. But she was evidently not that, for she showed only four
guns of a side upon her upper-deck, and they were but small, apparently
not more than 6-pounders. She was very heavily rigged, with a wide
spread to her lower yards, but the heads of her square sails narrowed
away to such an extent that her royal-yards looked to be scarcely more