re hauled down and stowed away in their respective chests, and the
little vessels parted company without either one knowing who the other
was. But there was an angry lot of men on board the _Hattie._ Beardsley
showed that he was one of them by the hard words he used when he came
down from aloft and sent a lookout up to take his place, and Tierney,
after shaking his fist at the Yankee, shut one eye, glanced along the
rail with the other, as he had glanced through the sights of the
howitzer he once commanded, and then jerked back his right hand as if he
were pulling a lock-string. Marcy Gray was the only one aboard who
carried a light heart.

After the schooner's course was changed there was a good deal of
suppressed excitement among the crew, for Captain Beardsley was about to
take what some of them thought to be a desperate risk. Probably there
were no cruisers off Hatteras when that merchant vessel passed, but that
was all of fifteen or twenty hours ago, and they had had plenty of time
to get back to their stations. So a bright lookout was kept by all
hands, and Beardsley or one of the mates went aloft every few minutes to
take a peep through the glass. Marcy thought there was good cause for
watchfulness and anxiety. In the first place, the Bahama Islands, of
which Nassau, in the Island of New Providence, was the principal port,
lay off the coast of Florida, and about five hundred miles southeast of
Charleston. They must have been at least twice as far from Crooked
Inlet, so that Captain Beardsley, by selecting Newbern as his home port,
ran twice the risk of falling into the hands of the Federal cruisers
that he would if he had decided to run his contraband cargo into
Savannah or Charleston.

"It seems to me that the old man ought to have learned wisdom after
living for so many years in defiance of the law," thought Marcy, when it
came his turn to go aloft and relieve the lookout. "Of course a smuggler
has to take his chances with the revenue cutters he is liable to meet
along the coast, as well as with the Custom House authorities, and I
should think that constant fear of capture would have made him sly and
cautious; but it hasn't."--"Nothing in sight, sir," he said, in answer
to an inquiry from the officer who had charge of the deck.

And this was the report that was sent down by every lookout who went
aloft during the next four days; and what a time of excitement and
suspense that was for Marcy Gray and all the re