hts dancing before them instead of two, as there ought to have been,
and at last Captain Beardsley's worst fears were confirmed. The relative
position of the red and green lights ahead slowly changed until they
were almost in line with each other, and Marcy was sailor enough to know
what that meant. The steamer had caught sight of the _Hattie_, was
keeping watch of her, and had altered her course to intercept her. Marcy
began to tremble.

"I know how a prison looks when viewed from the outside," he said to
himself. "And unless something turns up in our favor, it will not be
many days before I shall know how one looks on the inside."

It was plain that his two companions were troubled by the same gloomy
thoughts, for he heard Beardsley say, in a husky voice:

"She ain't holding a course for nowhere, neither for the Indies nor the
Cape; she shifted her wheel when we did, and that proves that she's a
Yankee cruiser and nothing else. See any signs of a freshening
anywhere?"

"Nary freshening," replied the mate, with a hasty glance around the
horizon. "There ain't a cloud as big as your fist in sight."

Of course Beardsley used some heavy words--he always did when things did
not go to suit him--and then he said, as if he were almost on the point
of crying with vexation:

"It's too bad for them cowardly Yankees to come pirating around here
just at this time when we've got a big fortune in our hands. Them goods
we've got below is worth a cool hundred thousand dollars in Newbern, if
they're worth anything, and my commission will be somewhere in the
neighborhood of twenty-five per cent.; dog-gone it all. Can't we do
nothing to give her the slip? You ain't fitten to be a mate if you can't
give a word of advice in a case like this."

"And if I wanted to be sassy I might say that you ain't fit to command a
ship if you can't get her out of trouble when you get her into it. There
can't no advice be given that I can see, unless it be to chuck the cargo
over the side. I reckon that would be my way if I was master of the
_Hattie._

"But what good would that do?" exclaimed Beardsley. "Where are my
dockyments to prove that I am an honest trader? And even if I had some,
and the cargo was safe out of the hold and sunk to the bottom, I
couldn't say that I am in ballast, because I ain't got a pound of any
sort of ballast to show. Oh, I tell you we're gone coons, Morgan. Do the
Yankees put striped clothes on their prisoners when they