. She was long and lean, and as loose forward as an old
market basket.

Loose and lean and low, she was wiggling like a black snake through the
white-topped seas. We had men in our foretop looking for the guard-ship,
and because they knew almost exactly where to look for her, we saw her
in time and swung the _Bess_ inside her, yet closer to the breakers. Her
big bulk piled toward us, her great sails reached up in clouds--shadows
of clouds. Past our bow, past our waist, past our quarter. We could pick
the painted ports and the protruding black muzzles of her port battery
as she passed, a huge shapeless shadow racing one way, and we going the
other way like some long, sinuous, black devil of a creature streaking
through a white-bedded darkness.

We were by before they were alive to it. A voice, another voice, a
hundred voices, and then we saw her green sidelight swing in a great
arc; but long before then we were away on the other tack, and so when
her broadside belched (and there was metal sufficient to blow us out of
water), we were half a mile away and leaping like a black hound to the
westward.

A score of rockets followed the broadside. Captain Blaise glanced
astern, then ahead, aloft, and from there to the swinging hull beneath
him. He started to hum a tune, but broke it off, to recite:

"O the woe of wily Hassan
When they break the tragic news!"

And from that he turned to Miss Cunningham with a joyous, "And what d'y'
think of it all?"

She looked her answer, with her head held high and breathing deeply.

"And the _Dancing Bess_, isn't she a little jewel of a ship? Something
to love? Aye, she is. And you had no fear?"

"Fear!" Her laughter rang out. "When father went below, he said, 'Fear
nothing. If Captain Blaise gets caught, there's no help for it--it's
fate.'"

And I knew he was satisfied. She had seen him on the quarter of his own
ship and he playing the game at which, the _Bess_ under his _feet_, no
living man could beat him; and in playing it he had brought her father
and herself to freedom. It was for such moments he lived.

The night was fading. We could now see things close by. He took her hand
and patted it. "Go below, child, and sleep in peace. You're headed for
home. Look at her slipping through the white-topped seas, and when she
lays down to her work--there's nothing ever saw the African coast can
overhaul us. No, nothing that ever leaped the belted trades can hold her
now, not the _B