young man sighed a sigh of relief, and flung from his
shoulders the heavy load of care and anxiety that had of late been
wearing him down a great deal more than he knew or even suspected: for
now, at last, the expedition that meant so much to him had actually
begun, and very soon he would know the best and the worst that was to be
known; and perhaps, after all, the worst might prove to be not nearly so
bad as he had been led to believe. Alvaros, he was convinced, was not
only a blatant braggart, but also an unmitigated liar, and it might be
that the foul deed of which he had boasted had never happened, and that
the boast was merely another lie.

Milsom, regarding his companion with a sympathetic eye, noted how Jack
straightened up and flung back his shoulders like a fighter preparing
for the fray, and how his eye brightened and his cheek flushed as the
strong, salt breeze met his nostrils and swept into his lungs,
exhilarating as a draught of wine--and chuckled, for he knew now that
the worst was over, and that the collapse which he had been half-
dreading would not now come. As for himself, he was as happy as a man
can be who is unable to forget that a calamity has befallen certain of
his friends. But he was a keen, light-hearted sailor, intensely fond of
his profession, and he was now fairly started upon an expedition that
very strongly appealed to his professional instincts; he felt like a
hunter, and the exhilarating excitement of stalking and running down his
prey tended to very largely obliterate the memory of everything else.
And he was throwing himself heart and soul into this mad undertaking of
Jack's for the deliverance of their friends; he saw the difficulty and
recognised the extreme danger of the adventure, and with keen zest he
laid himself out to conquer the one and evade the other. Even now, when
the yacht had but barely cleared the harbour mouth, he adopted his first
ruse for the mystification of the foe, for he understood that it was
quite possible that some curious eye might follow the course of the
vessel and possibly suspect something if it were seen that she was going
the same road that the convict steamer would be following a few days
later; he therefore instructed the helmsman to make a very wide and
gradual sweep to the eastward, hauling up almost imperceptibly at the
rate of a point every quarter of an hour, and thus rendering it
absolutely impossible for an observer to guess whether the _T