“Mr. Jones,” he said, “call away my gig.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Jones, the astonishment in his voice hardly concealed at all.
Hornblower walked to the binnacle and took a careful reading of how the ship’s head lay. It was the most careful reading he could possibly take, not because his comfort or his safety but because his personal dignity depended on getting that reading right. North by East half East. As the ship lay riding to her anchor bows to the tide he could be sure that the oar had come down from that direction.
“I want a good boat compass in the gig, Mr. Jones, if you please.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Hornblower hesitated before the last final order, which would commit him to a public admission that he thought there was a chance of something serious awaiting him in the fog. But not to give the order would be to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. If that had really been a musket shot that he had heard there was a possibility of action; there was a likelihood that at least a show of force would be necessary.
“Pistols and cutlasses for the gig’s crew, Mr. Jones, if you please.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Jones, as if nothing could astonish him again.
Hornblower turned back as he was about to step down into the boat.
“I shall start timing you from this moment, Mr. Jones. Try to get those tops’l yards across in half an hour from now—I’ll be back before then.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The ship broke into a roar of activity as Hornblower took his place in the sternsheets of the gig.
“I’ll take the tiller,” he said to the coxswain. “Give way.”
He steered the gig along the Atropos from stern to bow. He took one last look up at her bows, at her bowsprit and bobstay, and then the fog swallowed them up. The gig was instantly in a world of its own, constricted about by the walls of mist. The sounds of activity on board the ship died rapidly away.
“Pull steady!” growled Hornblower to the man at the oars. That little boat compass would be swinging about chasing its tail in ten seconds if he allowed the gig to keep anything except an exactly straight course. North by East half East.
“Seventeen,” said Hornblower to himself. “Eighteen. Nineteen.”
He was counting the strokes of the oars; it was a rough way of estimating the progress made. At seven feet to the stroke less than two hundred strokes meant a quarter of a mile. But there was the speed of the tide to be allowed for. It would be nearer five hundred strokes—all very vague, but every possible precaution must be taken on a foolish expedition like Otis.
“Seventyfour, seventyfive,” said Hornblower, his eyes glued to the compass.
Even with the brisk tide running the surface of the sea was a glassy flat calm; the oarblades, lifting from the water at the completion of each stroke, left whirlpools circling on the surface.
“Two hundred,” said Hornblower, suppressing a momentary fear that he had miscounted and that it was really three hundred.
The oars groaned on monotonously in the rowlocks.
“Keep your eyes ahead,” said Hornblower to the coxswain. “Tell me the moment you see anything. Two sixtyfour.”
It seemed only yesterday that he had sat in the sternsheets of the jolly boat of the Indefatigable, rowing up the estuary of the Gironde to cut out the Papillon. But that was more than ten years ago. Three hundred. Three hundred and fifty.
“Sir,” said the coxswain, tersely.
Hornblower looked forward. Ahead, a trifle on the port bow, there was the slightest thickening in the fog, the slightest looming of something solid there.
“Easy all!” said Hornblower, and the boat continued to glide over the surface; he put the tiller over slightly so as to approach whatever it was more directly. But the boat’s way died away before they were near enough to distinguish any details, and at Hornblower’s command the men began to row again. Distantly came a low hail out of the fog, apparently called forth by the renewal of the sound of the oars.
“Boat ahoy!”
At least the hail was in English. By now there was visible the vague outlines of a large brig; from the heaviness of her spars and fast lines she looked like one of the West India packets.
“What brig’s that?” hailed Hornblower in reply.
“Amelia Jane of London, thirtyseven days out from Barbados.”
That was a direct confirmation of Hornblower’s first impression. But that voice? It did not sound quite English, somehow. There were foreign captains in the British merchant service, plenty of them, but hardly likely to be in command of a West India packet.
“Easy,” said Hornblower to the rowers, the gig glided silently on over the water. He could see no sign of anything wrong.
“Keep your distance,” said the voice from the brig.
There was nothing suspicious about the words. Any ship at anchor hardly more than twenty miles from the coast of France was fully entitled to be wary of strangers approaching in a fog. But that word sounded more like “deestance” all the same. Hornblower put his helm over to pass under the brig’s stern. Several heads were now apparent at the brig’s side; they moved round the stern in time with the gig. There was the brig’s name, sure enough. Amelia Jane, London. Then Hornblower caught sight of something else; it was a large boat lying under the brig’s port quarter from the main chains. There might be a hundred possible explanations of that, but it was a suspicious circumstance.
“Brig ahoy!” he hailed, “I’m coming aboard.”
“Keep off!” said the voice in reply.
Some of the heads at the brig’s side developed shoulders, and three or four muskets were pointed at the gig.
“I am a King’s officer,” said Hornblower.
He stood up in the sternsheets and unbuttoned his peajacket so that his uniform was visible. The central figure at the brig’s side, the man who had been speaking, looked for a long moment and then spread his hands in a gesture of despair.
“Yes,” he said.
Hornblower went up the brig’s side as briskly as his chilled limbs would permit. As he stood on the deck he felt a trifle selfconscious of being unarmed, for facing him were more than a dozen men, hostility in their bearing, and some of them with muskets in their hands. But the gig’s crew had followed him on the deck and closed up behind him, handling their cutlasses and pistols.
“Cap’n, sir!” It was the voice from overside of one of the two men left down in the gig. “Please, sir, there’s a dead man in the boat here.”
Hornblower turned away to look over. A dead man certainly lay there, doubled up in the bottom of the boat. That accounted for the floating oar, then. And for the shot, of course. The man had been killed by a bullet from the brig at the moment the boat was laid alongside; the brig had been taken by boarding. Hornblower looked back towards the group on the deck.
“Frenchmen?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
The fellow was a man of sense. He had not attempted a hopeless resistance when his coup had been discovered. Although he had fifteen men at his back and there were only eight altogether in the gig he had realized that the presence of a King’s ship in the immediate vicinity made his final capture a certainty.
“Where’s the crew?” asked Hornblower.
The Frenchman pointed forward, and at a gesture from Hornblower one of his men ran to release the brig’s crew from their confinement in the forecastle, half a dozen coloured hands and a couple of officers.