It was now afternoon, the sun being behind the two vessels as they headed for the harbour.  “The beetle’s little joke shall soon be over,” thought Jasper, without any great animosity.  As a seaman well acquainted with that part of the world, a casual glance was enough to tell him what was being done.  “Hallo,” he thought, “he is going through Spermonde Passage.  We shall be rounding Tamissa reef presently.”  And again he returned to the contemplation of his brig, that main-stay of his material and emotional existence which would be soon in his hands again.  On a sea, calm like a millpond, a heavy smooth ripple undulated and streamed away from her bows, for the powerful Neptun was towing at great speed, as if for a wager.  The Dutch gunner appeared on the forecastle of the Bonito, and with him a couple of men.  They stood looking at the coast, and Jasper lost himself in a loverlike trance.

The deep-toned blast of the gunboat’s steam-whistle made him shudder by its unexpectedness.  Slowly he looked about.  Swift as lightning he leaped from where he stood, bounding forward along the deck.

“You will be on Tamissa reef!” he yelled.

High up on the bridge Heemskirk looked back over his shoulder heavily; two seamen were spinning the wheel round, and the Neptun was already swinging rapidly away from the edge of the pale water over the danger.  Ha! just in time.  Jasper turned about instantly to watch his brig; and, even before he realised that—­in obedience, it appears, to Heemskirk’s orders given beforehand to the gunner—­ the tow-rope had been let go at the blast of the whistle, before he had time to cry out or to move a limb, he saw her cast adrift and shooting across the gunboat’s stern with the impetus of her speed.  He followed her fine, gliding form with eyes growing big with incredulity, wild with horror.  The cries on board of her came to him only as a dreadful and confused murmur through the loud thumping of blood in his ears, while she held on.  She ran upright in a terrible display of her gift of speed, with an incomparable air of life and grace.  She ran on till the smooth level of water in front of her bows seemed to sink down suddenly as if sucked away; and, with a strange, violent tremor of her mast-heads she stopped, inclined her lofty spars a little, and lay still.  She lay still on the reef, while the Neptun, fetching a wide circle, continued at full speed up Spermonde Passage, heading for the town.  She lay still, perfectly still, with something ill-omened and unnatural in her attitude.  In an instant the subtle melancholy of things touched by decay had fallen on her in the sunshine; she was but a speck in the brilliant emptiness of space, already lonely, already desolate.

“Hold him!” yelled a voice from the bridge.

Jasper had started to run to his brig with a headlong impulse, as a man dashes forward to pull away with his hands a living, breathing, loved creature from the brink of destruction.  “Hold him!  Stick to him!” vociferated the lieutenant at the top of the bridge-ladder, while Jasper struggled madly without a word, only his head emerging from the heaving crowd of the Neptun’s seamen, who had flung themselves upon him obediently.  “Hold—­I would not have that fellow drown himself for anything now!”