The next observation that trickled out of Fullalove’s tube was this:  “I judge there are too few hands on deck, and too many—­white—­eyeballs—­glittering at the portholes.”

“Confound it!” muttered Bayliss, uneasily; “how can you see that?”

Fullalove replied only by quietly handing his glass to Dodd.  The captain, thus appealed to, glued his eye to the tube.

“Well, sir; see the false ports, and the white eyebrows?” asked Sharpe, ironically.

“I see this is the best glass I ever looked through,” said Dodd doggedly, without interrupting his inspection.

“I think he is a Malay pirate,” said Mr. Grey.

Sharpe took him up very quickly, and, indeed, angrily:  “Nonsense!  And if he is, he won’t venture on a craft of this size.”

“Says the whale to the swordfish,” suggested Fullalove, with a little guttural laugh.

The captain, with the American glass at his eye, turned half round to the man at the wheel:  “Starboard!”

“Starboard it is.”

“Steer South South East.”

“Ay, ay, sir.”  And the ship’s course was thus altered two points.

This order lowered Dodd fifty per cent in Mr. Sharpe’s estimation.  He held his tongue as long as he could:  but at last his surprise and dissatisfaction burst out of him, “Won’t that bring him out on us?”

“Very likely, sir,” replied Dodd.

“Begging your pardon, captain, would it not be wiser to keep our course, and show the blackguard we don’t fear him?”

“When we do?  Sharpe, he has made up his mind an hour ago whether to lie still, or bite; my changing my course two points won’t change his mind; but it may make him declare it; and I must know what he does intend, before I run the ship into the narrows ahead.”

“Oh, I see,” said Sharpe, half convinced.

The alteration in the Agra’s course produced no movement on the part of the mysterious schooner.  She lay to under the land still, and with only a few hands on deck, while the Agra edged away from her and entered the straits between Long Island and Point Leat, leaving the schooner about two miles and a half distant to the N.W.

Ah!  The stranger’s deck swarms black with men.

His sham ports fell as if by magic, his guns grinned through the gaps like black teeth; his huge foresail rose and filled, and out he came in chase.

The breeze was a kiss from Heaven, the sky a vaulted sapphire, the sea a million dimples of liquid, lucid, gold. . . .

The way the pirate dropped the mask, showed his black teeth, and bore up in chase, was terrible:  so dilates and bounds the sudden tiger on his unwary prey.  There were stout hearts among the officers of the peaceful Agra; but danger in a new form shakes the brave; and this was their first pirate:  their dismay broke out in ejaculations not loud but deep. . . .