While this artifice was being practised on board the Molly Swash, the officers of the Poughkeepsie were not quite satisfied with their own mode of proceeding with the brigantine.  The more they reasoned on the matter, the more unlikely it seemed to them that Spike could be really carrying a cargo of flour from New York to Key West, in the expectation of disposing of it to the United States’ contractors, and the more out of the way did he seem to be in running through the Mona Passage.

“His true course should have been by the Hole in the Wall, and so down along the north side of Cuba, before the wind,” observed the first lieutenant.  “I wonder that never struck you, Wallace; you, who so little like trouble.”

“Certainly I knew it, but we lazy people like running off before the wind, and I did not know but such were Mr. Spike’s tastes,” answered the “ship’s gentleman.”  “In my judgment, the reluctance he showed to letting us have any of his flour, is much the most suspicious circumstance in the whole affair.”

These two speeches were made on the poop, in the presence of the captain, but in a sort of an aside that admitted of some of the ward-room familiarity exhibited.  Captain Mull was not supposed to hear what passed, though hear it he in fact did, as was seen by his own remarks, which immediately succeeded.

“I understood you to say, Mr. Wallace,” observed the captain, a little drily, “that you saw the flour yourself?”

“I saw the flour-barrels, sir; and as regularly built were they as any barrels that ever were branded.  But a flour-barrel may have contained something beside flour.”

“Flour usually makes itself visible in the handling; were these barrels quite clean?”

“Far from it, sir.  They showed flour on their staves, like any other cargo.  After all, the man may have more sense than we give him credit for, and find a high market for his cargo.”

Captain Mull seemed to muse, which was a hint for his juniors not to continue the conversation, but rather to seem to muse, too.  After a short pause, the captain quietly remarked—­“Well, gentlemen, he will be coming down after us, I suppose, as soon as he gets his new topgallant-mast on-end, and then we can keep a bright look-out for him.  We shall cruise off Cape St. Antonio for a day or two, and no doubt shall get another look at him.  I should like to have one baking from his flour.”

But Spike had no intention to give the Poughkeepsie the desired opportunity.  As has been stated, he stood off to the southward on a wind, and completely doubled the eastern end of Jamaica, when he put his helm up, and went, with favouring wind and current, toward the northward and westward.  The consequence was, that he did not fall in with the Poughkeepsie at all, which vessel was keeping a sharp look-out for him in the neighbourhood of Cape St. Antonio and the Isle of Pines, at the very moment he was running