Twenty minutes later the watchers at the port rail made out, briefly, a part of the hull of the "Victor." The two craft were but little more than two hundred yards apart.
Ten minutes later both craft passed almost completely out of the fog. A cheer went up from the deck of the "Panther." There was no answer from the pursued craft.
Running up to the bridge, and snatching up a megaphone, Joseph Baldwin bawled lustily:
"We're still with you, you pirates! You can't shake us!"
Still no sound of human voice came from the steam yacht. The answer was of another sort. Great clouds of smoke began to pour from the "Victor's" funnel.
"They're going to try a spurt," chuckled Halstead, gleefully. "Well, let 'em. We don't even have to get up more steam for a spurt. All we have to do is to feed in the gasoline quicker."
Within five minutes the "Victor" was racing along at more than twenty miles an hour. On board the "Panther," however, Joe Dawson did not even feel it necessary to go below to look at the motors. Jed Prentiss was down there in the engine room, and Jed was a boy who knew what he was doing. Second Officer Davis gave the speed orders from the bridge; Jed carried out the orders. The "Panther," now widening the interval to four hundred yards in this clearer atmosphere, ran along parallel with the steam yacht.
"They may fool us yet," chuckled Halstead, turning around to the owner. "But they'll have to do it with something better than speed."
"If they get away from _you_, Captain Halstead," replied the owner, his face beaming, "I promise, in advance, to forgive you. It won't be your fault. Lord, how you've hung to them! What a report I shall have to send Delavan on the officers he sent me!"
Then, suddenly, Halstead thought of the prisoner down in the brig.
"Pass the word for Second Steward Collins," he directed, and that yacht's servant soon reported.
"You didn't forget to feed the prisoner, Collins?"
"Oh, no, sir," and the steward rattled off the names of the dishes that had been supplied the man in the brig.
"He seems to have fed nearly as well as we did," laughed Skipper Tom. "Well, that's right; just because we lock a fellow up is no reason why we should starve him. The prisoner had a good appetite?"