"I don't think she does, sir," replied the first lieutenant. "She can see the American flag at the peak, and she knows what we are. Doubtless she is making the mistake of believing that all the Federal ships are slow coaches."
"Heave the log, Mr. Baskirk," added Christy, and he walked forward.
It was a matter of angles when it was desirable to come down to a close calculation, and the young commander found his trigonometry very useful, and fortunately not forgotten. With an apparatus for taking ranges he had procured the bearing of the highflyer accurately as soon as the last course was given out, perhaps half an hour before. He took the range again, and found there was a slight difference, which was, however, enough to show that the form of the triangle had been disturbed.
Both ships were headed for the same point, and the sides of the triangle were equal at the first observation. Now the St. Regis's side of the figure was perceptibly shorter than its opposite. This proved to the captain that his ship had gained on the other. The two chasers had been losing on the chase for the last half-hour, and Christy regarded them as out of the game.
There was some appearance of fog in the south-west, and no land could be seen in any direction. For another hour the St. Regis drove ahead furiously on her course, and the highflyer was doing the same. The two steamers, regardless of the speed of either, were necessarily approaching each other as long as they followed the two sides of the triangle. They had come within half a mile the one of the other, when the commander gave the order to beat to quarters. Ten minutes later the frame of the ship shook under the discharge of the big Parrot. The shot went over the chase; but she promptly changed her course to the southward.
The shot from the Parrot passed between the funnel and the mainmast of the chase, as judged by the splash of the ball in the water just beyond her. It had come near enough to the mark to wake up the captain of the highflyer. He appeared to believe that the pursuer from the northward had simply cut him off by approaching on the shorter side of the triangle, and that all he had to do was to escape to the southward, evidently satisfied that no steamer in the Federal navy could overhaul him in a fair and square race.