For a slender steamer, and in such weather, the risk was desperate. The skipper hoped that the blockaders would never credit him with quite the insanity of it. He held the wheel himself, while beside him his keenest-sighted quartermaster stood guard with a glass. The agitated owner was there also, huddled in his black shawl, but the binoculars glued to his eyes trembled so that he could hardly have seen a full-rigged armada in broad daylight.
Suddenly the quartermaster touched the skipper's arm under the shrouded binnacle. "I s'y sir," he whispered excitedly, "they're--_there!_ There, anchored at the inshore station, just off the bar! My eye, but hain't they beastly idiots? They'll smash to pieces."
The skipper looked and Murguía tried to look. But they saw nothing. Except for the booming of the surf, they might have been on a landless sea, alone in the black night. Don Anastasio was shaking at such a rate that his two companions in the dark wheelhouse were conscious of it. He cursed the quartermaster for a pessimist. The skipper, though, was brave enough to believe.
"We're expected, that's gospel," he muttered. But he did not change his course, for he knew that on his other side there was a second fleet, tugging at drift leads off the entrance to the main ship channel. It was near hopeless, but he meant to dart between the two.
"Now for a reception as 'ull touch us to the quick, as Loo-ee Sixteenth said----" The skipper cut himself short. "Aye, aye, sir," he cried, "they've spied us!"
"They haven't!" groaned Murguía. "How could they?"
"'T'aint important now, sir, how they could. There might be a gleam in our wake. But any'ow they 'ave."
They had indeed. Less than a mile to port there suddenly appeared two red lights, two sullen eyeballs of fire. Then, a rocket cleft the darkness, its slant proclaiming the fugitive's course. Hurriedly the _Luz's_ quartermaster sent up a rocket also, but in the opposite direction. It was useless. A third rocket from the signaling blockader contradicted him.
"We're bein' chased," announced the skipper. "One of 'em 'as slipped her chain and got off."
As _La Luz_ had gained the open, the skipper let his quartermaster take the wheel. "'Old her to the wind, lad," he cautioned. "A beam sea 'ud swamp us." Next he whistled down to the engine room. They were to stoke with turpentine and cotton. At once Murguía began to fidget. "It, it will make smoke," he whined.