ng, the _Tigress_ would not have been recognized as the smart craft
that had, twenty-four hours before, sailed from Rhodes. The sailors were
all in high glee. After the hard work they had had at Acre they looked
upon this as a holiday, and entered with the greatest zest into the work
of disguising the ship.

"Now, lads, you must sit down," Wilkinson said, "and only five or six
heads must be shown above the bulwarks. They doubtless have some good
glasses taken from the ships they have captured, and if they saw that we
had an unusually strong crew they might smell a rat."

It was now a dead calm, the sails hung idly down, and the brig lay
almost motionless on a waveless sea.

"I am pretty sure that I can make out the upper spars of two or three
craft behind that long, low islet, Wilkinson," Edgar said after, for the
twentieth time, gazing long and earnestly through his telescope.

"I fancied so two or three times, Edgar, but I am by no means sure that
it is not fancy. I felt more sure of it at first than I do now, for
there is a slight mist rising from the water. If they don't come out to
us by the afternoon we will go in and have a look at them. We have got
half a dozen sweeps on board, and with those and the boats we could work
her in in a couple of hours."

"I hope we sha'n't have to do that," Edgar replied. "They would guess
what we were at once, and would be scattering in all directions. We
might pick up one or two, the rest would get off and carry news of us to
all the islands round."

"Perhaps you are right," Wilkinson agreed. "It would certainly be
unfortunate to begin by giving them a scare."

"Besides," Edgar went on, "if the calm holds till night, they may come
out and try to take us by surprise."

The day passed very slowly. The heat was great, and the men picked out
spots on the deck where the sails threw a shade, and dosed off to sleep.
They had, long before, made every preparation; the cutlasses had been
ground, the boarding-pikes sharpened, and the pistols loaded and primed.
Piles of shot lay by the side of the guns, and it needed only to fetch
up the powder cartridges from the magazine to be ready for action. The
marines had cleaned and loaded all the muskets, and placed them in the
racks. At two o'clock, after dinner had been eaten, Wilkinson said to
the boatswain:

"The starboard-watch can sling their hammocks and turn in if they like.
If these fellows mean to come out and attack us, they will