o be
undertaken at any great speed at night. Consequently Douglas was
obliged to crawl slowly along at about five knots an hour, with two
leadsmen in the fore chains, at the very time when he wanted to be
steaming fourteen; and he feared that the _Union_ would have got such a
lengthy start, while daylight lasted, that it would be a very difficult
matter indeed to overhaul her. But there was just one hope for him; he
reflected that she would almost certainly wait at the eastern entrance
of the Straits for her convoy, and, if she were there, he would find
her, and bring her to action.

The moment that daylight dawned, Jim, whose nerves were by this time
torn to fiddle-strings by frequent necessary stoppages during the night,
put his vessel at full speed again, and, still with two leadsmen
sounding the whole time, the _Angamos_ swept along the narrow waters,
finally emerging at the Argentine end of the Straits. A fresh
disappointment was, however, in store for the young Englishman; for
still there was no sign of the corvette; and now he did not in the least
know in what direction to look for her. Finally, after cruising to and
fro off the entrance for some hours, in the hope of sighting the chase,
he determined to reach over toward the Falkland Islands, in the hope
that the _Union_ might have gone there to meet the convoy.

The _Angamos_ had, by about midnight on the next night, traversed close
upon half the distance to the Islands, and Jim was almost beginning to
despair of ever catching the elusive corvette, when a hail came down
from one of the men who were still stationed at the masthead: "Light
ahead! bearing about a point on our port bow!"

Douglas's heart jumped. Here, surely, must be the craft of which he was
in search. He had to wait a few seconds to control his excitement, and
then he replied: "How far distant is the light, and what does it look
like?"

"It's about eight miles distant," replied the seaman, "and looks like
the light at a ship's masthead; but I can now see two red lights, one
over the other, arranged just below the white one; and I should say that
the three of them, shown together as they are, mean a signal of some
sort; for I can see neither port nor starboard lights showing in their
usual places."

"Aha!" thought Jim, "this is not so bad, after all; this approaching
craft can hardly be our friend the _Union_, I should think; it is more
likely that she will prove to be one of the gun-r