ptain Blaise broke in on me.
"Aren't you laughing rather soon? You're not over your troubles yet."

"Troubles, sir? Troubles?" It was not at all like him, and his voice,
too, was unwontedly harsh. "Troubles?" I almost laughed aloud again. He
did not understand--I had only to lean forward to gaze into her eyes. I
had only to reach out to clasp her hand. Troubles? Well, possibly so,
but I smiled to myself in the dark.

IV

Ere we had fairly boarded the brig they were in chase of us. We could
see lights flitting along the lagoon bank and hear the hallooing of
native runners--the Governor's, we knew. And for every voice we heard
and every light we saw, we knew that hidden back of the trees were a
dozen or a score whom we could not hear or see. And on the black surface
of the lagoon, paddling between us and the bank, as we worked the ship
out, were noiseless men in canoes. We could not see them, but every few
minutes a mysterious cry carried across the silent water, and the cry,
we knew, was the word of our progress from the Governor's canoe-men to
the messengers on the bank.

The lagoon emptied on the south into the Momba River, which twisted and
turned like so many S's to the sea; on the north was the passage by
which we had come, that which led to the sea by way of the bar. But
there was to be no crossing of the bar for us that night. Ten miles
inland we had smelled that sea-breeze and knew what it meant; but
Captain Blaise, nevertheless, held on with the _Bess_ toward the bar. We
could hear their crews paddling off and shouting their messages of our
progress until they were forced by the breakers to go ashore. Their
parting triumphant shouts was their word of our sure intent to attempt
the passage of the bar.

When all was quiet from their direction, we put back to the lagoon and
headed for the river passage. But one ship of any size had ventured this
river passage in a generation, and the planking of that one, the brig
_Orion_, for years lay on the bank by way of a warning. "But the _Orion_
was no _Dancing Bess_," commented Captain Blaise. Surely not, nor was
her master a Captain Blaise.

The top spars of the _Bess_ had been slung while we were ashore, and by
this time we had also knocked away the ugly and hindering false work on
bow and stern, so that with her lifting foreyards which would have done
for a sloop-of-war, and on her driving fore and aft sails which could
have served the mizzen of a two-thousand-t