ion made to
drive the vessel forward to her object.

The Coquette reached the Race early in the day, and, shooting through the
passage on an ebb-tide, she was off Montauk at noon. No sooner had the
ship drawn past the cape, and reached a point where she felt the breeze
and the waves of the Atlantic, than men were sent aloft, and twenty eyes
were curiously employed in examining the offing. Ludlow remembered the
promise of the Skimmer to meet him at that spot, and, notwithstanding the
motives which the latter might be supposed to have for avoiding the
interview, so great was the influence of the free-trader's manner and
character, that the young captain entertained secret expectations the
promise would be kept.

"The offing is clear!" said the young captain, in a tone of
disappointment, when he lowered his glass; "and yet that rover does not
seem a man to hide his head in fear----"

"Fear--that is to say, fear of a Frenchman--and a decent respect for Her
Majesty's cruisers, are very different sorts of things," returned the
master. "I never got a bandanna, or a bottle of your Cogniac ashore, in my
life, that I did not think every man that I passed in the street, could
see the spots in the one, or scent the flavor of the other; but then I
never supposed this shyness amounted to more than a certain suspicion in
my own mind, that other people know when a man is running on an illegal
course, I suppose that one of your rectors, who is snugly anchored for
life in a good warm living, would call this conscience; but, for my own
part, Captain Ludlow, though no great logician in matters of this sort, I
have always believed that it was natural concern of mind lest the articles
should be seized. If this 'Skimmer of the Seas' comes out to give us
another chase in rough water, he is by no means as good a judge of the
difference between a large and a small vessel as I had thought him--and I
confess, Sir, I should have more hopes of taking him, were the woman under
his bowsprit fairly burnt."

"The offing is clear!"

"That it is, with a show of the wind holding here at south-half-south.
This bit of water that we have passed, between yon island and the main, is
lined with bays; and while we are here looking out for them on the high
seas, the cunning varlets may be trading in any one of the fifty good
basins that lie between the cape and the place where we lost him. For
aught we know, he may have run westward again in the night-watches