that he
would defy anybody to trace the most remote resemblance between the
vessel upon which his eyes rested and the trim English yacht which had
steamed out of Havana harbour on the previous day.

On the following Monday morning at daylight the furnace fires were
lighted on board the disguised yacht, and at the same time a man with
sharp eyes was sent aloft to the fore-masthead to watch the offing over
the tops of the low mangrove trees, and give notice of the passage of
the _Maranon_, should she happen to heave in sight; but hour after hour
passed with no sign of her, unless one of the eastward-going trails of
smoke that showed on the horizon during the forenoon happened to emanate
from her. They waited patiently until noon, and then, nothing having
been seen of the convict ship, Jack and Milsom agreed that it was quite
useless to wait any longer; and half an hour later the fishermen outside
the Boca de Maravillas were astonished to see a craft, which some of
them described as a cruiser, while the others spoke of her as a gunboat,
sweep through the passage and head away north-east, as though to clear
the eastern extremity of Cay Sal Bank on her way northward through the
Santaren Channel. The vessel showed no colours, but was flying a
pennant, and the general opinion was that she was an American man-o'-
war; though what she had been doing in Sagua la Grande harbour, or how
she had got there, nobody seemed able to guess.

But although, to the unsophisticated fishermen of Sagua la Grande, the
mysterious warship appeared to be bound north, she was really bound
south-east through the Nicholas and Old Bahama channels: and when the
yacht had made an offing of some fifteen miles--by which time she was of
course out of sight of the fishermen's boats, Milsom ordered the helm to
be ported and the engines sent full speed ahead, she having by that time
run on to a line which the ex-Navy man had pencilled on his chart as the
probable course of the convict steamer; and if that craft had left
Havana at the hour arranged, and were steaming at the rate which the
harbour-master had anticipated would be her pace, she must now be nearly
sixty miles ahead. That was a fairly long lead, certainly; but there is
a big difference between a speed of eight knots and that of twenty-four,
and Milsom calculated that, if the _Maranon_ were really ahead of them,
they ought to overtake her in something like three hours. As a matter
of fact, they