"They've found the yacht's boats are better than their own," said Fielding. "They'll be----"
"So they are; and there are nearly eighty men of the pirate crew still on board, I should imagine. What's the game?"
"Cervillo's done a bunk with the rest of the oof," said the mid.
"Guess you've hit it, sonny," exclaimed Hiram B. Rutter. "Reckon we may as well get rid of this grease; 'tisn't necessary."
"He's off," said Fielding. "The yacht's gathering way. Won't there be a rumpus when the others find it out? I wonder where their eyes are."
For fully ten minutes the English officers and their companions watched the disappearing vessel. Then a chorus of shouts and curses on deck announced that the abandoned pirates had discovered they were tricked.
Not until the _Serena_ disappeared beneath the horizon did the excited crew calm down. The majority drowned their woes in drink, while a few, realising the importance of fuel supply, brought the cruiser alongside the _Hetty_ and emptied her cargo of oil into the _Independencia's_ tanks. There was now sufficient fuel to take the crippled cruiser a thousand miles. Tito, who had been chosen captain by his shipmates, resolved to stand south, fall in with another vessel, and save the remainder of the crew in a similar manner to that adopted by the recreant Cervillo.
Just before midnight the _Independencia_ raised steam, and at a bare ten knots plugged laboriously through the water. The _Hetty_ was left astern. The last Fielding saw of her was that the crew were engaged in setting the canvas that the gale had spared. It was not much of a spread, but with the wind in its present quarter there was every prospect of the whaler fetching the Gulf of St. Lawrence or one of the harbours on the Newfoundland coast.
The young officers realised that now was the opportunity to recapture the cruiser. Numerically the pirates were stronger, but by the noise on deck the Englishmen knew that they were for the most part indulging in a drunken orgy.
Just before dawn Mukyima and Hokosuka crept through the ports and hoisted themselves on deck. They were able to discern that most of the men were below, a few being on watch on the quarter-deck, two being stationed at the half-deck ladder; but so lax was their vigilance that the two Japs made a careful examination of the mode of securing the hatches. The only thing that prevented the steel hatches from being opened from the inside was an iron bar lashed at each end to massive ring-bolts in the deck. Lying prone by the side of the hatchway coamings the Japs quietly severed the ropes, then retraced their course, and, through General Oki's interpretation, announced that the hatches were ready to be forced open from the inside.