The _Tartar_ lay at anchor two miles off the point, and on such a blind night, with its smother of snow, it was easy to miss the goal. Orders had been strict that the boats should keep bunched together almost within oar's-length. True, the men of the crews knew their waters so well that they might have bragged they could smell their way to the frigate over that smooth black pitch like hounds on the scent. But cocksureness was tricky on such a night. They pulled with slow strokes, straining to catch a sound or a glimpse. It had begun to get intensely cold, and the spit of the snow stung their faces and stiffened their fingers. Jack's young blood was proof against rigor of frost, for his ears sang with a roaring music, as if a pair of sea-shells had been clapped against the sides of his skull. His veins beat like hammer-strokes. He thought he felt a new sensation. "Can it be I'm afraid?" he repeated to himself.
No, Jack, fear never comes that way. Fear strikes the coward to a lump of jelly. What you feel now quivering to your finger-tips is the thing which gives fire and mettle to every gallant heart, and nerves the muscles to greater strength. No fighter worth his salt ever failed of this galloping music in his veins on the eve of action. Whisper to that gray beard by your side whether he doesn't feel the same leap of pulse, though his sinews have got stiff at the plough-tail, and his blood sluggish with years since he smelt powder. And don't you remember, too, Jack, that you felt a little of the same sort of thing that time you "pitched in" and "licked" the hulking bully nearly twice your size, for insulting the "school-marm," till he bellowed like a calf?
It seemed that more than an hour must have passed. Could they have missed the ship, was the thought of all. This meant failure. There was not the faintest ripple in the dead silence. But hark! there suddenly boomed on the night the sweet muffled notes of a ship's bell, and with it there was a dim flicker to starboard, as of a light shining through a port-hole. Luck was with them, after all, and now the time was close at hand. A denser black loomed against the darkness, vaguely outlining the ship's hull, and the head-boat grated on the long hawser holding the after anchor, thrown out to take up the swing of the ebb-tide. And hark again! Through the cabin windows, suddenly thrown open as if for a breath of fresh air, floated the sounds of laughter and singing, the chorus of a Bacchanalian catch. Captain Askew and his subs, late as it was, were still making merry with song.