“The weather’s against us,” he said gloomily, to the storm-beaten old pilot. “They could pass us at a couple of cable lengths and we’d never know it.”
“Not if we were out in a small boat, listening,” Christophe said. “In small boat hear everything. On ship, no—not so quite well. We must put out boat and get out maybe two three miles and wait. Yes, maybe fog too bad, one way, but very good, other. When they pass we get course then slip quiet, very quiet, same way, with Malabart, eh?”
Drake pondered. There seemed no other method. He cursed the fog, but ordered a boat away with Catlin and the pilot aboard, the latter assuring him that he could find his way back to the ship if the night were as black as the pits of Satan. A long wait followed after the boat had disappeared. The gloom of the darkened Malabart, the lack of the bell striking the hour, the absolute stillness of the ship, were all upsetting. The very lifelessness of the protected water where she lay was annoying, for there was not the slightest lapping whisper of a wave against her hull. Down in the engine room even the stokers who kept up steam had been cautioned against the clanging of a furnace door or the ring of a shovel. Had one passed the Malabart within ten yards he might have thought her the ghost of some long-abandoned ship. Drake listened from the outer wing of the bridge, bending over, sometimes with a hand cupped to his ear, until he was tired. He had about decided that his voyage and expenditure had been born of folly, when he heard a faint creak, followed a minute later by another. Then Catlin’s voice below hailed softly, and the boat pulled around to the side ladder, which had been lowered and swung barely above the water.
“All right, sir. She passed so close that she almost ran us down. She had doused her lights and was not doing more than five or six knots. Christophe says there could be no mistake. She was the Rhodialim, all right.”
The pilot joined in with: “About a mile and a half out. Long row back.”
“It won’t do for us to follow too closely on their heels, anyway,” Captain Eli said. “But are you certain that you can pick her up again, Christophe, in all this murk?”
“I know the course she will take. I think so, with luck,” the pilot said. “They not alter course again. Too much else business think of, I expect. Just keep straight on about five, six miles; then stop. They not want go much farther. Might meet small fishin’ boats out of Nauplia. Not take chance of that, eh?”
Captain Eli stood blockily, a dim figure in the darkness, and seemed making mental calculations.
“I don’t think we’d best be in too much of a hurry,” he said at last. “We’ve got to take the chances of being too late. If the crew are in on it with the commander, mate and engineer, there’ll be no time wasted. If they’re not, the boats won’t be ready to lower, and besides he’ll have to put up a bluff at saving the ship, to fool the crew. We’d best give them at least an hour and a half.”
“That crew, captain, sir, are the scum of the water front,” Christophe put in.