At length, with a final jerk that made the little craft tremble to her keel, the big single sail filled, and the felucca careened to her bearings, as her canvas caught the full pressure of the wind. At the same instant I heard an oar-blade clatter as it was hastily laid in, and an exultant cheer arise from immediately under our counter. "Catch a turn with the halliards, quick, and then lay aft," I gasped. "The villains are alongside, and will be in over our quarter before we can do anything to prevent them if we are not smart." As I spoke I passed the rope under, then over, a belaying-pin before surrendering it to Cutler to complete the operation of belaying, and then bounded aft, followed by Tom Brown, who had snatched a handspike from the rack as he passed it. My first act was to drag the tiller over to windward and pass a turn of the tiller rope round the head of it, to help the felucca to pay off; for she was now gathering headway. Then I sprang to the taffrail and looked over it. The pursuing boat had actually overtaken us, and the man who pulled "bow," having laid in his oar, had grabbed the gunwale of the small boat in which I had come off from the shore--and which I had dropped astern upon boarding the felucca--and was now hauling his own boat up alongside her, while some half-dozen of his companions had risen to their feet and were scrambling into the smaller boat, apparently with some idea of climbing aboard us by shinning up her painter. But the felucca had by this time gathered way, and was moving so fast through the water that it was as much as the man could do to hold on, and quite beyond his power to haul the one boat any closer to the other. For a couple of breathless seconds longer he hung on desperately, and then, with a yell of savage disappointment, was obliged to let go, while somebody in the stern--I fancy it must have been Fernandez--seeing how things were going, shouted to the crew to throw out their oars again and give way. But before this could be done the big boat was half-a-dozen fathoms astern, and we were leaving her so rapidly that for her to overtake us was a manifest impossibility. Meanwhile the small boat, with six men in her, was towing astern of the felucca, with her nose raised high in the air and the water bubbling and boiling up to the level of the top of her transom, and even slopping in over it occasionally, so that it was impossible for any of her occupants to move, lest by so doing they should cause her to fill and swamp. The said occupants therefore did what they could in the way of relieving their feelings by vigorously anathematising us in good sonorous Spanish, and explaining, in short, pithy sentences, the sort of treatment that we might confidently look for when next they got us into their power. Then one of them happened to remember that all this time a brace of loaded pistols were sticking in his belt, whereupon he whipped them out and