"Ah!" observed the skipper, with much meaning. "Well, we shall see. It is perfectly evident that he is anxious to keep out of our clutches, which desire argues a guilty conscience on his part, and only makes me the more determined to overhaul him. Confound it, here comes the rain again! Mr Gascoigne, have the goodness to slip into my cabin and desire my steward to bring my oilskins on deck. Or, stay, the fellow will have turned-in by this time; I will get them myself." The rain came swooping down upon us with the tail-end of the squall, and for a quarter of an hour it was so thick that we could see nothing a couple of ships'-lengths outside the bulwarks. Then it cleared away, the clouds dispersed, the stars came out, the wind dropped to a moderate breeze, and presently the moon, with nearly half her disc in shadow, crept up above the horizon, flooding the heaving waters with ruddy gold that quickly changed to silver as the satellite climbed high enough to clear herself of the vapours that distorted her shape and imparted to her the colour of burnished copper. But where was the brigantine? Ahead, abeam, on our quarter we looked, but nowhere could we discern the faintest trace of her. We had lost sight of her a bare quarter of an hour, and in that brief space of time she had contrived to vanish as completely as though she had gone to the bottom in deep-water, leaving not so much as a fragment of floating wreckage to furnish a clue to her fate. The skipper was as much puzzled as he was annoyed, and in his perplexity he turned to the master. "What do you think has become of her, Mr Trimble?" he demanded. "She cannot have gone ashore and broken up so completely in a quarter of an hour that no sign of her would remain. We should see something at least in the nature of wreckage to give us a hint of what had happened. Yet I see nothing; although if she had been stranded, either purposely or by accident, her wreck ought to be away in there somewhere about abreast of us. And there are no off-shore dangers, are there?" "The nearest that I know of are The Monks, away out here, some twenty-five miles to the nor'ard and east'ard of us," answered the master. "The coast inshore of us is, of course, a bit rocky, but there is nothing, so far as I know, in the nature of hidden dangers to cause the wreck of the brigantine. No, sir, it is my belief that there is some snug little secret cove, known to the skipper of that brigantine, and that he took advantage of the rain squall to slip into it, in the hope of dodging us."