There was some appearance of fog in the south-west, and no land could be seen in any direction. For another hour the St. Regis drove ahead furiously on her course, and the highflyer was doing the same. The two steamers, regardless of the speed of either, were necessarily approaching each other as long as they followed the two sides of the triangle. They had come within half a mile the one of the other, when the commander gave the order to beat to quarters. Ten minutes later the frame of the ship shook under the discharge of the big Parrot. The shot went over the chase; but she promptly changed her course to the southward. CHAPTER XXIX THE FIRST PRIZE OF THE ST. REGIS The shot from the Parrot passed between the funnel and the mainmast of the chase, as judged by the splash of the ball in the water just beyond her. It had come near enough to the mark to wake up the captain of the highflyer. He appeared to believe that the pursuer from the northward had simply cut him off by approaching on the shorter side of the triangle, and that all he had to do was to escape to the southward, evidently satisfied that no steamer in the Federal navy could overhaul him in a fair and square race. "Now comes the tug of war," said Mr. Baskirk, when the St. Regis had been headed for the chase. "The game will not last all day," added Christy. "If I owned that highflyer, I should not employ her present captain to sail her for me. He is overloaded with a blind confidence, and he has made a very bad use of his opportunities. If I had been in command of that steamer I should have made her course so as to run away from all three of my pursuers as soon as I made them out. It is six o'clock now, and I should have got far enough into the darkness to give them all the slip, and gone into Wilmington on a new track." "Her captain appears to trust entirely to his heels, and to look with contempt upon anything like manoeuvring," replied the first lieutenant. "But we must finish him up before the darkness enables him to give us the slip. I have no doubt we could knock her all to pieces with the midship gun in the next fifteen minutes; but if she can make eighteen knots an hour, which we seem to be all agreed that she can do, she will not be a useless addition to the United States Navy, and it would be a pity to smash her up, for she is a good-looking craft. We are gaining two knots an hour on her, and Mr. Vapoor is keeping things warm in the engine and fire rooms." "That is taking an economical view of the subject," added Mr. Baskirk, laughing at the commander's utilitarian views. "If we continue to fire into her, we must swing to every shot we send, and that would take so much from our speed," argued Christy. "We are as sure of her as though we already had her in our clutches. There are plenty of officers in the navy who would like to command her when she is altered over into a cruiser."