“Ye missed him! Ye missed him!” cried the rival theorist joyfully. He was mistaken: the smoke cleared, and there was the pirate captain leaning wounded against the mainmast with a Yankee bullet in his shoulder, and his crew uttering yells of dismay and vengeance. They jumped, and raged, and brandished their knives, and made horrid gesticulations of revenge; and the white eyeballs of the Malays and Papuans glittered fiendishly; and the wounded captain raised his sound arm and had a signal hoisted to his consort, and she bore up in chase, and jamming her fore lateen flat as a board, lay far nearer the wind than the _Agra_ could, and sailed three feet to her two besides. On this superiority being made clear, the situation of the merchant vessel, though not so utterly desperate as before Monk fired his lucky shot, became pitiable enough. If she ran before the wind, the fresh pirate would cut her off: if she lay to windward, she might postpone the inevitable and fatal collision with a foe as strong as that she had only escaped by a rare piece of luck; but this would give the crippled pirate time to refit and unite to destroy her. Add to this the failing ammunition and the thinned crew! Dodd cast his eyes all round the horizon for help. The sea was blank. The bright sun was hidden now; drops of rain fell, and the wind was beginning to sing, and the sea to rise a little. “Gentlemen,” said he, “let us kneel down and pray for wisdom, in this sore strait.” He and his officers kneeled on the quarter-deck. When they rose, Dodd stood rapt about a minute: his great thoughtful eye saw no more the enemy, the sea, nor anything external; it was turned inward. His officers looked at him in silence. “Sharpe,” said he at last, “there _must_ be a way out of them both with such a breeze as this is now; if we could but see it.” “Ay, _if,_” groaned Sharpe. Dodd mused again. “About ship!” said he softly, like an absent man. “Ay, ay, sir!” “Steer due north!” said he, still like one whose mind was elsewhere. While the ship was coming about, he gave minute orders to the mates and the gunner, to ensure co-operation in the delicate and dangerous manoeuvres that were sure to be at hand. The wind was W.N.W: lie was standing north; one pirate lay on his lee beam stopping a leak between wind and water, and hacking the deck clear of his broken mast and yards. The other, fresh, and thirsting for the easy prey, came up to weather on him and hang on his quarter, pirate fashion. When they were distant about a cable's length, the fresh pirate, to meet the ship's change of tactics, changed his own, luffed up, and gave the ship a broadside, well aimed but not destructive, the guns being loaded with ball.