"There being no more we could do, and having instructed Jacobs to go down and rouse Mr Macleod himself if he saw the signal, I kept stealing back and forward on one side of the quarter-deck alone. The river was still as a mill-pond, except where it trembled in long streaky gleams from the sky, else I should at once have slipped cable and begun to go down, leaving the boats to come after us, if they did come, as they best could. There wasn't a breath of air yet, either, save what seemed now and then to waft out of the thick woods, and to bring the whole whispering buzz of them stifled together along the face of the water, with the heavy scent of the aloes and trailers on the bank, meeting the warm steam that crept across from the mangroves on the opposite shore. A hundred notions ran through my head, as I walked, of what might happen: whether the boats would miss the schooner altogether, and she drop down upon us in the meantime, either by the creek or the river--or whether Foster and his crew of Wapping blackguards would carry out what I'd no doubt they had at heart. "But at any rate, as for a set of passengers and merchant sailors catching an armed schooner asleep, with one like that Frenchman in her, I had his fierce dark face too much before me whenever I thought of him to fancy the thing for a moment. That _that_ man was in command of the stranger craft, and had some scheme in hand he would stir heaven and earth to carry out, unless you ground his head to powder, was an idea that came shivering sharp into me as I kept watching the dark mouth of the creek astern, and the glimmering reach beyond--looking almost to see the schooner's bowsprit shoot out of one of them, tide or wind though there was none. Frigate to frigate in a breeze, in fact, I should have minded my weather-gage pretty cautiously with _him_, if a seaman he was; but if he were bent on having the old _Seringapatam_ at present, by heaven! what I feared was worse than either plunder or walking the plank--seeing there was a prize the judge had left on board, for which I felt a free-cruising captain would give all the treasures that fellows like Foster might think an Indian nabob had in his portmanteau.