The boom of a cannon disturbed his reverie. He looked up just in time to see the ball appear at the end of its arc and flash by him. It was not enough to scare him, but watching it plow into the ground about twenty feet away from the starboard steering wheel made him realize what damage one lucky shot could do. However, the Ving did not try again. He was a canny pirate who knew better than to throw away ammunition. Doubtless he was hoping to panic the merchantman into a frenzy of replies, powder-wasting and useless. Useless because the sun set just then and in a few minutes dusk was gone and darkness was all around them. Miran didn't even bother to tell his men to hold their fire, since they wouldn't have dreamed of touching off the cannon until he gave the word. Instead he repeated that no light should be shown and that the children must go below decks and must be kept quiet. No one was to make a noise. Then, casting one last glance at the positions of the pursuing craft, now rapidly dissolving into the night, he estimated the direction and strength of the wind. It was as it had been the day they set sail, an east wind dead astern, a good wind, pushing them along at eighteen miles an hour. Miran spoke in a soft voice to the first mate and the other officers, and they disappeared into the darkness shrouding the decks. They were giving prearranged orders, not by the customary bellowing through a megaphone but by low voices and touches. While they directed the crew, Miran stood with bare feet upon the foredeck. He held a half-crouching posture, and acted as if he were detecting the moves of the invisible sailors by the vibrations of their activities running through the wood of the decks and the spars and the masts and up to his feet. Miran was a fat nerve center that gathered in all the unspoken messages scattered everywhere through the body of the _Bird_. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and if he hesitated or doubted because of the solid blackness around him, he gave the helmsmen no sign. His voice was firm. "Hold it steady." "... six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Now! Swing her hard aport! Hold her, hold her!" To Green, high up on the topmost spar of the foremast, the turning about seemed an awful and unnatural deed. He could _feel_ the hull, and with it his mast, of course, leaning over and over, until his senses told him that they must inevitably capsize and send him crashing to the ground. But his senses lied, for though he seemed to fall forever, the time came when the journey back toward an upright position began. Then he was sure he would keep falling the other way, forever.