The sun was just rising above the hills beyond the park when he reached it. He was in ample time. He made quick work of getting his boat into the stream and his oars out, and he was not long in pulling to the lake. Once there, where he could make use of the wind, he let drop the center board; then stepped the mast, and very soon thereafter the light craft was shooting away under a broad leg-of-mutton sail, like a race horse, that is, supposing that a race horse could travel like a duck. The distance from the inner shore of the bay to the outer headlands was not far from two miles. The brig was to come from the south, so our pilot put his boat’s head in that direction, running it over Dead Man’s Reef, the great black rocks of which he could plainly see as he passed above them. They were, in truth, terrible looking things and the man who would have proposed to run a large vessel, anything deeper than a common sailboat, through the territory they occupied might well have been deemed insane or mad. Percy ran out between the southern headland of the bay, called South Head and Hood’s Island, and scarcely had he gained the open sea when he saw the brig three miles away or more, coming up with the wind on her larboard beam and every rag of canvas spread that she could carry. What did it mean? he asked himself. Ha! Ere long he saw. Having run a little further out, so that his eye could sweep the southern horizon to the coast, he espied a heavy ship, also spanking along under all the sail she could spread. He kept a small telescope in the close locker in the stern-sheets, and, through this, standing erect against the mast, he viewed the stranger. “Oho! The sloop-of-war, as I live!” He made sure there could be no mistake, then he put away the glass and resumed his place at the helm. The corvette was, as nearly as he could judge, three miles distant from the brig and she appeared to be gaining. At first Percy was surprised. He had not thought there was a ship in the British navy that could sail with the Staghound; but he very soon solved the mystery. The latter’s lee scuppers were under water. She was loaded as he had never seen her loaded before. Only a reckless, unreliable man could have done such a thing. In a heavy seaway, or in the teeth of a respectable storm, she would have foundered, in spite of all that could have been done to save her. Of course, the throwing overboard of a portion of the cargo might have saved her; but, if they would have cast it over in a storm, why had they not done it to enable them to run way from the king’s ship? With the brig and the boat approaching one another rapidly, the three miles were quickly covered. Percy had taken in his sail, and unstepped his mast just in season to catch a line thrown to him from the brig’s lee quarter; and in a few moments more he was on her deck, with his boat towing astern.