Now or never the launch must make her effort. Ready hands tore
away her disguise, she was tilted by crowding in the poop nearly every
man on board, the engines throbbed, and she was afloat.
At daybreak the thousand-foot peak of Fernando Noronha was a dark blur
on the western horizon. No sail or smudge of smoke broke the remainder
of the far-flung circle. The fugitives could breathe freely once more.
They were not pursued.
Iris fell asleep when assured that the dreaded warship was not in
sight. Hozier, too, utterly exhausted by all that he had gone through,
slept as if he were dead. Coke, whose iron constitution defied
fatigue, though it was with the utmost difficulty that he had walked
across the narrow breadth of Fernando Noronha, took the first watch in
person. He chatted with the men, surprised them by his candor on the
question of compensation, and announced his resolve to make for the
three-hundred-mile channel between Fernando Noronha and the mainland.
"You see, it's this way, me lads," he explained affably. "We're short
o' vittles an' bunker, an' if we kep' cruisin' east in this latitood
we'd soon be drawrin' lots to see 'oo'd cut up juiciest. So we must
run for the tramp's track, which is two hundred miles to the west.
We'll bear north, an' that rotten cruiser will look south for sartin,
seein' as 'ow they know we 'ave the next President aboard.
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