pirate's bow-chaser, and crashed into the _Agra's_ side, and passed
nearly through her.

"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 around 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."