"Is it that the phantoms can be flesh and blood?" said Mr. Gabriel,
laughingly; and, lifting his arm again, he hailed the foremost.

"Boat ahoy! What names?" said he.

The answer came back on the wind full and round.

"Speed, and Follow."

"Where from?" asked Dan, with just a glint in his eye: for usually he
knew every boat on the river, but he didn’t know these.

"From the schooner Flyaway, taking in sand over at Black Rocks."

Then Mr. Gabriel spoke again, as they drew near; but whether he spoke
so fast that I couldn’t understand, or whether he spoke French, I never
knew; and Dan, with some kind of feeling that it was Mr. Gabriel’s
acquaintance, suffered the one we spoke to pass us.

Once or twice Mr. Gabriel had begun some question to Dan about the
approaching weather, but had turned it off again before anybody could
answer. You see he had some little nobility left, and didn’t want the
very man he was going to injure to show him how to do it. Now, however,
he asked him that was steering the Speed by, if it was going to storm.

The man thought it was.

"How is it, then, that your schooner prepares to sail?"

"O, wind’s backed in; we’ll be on blue water before the gale breaks, I
reckon, and then beat off where there’s plenty of sea-room."

"But she shall make shipwreck!"

"'Not if the court know herself, and he think she do,'" was the reply
from another, as they passed.

Somehow I began to hate myself, I was so full of poisonous suspicions.
How did Mr. Gabriel know the schooner prepared to sail? And this man,

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