In the mean time, the order of Wilder had been executed.  Those vast sheets of canvas which, a moment before, had been either fluttering in the air, or were bellying inward or outward, as they touched or filled, as it is technically called, were now all pressing against their respective masts, impelling the vessel to retrace her mistaken path.  The manoeuvre required the utmost attention, and the nicest delicacy in its direction.  But her young Commander proved himself, in every particular, competent to his task.  Here, a sail was lifted; there, another was brought with a flatter surface to the air; now, the lighter canvas was spread; and now it disappeared, like thin vapour suddenly dispelled by the sun.  The voice of Wilder, throughout, though calm, was breathing with authority.  The ship itself seemed, like an animated being, conscious that her destinies were reposed in different, and more intelligent, hands than before.  Obedient to the new impulse they had received the immense cloud of canvas, with all its tall forest of spars and rigging, rolled to and fro; and then, having overcome the state of comparative rest in which it had been lying, the vessel heavily yielded to the pressure, and began to recede.

Throughout the whole of the time necessary to extricate the “Caroline,” the attention of Wilder was divided between his own ship and his inexplicable neighbour.  Not a sound was heard to issue from the imposing and death-like stillness of the latter.  Not a single anxious countenance, not even one lurking eye, was to be detected, at any of the numerous outlets by which the inmates of an armed vessel can look abroad upon the deep.  The seaman on the yard continued his labour, like a man unconscious of any thing but his own existence.  There however, a slow, though nearly imperceptible, motion in the ship itself, which was apparently made, like the lazy movement of a slumbering whale, more by listless volition, than through any agency of human hands.

Not the smallest of these changes escaped the keen and understanding examination of Wilder.  He saw that, as his own ship retired, the side of the slaver was gradually exposed to the “Caroline.”  The muzzles of the threatening guns gaped constantly on his vessel, as the eye of the crouching tiger follows the movement of its prey; and at no time, while nearest, did there exist a single instant that the decks of the latter ship could not have been swept, by a general discharge from the battery of the former.  At each successive order issued from his own lips, our adventurer turned his eye, with increasng interest, to ascertain whether he would be permitted to execute it; and never did he feel certain that he was left to the sole management of the “Caroline” until he found that she had backed from her dangerous proximity to the other; and that, obedient to a new disposition of her sails, she was falling off, before the light air, in a place where he could hold her entirely at command.