The pirate schooner--a craft of apparently two hundred tons or more, very long and low on the water, painted dead black, with immensely tall, wand-like masts, and an enormous spread of canvas--was now slipping along fast through the water, heading to the northward, and some six miles dead to windward of us.  It was a long start, and I foresaw that, fast as the little _Wasp_ undoubtedly was, unless something quite unforeseen occurred, a good many things might happen before we could get alongside the enemy.  Why such a big powerful vessel--she showed seven ports of a side, and there was something suspiciously like a long 32-pounder on her forecastle--should turn tail so ignominiously and run from a little shrimp of a craft like the _Wasp_ I could not imagine, though I was to receive enlightenment upon that point before long.  Our immediate business, however, was not with her, but with the big ship that was coming yawing down the wind toward us.