Explore "The Freebooters" by Gustave Aimard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was about four in the morning; the dawn was beginning to mark the horizon with wide white bands; on the extreme line of the water, a bright red reflection, the harbinger of sunrise, announced that the sun would soon appear. At this moment a light brig gradually emerged from the dense fog that hid it, and could be seen sailing close to the wind along the dangerous and rugged coast which forms the entrance of Galveston Bay, at the mouth of the Rio Trinidad.
It was a neat vessel of three hundred tons at the most, with a gracefully-built hull, and its tall masts coquettishly raking. The rigging was carefully painted and tarred, the yards symmetrically square, and more than all, the menacing muzzles of four eight-pounder carronades which peered out of the bulwarks on either side, and the long thirty-two pounder swivel in the bows, indicated that, although a man-of-war pennant might not be flying from the mainmast, it was not the less resolved, in case of necessity, to fight energetically against the cruisers that might attempt to check its progress.