LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Six.

       Table of Contents

      Chapter Six.

      A Chapter of Accidents.

       “Nonsense, man!” cried Captain Applegarth. “Don’t make such an ass of yourself! Flying Dutchman indeed! Why, that cock and bull yarn was exploded years ago, and I didn’t think there was a sailor afloat in the present day ass enough to believe in this story!”

       “I may be a hass, sir; I know I am sometimes,” retorted old Masters, evidently aggrieved by the skipper speaking to him like this before the men. “But, sir, seein’ is believin’. There’s this ship an’ there’s that there craft a-sailin’ alongside in the teeth o’ the gale. Hass or no hass, I sees that, captain!”

       “Hang it all, man, can’t you see that it is only the mirage or reflection of our own vessel, produced by the light of the meteor throwing her shadow on to the mass of cloud leeward? Look, there are our two old sticks and the funnels between, with the smoke rushing out of them! Aye, and there, too, you can see this very bridge here we’re standing on, and all of us, as large as life. Why, bo’sun, you can see your own ugly mug reflected now opposite us, just as it would be in a looking glass. Look, man!”

       “Aye, I sees, sir, plain enuff, though I’m a hass,” said Masters at length. “But it ain’t nat’rel, sir, anyhow; an’ I misdoubts sich skeary things. I ain’t been to sea forty years for nothin’, Captain Applegarth, an’ I fears sich a sight as that betokens some danger ahead as ’ill happen to us some time or other this voyage. Even started on a Friday, sir, as you knows on, sir!”

       “Rubbish!” cried the skipper, angry at his obstinacy. “See, the mirage has disappeared now that the meteor light has become dispersed. Look smart there, aloft, and furl that topsail! It’s just seven bells and I’m going to ease down the engines and bear up on our course again. Up with you, men, and lay out on the yard!”

       The hands who had stopped half-way up the fore-rigging, spell-bound at the sight of the mirage, now bestirred themselves, shaking off their superstitious fears; old Masters, in the presence of something to be done, also working, and soon the sail was furled, the bunt stowed, and the gaskets passed.

       “It’s no use our keeping on any longer after that ship of yours, Haldane,” observed the skipper, turning to me when the men had all come in from the topsail yard and scrambled down on deck again after making everything snug aloft. “If she were still afloat we must have overhauled her before this. I really think, youngster, she must have been only a sort of will-o’-the-wisp, like that we saw just now—an optical illusion, as I told you at the time, recollect, caused by some cross light from the afterglow of the sunset thrown upon the white mist which we noticed subsequently rising off the water. Eh, my boy?”

       “Ah, no, captain,” I replied earnestly. “The ship I saw presented a very different appearance to that reflection of ours! She was full-rigged, I told you, sir, and though her canvas was torn and she looked a bit knocked about in the matter of her tophamper, she was as unlike our old Star of the North as a sailing vessel is unlike a steamer!”

       “She might have been a derelict.”

       “I saw a girl on her deck aft, sir, with a dog beside her, as distinctly as I see you, sir, now!”

       “Well, well, be that as it may, my lad, though I’m very sorry for the poor young thing, if she is still in the land of the living, I can’t carry on like this for ever! If she were anywhere in sight it would be quite another matter; but, as it is, not knowing whether we’re on her right track or not, we might scud on to the Equator without running across her again. No, no; it wouldn’t be fair to the owners or to ourselves, indeed, to risk the ship as well as the lives of all on board by continuing any longer on such a wild-goose chase.”

       “Very good, sir,” said I, on his pausing here, as if waiting for me to say something. “We’ve tried our best to come up with her, at any rate.”

       “We have that, and I daresay a good many would call us foolhardy for carrying on as we’ve done so long. However, I’m going to abandon the chase now and bear up again on our proper course, my boy, and the devil of a job that will be, I know, in the teeth of this gale!”

       So saying, the skipper, grasping the handle of the engine-room telegraph, which led up through a tube at the end of the bridge, signalled to those in charge below to slow down to half speed.

       “Down with the helm, quartermaster!” he cried to the man at the wheel, and, at the same moment holding up his hand to attract the attention of old Masters, who had returned to his station on the fo’c’s’le, greatly exercised in his mind by what had recently occurred, he sang out in a voice of thunder that reached the knightheads and made the boatswain skip: “Haul in your jib sheet and flatten those staysails sharp! I want to bring her round to the wind handsomely, to prevent taking in another of those green seas aboard when we get broadside-on. Look smart, bo’sun, and keep your eye on her. Keep your eye on her, d’you hear? It’s ticklish work, you know. Look-out sharp or she’ll broach to!”

       Far as the eye could reach, the storm-tossed surface of the deep was white with foam, white as a snowfield, and boiling with rage and fury.

       The bank of blue-black cloud that had rested along the horizon to leeward had now melted away in some mysterious fashion or other, and the sky became as clear as a bell, only some wind-driven scrap of semi-transparent white vapour sweeping occasionally across the face of the pale, sickly-looking moon that looked down on the weird scene in a sort of menacing way; while, in lieu of the two or three odd sentinels that had previously peeped out from the firmament, all the galaxies of heaven were, at this moment, in their myriads above, spangling the empyrean from zenith to pole.

       But the gale!

       While running before the wind, the wind, although it had ballooned our sails out to bursting point, brushing us along at a wild, mad-cap rate, and buffeting the boisterous billows on either hand, scooping them up from the depths of the ocean and piling them in immense waves of angry water that rolled after us, striving to overwhelm us, we could hardly, even while taking advantage of it, appreciate its awful and tremendous force.

       On coming about, however, and facing it, the case was vastly different, the wind increasing tenfold in its intensity.

       Where it had sung through the rigging it now shrieked and howled, as if the air were peopled with demons, while the waves, lashed into fury, dashed against our bows like battering rams, rising almost to the level of our masthead where their towering crests met overhead.

       Round came

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