He then coolly paddled off, whistling. To have attempted to follow him would be sheer nonsense. We had our wings, as it were, clipped, and if we could not catch the canoe with four fresh men and four oars, there was little chance of overhauling him with four wearied men and two oars, so we addressed ourselves to get back to the schooner. The chase had lasted nearly an hour, and upon looking around we saw the mast of the ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ at a distance which somewhat startled us. There was a flag flying at her main-topmast-head which we supposed was a signal of recall. We therefore began to retrace our course, manning the remaining oars double.
‘I hope we may make the schooner, Will Thistle,’ said Edward Lanscriffe, one of the boat’s crew.
‘So do I,’ said Paul Williamson, who tugged at the same oar with him; ‘it would be ill sleeping among desert rocks and sands, and them haunted too.’
‘Haunted?’ said I, ‘what do you mean? Haunted by whom?’
‘By whom but the dwarf who paddled that canoe,’ answered the bowman, a sailor from Penzance.
‘Why,’ quoth I, ‘do you think he is anything but a man like ourselves—only, perhaps, for the matter of that, a trifle shorter?’
All the men shook their heads gloomily, and one of them replied—
‘No, no; it is no mortal that lives alone amongst these reefs, and refused the help of Christian men to carry him away from the middle of the sea.’
‘That is over true,’ quoth Paul Williamson, ‘and greatly do I fear that his coming boded no good to ship or crew. He ought not to have been allowed on board.’
I tried to laugh at all this, but somehow I was startled and put out of spirits myself, not that I much heeded the fancies of the superstitious sailors, but the whole thing seemed to me so wild, and strange, and uncommon, that I mused and mused hardly knowing what to think of it. Meantime, we were making the best of our way to the ship; of course our progress was slow, for we had to fish out a channel amid the shoals, and the tide being then low, the task was the more difficult. The accursed dwarf seemed to have led us into the most puzzling nook of all the reefs. We rowed and poled, and sometimes waded, dragging the boat along slippery ledges of rock, or smooth banks of fine white sand; but the schooner was still separated from us by a good couple of miles of rock, and sand, and sea, when the sun went down, and in less than half an hour we were groping in the darkness. The ship then fired a gun, and hoisted a light to one of the mast-heads as a signal. The twinkle of this light was, however, so faint, that had we not observed the lantern run up, we might well have taken it for a star, and therefore I kept my eyes steadily fixed upon the tiny spark, intending not to let it get out of sight. Directing the men, therefore, how to row, and continually bumping against points of rock and sand, we jogged on until, just as we rounded a long belt of reef, along which we had been running, the rush of a current of the young flood tide, which had just began to set in, sheered the shallop’s bows violently round, bore us some yards away out of our course, and then tossing us into a sort of boiling caldron, or rather slight whirlpool, we were swung round and round until our heads were giddy, and every idea of our proper course gone. Pulling at last clear of this vortex, we tried to discover the signal-light from the schooner, but in vain. The sky was now gemmed with stars down to the very horizon, and we knew not where to look for the guiding ray. It was then that I recollected how easily I might have set the position of the schooner by the constellations, but I had not thought of doing so, and now it was too late. The men began to look startled, and one of them said, in a low voice—