“She’s guid guts in her,” said Ferguson.
The argument was still going on as merrily as ever while the “Gairloch” rolled heavily up from the Line through days which grew ever colder and winds which grew ever more stormy.
The little ship had struck the Western Ocean in one of the very worst of his moods. She was making shocking weather of it. She rolled, she pitched, she wallowed, she did every conceivable thing a deeply laden and ill-designed ship could do in a seaway. Her iron decks were most of the time under water, and the atmosphere of the stuffy little cabin, with every scuttle shut and the lamp smoking villainously as it swung in its gimbals, resembled that of the infernal regions.
But still, whenever Ferguson and Kavanagh met, the argument continued without abatement. They went on with it grimly, with their legs hooked on those of the cabin table, and their backs braced against the backs of their chairs, while, in spite of the fiddles that had graced the board for weeks, every roll of the ship added yet further contributions of cold potato and congealed meat to the dreary confusion of the cabin floor.
And so they might have gone on to the crack of doom had nothing happened to interrupt them.
In this case what happened was the sighting of the derelict.
It was about the end of the morning watch, one dark, dreary morning, when a late livid dawn was just creeping over the rim of the heaving waste of waters. Kavanagh was cold, tired, and depressed, and his reflections, as he stood on the bridge of the “Gairloch,” were in harmony with the time and the weather. The future stretched before him no more cheerfully than that expanse of grey Atlantic—dreary, monotonous, and dismal to a degree. He didn’t expect he would ever get a command. He ought to have gone into steam earlier. He might have got into one of the big liner companies. Now——
Precisely at this point in his meditations he sighted the deserted ship—now visible on the crest of a roller, now lost to sight as she slid drunkenly down into the trough of the sea.
It was evident at a glance that she was not under control. She was yawing helplessly hither and thither in the seas, her yards, with the rags of their sails still fluttering in the wind, pointing as if in mute appeal to the four quarters of the heavens.
“‘Maria’—Genoa,” said Kavanagh, with his glasses to his eyes, “and built on the Clyde by the looks of her.... I think she’s been abandoned—I don’t make out anyone moving, or any signal.”