So they watched the sun dropping lower and lower in the western sky without any one voicing the thought that must have been in each mind. The same inscrutable Providence that had watched over them by day would still guard them when the light was gone. Under the stars, seeming now so much nearer and brighter than when ashore, they went on and on, until back in the east another day dawned, the great day of hope for them!
Jack had taken to looking eagerly ahead once more.
"What do you think you see?" Beverly asked him, for Tom again served as pilot at the steering gear.
"Why, I'm all mixed up about it," came the slow reply. "It certainly isn't a steamer, and again it just can't be land!"
"Well, hardly," Beverly answered. "To tell the honest truth I don't believe there's a foot of land closer to us than the Bermudas, which must lie off in that direction," pointing further toward the southwest.
"When the sun glints on it I'm fairly dazzled," Jack continued, "just as if some one had used a piece of broken looking-glass to shoot the rays into my eyes. And then there's a sort of queer mist hanging about that thing in the bargain, so that sometimes it's almost blotted out. What under the sun can it be?"
"I think I can give a guess," Tom called back. "How would an iceberg fill the bill, Colin?"
"Just the thing, I'd say," the lieutenant answered, "only who ever heard of an iceberg floating down in mid-Atlantic at this season of the year? Such a thing would be uncommon, to say the least."
"But not impossible?" ventured Tom, to which the other agreed.
"Take a look, and tell us, Colin," urged Jack, offering the glasses.