IV
THREE DESPERATE MEN
CHAPTER XV
THE ISLAND
To the dark land on the sky-line, we swiftly drew nearer, and presently saw a low shore where a thread of gleaming white, which came and went, told us unmistakably that great seas were breaking. Of the exact point that we had reached on the coast we still were in doubt, for our charts were poor and Captain North suspected the quadrant of having developed some fault of a nature so technical that I neither understood it at the time nor now remember its name; so we hove to, while Gleazen and Matterson and Gideon North, and eventually Mr. Severance, of whom I saw less and thought more seldom than of any other man in the cabin, put their heads together and argued the matter.
Mr. Severance was a good enough man in his place, I suppose, but he was too indolent and self-centred, and too sleepily fond of his pipe, to command attention.
For all the headway that the four seemed to be making, they might have argued until the crack of doom, as far as I could see, when from the masthead came the cry, "Sail ho!"