He went below to smoke, leaving me fully occupied with the steering. We rose the steamer pretty fast, and in half an hour could see her water-line when she lifted. She was a fine screw boat of three thousand tons, racing along at eighteen knots, and rolling with the beam sea up to her rails, in spite of the fore and aft canvas they had set to steady her.
Haigh came back to deck, blinking like an owl at the growing day. "Look at the gray-backs chivying her," said he. "Aren't the passengers just sorry for themselves now? And won't they have some fine yarns to pitch when they get ashore about the hardest gale the captain ever knew, and their own heroic efforts (down below), and all the rest of it? I've listened to those tales of desperate adventure by the hour together. Passengers by Dover-Calais packets are great at 'em."
All this while we were closing up. The steamer's decks were tenantless save for a couple of lookouts forward in oilskins, bright varnished by the spin-drift, and a couple of officers crouched behind the canvas dodgers of the bridge, and holding fast on to the stanchions. I was clearing my throat to hail these last, when Haigh turned and told me I might save my wind.
"Never mind," he said; "I know her well. She's the Eugène Perrier, a Transatlantique Company's boat, one of the quick line out of Algiers for Marseille. Look at your compass, and note the course she's steering—N.N.E. and by E. That's from Cape Bajoli straight for Marseille. They run both ways between Mallorca and Minorca without touching. Hooray! who says our luck isn't stupendous? Here we are, not having made enough southing, and heading so as to fetch Gibraltar without sighting the islands at all; and then in the nick of time up comes a dea ex machinâ in the guise of the Eugène Perrier to shove us on the course again. In main-sheet, and then, blow me if we won't have a bottle of that vermouth by way of celebrating the event in a way at once highly becoming and original."
We made a landfall that afternoon off some of the high ground in North-east Mallorca, and Haigh gave over champing his cold cigar-butt, and delivered himself of an idea.
"Isn't there another harbour in Minorca besides Port Mahon?"
I said I believed there were some half-dozen small ones.
"Any this west side?"
"Ciudadella, about in the middle."
"Know anything about it?"