vapor which showed that a whale had just spouted.
"Do you suppose that's a whalebone whale, Hank?" asked the boy, turning to a lithe Yankee sea-dog with a scraggy gray beard who had been busily working over the mechanism of the whale-gun.
"No sayin'," was the cautious reply, "we're too fur off to be able to tell yet a while. How fur away do you reckon we be?"
"A mile or two, I suppose," Colin said, "but we ought to catch up with the whale pretty soon, oughtn't we?"
"That depends," the gunner answered, "on whether the whale's willin' or not. He ain't goin' to stay, right there."
"But you usually do catch up?"
"If it's a 'right' whale we generally try to, an' havin' steam to help us out makes a pile o' difference. Now, in the ol' days, I've seen a dozen whales to wind'ard an' we couldn't get to 'em at all. By the time we'd beaten 'round to where they'd been sighted, they were gone."
"Well, I hope this is a 'right' whale," Colin said with emphatic earnestness.
"Why this one 'specially?" the old sailor asked.