Then without further speech he went on deck.
The air was cool. The sun was not yet up. It was that strange, queer mid-period between dark and dawn, when the night is over and the day not yet come, just the gray that is neither light nor dark, the dim dead blink as of the refracted light from extinct worlds.
We stood at the rail. We did not speak; we stood watching. It was so still that the drip of steam from some loosened pipe far below was plainly audible, and it sounded in that lifeless, silent grayness like—God knows what—a death tick.
"You see," said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, "there's no mistake about it. She is moving—this way."
"Oh, a current, of course," Strokher tried to say cheerfully, "sets her toward us."
Would the morning never come?
Ally Bazan—his parents were Catholic—began to mutter to himself.
Then Hardenberg spoke aloud.
"I particularly don't want—that—out—there—to cross our bows. I don't want it to come to that. We must get some sails on her."
"And I put it to you as man to man," said Strokher, "where might be your wind."