"I will put a wineglass of brandy into one of the bottles," mother said. "It may be useful to you; who can say?"
I got the life-preserver, as you call it nowadays, on board without its being seen, and stowed it away in my locker. I felt glad now I'd got it, for mother's dream had made me feel uneasy; and on my way down old Dick Tremaine said to me:
"I don't like the look of the sky, lad."
"No!" says I; "why, it looks fine enough."
"Too fine, lad. I tell ye, boy, I don't like the look of it. I think we're going to have a bad blow."
I told the others what he had said; but they didn't heed much. Two boats had come in that morning with a fine catch, and after the bad time we'd been having it would have taken a lot to keep them in after that.
We thought no more about it after we had once started. The wind was light and puffy; but we had great luck, and were too busy to watch the weather. What wind there was, was northerly; but towards sunset it dropped suddenly, and as the sails flapped we looked round at the sky.
"I fear old Dick was right, lads," Jabez Harper, who was skipper, said, "and I wish we had taken more heed to his words. That's about as wild a sunset as may be; and look how that drift is nearing our boat."
Even I, who was the youngest of them, was old enough to read the signs of a storm—the heavy bank of dark clouds, the pale-yellow broken light, the horse-tails high up in the sky, and the small broken irregular masses of cloud that hurried across them. Instinctively we looked round towards the coast. It was fully fifteen miles away, and we were to the east of it. The great change in the appearance of the sky had taken place in the last half-hour; previous to that time there had been nothing which would have struck any but a man grown old upon the coast like Dick Tremaine.
"Reef the mainsail," Jabez said, "and the foresail too; take in the mizzen. Like enough it will come with a squall, and we'd best be as snug as may be. What do you say? shall we throw over some of the fish?"