And their screaming awoke McBain.
He was speedily on deck.
Yonder was the Perseverando slowly descending.
During all the long cruise of the Arrandoon nobody referred to the adventure at the crater of Jan Mayen without a feeling akin to sadness and contrition, for all felt that something had been done which ought not to have been done—there had been, as McBain called it, “a tempting of Providence.”
“Well, well, well,” cried the skipper of the Canny Scotia—and he seemed to be in anything but a sweet temper. “Just like my luck. I do declare, mate, if I’d been born a hatter everybody else would have been born without heads. Here have I been struggling away for years against fortune, always trying to get a good voyage to support a small wife and a big family, and now that luck seems to have all turned in our favour, two glorious patches of seals on the ice yonder, a hard frost, and the ice beautifully red with blood, and no ship near us, then you, mate, come down from the crow’s-nest with that confoundedly long face of yours, for which you ought to have been smothered at birth—”
“I can’t help my face, sir,” cried the mate, bristling up like a bantam cock.
“Silence!” roared the burly skipper. “Silence! when you talk to your captain. You, I say, you come and report a big steamer in sight to help us at the banquet.”
The mate scratched his head, taking his hat off for the purpose.
“Did I make the ship?” he asked with naïve innocence.