“Bon Dieu,” cried La Touche. “The cursed boat.” He spat as though something bitter were in his mouth and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He did not seem to care a button whether the lady were alive or not. He had been dreaming that he was in a tavern, just raising a glass to his mouth, and Bompard had awakened him to this.
The girl could not repeat the question to which there seemed no answer, she crawled into the stern sheets and sitting there, half bent, watched the two men. An observer perched in the sky above might have noticed the curious fact that on board the forsaken boat quarter deck and fo’c’sle still held sway, that the lady was the lady and the hands the hands, that Bompard was talking in an undertone, saying to La Touche: “Come, get alive, get alive,” and that La Touche, after his first outburst, was holding himself in. They were old yachtsmen, no disaster could shake that fact.
La Touche, rising and taking his seat on a thwart and looking everywhere but in the direction of the girl, as though ashamed of something, began cutting up some tobacco in a mechanical way, whilst Bompard, on his knees, was exploring the contents of the forward locker. La Touche was a fair-haired man, younger than Bompard, a melancholy looking individual who always seemed gazing at the worst of things. He spoke now as the girl drew his attention to something far away in the east, something sketched vaguely in the sky as though a picture lay there beyond the haze.
“Ay, that’s Kerguelen,” said La Touche.
Bompard, on his knees, and with a maconochie tin in his left hand, raised his head and looked.
“Ay, that’s Kerguelen,” said Bompard.
“And look,” said the girl, pointing towards Kerguelen. “Is not that the sail of a boat, away ever so far—or is it a gull? Now it’s gone. Look, there it is again.”
Bompard looked.
“I see nothing,” said he, “gull, most like—there wouldn’t be any boat from us, they’re all gone, unless it was a boat from that hooker we struck.”
“Boat,” said La Touche with a dismal laugh. “She got no boat away, she went down by the bows with the fellows like flies on her, this is the only boat of the lot that got away.”