As he rowed he shouted, and had anyone on board heard him they might have fancied it, so thin and hard was his voice, the crying of a sea gull, but from all appearances no one heard him, for not a light shewed.
Now she bulked up enormous, a great trapezium of ebony cutting the silver sky; he ceased rowing, shouted again, and paused to listen. So close was she that he could hear the wash of the water at her fore foot, the creaking of blocks and the slatting of the scarcely filled sails.
Scarcely a cable length away and making to pass him by half that distance she came, black as ebony, a barquentine, silent as a phantom, stealthy as a thief. Then, as he hailed her again with a last despairing cry, she burst into voice.
CHAPTER XI
CAPTAIN SAGESSE
A lantern shot its light over the port quarter, a voice hailed him from the deck:
“Hi yi ow!” shrill as a bird, and at the cry, like a shaken beehive, the forecastle broke into life; the decks in a moment were a-swarm, chattering like a tree full of monkeys, another lantern shewed over the port bow, and above the lantern a face black as the face of a devil with glittering eyeballs and white teeth grinned down on the boat below.
Next moment something struck Gaspard across the chest, it was a rope; seizing it he held on, and the little boat came up grinding against the great washing wall of the vessel, carried with her on her slow way and right beneath the broad channel of the foremast. He seized the rope’s end to the forward seat, caught up the belt with the pouch of gold and fastened it to his waist; then, reaching up, he caught hold of a channelplate and with the help of another rope flung by the chattering crowd above, swung himself on to the channel. Next moment he was on deck.
The starlight lit the decks dimly fore and aft, he was surrounded with negroes swarming and chattering like monkeys; a man in a panama hat who had helped him over the side, and who, disregarding him, was now shouting directions in shrill French to a black man who had slipped down into the boat, seemed the only white man on board.