“She’s very like them,” Jake agreed. “There’s no smoke, and no wash about her. It looks as if they’d had some trouble in the engine-room and she’d stopped.”
Dick nodded and glanced across the dazzling water towards the high, blue coast. He did not think the steamer could be seen from the land, and the launch would, no doubt, be invisible from her deck, but this was not important and he began to calculate how long it would take them to reach a point ahead. Some time later, he looked round again. The steamer was fading in the distance, but no smoke trailed behind her and he did not think she had started yet. His attention, however, was occupied by the headland he was steering for, because he thought it marked the neighborhood of their port.
He spent an hour in the place before he finished his business and started home, and when they were about half-way across the bay the light began to fade. The sun had sunk and the high land cut, harshly blue, against a saffron glow; the sea was shadowy and colorless in the east. Presently Jake, who sat facing aft, called out:
“There’s a steamer’s masthead light coming up astern of us. Now I see her side lights, and by the distance between them she’s a big boat.”
Dick changed his course, because the steamer’s three lights would not have been visible unless she was directly following him and the launch’s small yellow funnel and dingy white topsides would be hard to distinguish. When he had shut out one of the colored side lights and knew he was safe, he stopped the engine to wait until the vessel passed. There was no reason why he should do so, but somehow he felt interested in the ship. Lighting his pipe, he studied her through the glasses, which he gave to Jake.
“She’s the boat we saw before,” he said.
“That’s so,” Jake agreed. “Her engines are all right now because she’s steaming fast.”
Dick nodded, for he had marked the mass of foam that curled and broke away beneath the vessel’s bow, but Jake resumed: “It looks as if her dynamo had stopped. There’s nothing to be seen but her navigation lights and she’s certainly a passenger boat. They generally glitter like a gin-saloon.”
The ship was getting close now and Dick, who asked for the glasses, examined her carefully as she came up, foreshortened, on their quarter. Her dark bow looked very tall and her funnel loomed, huge and shadowy, against the sky. Above its top the masthead light shed a yellow glimmer, and far below, the sea leapt and frothed about the line of hull. This drew out and lengthened as she came abreast of them, but now he could see the tiers of passenger decks, one above the other, there was something mysterious in the gloom that reigned on board. No ring of light pierced her long dark side and the gangways behind the rails and rows of stanchions looked like shadowy caves. In the open spaces, forward and aft, however, bodies of men were gathered, their clothes showing faintly white, but they stood still in a compact mass until a whistle blew and the indistinct figures scattered across the deck.
“A big crew,” Jake remarked. “Guess they’ve been putting them through a boat or fire drill.”