Something in his tone suggested that the question might be considered as closed, and they discussed other matters while the deck heaved and slanted under them until a man forward flung up an arm and turned towards them with a cry which the wind swept away. In another moment Desmond scrambled half-way up the bridge ladder, and clung there with the mate close beneath him gazing at the white welter where the seas swept by the point. There was a sail just outshore of it, a little strip of gray canvas that appeared and vanished amidst the serried ranks of tumbling combers. It drew out of them and drove furiously towards the Palestrina, and when a strip of white hull grew into visibility beneath it Desmond looked down at his mate.
"A big surf-boat. It's Ormsgill," he said.
There was certainty in his tone, as well as a little ring of satisfaction which was, perhaps, warranted, for it is, after all, something to be the friend of a man who does just what he has promised and never arrives too late. In the meanwhile the object they were watching had grown into a bellying lug-sail that reeled to lee and to weather with the sea streaming from the foot of it, and a patch of foam-swept hull. The boat came on furiously, and when the mate sprang from the ladder roaring orders Desmond could see three or four black figures through the spray that whirled over her. There was also another man in white garments standing upright in her stern, and Desmond was wholly sure of his identity. Then she was lost for awhile, and only swept into sight again abreast of the Palestrina's dipping bows, hove high with half her length lifted out of the crest of a breaking sea.
She drove forward with it, the foam standing half a man's height above her stern and the foot of the slanted lug-sail washing in the brine, while a bent white figure struggled with the great steering oar. She swooped like a toboggan plunging down an icy slide when she was level with the Palestrina's bridge, and some of the men who watched her from the latter's rail held their breath as the smoking sea passed on and another gathered itself together astern of her. The helmsman, they knew, must bring the dripping, half-swamped boat on the wind to reach the strip of lee beneath the steamer's stern, and when he did it there was every prospect of her rolling over.
In another moment several black objects rose and grappled with the lug-sail sheet, and the big boat tilted until all one side of her was in the air. Then she went up in the midst of a white spouting as the slope of water behind fell upon her. Still, the slanted lug-sail rose out of it, and then came down thrashing furiously while naked black figures half-seen in the spray bent from her gunwale with swinging paddles as she drove towards the Palestrina's quarter. After that there was a hoarse shouting, and the lines flew from the reeling taffrail as she slid under the steamer's stern.
In another minute or two Ormsgill swung himself on board through the gangway. He had no hat, and the water ran from him, but he shook hands with Desmond unconcernedly.
"Ask them to hand that fellow up," he said pointing to a man who sat huddled in the water that swirled up and down inside the plunging boat. "We took rather a heavy one over two or three hours ago, and he brought up on the after thwart when the big oar jumped its crutch. As he's the only Kroo among them, I took the helm myself after that. I don't fancy he has broken anything."
Desmond hustled him into the deck-house when the negro had been brought on deck and the dripping boat rode astern, and an hour later he sat at dinner with his comrade in the little white saloon. Darkness had closed down in the meanwhile, and the lamp that swung above their heads flung a soft light across the table, where dainty glassware and silver glittered on the snowy cloth. Ormsgill smiled as he glanced at it and the glowing blotch of color in his wine glass.
"After all, this kind of thing has its advantages, especially when one has been accustomed to squatting in the wood smoke over a calabash of palm oil or some other unhallowed nigger compound," he said. "It's a trifle pleasant to wear clothes that fit you, too. Father Tiebout's and those Dom Clemente lent me didn't. I had to cut the wrists off the latter's jacket."
Desmond looked at him reflectively over his cigar, for he had something to say, and was a trifle uncertain as to how he should set about it.