“I pray Heaven that he does nothing so foolish!” murmured Roger, who still remembered his own experience with the sharks.
The unfortunate man had no such intention, it presently appeared; yet was he still in a sufficiently dangerous situation, for he stopped where he was with the water up round his shoulders, and continued waving his signal of distress.
“Five fathoms bare!” was the next report of the man with the sounding-line.
“We can edge in even a little farther yet,” remarked the captain. “But I cannot understand,” he continued, “why that man persists in acting so strangely. He must know by this time that we have seen him and will rescue him, yet he continues to signal with his arms and that red rag as though he were demented. It would not greatly surprise me to find, when we get him on board, that his brain has given way with the horror of solitude, suffering, and privation.”
“By your leave, sir, it seems very much to me,” suggested Roger, touching his hat, “as though the poor fellow were striving not so much to attract us nearer as to warn us to keep farther away.”
“Why, boy, prithee what puts that idea into your head?” retorted the captain rather testily. “Why should he wish us to keep off? Surely if you were in his place you would be fully as anxious as he appears to be to have the rescuing ships approach and take you off without delay?”
“What I meant to suggest, Mr Cavendish,” responded Roger rather stiffly, and not one whit abashed by his commander’s testiness, “was that perchance this man knows the shoals and rocks round the island well. He may perceive that we are sailing into danger, and wish to warn us from approaching any closer before it be too late.”
“Zounds, boy!” shouted Cavendish, “’fore Heaven I believe that you may be right in your assumption!”
Then, turning to the crew: “All hands stand by to veer ship!” he cried.
But even as he spoke there was a sudden check to the vessel’s way, and almost instantly she stopped dead, the sudden shock throwing more than one man prostrate on the deck. At the same moment the leadsman in the chains gave his warning cry: “Three fathoms only, and shoaling fast!”