“I do not agree with you. I think they are quite as near to us as they are to the brig; and if they keep on and the squall bursts before they reach the brig, they will have to pull against it, and may perhaps not fetch her after all, whereas if I recall them, and they are overtaken before they reach us, they will have the wind all in their favour instead of dead against them.”
“That is very true,” I assented. “It appears to me, however, that the whole question hinges upon the point whether they are nearer to us or to the brig; and in my opinion they are much nearer to the latter.”
For fully another minute Mendouca continued to watch the boats; then he suddenly exclaimed—
“I shall recall them. Clear away the bow gun there, and fire it with a blank cartridge; and, Pedro, get out the recall signal, and stand by to run it up to the main-truck at the flash of the gun.”
The signal was made, the boom of the gun seeming to echo with a hollow, long-drawn-out reverberation between sea and sky; and within a minute the boats, with seeming reluctance, had turned and were pulling back to the brigantine.
Meanwhile the heavens had continued to darken, until, by the time that the boats had turned, the whole scene had become involved in a murky twilight, through the gloom of which the brig, still with every stitch of canvas set, could with difficulty be made out. Still, although it seemed to me that the brooding squall might burst upon us at any moment, the atmosphere maintained its ominous condition of stagnation until the boats had reached within some four cables’ lengths—or somewhat less than half-a-mile—of us; when, as I was intently watching their progress, I saw the sky suddenly break along the horizon just above them, the clouds appearing as though rent violently apart for a length of some ten or twelve degrees of arc, while the rent was filled with a strong yet misty glare of coppery-yellow light, in the very centre of which the brig stood out sharply-defined, and as black as a shape cut out of silhouette paper.
“Here it comes, at last!” I exclaimed; and as the words passed my lips I felt a spot of rain upon my face, and in another instant down it came, a regular deluge, but only for about half a minute, when it ceased abruptly, and, looking toward the brig, I saw a long line of white foam sweeping down towards her.
“God help those poor, unhappy blacks!” I cried. “If that craft’s spars and rigging happen to be good she will turn the turtle with them, and probably not one of them will escape!”
“It is a just punishment upon them for rising against the crew,” exclaimed Mendouca savagely; “but if I had only succeeded in laying hands upon them I would have inflicted a worse punishment upon them than drowning. I would have—ah! look at that! Now the squall strikes her, and over she goes. Taken flat aback, by heaven!”
It was as Mendouca had said; the brig when struck by the squall happened to be lying head on to it, and her topmasts bent like reeds ere they yielded to the pressure, and snapped short off by the caps. Then, gathering stern-way, she paid off until she was nearly broadside on to us, and we could see that her stern was becoming more and more depressed as it was forced against the comparatively stubborn and unyielding water, while her bow was raised proportionally high in the air. Foot by foot, and second by second, her stern sank deeper and deeper into the water until the latter was flush with her taffrail, and then, with the aid of a telescope, I saw it go foaming and boiling in upon her deck, driving the dense crowd of negroes forward foot by foot. By this time her forefoot was raised clear out of the water, and, enveloped in mist and spray though she was, I could see the bright, glassy glare of the sky beyond and below it. For a second she remained thus; then her bow rose still higher in the air, and, with a long sliding plunge, she disappeared stern foremost.