I saw Farmer start from his seat on the gun as if shot, his flushed features turned ashen pale, and for a moment his palsied lips refused to give utterance to a sound.
“Sail ho!” repeated the man in a louder hail, thinking, I suppose, that his first intimation had passed unnoticed. This second hail fairly startled the men, and in a moment everything was bustle and confusion and panic. It aroused Farmer too; he pulled himself together sufficiently to respond to the hail with the usual question, “Where away?” and, on receiving the reply, “Two points on the larboard bow,” walked forward to personally inspect the stranger. We, of course, likewise directed our glances in the specified direction; and there she was, sure enough, a large ship, on the starboard tack, with every stitch of canvas set that would draw, and steering a course which would take her across our bows at a distance of about a mile.
“Bring me the spy-glass out of the cabin, somebody!” hailed Farmer from the forecastle. The glass—a very powerful one and a favourite instrument with the murdered captain—was handed him by one of the quarter-masters, and he applied it to his eye. A breathless silence now prevailed fore and aft for the stranger had all the look of a British man-of-war, and everybody was waiting to hear what Farmer’s verdict would be. The inspection was a long-sustained and evidently anxious one. At length, dropping the glass into the hollow of his arm Farmer turned and said:
“Bring Mr Southcott on deck, and let us hear his opinion of yonder hooker.”
In a few minutes the master was escorted on deck by a couple of armed seamen, and led forward to where Farmer was standing.
“Mr Southcott,” said the mutineer, turning toward the individual addressed, and perceptibly shrinking as their glance met, “be good enough to take this glass, and let me know wha’ you think of the stranger yonder.”
“Stranger!” ejaculated Southcott. “Where away? Ah, I see her!” and he took the glass from Farmer’s extended hand.
“Well, what think you of her?” asked Farmer impatiently, after the master had been silently working away with the glass for some two or three minutes.
“One moment, please,” answered Southcott with his eye still glued to the tube; “I think—but I am not quite sure—if she would only keep just the merest trifle more away—so as to permit of my catching a glimpse—”
“Sail ho!” shouted a man in the fore-top; “two of ’em, a brig and a ship on the starboard beam, away in under the land there!”