“Excellent, sir,” I replied; “we shall just nicely clear the northern end of the reef if she is kept at that.”
“D’ye see anything else besides the reef, Mr Temple?” asked the skipper,—“anything, I mean, in the shape of another schooner, for instance?”
“Nothing at all, sir,” I answered.
“That’s all right, then,” answered the skipper in a tone of exuberant satisfaction. “I guess you don’t need to stay up there no longer, do ye?”
I slung the telescope round my neck by its strap, and then, swinging off the yard, slid down to the deck hand over hand by way of the topgallant backstay, walking aft and joining the skipper and Cunningham as soon as my feet touched the planks.
“So the reefs there, all right, is it?” remarked Brown, as I joined the pair and returned the telescope with thanks to its lawful owner. “There ain’t no chance of a mistake, I s’pose?”
“No chance at all,” I replied confidently. “It is there as plain as the nose on one’s face. If you remember, I told you yesterday that, provided the breeze held, we should be at anchor in the lagoon by noon to-day; and so we shall.”
“Ay, ay,” answered Brown. “I remember your sayin’ so. And I didn’t doubt your word, not for a second, for you’re an A1 navigator, and no mistake. Never knowed a better. But I was just a little bit afeard that Abe might ha’ been playin’ it on me, or else that his riggers might ha’ got a bit mixed. But I reckon it’s a square deal, since you say that the reefs there. What do it look like?”
“From aloft it presents the precise appearance that you described to me,” I said. “A bare reef, almost awash, with not a thing upon it, except a few birds which I could just make out circling in the air above it.”
“Ay, that’ll be it, sure enough,” agreed Brown. “I remember Abe speakin’ about them birds. Their eggs, some clams that he knocked off the rocks, and a fish or two that he managed to catch later on was all that the pore feller had to eat for five everlastin’ months—and raw at that.”