Jack came to the break of the poop and looked over to where Tom was standing, on the deck below. His black hair and beard were covered with the dampness, so that he looked as though he had turned gray.
“Tom,” said he, “I wish you’d slip foreward and see that those men are keeping a bright lookout ahead. Keep your weather eye lifted too, Tom, till we’re out of the worst of this infernally thick fog.”
So Tom went foreward, as Jack had asked him to do, and found that the two men who had been placed there since they had run into the fog were keeping as sharp a lookout as could be wished for.
Just as Tom climbed up on the forecastle, they surged out into a clear space, that was maybe two miles or two miles and a quarter from side to side.
They had run pretty nearly across this stretch, and I recollect that Tom was just lighting his pipe under the lee of the foremast. As he raised his head and looked over the port bow, he saw a sight that made the blood stand still in his veins.
It was a man-of-war in full sail, looming up like a mountain.
It came out of the fog so suddenly, that it seemed as though the mist had taken form from itself. It was bearing straight down across the port bow of the Nancy Hazlewood, plunging forward as solemnly as death. It could not have been more than six or seven ships’ lengths distant, and the great sails bellying out like big clouds, shadowed over the Nancy Hazlewood as she might have shadowed over a fishing smack.
Ten seconds more and she would have been down upon them, and would have crushed the little craft as though she had been made of paper. There was a moment of silence as great as though every man aboard of the Nancy Hazlewood had been turned to stone. I remember that Tom Granger stood with his newly-lighted pipe in his hand, never moving a hair.
The silence was only for an instant, though, for the next moment a voice roared like a trumpet:
“Hard a starboard! Let go, head sheets and lee head braces!”