Slipping slowly through the water, the whaler did exactly as the man Forest predicted.
She was a dull sailer, and the time seemed long and weary to those who watched her on board the raft with intense anxiety. So precarious had been their late position, so changeable the events of their life, that they could not believe in safety until they should actually feel its existence.
The whaler was now dead to windward, and the raft still going slowly through the water before the breeze. The two bodies, namely, those of Captain Weber and the carpenter Morris, lay side by side amidships.
“Take the sail off her, my lads,” said the mate, and he was obeyed with ready alacrity, the canvas being stripped from the stump of a mast, and thrown over the two corpses.
Paying round, the whaler wore, and slowly handling her loftier canvas, her huge hull came rolling along, heading straight for the raft, her crew shortening sail as they came on.
Slowly she neared it, and a score or more of men might be seen clustering in her rigging, or gazing over her bulwarks at the strange sight presented by the spars drifting along on the waves of the ocean.
“Raft, ahoy!” shouted a man, who was holding on in the mizen rigging of the ship, “what raft is that?”
“The wreck of the brig ‘Halcyon,’ lost in the late gale,” replied the mate, using his two hands as a trumpet.
“What was the meaning of the firing?” again shouted Captain Hawkins, master of the whaler the “Dolphin,” still misdoubting, for in those days pirates were not unknown off the coast of Madagascar.
“Mutiny and murder,” returned the mate, at the top of his voice, for all reply.