She leaned heavily against me, and I do believe that she had fallen asleep again between the arm-chair and the state-room. This I discovered when she nearly fell into the bunk during a sudden lurch of the schooner. She aroused, smiled drowsily, and was off to sleep again; and asleep I left her, under a heavy pair of sailor’s blankets, her head resting on a pillow I had appropriated from Wolf Larsen’s bunk.
CHAPTER XIX.
I came on deck to find the Ghost heading up close on the port tack and cutting in to windward of a familiar spritsail close-hauled on the same tack ahead of us. All hands were on deck, for they knew that something was to happen when Leach and Johnson were dragged aboard.
It was four bells. Louis came aft to relieve the wheel. There was a dampness in the air, and I noticed he had on his oilskins.
“What are we going to have?” I asked him.
“A healthy young slip of a gale from the breath iv it, sir,” he answered, “with a splatter iv rain just to wet our gills an’ no more.”
“Too bad we sighted them,” I said, as the Ghost’s bow was flung off a point by a large sea and the boat leaped for a moment past the jibs and into our line of vision.
Louis gave a spoke and temporized. “They’d never iv made the land, sir, I’m thinkin’.”
“Think not?” I queried.
“No, sir. Did you feel that?” (A puff had caught the schooner, and he was forced to put the wheel up rapidly to keep her out of the wind.) “’Tis no egg-shell’ll float on this sea an hour come, an’ it’s a stroke iv luck for them we’re here to pick ’em up.”