“Why, what can we do?”
“O, never mind. I’ve got a plan. Do you think we couldn’t have been doing better all this day than staying here, moping our lives out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, I mean the very thing that I proposed this morning.”
“What, to row to the ship?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“How can you row twenty miles?”
“Stuff and nonsense. She can’t be so far. Captain Corbet’s utterly mistaken.”
“Why, she’s below the horizon.”
“I don’t care. I judge from the looks of her. Do you believe you can see so plainly a ship that’s twenty miles away? Why, man alive, if she had a flag up you could almost make it out. For my part, I feel sure that she isn’t over five miles away at the very farthest. I haven’t the slightest doubt about it. Why, Bart, you and I are both accustomed enough to look at ships out on the water, and you can see for yourself that it’s simply impossible that this one can be so far away as twenty miles, or farther away than I say. All the morning I couldn’t help feeling puzzled, and concluded that it might be something in the atmosphere that magnified the ship, and made her seem so near,—like the mirage, you know; but, afterwards, I gave that up.”