Greatly to the disgust and annoyance of Mr. Rudderhead, Captain Talbot, having as we have said, a proportion of Royal Naval Reserve men on board, when the weather was fine, was fond of training the crew to the guns and small arms, making and shortening sail, reefing topsails, and otherwise manoeuvring the ship; and when she was about the latitude of St. Helena, it would seem as if the skill and mettle of her crew were on the point of being tangibly proved.
Foul winds, as stated, had driven the Amethyst considerably to the westward of her course. One day, in the early part of the morning watch, Derval was regarding with pleasure, as he often did, the strange beauty of the early day-break on the vast and wide expanse of ocean. The first streaks of grey and then yellow light stretched for miles and miles along the horizon eastward, indicating the line where sky and ocean met; throwing a broadening sheet of radiance upon the face of the undulating deep, imparting a weird beauty to it, which, as a writer says, combined with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around you, "gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can give."
Day broke and brightened fast, and the Amethyst was on a wind, with topsails, courses, jib, and spanker set, when suddenly the cry, which always attracts attention on board ship, "Sail ho!" was given by one of the watch.
"Where?" demanded Derval.
"Right astern, sir."
Derval took the glass from the cleats, where it hung in the companion, and saw a vessel, equal in tonnage evidently to the Amethyst, heading directly after her, with every stitch of canvas spread. She was a great clipper-built brigantine.
"She is following us, certainly," said one of the men.
"What can she want with us?" asked another.
"Has lost her reckoning—or is out of water or something else," suggested the first speaker.
"Are you going to shorten sail, and let her come up with us?" asked Harry Bowline.