We could feel the heat of the conflagration even to windward. In a quarter of an hour she was enveloped from stem to stern in a sheet of fire, that rose skyward in the form of a pyramid. By this time every vestige of her spars, sails, and rigging had disappeared.
The entire deck had been consumed; the bulwarks and moulded plank-sheer rapidly followed, and through the flames that roared fiercely from the hollow of her hull, we could see the black timberheads standing upward like a row of fangs.
Rents appeared next in her sides, as the flames burst through the inner and outer sheathing, and with a hissing sound as they met the waves of the briny sea. Then a salt steam rose, and its strange odor, with that of the burning wood, was wafted at times toward us.
At last she gave a sudden heel to starboard, and with a sound unlike any thing I ever heard before—a deluge of water extinguishing a mighty fire—the waves rushed tumultuously in on all sides. She vanished from our sight in mist and obscurity, and a heavy darkness suddenly replaced the glare that for a time had lit up the heaving sea, dazzling our eyes and sickening our hearts.
"All's over now," said Tom Lambourne, as he grasped the tiller with a firm hand, after carefully wrapping a blanket round poor Hislop, who drooped beside him in the stern-sheets.
"Which way shall we pull?" asked the bow-man, as we paused with our oars in the rowlocks.
"It matters little, mates," cried Tom, in a loud voice, with his left hand at the side of his mouth, to send what he said forward above the roar of the wind and sea. "We must be many hundred miles from Brazil, the nearest land, and we can do nothing now but keep our boat alive by baling and steering till daybreak. Now, Master Hislop," he added, lowering his voice, "how do you feel, sir?"
"I feel that I am quite in your way, my lads—a useless hand aboard, to consume your food and water, replied Hislop, faintly.
"Why, sir," said Probart, the stroke-oarsman, "you don't think we could have left you to burn in the poor old brig?"
"No, not exactly; still, I am of no use to you, and I feel——"