CHAPTER XXIV.
THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE.
"A fair and goodly day!" exclaimed Standish ever sensitive to the aspects of nature, although never allowing himself to be mastered by any extremity of weather.
"Ay," replied Bradford. "And yet methinks that cloud rising over Manomet hath a stormy look."
"Let us once weather the Gurnet's Nose, and a south wind will not harm us," ventured Billington, whose out-of-door prowlings had at least made him weatherwise.
"Ay, if south wind is all that it means," said Doctor Fuller gravely. "But to my mind yon cloud is of no common kind. It minds me shrewdly of those whirlwind or cyclone clouds that used to fright us in the China Seas when I sailed them as a lad."
"Say you so, Surgeon!" replied Bradford looking uneasily at the cloud rapidly rising and enlarging in the southern horizon. "Be ready with the sheets, Peter Browne and Cooke, and Francis Eaton had best stand with Latham at the helm."
"Look! Look you there! 'T is a waterspout!" cried Fuller, pointing excitedly at the cloud, which, driven on with furious force by an upper current of wind unfelt below, was now bellying in a marked and abnormal fashion, while from the lowest point of the convexity appeared a spiral column of dense vapor rapidly elongating itself toward the sea whose waters assumed a black and sullen aspect, disturbed by chopping counter currents of short waves, which gradually, as the waterspout neared them, fell into its rotary motion, rising at the centre of the whirlpool into a column of foaming water, a liquid stalagmite climbing to meet the stalactite bending to it from above.
"If we had but a heavy gun!" cried Warren. "They say to hit the waterspout in the centre where it joins the other from below will disperse it."