However, neither of the brothers had much the advantage of the other; for, up to breakfast time, Tristan had not been sighted.
But, about noon, “a change came o’er the spirit of their dream!”
Captain Brown had just gone below to his cabin to get his sextant in order to take the sun, while Fritz, to quiet his impatience, had sat down on the top of the cuddy skylight with a book in his hand, which he was pretending to read so as to cheat himself, as it were; when, suddenly, there came a shout from a man whom the skipper had ordered to be placed on the look-out forward—a shout that rang through the ship.
“Land ho!”
Fritz dropped his book on to the deck at once and Eric sprang up into the mizzen rigging, hurriedly scrambling up the ratlins to the masthead, whence he would have a better point of observation; the skipper meanwhile racing up the companion way with his sextant in his hand.
“Land—where away?” he sang out, hailing the man on the fore cross-trees.
“Dead away to leeward, two points off the beam,” was the answer at once returned by the man on the look-out, who happened, strangely enough, to be Fritz’s whilom acquaintance, the “deck hand!”
“Are you sure?” hailed the captain again to make certain.
“As sure as there’s claws on a Rocky Mountain b’ar,” replied the man in a tone of voice that showed he was a bit nettled at his judgment being questioned; for he next added, quite loud enough for all to hear, “I guess I oughter know land when I see it. I ain’t a child put out to dry nurse, I ain’t!”
“There, thet’ll do; stow thet palaver!” said Captain Brown sharply, “else you’ll find thet if Rocky Mountain b’ars hev claws, they ken use ’em, an’ hug with a prutty good grip of their own too, when they mean bizness, I guess, Nat Slater; so, you’d better quiet down an’ keep thet sass o’ yourn for some un else!”