There was a delicious smell of something cooking in one of Pat Doolan’s galley pots, hung gipsy fashion over a roaring fire, and superintended by the Irishman, now himself again. A large tent had also been rigged up by the aid of the boat sails and tarpaulins, making the place have the appearance of a cosy encampment, and offering a pleasant change to the desolate look it had worn the previous afternoon—when the sea was roaring in, hurling a deluge of foam on the beach, and we, wet and forlorn, were endeavouring to save the flotsam and jetsam of the long-boat’s cargo.
“Sure an’ you’re a foine gintleman, taking it aisy,” said Pat Doolan, when I went up to him. “An’ is it a pannikin o’ coffee you’ll be afther wanting, this watch?”
“I shouldn’t refuse it if you offered it,” said I, with a laugh.
“Be jabers, you’re the bhoy for the coffee!” he replied cheerily. “An’ its meeself that’s moighty proud to sarve you. Sure an’ I don’t forgit how you thried, like a brave gossoon, to save that poor chap last night!”
“Ah!” I ejaculated, feeling melancholy when he thus brought up Harmer’s fate, which had passed out of my mind for the moment. “But you did your best, too, Pat.”
“Bad was the bist then, alannah, bad cess to it!” said he. “There, now, Mister Leigh, dhrink your coffee an’ ha’ done with it. The poor chap’s gone, and we can’t call him back; but have you heard tell of the news? Misther ‘Old-son-of-a-gun’ is moighty bad this morning, too, and the skipper think’s he’s a going too, by the same token!”
“Indeed!” I cried, turning towards the tent, seeing Captain Billings standing close by it. The news was too true. The wetting and shock to the system had completed what a low fever had begun, and Mr Ohlsen’s days—nay, hours—were numbered. Ere the sun had again set, we had to mourn the loss of the second of our shipmates!
Towards evening of this day, the wind got up again even more fiercely than it had done the night before—the heavy southern billows rolling in again upon the beach with a terrible din, although they could do no harm now to either of our boats, both being snugly sheltered beyond their reach.
But when it grew dark, we witnessed a wonderful phenomenon.
It made many of the seamen believe that they were dreaming over again the scene connected with the burning of the Esmeralda; while others went almost wild with terror, fancying that the end of the world was come—or that, at all events, the natural display we saw of the greatest wonder of the arctic and antarctic worlds, was a portent of fresh disasters to us, greater than all we had already passed through!