Chapter Twenty One.
Butchered.
“Dios!” exclaimed Colonel Vereker. “Are you—certain of this, sir?”
Captain Applegarth shrugged his shoulders.
“Ask Mr Stokes here and your doctor there, Mr O’Neil, whether they did not hear Haldane’s yarn about your ship five days ago, sir, before we ever clapped eyes on you,” said he in a slightly aggrieved tone, as if he thought his word was being doubted. “Why, colonel, this poor lad was becoming the butt for everybody’s chaff on board on account of it!”
“Gracious!” cried the other. “This is indeed really wonderful!”
“Aye, colonel, and more than that! But for the lad seeing this mirage, or whatever else it was, and telling me about it, we would not have gone off our course in search of you to render what assistance we could—yours being the ‘ship in distress’ Haldane reported having sighted to the southward. This divergence from our track, sir, took us into the very teeth of the gale which we encountered later on, that same evening, and conduced to our breaking down.”
“Faith,” put in Garry O’Neil, “that’s thrue for sure, sor!”
“This breakdown of ours, colonel, led to our drifting to the southward into the trail of the Gulf Stream,” continued the skipper, following up the strange sequence of events as they occurred, one by one. “Your ship—the real ship, I mean—was drifting north and east meanwhile, carried along by the same current, and then it came about that, although apparently going in opposite directions and acted on by different causes, our tracks crossed each other on the chart last night—at least, that is my opinion.”