She was a full-rigged ship running before the wind, but going a bit every now and then off her course as if under no proper guidance or management, while all her sails were torn and hanging anyhow, and her spars and rigging apparently at sixes and sevens, as though she had been terribly mauled by the weather.
“For Heaven’s sake, tell me!” cried the colonel, who had approached me unobserved while I was looking through the telescope. “Tell me, is she there? Can you see her?”
“Yes, sir,” said I. “I can see her, and it’s the same ship I saw the other night. It is the Saint Pierre!”
“Ha!” he exclaimed, his black eyes flashing into a passion that made him forget his lameness, as he strode to the side of the vessel, where, resting one hand on the rail, he shook the other menacingly at the ill-fated craft, now with her hull well above the horizon. “Ah, you black devils, we’ll settle you at last!”
Meanwhile, the skipper, who had gone up to join Mr Fosset on the bridge after leaving us below so suddenly, was making his way aft again; and on the colonel turning round from the rail he found him at his back, looking over his shoulder at the ship we were approaching.
The skipper was all agog with excitement.
“By George!” he exclaimed. “We’re closing on her fast now, colonel!”
“How soon, Señor Applegarth, do you think we’ll be before we’re alongside her?”
“In about half an hour at the outside, sir, unless something gives way. We would have been up to her before if she had been lying-to; but she’s going ahead too, like ourselves, and not making bad way either, considering the state she’s in aloft, and her yawing this way and that. It is wonderful how she keeps on!”
“Oh dear! oh dear! she’s possessed, as your companion here said just now to the young Señor Haldane.”