“Rubbish!” cried the skipper, angry at his obstinacy. “See, the mirage has disappeared now that the meteor light has become dispersed. Look smart there, aloft, and furl that topsail! It’s just seven bells and I’m going to ease down the engines and bear up on our course again. Up with you, men, and lay out on the yard!”
The hands who had stopped half-way up the fore-rigging, spell-bound at the sight of the mirage, now bestirred themselves, shaking off their superstitious fears; old Masters, in the presence of something to be done, also working, and soon the sail was furled, the bunt stowed, and the gaskets passed.
“It’s no use our keeping on any longer after that ship of yours, Haldane,” observed the skipper, turning to me when the men had all come in from the topsail yard and scrambled down on deck again after making everything snug aloft. “If she were still afloat we must have overhauled her before this. I really think, youngster, she must have been only a sort of will-o’-the-wisp, like that we saw just now—an optical illusion, as I told you at the time, recollect, caused by some cross light from the afterglow of the sunset thrown upon the white mist which we noticed subsequently rising off the water. Eh, my boy?”
“Ah, no, captain,” I replied earnestly. “The ship I saw presented a very different appearance to that reflection of ours! She was full-rigged, I told you, sir, and though her canvas was torn and she looked a bit knocked about in the matter of her tophamper, she was as unlike our old Star of the North as a sailing vessel is unlike a steamer!”
“She might have been a derelict.”
“I saw a girl on her deck aft, sir, with a dog beside her, as distinctly as I see you, sir, now!”
“Well, well, be that as it may, my lad, though I’m very sorry for the poor young thing, if she is still in the land of the living, I can’t carry on like this for ever! If she were anywhere in sight it would be quite another matter; but, as it is, not knowing whether we’re on her right track or not, we might scud on to the Equator without running across her again. No, no; it wouldn’t be fair to the owners or to ourselves, indeed, to risk the ship as well as the lives of all on board by continuing any longer on such a wild-goose chase.”
“Very good, sir,” said I, on his pausing here, as if waiting for me to say something. “We’ve tried our best to come up with her, at any rate.”
“We have that, and I daresay a good many would call us foolhardy for carrying on as we’ve done so long. However, I’m going to abandon the chase now and bear up again on our proper course, my boy, and the devil of a job that will be, I know, in the teeth of this gale!”
So saying, the skipper, grasping the handle of the engine-room telegraph, which led up through a tube at the end of the bridge, signalled to those in charge below to slow down to half speed.