Captain Applegarth whistled through his teeth.
“My good lad,” he said incredulously, “that’s simply impossible!”
“Well, sir, you may not believe me,” I urged, rather nettled that he should put me down in this way, “but I declare to you she is the identical vessel I saw that evening, as I told you at the time, and of which we went in chase till the gale stopped us and our machinery gave out! I cannot doubt the evidence of my own eyes, sir.”
“My dear boy,” replied the skipper, in kinder tones than I expected to this outburst, for he was a hot-tempered man generally, and disliked anything like argument from his officers when he had once said his say, being of the opinion that his word should be last. “Just reflect a moment and let your own natural good sense decide the point. How can it be likely that the vessel you asserted you saw on Friday night, hundreds of miles away from here, should come across us now under precisely similar circumstances, considering all that has happened since?”
“She’s the same ship, sir, nevertheless,” I maintained stubbornly, though I was a bit puzzled on my own account, mind, by his putting the case so strongly. “The vessel I saw on Friday night was a full-rigged ship, with her sails knocked about and had her ensign hoisted half-mast high at the peak, and this one seemed the same in every particular. I did not notice all that when she burnt the flare-up just now. The light only lasted an instant.”
“There is something in that, certainly, Haldane,” answered the skipper, wavering a little, I thought, in his ideas. “Still, when one is inclined to believe in a thing, the imagination is often a great aid in turning a wish into a certainty.”
“Besides, sir,” I continued, wishing to clench my argument, “if we were driven out of our course by the gale, she might have been similarly affected, and the winds and currents might have brought us together again.”
“That’s possible, but not probable,” he rejoined. “I’ve known two bottles of the same weight dropped overboard from the same ship at the same hour, and—”
“Well, sir?”
“One was found landed on the Lofoden Isles, off the coast of Norway: the other came ashore at Sandy Point, in the Straits of Magellan!”