“Yes, like one o’clock!” chimed in Captain Dinks, showing an equal enthusiasm. “The old girl is walking away with us at a fine rate, McCarthy. I wouldn’t be surprised if we logged three hundred by noon.”
“And fifty more tacked on it, sorr,” said the mate. “Why, we’ve done twelve knots ivry hour of my watch; and Adams tould me she wor running the same at eight bells. By the piper that played before Moses, it’s a beauty she is—she’d bate aisy the fastest tay clipper from Shanghai!”
“Aye, that she would!” chorused the captain. “What do you think of the ship now, Miss Kate?” he added to that young lady, who was leaning against the bulwarks to leeward, looking out over the sea. She was all alone with her thoughts, Frank Harness being away forwards attending to the cutting out of a new main-topgallant sail to replace the one they had lost in the storm, the one they were now using being old and unable to stand any further rough usage.—“You are not ashamed of the old Nancy, now, eh?”
“Oh no, Captain Dinks,” answered Kate, “I never was, even in her worst moments when we were becalmed; and I’m sure I couldn’t be now, when she is sailing along so beautifully; but, what is that speck out there, captain, away to the right—is it a bird, or what?”
“Eh, my dear?” said the skipper, looking in the direction the girl had pointed—“a bird? no, by Jove, it looks like a sail of a boat well down on the horizon. Here, McCarthy, hand me your glass.”
Captain Dinks seemed even more excited than he had been a moment before when he spoke of the vessel’s progress; for, taking the telescope that the mate handed him, he scrutinised eagerly the object Kate had noticed.
“Good heavens, it is a boat!” he exclaimed presently, “and I think I can see a man in the stern-sheets, though I’m not quite sure: at all events, I’ll run down and overhaul it, for it would never do to abandon a poor fellow in distress; no English sailor would think of such a thing! This is all your doing, Miss Kate, you and your pretty eyes, which have the best sight of any on board. We’ll have to put the ship about, McCarthy,” he added to the mate; “we can’t fetch that boat on this tack.”
“Hands ’bout ship!” roared the mate, in response to the captain’s implied wish; and, immediately, there was much running to and fro on the decks, and a yelling out of orders and hoarse “aye ayes” in reply—a striking difference to the quiet that had reigned a moment or two before, when the ship was slipping along through the water with the wind on her quarter, never a sail having to be shifted or a rope pulled, and only the man at the wheel for the time being having anything to do out of the thirty odd hands on board.
“Helm’s a lee!” cried the captain, and the head-sheets were let go; “raise tacks and sheets!” and the fore-tacks and main sheets were cast off; while the weather crossjack braces and the lee main braces were belayed, ready to be let go at a moment’s notice, and the opposite braces hauled taut. “Mainsail haul!” then sang out the captain when these preparations were completed; when the braces being let go, the yards swung round like a top. The after yards were subsequently braced up and belayed, the main sheet hauled aft, the spanker eased over to leeward, and the watch stood by the head braces.
“Let go and haul!” was the next word of command; upon which the weather fore-braces were let go and those to leeward hauled in by the men forward under the personal supervision of Mr McCarthy, after which the men boarded the fore-tack and hauled down the jib-sheet, clapping a tackle on it as it blew fresh; and the Nancy Bell, braced round on the starboard tack and with the wind a little more aft than when she was running eastwards just now, stood towards the boat that Kate had been the first to perceive, drifting a bout upon the wild ocean so far away from land.