“She’s a distinct menace to navigation, and would be much better out of the way.”
“I agree with you, sir,” agreed the ensign. “Shall I change the course?”
“You had better do so, if you please. We are too far south for any of the regular derelict destroyers to happen along, so it becomes our duty to put her out of the way.”
The Beale’s course was changed. She was headed up toward the derelict, which speedily became visible to the naked eye as a low-lying hulk, with the stumps of three masts sticking up from her clean-swept decks. Few objects equal in melancholy suggestion a derelict met with in mid-ocean. The sight of a craft which once gallantly bore human beings, with their hopes and aspirations, now miserably tumbled about by every passing breeze or wave, invariably affects a sailor depressingly.
As the Beale drew closer there was not much conversation among the men. Such as there was, was carried on in low tones.
“She’ll have been a barque,” remarked Stanley, who was himself an old blue-water man, and who stood alongside the boys. “See those three stumps. An old-timer, too, judging by that deck house right aft of her foremast.”
The derelict was, indeed, a battered relic of the seas. Green weeds could be seen clinging thickly to her underhull as she dipped slowly and lazily on the swell. Ragged, bleached ends of ropes hung over her side like the rags on a beggar. It was evidently some time since she had been abandoned. So far as her timbers went, however, she was, to all seeming, still seaworthy, as her large amount of free-board showed.
“What are we going to do?” Herc asked curiously, as the Beale ranged up alongside at a distance of two hundred yards or so.
“I imagine that we are going to blow her up,” rejoined Ned.
“That’s it,” put in Stanley. “She’ll make a fine target, too.”