Corkery said nothing for a space, and his keen eye went backward and forward over the sluggish sea. Then he spoke:
"You haven't said what your meaning is in this voyage, and I haven't asked any questions. But in the last few days I've come to see that our friend there," and he nodded toward Tom Horn, who had taken his accustomed place in the bow, "has something to do with it; and so I bid you look to your facts. Even now we are in strange seas; and we're headed for stranger still."
Anthony nodded.
"The ship is commissioned for an errand out of the common," he said. "And we are headed now as I intended to head from the first."
Corkery looked at the sky to the north, and then at the limp sails.
"We'll have a stir of wind in a little," he said. "And I'll be pleased enough when it comes."
But the breeze was a light one, and, though it huddled into the sails, it increased the schooner's pace but little. Mademoiselle Lafargue, who had come on deck, gazed out across the water with its masses of weed and its bits of wreckage.
"I had been trying to read," she said. "But there is something oppressive in the air, and I could not. So I sat and looked out at the port; the sea looks strange, and the birds that hover about are stranger still."
She pointed to where some dirty, evil-looking fowl hung, poised, near the schooner; their great wings seldom stirred, and their narrow eyes were fixed upon the Roebuck.
"Tom Horn has told me of those," said Anthony. "It seems to be a sort of vulture, and, no doubt, there is much drifts into these seas which goes to keeping them sleek."