For a whole day the Fish-hawk cruised back and forth and in great circles in the vicinity of the deserted buoy, with a man constantly at the mast-head scanning the surface of the sea for some trace of the missing dory. Then leaving the spot, she ran into the coast, from which the buoy was about twenty miles distant, and made inquiries at several of the tiny fishing villages that nestle at the heads of the deep fiords. It was all in vain. Nothing was seen, nothing had been heard, and the cause of the dory’s sudden and complete disappearance could not even be satisfactorily guessed at. The only bit of information gained from the islanders was, that on the day the dory was lost a steamer had been seen skirting the coast, on her way to the southward, which was such an unusual circumstance that it was something to be talked about and wondered over.
Finally the crew of the Fish-hawk sailed sorrowfully back to the halibut grounds, convinced that their well-loved young shipmate and his black dory mate had been swallowed by the cold waters of that northern sea, and that they should never again see them in this world. Captain Coffin and old Mateo were especially distressed over what had happened, for they had loved the boy as an own son, and could not become reconciled to the fate which they supposed had overtaken him. It was the harder to bear because of its uncertainty. If they could only be sure of what had happened to him, and that he were not still drifting about, starving or perishing from thirst on that cruel sea, or stranded on some rocky islet of the inhospitable coast from which there was no escape!
With all this, the cause of the dory’s disappearance was a very simple one. Its occupants had merely been led astray, as many another has been and will be, in the pursuit of riches. They had hardly been left on their station, and begun fishing, when the negro’s quick eye detected a small lump of grayish matter floating on the water but a short distance from them. At the sight he uttered an exclamation of joy, and hastily hauling in his line, he seized the oars and began to pull towards it.
“What is the matter?” cried Breeze, who had not noticed the floating object, and would not have known what it was if he had. “Where are you going?”
“Ole Nim catch um dreckly, young cap’n, den you see. Better’n fish! better’n gole! better’n ebberyting!”
What could he mean? And when Nimbus stopped rowing, and, stretching out his arm, lifted the little gray lump, about the size of a man’s fist, from the water, Breeze was no wiser than before.
“What is it, Nimbus, and what is it good for?” he asked, in perplexity.
“Amble grease! Good for sell! Heap money! P’r’aps fin’ more!” answered the black man, smelling of his prize and patting it with his great hands, while his eyes roved over the water in search of another like it.
“Ambergris!” shouted Breeze, who had heard from old fishermen stories of this precious substance, and of its fabulous value, but had never before seen it. “You don’t mean, Nimbus, that that dirty-looking stuff is ambergris!”
“Yes, sah. Him amble grease sure ’nough,” answered the black man, who had more than once seen this most valuable of all the products of the sea on his native African coast.