VI
Day was breaking when Drew came on deck the next morning. The noises of the vessel, which had clanked and whined all night through his broken sleep, seemed to him to take on new life as he reached the deck; but the brig, as she lay rolling in the trough of the sea, had the gray, tired look of ships coming home from long voyages. There were no clouds in the sky, but the stars had faded out, and even as he gazed the rim of the sun appeared above the sea, flattened out on the horizon, then rose in an elongated ball. For an instant a red pendant seemed to cling to the far edge of the ocean; then it vanished, and the sun, round again and red, had broken free. Day had come.
The ocean had the glassy aspect of the preceding day; as far as the eye carried not a catspaw darkened the surface. In every direction the white sails of the Portuguese men-of-war rose and fell on the long blue swells. Fifty yards astern the triangular dorsal fin of a shark moved slowly across their track. Drew watched its silent progress with the fascination that the landsman, seeing it for the first time, bestows upon it as the embodiment of the cruelty and mystery of its abode.
He turned at the sound of a footstep, and, seeing Medbury beside him, greeted him, and then nodded astern.
"It's a shark, isn't it?" he asked. "I never saw one before."
"Yes," replied the mate. "It's queer, but everybody seems to know them right off. Sort of natural dislike, I guess."
Medbury watched it a moment and then looked aloft to where the fly hung limp.
"It beats all," he muttered; "there isn't air enough to float a soap-bubble." He walked to the pennant halyards, and, untying them, jerked the fly free from its staff. "It hasn't lifted an inch in fifteen hours," he said. "Confound it! I believe the world has died overnight!" Then he laughed at his own ill-nature. "It always gets on my nerves—weather like this," he explained to Drew.
He turned and walked to the other side of the vessel as Captain March came on deck. He also looked aloft, glanced at the binnacle from mere force of habit, and then swept the horizon with half-shut eyes. His face was inscrutable, and absolutely without emotion. "It's going to be hot," was his only remark. Then he walked to a camp-chair, and, drawing it to the rail, sat down, and began to whistle softly.