"Jim!" he cried.
His mate, engaged in shrouding the gleaming lenses from the sun's rays, came at the call. He was lame—the result of a wound received in the Egyptian campaign: nevertheless, he was quick on his feet.
"What do you make of that?"
The sailor required no more than a gesture. He shaded his eyes with his right hand, a mere shipboard trick of concentrating vision and brain, for the rising sun was almost behind him.
"Ship's boat," he answered, laconically. "Collision, I expect. There's bin no blow to speak of for days. But they're gone. Knocked overboard when she was took aback by a squall. Unless them birds—"
He spoke in a species of verbal shorthand, but his meaning was clear enough, even to the sentence left unfinished. The craft was under no control. She would drift steadily into the Bay until the tide turned, wander in an aimless circle for half an hour thereafter, and then, when the ebb restored direction and force to the current, voyage forth again to the fabled realm of Lyonnesse.
For a little while they stood together in silence. Jim suddenly quitted his companion and came back with a glass. He poised it with the precision of a Bisley marksman, and began to speak again, jerkily:
"Stove in forrard, above the water-line. Wouldn't live two minutes in a sea. Somethin' lyin' in the bows. Can't make it out. And there's a couple of cormorants perched on the gunwale. But she'll pass within two hundred yards on her present course, an' the tide'll hold long enough for that."
The other man looked around. From that elevated perch, one hundred and thirty feet above high-water mark, he could survey a vast area of sea. Excepting the approaching steamer—which would flit past a mile away to the south—and a few distant brown specks which betokened a shoal of Penzance fishing-smacks making the best of the tide eastward—there was not a sail in sight.
"I think we should try and get hold of her," he said.