It was now near three, P.M., and we were bethinking ourselves of going to dinner, when a perfect cloud of the dark specks, fifty at the least, began to drop down with the ebb in a solid phalanx, looking in the distance like a compact black raft of wood. Presently they sheered off right and left; and although the craft from which we had seen the smoke arise, still remained at anchor in the stream, the attendant canoes vanished, one and all, amongst the mangroves, on either bank. "Poo—nonsense!" said Dick Lanyard. "Come along, Sprawl—come along. Why, man, we shall get as thin as whipping-posts, if we allow these barbarian demonstrations to interfere with our comforts."
"You may be right, my boy—you may be right," said old Davie; but he appeared to have some strange misgivings.
However, we went to dinner; the reefers were all with us, little Joe Peake among the rest, who was now quite recovered from the thump he had got on shore, and old Pumpbolt; and we were in the very middle of it, when down came Wadding, the gunner.—"Beg pardon, sir," said the old seaman, sidling in, and trying to appear at his ease, although he was very far from that same. "Beg pardon—but them chaps are coming more nearer, sir, than seems quite convenient,—they are fast dropping down with the afternoon's ebb, sir."
"Indeed!" said old Sprawl, "We must keep a bright look-out here, Brail, at any rate."
We went on deck, and the report was literally true; but although the mass above us continued to increase until the whole surface of the river in the distance seemed swarming, as one has seen a pool with those blue water-insects which, I believe, as boys, we used to call sailors, still there was no warlike demonstration made, beyond the occasional descent of a fast-pulling canoe now and then, a mile or so below the main body. But they were always very easily satisfied in their reconnoitring, so far as we could judge, for the whole of them kept a wary distance.
We returned to the cabin for half an hour, and having finished off with a caulker of good cogniac, all hands of us once more came on deck.
It was now half-past four, and low water as near as could be. The bar astern of us—by this time the breeze having taken off, we were riding to the ebb—was one roaring ledge of white breakers; but it was smooth water where we lay, the fall of the tide having completely broken the heave of the heavy swell that rolled in from the offing on the bar. The clouds had risen over the land, some large drops of rain fell, and altogether we had strong prognostications of a wet, if not a tempestuous evening.
The declining sun, however, was yet shining brightly; and although, calculating on the average at this season hereabouts, one might have made himself almost sure of a fine evening, yet the present was an exception, and we had every appearance of a thunderstorm.
All nature seemed hushed; the thick clouds that arose in the east, sailed along on the usual current of the trade-wind with their edges as well defined as if it had been a dark screen gradually shoving up and across the arch of the blue empyrean; this gloomy canopy crept on and on, and as it overlapped us and stole down the western horizon, every thing assumed a deep dusky purple hue.
In the sudden darkness, the fires glanced bright and red on board of three war-canoes, that had now been suddenly advanced down the river in the shape of a triangle, the headmost being within a mile of us. Presently, the sable curtain descended within a very few degrees of the western horizon, until there was only a small streak of bright golden sky between it and the line of the land; in the centre of which the glorious sun, now near his setting, shot his level beams of blood-red light over the river and its banks, and the trees that grew on them, gilding the dark sides of the canoes; and as he sank, his last rays flashed up into the black arch overhead, until the dark masses of cloud glowed like crimson.