Now it was broad daylight, and the vessel was within a mile of them. Sometimes she was quite hidden, and sometimes she was flung up high on the crest of a wave. Heavy green seas broke over her as she lay with her starboard yardarms dipping. She had been running under a heavy press of canvas when she broached to, and went over on her beam ends, for even yet the sheets of the upper main-topsail were out to the lower yardarm, and though the starboard half of the sail had blown out of the bolt ropes, the upper or port yardarm still was sound and as tight as a drum with the wind.
"If she hasn't sunk yet she'll swim a while longer," said the skipper of the Ullswater, as the day grew lighter and lighter still. "Show the British ensign, Mr. Humphries, and cheer them up if they're alive. I wish I could tell them that I am here. I'll bet they know me. I'm famous with the French from Dunkirk to Toulon. At Marseilles they call me Mounseer Binoculaire, and stand in rows to see me pass."
The lies that he told now no one had any ears for. Wardle owned afterwards that he was afraid that the 'old man' would ask him to go in command of a boat, and, like the old fo'c'sle man, he was thinking a good deal of his wife's husband. But all the while Captain Amos Brown was telling whackers that would have done credit to Baron Munchausen, he was really thinking of how he was to save those whose passage to a port not named in any bills of lading looked almost certain. By this time the foreigner was not far to leeward of them.
"No one could blame us if we let 'em go," shrieked the 'old man' in his mate's ear as the wind lulled for one brief moment. "But I never think of what other men would do, Mr. Wardle. I remember once in a cyclone in the Formosa Channel——"
What dreadful deed of inspired heroism he had performed in a cyclone in the Formosa Channel Wardle never knew, for the wind cut the words from the skipper's lips and sent them in a howling shower of spray far to loo'ard. But his last words became audible.
"I was insensible for the best part of a month after it," screamed Amos Brown. "The usual ... silver-mounted ... sickened ... wife as I said."
Then he caught the mate by the arm.
"We'll stand by 'em, Mr. Wardle. If I get another sextant, as I suspect, I must put up with it. Get the lifeboat ready, Mr. Wardle, and get all the empty small casks and oil-drums that you can and lash them under the thwarts fore and aft. Make her so that she can't sink and I'll go in her myself."
This fetched the blood into Wardle's face.
"That's my job, sir," he said shortly, for he forgot all about his wife's husband at that moment.