"Ay," the cook repeated; "on a day like this a whale can play with the Viking."
The Viking was an iron screw-steamer, designed for chasing whales, and for nothing else. She was mostly engines, winches and gun. She could slip along, without much noise, at sixteen knots an hour; and she could lift sixty tons from the bottom of the sea with her little finger. Her gun—the swivel gun, with a three-inch bore, pitched at the bow, clear of everything—could drive a four-foot, 123-pound harpoon up to the hilt in the back of a whale if within range; and the harpoon itself—it protruded from the muzzle of the gun, with the rope attached to the shaft and coiled below—was a deadly missile. It was tipped with an iron bomb, which was designed to explode in the quarry's vitals when the rope snapped taut, and with half a dozen long barbs, which were to spread and take hold at the same instant.
"Well," Billy Topsail sighed, his glance on the gun and the harpoon, "if they hits a whale, that there arrow ought t' do the work!"
"It does," said the cook, quietly.
All morning long, they were all alive on deck—every man of that Norwegian crew, from the grinning man in the crow's nest, which was lashed to a stubby yellow mast, to the captain on the gun platform, with the glass to his eyes, and the stokers who stuck their heads out of the engine room for a breath of fresh air. The squat, grim little Viking was speeding across Notre Dame Bay, with a wide, frothy wake behind her, and the water curling from her bows. She was for all the world like a man making haste to business in the morning, the appointment being, in this case, off a low, gray coast, which the lifting haze was but then disclosing.
It was broad day: the sea was quiet, the sun shining brightly, the sky a cloudless blue; a fading breeze ruffled the water, and the ripples flashed in the sunlight. Dead ahead and far away, where the gray of the coast rocks shaded to the blue of the sea, little puffs of spray were drifting off with the light wind, like the puff of smoke from a distant rifle: they broke and drifted and vanished.
From time to time mirror-flashes of light—swift little flashes—struck Billy's eyes and darted away. Puff after puff of spray, flash after flash of light: the far-off sea seemed to be alive with the quarry. But where was the thrilling old cry of "There she blows!" or its Norwegian equivalent? The lookout had but spoken a quiet word to the captain, who, in turn, had spoken a quiet word to the steersman.
"W'ales," said the captain, whose English had its limitations. "Ho—far off!"