The flags were found in Trent’s cabin, neatly stored behind a lettered grating; Nares chose what he required, and (I following) returned on deck, where the sun had already dipped, and the dusk was coming.
“Here! don’t touch that, you fool!” shouted the captain to one of the hands, who was drinking from the scuttle-butt. “That water’s rotten!”
“Beg pardon, sir,” replied the man. “Tastes quite sweet.”
“Let me see,” returned Nares, and he took the dipper and held it to his lips. “Yes, it’s all right,” he said. “Must have rotted and come sweet again.—Queer, isn’t it, Mr. Dodd? Though I’ve known the same on a Cape Horner.”
There was something in his intonation that made me look him in the face; he stood a little on tiptoe to look right and left about the ship, like a man filled with curiosity, and his whole expression and bearing testified to some suppressed excitement.
“You don’t believe what you’re saying!” I broke out.
“O, I don’t know but what I do!” he replied, laying a hand upon me soothingly. “The thing’s very possible. Only, I’m bothered about something else.”
And with that he called a hand, gave him the code flags, and stepped himself to the main signal halliards, which vibrated under the weight of the ensign overhead. A minute later, the American colours, which we had brought in the boat, replaced the English red, and PQH was fluttering at the fore.
“Now, then,” said Nares, who had watched the breaking out of his signal with the old-maidish particularity of an American sailor, “out with those handspikes, and let’s see what water there is in the lagoon.”
The bars were shoved home; the barbarous cacophony of the clanking pump rose in the waist; and streams of ill-smelling water gushed on deck and made valleys in the slab guano. Nares leaned on the rail, watching the steady stream of bilge as though he found some interest in it.