Just then the boat-steerer was sending off several sled loads of blubber to his ship, and Jack and Mark, with the professor and their companions, accompanied the cargo.
The Orion was a fine big bark and was commanded by an old-fashioned Yankee skipper of the type now almost extinct. He welcomed the travelers aboard his ship most cordially, the ship itself all of a stench with the trying blubber, and overshadowed by a huge cloud of black smoke, for the fires were fed with waste bits of blubber and fat.
The skipper and crew were literally "making hay while the sun shone," for there were more than twenty huge leviathans within a circuit of ten miles from the bark, and they proposed to have every one of them before the flocks of seabirds, or the bears, should find and destroy the stranded creatures.
"We'll fill every barrel and be ready to sail home with our hatches battened down when the sea comes back," declared Captain Sproul.
"And you are quite sure the ocean will return and float your bark?" queried the scientist, patiently, for he saw that it was quite as useless to explain what had happened to this hard-headed old sea-dogas it was to talk to Phineas Roebach.
"You can bet your last dollar it will come back, Mr. Henderson," declared Captain Sproul.
"Why do you think so?" asked the professor.
"Why, the ocean always has been here; ain't it?"
"I expect so—within the memory of man."
"Then it will come back!" cried the skipper of the Orion, as though that were an unanswerable argument.