An exclamation and their eyes met. Johnson raised himself to a sitting posture, though the pain in his cramped limbs made him groan.
"The forrad house, eh?" he said.
"Yessir," said the mate.
"You saved me?"
"Yessir, I just heard your call in time. You were done for, but were right within a foot of me. It was dark."
"No one else but us two?" asked the captain.
"All gone, sir, and it looks like we are going. There won't be another ship this way in a week. That was the West India liner, Hammersea, from Kingston to Liverpool, who ran us down. I saw the name on one of her boats that was torn off her. It was smashed up and floating close aboard us an hour ago."
"To run a man down is carelessness, but to leave him afterwards is murder," said Johnson with bitterness.
They were about six hundred miles from the Bahamas and to the eastward of the Stream. The water was warm and blue and the sea was going down. The easterly weather was dying out and the semi-tropical warmth was taking its place. Near them several dark objects showed now and again upon the slopes of the seas, and they knew they must be débris from the sunken ship.
Johnson had probably not swam over twenty fathoms in the whole desperate endeavour he had made the night before. The darkness had prevented him from making any definite course and he had swum with the drift of the house. Garfunkle had been swept overboard with the wreck of the mainmast; the stem of the steamer had torn its way through the forward house, knocking it overboard. It was the only thing that had floated clear, for the spars were all stayed with steel rigging and the lanyards of the lee rigging had held against the shock although the mainmast had been driven out of her. The great spar had been dragged down with the sinking ship, but the house had floated clear and was resting upon its side. In the open doorway they could see clothes and sea-chests which had remained in the forecastle and which had not been washed out with the force of the sea.