I stood for some minutes talking to the young girl, and when her father spoke to me she held out her hand, smiling. "We'll be shipmates now and you'll have a chance to show what a Yankee sailor can do. I believe in heroes—when they're civil," she added.
"Unfortunately for the worshipper of heroes, there is a great deal left to the goddess Chance, in the picking of them," I answered. "Admiration for human beings should not be hysterical."
"From the little I've seen of men during the six voyages I've made around the world in this ship with papa, your advice is somewhat superfluous," she said, with the slightest raising of the eyebrows. Then she went aft to the taffrail and stood gazing into the fog astern.
"Mr. Rolling," said Sackett, "there's no use of thinking about leaving the ship while the fog lasts, now. You might have made the Pirate by close reckoning before, but she must have changed her bearings fully a half a dozen points since you started. She's under canvas, and this breeze will send her along at least six knots and drift her two with her yards aback. You might as well take hold here and get some of your men to lend a hand. The foremast is still alongside, and we might get a jury rig on her without danger of heeling her on her bilge. She's well loaded, the oil and light stuff on top, so she won't be apt to turn turtle."
It was as he said. We were all in the same ship, so as to speak, wrecked and water-logged to the southward of the Cape. The best thing to do was to take it in the right spirit and fall to work without delay, getting her in as shipshape condition as possible. The fog might last a week, and the Pirate might get clear across the equator before stopping a second time in her course. I knew that even Trunnell would not wait more than a few hours; for if we did not turn up then, it was duff to dog's-belly, as the saying went, that we wouldn't heave in sight at all. The ocean is a large place for a small boat to get lost in, and without compass or sextant there would be little chance for her to overhaul a ship standing along a certain course.
The dense vapor rolled in cool masses over the wreck, and the gentle breeze freshened so that the topsail, which still drew fair from the yard, bellied out and strained away taut on a bowline, taking the wind from almost due north, or dead away from the Cape. The Sovereign shoved through it log-wise under the pull, the swell roaring and gurgling along her sunken channels and through her water ports. She was making not more than a mile an hour, or hardly as fast as a man could swim, yet on she went, and as she did so, she was leaving behind our last hope of being picked up.
XII
The first night we spent aboard the hulk was far from convincing us of her seaworthiness. I had been in—a sailor is never "on board"—two ships that had seen fit to leave me above them, but their last throes were no more trying to the nerves than the ugly rooting of the Sovereign into the swell during that night. At each roll she appeared to be on the way to turn her keel toward the sky, and, at a plunge slowly down a sea-slope, she made us hold our breaths. Down, down, and under she would gouge, the water roaring and seething over sunken decks amidships, and even pouring over the topgallant rail until it would seem certain she was making her way to the bottom, and I would instinctively start to rise from the cabin transom to make a break for the deck. Then she would finally stop and take a slow heave to windward, which started a Niagara thundering below the deck, where the cargo was torn loose and sent crashing about in a whirlpool.
I once read a description by an English landsman of a shipwreck, and he told how the water would rest for an instant level with the rail, seeming to pause motionless for a fraction of a second before flowing over and sinking the ship, I lay a long time wondering vaguely at an imagination that could make such a description possible, and as a heaving swell would start along the rail at the waist, and go thundering along in a roaring surf the entire length of the midship section over the edge, fetching up with a crash against the forward cabin bulkhead, I heartily wished the writer were aboard to share our sufferings. There was no spoon and teacup business about that ship, and it sometimes seemed as though seven or eight seas were rolling over her rails from all directions at once.
We were still below the thirty-eighth parallel, and consequently the morning broke early, for it was January and midsummer. I arose from the transom and went on deck at dawn, and found that the fog had lifted. Andrews met me as I came from below, and gave me a nod as I took in the horizon line at a glance.