"You see," said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, "there's no mistake about it. She is moving—this way."
"Oh, a current, of course," Strokher tried to say cheerfully, "sets her toward us."
Would the morning never come?
Ally Bazan—his parents were Catholic—began to mutter to himself.
Then Hardenberg spoke aloud.
"I particularly don't want—that—out—there—to cross our bows. I don't want it to come to that. We must get some sails on her."
"And I put it to you as man to man," said Strokher, "where might be your wind."
He was right. The Glarus floated in absolute calm. On all that slab of ocean nothing moved but the Dead Ship.
She came on slowly; her bows, the high, clumsy bows pointed toward us, the water turning from her forefoot. She came on; she was near at hand. We saw her plainly—saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, the rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I could imagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluent wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean. She made no sound. No single thing stirred aboard the hulk of her—but she moved.
We were helpless. The Glarus could stir no boat in any direction; we were chained to the spot. Nobody had thought to put out our lights, and they still burned on through the dawn, strangely out of place in their red-and-green garishness, like maskers surprised by daylight.