They progressed finely with the job, and as there was nothing for me to do, I went aloft. I could smell the tar that they were boiling in the galley, and was hoping that we could finish our work in time to get under way that evening, when all at once I felt a jar, as if the vessel had struck something below, and it appeared to me that we heeled a little more to port.
In fact our list was very evident now, and the masts had quite an angle on them. I saw that the carpenter, who was standing in a boat alongside, had stopped work, and was looking curiously up at me. The seam at which he had been tapping was now two feet above the surface of the water, and the ripped green copper of the brig's bottom was plain to view.
The carpenter laid his head against the side, and then shouted up, in a frightened voice:
"For heaven's sake, Captain Hurdiss," he cried, "there's water entering somehow! I can hear the sound of it from here."
He and the men in the boat hastily scrambled up the side.
Just then there came another jarring sound. It was the cargo shifting.
I was hastening to descend, when I cast a glance toward the shore, and there I saw one of the prisoners, whom I had noticed standing on the top of the hill, suddenly wave his arms about his head, and come tearing down the slope toward where the others were grouped about a fire.
But this was not all. Through the cleft in the hill-side I could see the waters on the other side of the island. And in this narrow space, framed by the walls of the cliff, I saw a vessel just coming about into the wind. Another instant and she was gone, hidden by the dark mass of land. But so firmly impressed was this quick vision upon my mind that I can see it to this day, as firmly fixed as were it a painting that I had studied in its every detail.
As I reached the deck the brig gave another lurch, and our bulwarks were almost in the water.
"The cargo all adrift, Captain Hurdiss," shouted the carpenter, coming up the ladder. "And we must have a bad leak in our top sides. The old thing is rotten to her heart," he added.