“Oh! well I reckoned that I knew whether I was on my head, or my heels,” chuckled the boy from Georgia.
But I had been watching the mirage very sharply. I knew just what sails were set upon the Gullwing, and I counted those upon the ship in the sky. Misty as the reflection was I could distinguish them plainly. And suddenly I saw a movement among those sails. Sharply defined figures of men swarmed into her rigging.
“That’s not the Gullwing at all!” I shouted.
“That boy’s right,” said Mr. Barney sharply, coming out of the afterhouse with his glass, and with the captain right behind him. “You’ve got good eyes on you, Webb.”
“By jinks! It’s the Seamew!” roared our skipper, the moment he set his eyes upon the mirage. “And if she’s sailing that way, she’ll never beat us to the Capes of Virginia.”
A roar of laughter greeted this joke. But the ship in the sky began immediately to fade away, and it had soon disappeared, while the wind freshened with us and we forged ahead still faster. When the fog completely disappeared there was not a sail in sight anywhere on that sea, although Mr. Barney went into the tops himself and searched the horizon with a glass.
But I know that they made a note of the appearance on the log. Some of the sailors thought the Seamew couldn’t be far from us, either head or astern; but I knew that the mirage might have reflected our sister ship hundreds of miles away. The incident gave us a deal to talk about, however, and an added savor to the race we were sailing half around the globe.
Chapter VI
In Which the Gullwing Suffers a Ghostly Visitation
“The words of Agur, the son of Jaketh.... There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea....”