It was the pursuit of us by the dying barkentine. What sails the last storm had left played crazy pranks with the derelict. With no hand on her wheel the rudder swung free. We were rowing northwestwardly, with the wind, and thus it was that the Hope, thrust by wind and wave, followed us, with wide swerves, with lungings and lurchings, now and then making a graceful sweep up a swell and then a wallowing roll to the trough. The fore-and-aft sails were gone, but some of the square canvas held; and the sheets flapped with a dismal foolishness between accidental fills. It was the drunken plunging of the hulk in deliberate pursuit of us that appalled. She snouted the water swinishly; she reeled and groveled under the seas that boarded her. Through it all, whether she was coming prow first, beam on, or stern foremost, and no matter how far she would veer, she clung to our course, shadowing us, hounding us, as though imploring our help.
In all the fury of the storms, from their first assaults at Cape Horn to their beating us down in the South Seas, Captain Mason had not faltered; he fought desperate odds with the cunning and valor of Hercules. But this careering mad thing, stripped of the grace and dignity of a sane ship,—this staggering, sodden monster, mortally stricken and dumbly floundering after the master who had abandoned her that she might go down alone into the deep,—was more than the man could bear; and he had sat staring in the boat, Christopher and I rowing, while we dodged the barkentine’s blind assaults. We were still bending to the work when darkness fell. It was then that the wind died, and we saw her no more.
Captain Mason showed relief at being dragged back into the living world by our approach.
“No sign of her?” I asked.
“Not from here. The view is shut in by those promontories,” indicating two headlands embracing our beach.
“Then,” said I, “Christopher will scale one of them and I the other.” <
There was a faint twinkle behind the seaman’s look, and something else, which recalled what I had seen in Christopher’s face as he gazed at the forest.
“I imagine you haven’t slept much,” I said, knowing his anxiety on the barkentine’s account.
“How could I, Mr. Tudor, when she had been following me like that?”
“Then you have already been up there to see if you could find her?” I ventured.