“It was a providential dream, captain,” said I. “It has saved the lives of two men.”
“Well, perhaps it has,” he answered a little complacently. “Certainly, but for my dream, I should not have sent you aboard the schooner.”
“I know but of one instance like it—at sea,” said I. “The nephew of a French skipper dreamt three times in succession that some castaway wretches were lodged upon a lonely rock—where, I forget. The captain yielded to the influence of the third time of dreaming, and shifted his helm, made the rock, saw the men, and brought them off in a dying state.”
We continued to talk of the schooner, of the chances for and against the two men navigating her home unless they picked up help on the road, of dreams, and such matters. Jimmy withdrew. It was my watch below, and I was in no hurry to leave the table.
“This seems a voyage of overhauling,” said I. “First we board the melancholy Tarbrick, who doesn’t know the day of the month; then we board the little Rebecca, whose two forecastle rats of sailors don’t know what o’clock it is. What further in the boarding line lies between this time and our business t’other side the Horn?”
“We want nothing further in the boarding line,” Greaves answered; “our port is south of the Galapagos, and we are in the North Atlantic and in a hurry.”
“Has it ever occurred to you to imagine what became of the people of that locked-up ship of yours?”
“No; why should I trouble myself to imagine? She has been in that cave since 1810.”
“You may be sure,” said I, “that if any of her people came off with their lives they’d report her situation. The ship then would long ago have been visited, and the cargo and the half-million dollars taken out of her.”
“Long ago.”