Galloon barked sharply and furiously.
“Silence, you scoundrel!” hissed Greaves at the dear old brute, and the dog instantly ceased to bark. “Do you see anything, Fielding?”
“Nothing, sir,” I answered, crossing the deck. “The cry seemed to me to come from off the water on the larboard bow, and if it is our friend of to-day or any other ship, she is there.”
He went forward and I lost his figure in the blackness.
All hands were now wide awake. The gloom was so deep betwixt the rails that nothing was to be seen of the men, but I gathered from their voices that they were moving briskly here and there to look over the side and to peer into the smoky gloom over the bows. I went right aft, and first from one quarter and then from the other of the brig I stared and hearkened, straining my vision against the blackness till my eyeballs ached, straining my hearing against the incommunicable hush upon the ocean until I felt deaf with the sound of the beat of the pulse in my ear. Oh, it was such a night of wonderful silence that, had the full moon been overhead, the imagination might have heard the low thunder of the orb as it wheeled through space.
Greaves arrived aft.
“Is that you, Fielding?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can see nothing, and the sea is as silent as a graveyard o’ night. Is that hail some piratic trick? I tell you what: the words might have been English, but they were not delivered by an English throat. I shall make no answer. There is nothing to be done but to watch for fire in the water; should it show, to hail then, and to let fly if the answer is not to our liking.”
He called for Yan Bol. The Dutchman’s deep voice responded, but even while he approached us the hail was repeated.