He ordered the boy Jimmy to put breakfast on the skylight; and we ate, standing or walking, but exchanging very few words. Thus slipped the time away, and so slipped we through the water. The brig bowed as she went; a long breathing spell followed her astern, and the sails came in to the mast as she rose with the heave of the dark blue brine. The sailors lay over the forecastle head, waiting for the approach of the island and for orders. Now and again one would point and one would speak, but expectation lay as a weight upon their minds. It subdued them. For there was the island, to be sure, and the cave, no doubt, was round the corner, and in that cave might be the ship. But the dollars, the dollars, ah! Lay they there still massive, good tender as the guinea, plentiful as roe in the herring, noble coins to tassel a handkerchief with, to clink out the sweetest music in the world with to the accompaniment of deck-blistered feet marching across the gangway to the wharf, to the joys of the alley boarding house, to the delights of the runner’s parlor—lay they there still in the moldering hold within the cave?
So did I interpret the thoughts of the sailors, and I would have bet the last dollar of my share upon the accuracy of my construction of their several countenances and attitudes.
“Let her go off,” said the captain.
The man at the helm put the wheel over by two or three spokes.
“Steady!” exclaimed Greaves. He viewed the island through the glass. “We are opening the reef,” said he; and, taking the telescope from him, I instantly discerned the sallow line of a projection of rock, with a dazzle of sunshine coming and going along the base of the formation as the swell rose and sank there.
Deep silence fell upon the brig. All hands of us—nay, my beloved Galloon and the very brig herself—seemed to know that in a few minutes the cave would lie open before us.
And a few minutes disclosed it. I viewed the picture as though I had beheld it before, so clearly had Greaves painted it in his description, so familiar had it grown by frequent meditation. Almost abreast of us now, within a mile, lay a very perfect little natural harbor. The reefs swept out from either hand the island. They looked like piers. They needed but a lighthouse to have passed, at a glance, for roughly constructed artificial piers. Within their embrace lay a wide, smooth surface of dark blue water. A flat, livid front of rock overlooked, on the left, this placid expanse. Low down on the right of this rock ran a herbless and treeless beach, without scintillation as of sand or gleam as of coral—a dead ground of foreshore, mouse-colored; a sort of pumice, with a small shelving to the wash of the water. But I had no eyes for that beach then, nor for any other portion of the island saving the vast, sullen, gloomy fissure which denoted the entrance of the cave right amidships of the tall face of flat rock.
Greaves let fall the glass from his eye. He swung it with an odd gesture of irritable triumph.
“Back the main topsail, Mr. Fielding.”
I instantly delivered the necessary orders for heaving the ship to. The men sprang out of the bows, and rushed to the braces and clew garnets as though to a summons which signified life or death to them. The brig’s way was arrested. She came with her head to the southwest, bringing the island upon her starboard quarter. All the time, while I sung out orders and while the men were hauling upon the braces, Greaves stood at the rail, his eye glued to the glass that was pointed at the cavern. He turned his head when the noise about our decks had ceased, and, observing me standing at a little distance regarding him, he beckoned.