I shook my head with a slight smile.
'He has some trifling knowledge,' said I. 'Fortunately, there is no occasion to trust to his skill.'
'De sweet young lady sabbe navigation, sah?'
'I will not answer for it!' I exclaimed, looking at him. A sudden fancy in me may have been disclosed by my eyes. His gaze fell, and he drew in his head. Just then I caught sight of Helga at the break of the poop to leeward, looking along the decks. She saw me, and beckoned. As I knocked the ashes out of my pipe, Jacob cried out:
'Blowed if I don't believe that's a steamer's smoke ahead.'
'Ha!' thought I, 'Helga has seen it;' and I at once made for the poop-ladder.
It was as I supposed. She had seen the smoke when she came on deck, and instantly looked about for me. It was the merest film, the faintest streak, dim as a filament of spider's web; but it was directly ahead, and it was easy to guess that unless the steamer was heading east or west she must be coming our way, for assuredly, though the Light of the World was sweeping through it at some six or seven knots, we were not going to overhaul a steamer at that pace.
A telescope lay in brackets inside the companionway; I fetched and levelled it, but there was nothing more to be seen than the soaring of the thin blue vein of smoke from behind the edge of the sea, where the dark, rich central blue of it went lightening out into a tint of opal. It did not take long, however, to discover, by the hanging of the smoke in the same place, that the steamer was heading directly for us. I put down the glass, and said to Mr. Jones:
'Will you be so good as to call the Captain and tell him that there is a steamer in sight, coming this way?'
'I have no orders to call the Captain merely to report a ship in sight, sir,' he answered.