‘Pull!’ cried Tom fiercely.
‘Won’t you return to pick him up?’ said the mate.
‘Pull!’ hissed Tom. ‘Return to that ship? Pull! Break your backs! A suicide in delirium. Let them all leap! There’s the peace of God over the side; there’s the devil’s own hell within board. Pull!’
He strained at his own oar with fury; the others plied with all their might. The boat buzzed over the smooth surface, the smudge of the craft for which we were making was dead-on-end over the bow. The moon hung low, large, and red; the situation of our boat put the convict ship right over against the satellite, and the vessel was painted upon the red surface of the orb. Never did the ocean offer a more impressive night-piece. An awful horror went into the ship out of the fancy of the man drowning alongside. Her sails showed as though cut out of black paper against the moon; her rigging ran in fine black lines; the ship looked to be afloat in vapour, so smoky was the obscurity which moved over the face of that black, greasy calm in folds like smoke.
There was no more halloing; so still was the breast on which the vessel lay that never a sound of the flap of canvas, the jar of a wheel chain, the clank of a topsail-sheet came from her. Slowly she receded to the impulse of our oars; then sliding out of the sphere of the moon, she glimmered dimly and hovered like a pale cloud rising off the edge of the sea.
Tom and the others rowed steadily; they had slackened their rage, and the boat foamed along to the steady sweep of the blades. They talked as they pulled.
‘Bates, I wouldn’t have put back,’ said Tom, ‘if fifty of them had sprung overboard. It was too late. Once away from such a ship as that, it must be away for ever with us.’
‘You’re in the right. It was just the impulse to save life, Butler.’
‘I smell wind,’ said Will.
The mate turned his head and exclaimed: ‘Yes, there’s a dark line of wind to the south’ard, Johnstone.’