"Wheel, there!" he roared. "Starboard your helm. Let her go off five points."
"Starboard it is, sir," came back the answer.
"See that sheen out to starboard there, sir?" rang out a voice which sounded clear through the barking of the dog.
"Hush! Sailor. Down, sir. Hush, my beauty," cried Hardy, and the dog was instantly silent. "Hark! now."
A sort of oozing of light, dimly scarlet, wild and weak and wet as some ghostly star of death hovering over a grave, was visible to windward, a trifle forward of the fore-rigging. "Hark!" cried Hardy, and sure enough amid the greasy slopping of water, falling lazily from the thrust of the ship's bow, they could hear a distant noise of shouting, of cries reëchoed as from one part of a deck to the other, with a deeper threading of some throat hoarse in a speaking-trumpet.
"Is the mate forward?" sang out the voice of the ship's carpenter.
"Fire one right away off," shouted Hardy, knowing what the fellow had got and meant.
In a few heart-beats a stream of sun-bright fire was pouring like water from a hose over the bow, but its lightning illumination touched but a narrow stretch of the dark water. The foresail turned of a sickly yellow, and the staysail soared wan as the wing of the albatross in dying moonlight. All above and abaft, and then forward to the flying-jib boom end, yards and sailcloth lay steeped in the impenetrable smother, and within the area of the light the fog drove slowly in a very Milky Way of silver crystals. But the men could see one another, and helped by the light Hardy sped aft to be near the wheel, and there he found Captain Layard.
"There's a ship off the starboard bow, sir," he exclaimed.
"They'll never see that port fire," answered the commander. "They're burning flares, or we shouldn't see her. A foreigner, by the row. How's she heading?"