A seaman, who was sitting astride of the starboard foretopsail yard-arm, busy with marline-spike on some job that the lift needed, hailed the deck.
"Where away?" shouted Hardy from the quarter-deck.
"Right ahead, sir," answered the man, who looked a toy sailor, his white breeches trembling, and the round of his back sharp-lined against the blue.
Hardy fetched the glass, and going to the mizzen-rigging pointed it. He caught it instantly. It was a boat, how far off it was impossible to say, for distance, when a small object grows visible, is very difficult to measure with the eye at sea, but she was plain to the naked sight of the man on the yard-arm; the telescope brought her close, and Hardy counted five figures in her, one of whom was standing on the foremost thwart waving something,—a shirt or a piece of canvas. Her mast was stepped, but the sail was down, and she lay waiting, vanishing and reappearing as the shallow hollows ran sucking under her.
When Hardy dropped the glass he found the captain by his side.
"What is in sight?" he exclaimed, speaking with something of breathlessness, as though his heart was tightened.
"A ship's boat, sir, with five people in her," answered Hardy.
"I shall find him," exclaimed the captain, and the old look of superiority to all human intelligence, and the pathetic sparkle of cunning with which the diseased brain will often illuminate the eye, were perceptible to Hardy. "Give me the glass, sir."
The captain levelled it and was a long time in looking, and all the time he looked he breathed slow and deep like a man in heavy slumber.
"Stand by to back the foretopsail," he exclaimed. "Let a hand be ready with a line and others to help them aboard, for twice I have fallen in with people so weakened by distress and famine and thirst—O God, that awful part of it—that we have lifted them like babies over the side."