“So it should be,” replied our fat captain. “No rule without an exception though; but never mind, it will soon roll itself quiet; and then the cutter will do her best to make up for lost time.”
The person evidently most at his ease was Will Bubble. Blow high or blow low, it seemed all the same to him; he sang and whistled away as happily as ever.
“Oh, oh, oh! you jolly dog, don’t mock us in our misery!” exclaimed Carstairs with a groan.
“On no account,” answered Will, with a demure look. “I’ll betake myself to the dock, and smoke my weed in quiet.”
On deck he went, and seated himself on the companion-hatch, where he held on by a becket secured for the purpose; but as to smoking a cigar, that was next to an impossibility, for the wind almost blew the leaves into a flame. I was glad to go on deck, also; for the skylights being battened down made the cabin somewhat close. The cutter rode like a wild fowl over the heavy seas, which, like dark walls crested with foam, came rolling up as if they would ingulf her. Just as one with threatening aspect approached her, she would lift her bows with a spring, and anon it would be found that she had sidled up to the top of it.
It was a wild scene—to a landsman it must have appeared particularly so. The dark, heavy clouds close overhead; the leaden seas, not jumping and leaping as in shallow waters, but rising and falling, with majestic deliberation, in mountain masses, forming deep valleys and lofty ridges, from the summits of which, high above our heads, the foam was blown off in sheets of snowy whiteness with a hissing sound, interrupted by the loud flop of the seas as they dashed together.
We were not the only floating thing within the compass of vision. Far away I could see to windward, as the cutter rose to the top of a sea, the canvas of a craft as we were hove-to. She was a small schooner, and though we undoubtedly were as unsteady as she was, it seemed impossible, from the way she was tumbling about, that any thing could hold together on board her.
I had rejoined the party in the cabin, when an exclamation from Bubble called us all on deck.
“The schooner has bore up, and is running down directly for us!” he exclaimed.