“Ah! just as I expected. Blister my kidneys, doctor, but we’ve no bloomin’ luck. That hawser’s parted!”
I turned quickly to look astern, and there, sure enough, the Seahorse was adrift and out of our wake. Until that moment the strain on the hawser had kept her comparatively steady, but the instant the steel cable had broken she pitched upon her beam-ends, burying her nose deep into the angry waves.
We both stood gripping a rail and watching, neither of us uttering a word.
For perhaps five minutes the antique vessel strove again and again to right herself, until one wave greater than the others crashed over her high stern. From where we stood we could hear the breaking of glass and the shivering of the heavy timbers that, half rotten, now broke up like matchwood.
Then almost immediately the saloon which we had explored began to fill, and slowly before our eyes she went down stern first.
The men, watching like ourselves, set up a howl of disappointment, and Seal gave vent to a volley of nautical expressions which need not here be repeated; but the Mysterious Man, who had also noticed the disaster, began dancing joyously and cutting capers on the deck, heedless of the storm raging about him. It was evident that the final disappearance of the Seahorse gave him the utmost satisfaction.
As for ourselves, we gazed with regret upon the mass of floating timbers that were swept around us. It was to our bitter chagrin that, after towing that relic of a bygone age all those miles at a cost of fuel and time, we had lost her almost at the mouth of the Thames.
But regret was useless. The Seahorse, with its freight of crumbling skeletons, had gone down again, and would certainly never reappear. So Job Seal drew his oilskin closer around him, lamented his infernal luck, and, recollecting the thousand odd pieces of gold in his cabin, turned and gave an order to the helmsman which caused the bows of the Thrush to run nearer towards the dark line of England’s cliffs between Folkestone and Dover.
Lights white and green were beginning to show in the distance, those of other ships passing up and down Channel, and as I stood by his side in my dripping oilskins I congratulated myself that if we weathered the squall I should be safely back in London in a very few hours, with as strange a story to tell as any man had related.