“Look, Joe!” exclaimed Seal. “What the dickens do you make out o’ that?”
Thorpe swung his body with the motion of the vessel and took a long look at the object of mystery.
“Thunder, cap’n!” he cried. “Looks like Noah’s Ark, sir.”
By this time the smutty-faced crew, in their dirty blue trousers and sea-boots, had emerged from the forecastle and stood gazing in the direction of the mystery, heedless of the waves that now and then swept the deck from stem to stern. Some of the men shaded their eyes with horny hands, and the opinions expressed were both forcible and various.
Job Seal borrowed a fusee from me and lit his foul-smelling pipe, a habit of his when puzzled. With his blackened clay between his teeth he talked to Thorpe, while the spray showered in our faces and the vessel rose and fell in the long trough of the sea.
Again and again he sighted the object which his sea-trained eyes had so quickly detected, and each time growled in dissatisfaction.
At length, in a voice quite unusual to him, and with all the brown gone out of his face, he said: —
“There’s something very uncanny about that blessed craft, doctor! I’ve been afloat these thirty-three years come August, but I never saw such a tarnation funny thing as that before! I believe it’s the Flyin’ Dutchman, as true as I’m here on my own bridge!”
He handed me the binocular again, and steadying myself carefully I managed to focus it.
Sailors are nothing if not superstitious, and I could see that the unusual sight had sent a stir of consternation through the ship.