THE VISION OF THE SHIP.

Dr. Fabos Proposes to Visit the Azores.

I slept a little about midnight, being convinced that the night had written the last word of its story. The storm had not abated. A wild wind blew tempestuously from the south-east, and drove us before it as a leaf before a winter’s blast. Good ship as my yacht proved to be, she was like many turbined steamers, a wet boat in a gale and no friend to the landsman. We shipped heavy seas persistently, and drove our bull’s nose wildly into mountains of seething foam. Even the hardy crew complained of her; while my poor friend Timothy McShanus implored me, for the love of God, to throw him overboard.

“Was it for this I left the home of me fathers?” he asked me pitifully when I entered the cabin where he lay. “Is this the land of milk and honey to which ye would take me? Stop the ship, I tell ye, and put me ashore. Let me die among the naygroes. Kill me with laudanum. Man, I’ll thank ye to have done it. I’ll call ye the best friend that Timothy McShanus ever had.”

Poor fellow! His groans were in my ears when I fell to sleep. His was the voice which reproached me when I awoke. That would have been about three o’clock of the morning, I suppose. Dawn was breaking furtively in an ink-black sky. The swaying of a lamp in the gimbals, the swish of water against the cabin walls told me that the gale had somewhat abated. I asked McShanus if he had waked me, and he answered that the captain had been down to call me to the deck.

“Put Timothy McShanus ashore and let the naygroes devour him,” he said; and then, almost with tears in his eyes, “Man, the last of me has been given up. I’m no more than a hollow drum for sport to bate upon. Bury me where the shamrock grows. Say ’twas the ups and downs that did for this same McShanus.”

I spoke what cheer I could, and went on deck as the captain had asked me. Abel, the quartermaster, stood at the wheel, and all our officers were with Larry upon the bridge. The sea still ran high, but the wind had moderated. I perceived a sky that was black and thunderous to leeward, but clearing in the sun’s path. There were wonderful lights upon the raging waters—beams of gold and grey and green interweaved and superb in their weirdness. The waves ran high, but with less power in their assault; and though a fine rain was falling, the measure of it became less with every minute that passed. These things I observed almost as I stepped from the companion hatch. But it was not until I stood side by side with Captain Larry upon the bridge that I knew why he had summoned me.

He turned as I mounted the ladder, and helped me up with an icy cold hand. The little group there, I thought, seemed awed and afraid to speak. Larry himself merely pointed with his hand to a sailing ship sagging heavily in the swell, perhaps half a mile from our port quarter. The glass which he put into my hand helped me but little, so dense was the spray upon its lens. I could, at the first glance, make little of the spectacle save that the ship had four masts, was of unusual size, and seemed to be standing well up to the gale, although her masts were bare. For the rest, she might have been any ship you like bound from Europe to “down under,” and thence returning by Cape Horn. I told Larry as much, and then looked at the stranger again. Undoubtedly there was something queer about her. Yet what it was a landsman might well have been unable to say.

“Well, Larry, and what do you make of it now?” I asked the captain presently. Had I not known him too well, his answer would have made me doubt his sanity.

“I think she is the ship you are seeking, sir.”

I took up the glass without a word, and focussed it upon the deck of the sailing ship. Not a living soul could be discerned there. It might have been a derelict buffeted at hazard about the great Atlantic waste. And yet the vessel appeared to hold a steady course. Behind it my quick eye detected a wake of water such as is left by the propeller of a steamer. There were black objects at the bows which, in sober reason, might have been given the shape of machine guns. These things I was almost afraid to admit aloud. The idea that came to me had been purchased at a heavy price. I felt that I could share it with none.

“She is a sailing ship, Larry,” I said, “and yet not a sailing ship.”

“Far from it, sir. Yon’s no sailing ship.”

“You are thinking that she is fitted with auxiliary steam?”

“I am thinking that she has enough arms on board to serve a cruiser of the line. Machine guns fore and aft and big stuff amidships. The masts are all blarney, sir, or I’m a Dutchman. That vessel’s heavily engined, and we may thank God we’re the fastest yacht afloat. If there were less sea running they would have fired at us already.”

“You mean it, Larry?”

“As true as there’s blue sky above, sir, yonder ship will sink us if we stand by. I’m telling you what I see with an old sailor’s eyes. Ten minutes ago, we came on her suddenly out of the mists. She had fifty men on her poop then, and one dead man she put overboard. The sound of a gun they were firing called my attention to her. I saw a group of hands on the quarter-deck, and one shot down in cold blood. They put him overboard and then discovered us. What happens then? The men go out of sight like so many spiders to their webs. The ship is navigated, heaven knows how. She keeps by us, and wants to know our business. I signal to them and no man answers. What shall I make of that, sir?”

I answered him without a moment’s hesitation.

“You will make full speed ahead, Larry—now, this instant, let the yacht do what she can.”

He rang the order down to the engineers, and White Wings began to race as a human thing over the great seas which swept upward toward the equator. The words were not spoken a moment too soon. Even as the bells rang out, a shell came hurtling after us from the great gun Larry’s clever eyes had discerned upon the deck of the unknown vessel. It fell far ahead of us—a reckless, unmeaning threat, and yet one which Fate ironically might have turned to our destruction. A second and a third followed it. We stood as though spell-bound, the spindrift half blinding us, the monster seas surging upon our decks in cataracts of clear water. Would they hit us, or should we be lost in the curtain of the storm? I claim no better courage in that moment of the ordeal than the good fellows who closed about me were so ready to display. We raced from death together, and numbered the minutes which stood between us and our salvation. No thought or deed of our own could help us. The good yacht alone would answer for our lives.

Now, this strange pursuit lasted, I suppose, a full ten minutes. That it came to a premature end must be set down to the immense speed of which the White Wings was capable, and the force of the gale which still raged about us. We had, indeed, now caught the tail end of the hurricane, the outer edge of the storm cycle; and immediately it enveloped us, a darkness as of intensest night came down upon the waters. Turbulent waves, foaming and angry at their crests, deeply hollowed and black below, rolled northward in monster seas of towering grandeur, each threatening us with the menace of disaster, but passing impotently as we rose at its approach and were hurled onward to the depths. The sound of the rushing wind became terrible to hear. Unseen armies of the ether clashed and thundered above our heads. The rain of the spindrift cut our faces as with a whip. We held a course with difficulty, and must instantly have been lost to the view of those upon the pursuing ship.

A full hour elapsed, I suppose, before the storm spent itself. Swiftly as it had come upon us, so swiftly it passed, leaving an aftermath of glorious sunshine and sweet, clear air, and a sea deliciously green and fresh. Not a trace of any other ship could we now espy upon the horizon. We steamed the hither ocean alone, and the memory of the night was as that of a vision moribund, of sights and sounds of sleep to be mocked and forgotten at the dawn. So reason would have had it, but reason is rarely a sailor’s friend. If my men had made nothing of the unknown ships, of the shell they had fired, and the deeper mysteries they spoke of, none the less I knew that the fo’castle would resound presently with the talk of it, and that even my officers would recount that strange experience by many a fireside yet unbuilt. For myself, my duty had ............