horizontally over the water, did not see
anything. Not a shadow. Moreover, if they were so near, we ought to have
heard something.

"I believe it is land!" she murmured. "You are looking too low, Juan."

As soon as I looked up I saw it, too, dark and beetling, like the
overhang of a low cliff. Where on earth had we blundered to? For a
moment I was confounded. Fiery reflections from a light played faintly
above that shape. Then I recognized what I was looking at. We had found
the ship.

The fog was so shallow that up there the upper bulk of a heavy, square
stern, the very rails and stanchions crowning it like a balustrade,
jutted out in the misty sheen like the balcony of an invisible edifice,
for the lines of her run, the sides of her hull, were plunged in the
dense white layer below. And, throwing back my head, I traced even
her becalmed sails, pearly gray pinnacles of shadow uprising, tall and
motionless, towards the moon.

A redness wavered over her, as from a blaze on her deck. Could she be
on fire? And she was silent as a tomb. Could she be abandoned? I had
promised myself to dash alongside, but there was a weirdness in that
fragment of a dumb ship hanging out of a fog. We pulled only a stroke or
two nearer to the stern, and stopped. I remembered Castro's warning--the
blindness of flying lead; but it was the profound stillness that checked
me. It seemed to portend something inconceivable. I hailed, tentatively,
as if I had not expected to be answered, "Ship, ahoy!"

Neither was I answered by the instantaneous, "Hallo," of usual
watchfulness, though she was not abandoned. Indeed, my hail made a good
many men jump, to judge by the sounds and the words that came to me from
above. "What? What? A hail?" "Boat near?" "In English, sir."

"Dive for the captain, one of you," an authoritative voice directed.
"He's just run below for a minute. Don't frighten the missus. Call him
out quietly."

Talking, in confidential undertones, followed.

"See him?" "Can't, sir." "What's the dodge, I wonder." "Astern, I think,
sir." "D------n this fog, it lies as thick as pea-soup on the water."

I waited, and after a perplexed sort of pause, heard a stern "Keep off."

CHAPTER THREE

They did not suspect how close I was to them. And their temper struck
me at once as unsafe. They seemed very much on the alert, and, as I
imagined, disposed to precipitate action. I called out, deadening my
voice warily:

"I am an Englishma