All the fates of weather seemed to combine to part the schooner from her convoy.  As before, the fog fell, only to be succeeded by squally rain-showers that cut out the vista into a checkerboard pattern of visible sea and impenetrable greyness.  Before evening the Laughing Lass, making slow way through the mists, had become separated by a league of waves from the cruiser.  One glimpse of her between mist areas the Wolverines caught at sunset.  Then wind and rain descended in furious volume from the southeast.  The cruiser immediately headed about, following the probable course of her charge, which would be beaten far down to leeward.  It was a gloomy mess on the warship.  In his cabin, Captain Parkinson was frankly sea-sick:  a condition which nothing but the extreme of nervous depression ever induced in him.

For several hours the rain fell and the gale howled.  Then the sky swiftly cleared, and with the clearing there rose a great cry of amaze from stem to stern of the Wolverine.  For far toward the western horizon appeared such a prodigy as the eye of no man aboard that ship had ever beheld.  From a belt of marvellous, glowing gold, rich and splendid streamers of light spiralled up into the blackness of the heavens.

In all the colours of the spectrum they rose and fell; blazing orange, silken, wonderful, translucent blues, and shimmering reds.  Below, a broad band of paler hue, like sheet lightning fixed to rigidity, wavered and rippled.  All the auroras of the northland blended in one could but have paled away before the splendour of that terrific celestial apparition.

On board the cruiser all hands stood petrified, bound in a stricture of speechless wonder.  After the first cry, silence lay leaden over the ship.  It was broken by a scream of terror from forward.  The quartermaster who had been at the wheel came clambering down the ladder and ran along the deck, his fingers splayed and stiffened before him in the intensity of his panic.

“The needle!  The compass!” he shrieked.

Barnett ran to the wheel house with Trendon at his heels.  The others followed.  The needle was swaying like a cobra’s head.  And as a cobra’s head spits venom, it spat forth a thin, steel-blue stream of lucent fire.  Then so swiftly it whirled that the sparks scattered from it in a tiny shower.  It stopped, quivered, and curved itself upward until it rattled like a fairy drum upon the glass shield.  Barnett looked at Trendon.

“Volcanic?” he said.

“‘Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord,’” muttered the surgeon in his deep bass, as he looked forth upon the streaming, radiant heavens.  “It’s like nothing else.”

In the west the splendour and the terror shot to the zenith.  Barnett whirled the wheel.  The ship responded perfectly.

“I though she might be bewitched, too,” he murmured.

“You may heal her for the light, Mr. Barnett,” said Captain Parkinson calmly.  He had come from his cabin, all his nervous depression gone in the face of an imminent and visible danger.