“It’s blown clear,” Disko cried, and all the foc’sle tumbled up for a bit of fresh air.  The fog had gone, but a sullen sea ran in great rollers behind it.  The ‘We’re Here’ slid, as it were, into long, sunk avenues and ditches which felt quite sheltered and homelike if they would only stay still; but they changed without rest or mercy, and flung up the schooner to crown one peak of a thousand gray hills, while the wind hooted through her rigging as she zigzagged down the slopes.  Far away a sea would burst into a sheet of foam, and the others would follow suit as at a signal, till Harvey’s eyes swam with the vision of interlacing whites and grays.  Four or five Mother Carey’s chickens stormed round in circles, shrieking as they swept past the bows.  A rain-squall or two strayed aimlessly over the hopeless waste, ran down ’wind and back again, and melted away.

“Seems to me I saw somethin’ flicker jest naow over yonder,” said Uncle Salters, pointing to the northeast.

“Can’t be any of the fleet,” said Disko, peering under his eyebrows, a hand on the foc’sle gangway as the solid bows hatcheted into the troughs.  “Sea’s oilin’ over dretful fast.  Danny, don’t you want to skip up a piece an’ see how aour trawl-buoy lays?”

Danny, in his big boots, trotted rather than climbed up the main rigging (this consumed Harvey with envy), hitched himself around the reeling cross-trees, and let his eye rove till it caught the tiny black buoy-flag on the shoulder of a mile-away swell.

“She’s all right,” he hailed.  “Sail O!  Dead to the no’th’ard, corain’ down like smoke!  Schooner she be, too.’”

They waited yet another half-hour, the sky clearing in patches, with a flicker of sickly sun from time to time that made patches of olive-green water.  Then a stump-foremast lifted, ducked, and disappeared, to be followed on the next wave by a high stern with old-fashioned wooden snail’s-horn davits.  The snails were red-tanned.

“Frenchmen!” shouted Dan.  “No, ’tain’t, neither.  Daad!”

“That’s no French,” said Disko.  “Salters, your blame luck holds tighter’n a screw in a keg-head.”

“I’ve eyes.  It’s Uncle Abishai.”

“You can’t nowise tell fer sure.”

“The head-king of all Jonahs,” groaned Tom Platt.  “Oh, Salters, Salters, why wasn’t you abed an’ asleep?”

“How could I tell?” said poor Salters, as the schooner swung up.

She might have been the very Flying Dutchman, so foul, draggled, and unkempt was every rope and stick aboard.  Her old-style quarterdeck was some or five feet high, and her rigging flew knotted and tangled like weed at a wharf-end.  She was running before the wind—­yawing frightfully—­her staysail let down to act as a sort of extra foresail,—­“scandalized,” they call it,—­and her foreboom guyed out over the side.  Her bowsprit cocked up like an old-fashioned frigate’s; her jib-boom had been fished and spliced and nailed and clamped beyond further repair; and as she hove herself forward, and sat down on her broad tail, she looked for all the world like a blouzy, frouzy, bad old woman sneering at a decent girl.