Captain Brown had just gone below to his cabin to get his sextant in
order to take the sun, while Fritz, to quiet his impatience, had sat
down on the top of the cuddy skylight with a book in his hand, which he
was pretending to read so as to cheat himself, as it were; when,
suddenly, there came a shout from a man whom the skipper had ordered to
be placed on the look-out forward--a shout that rang through the ship.
"Land ho!"
Fritz dropped his book on to the deck at once and Eric sprang up into
the mizzen rigging, hurriedly scrambling up the ratlins to the masthead,
whence he would have a better point of observation; the skipper
meanwhile racing up the companion way with his sextant in his hand.
"Land--where away?" he sang out, hailing the man on the fore cross-
trees.
"Dead away to leeward, two points off the beam," was the answer at once
returned by the man on the look-out, who happened, strangely enough, to
be Fritz's whilom acquaintance, the "deck hand!"
"Are you sure?" hailed the captain again to make certain.
"As sure as there's claws on a Rocky Mountain b'ar," replied the man in
a tone of voice that showed he was a bit nettled at his judgment being
questioned; for he next added, quite loud enough for all to hear, "I
guess I oughter know land when I see it. I ain't a child put out to dry
nurse, I ain't!"
"There, thet'll do; stow thet palaver!" said Captain Brown sharply,
"else you'll find thet if Rocky Mountain b'ars hev claws, they ken use
'em, an' hug with a prutty good grip of their own too, when they mean
bizness, I guess, Nat Slater; so, you'd better quiet down an' keep thet
sass o' yourn for some un else!"
This stopped the fellow's grumbling at once; and Captain Brown, after
proceeding aloft to have a look for himself and see how far the island
was off, gave directions for having the ship's course altered, letting
her fall off a point or two from the wind.
"I guess I wer standin' a bit too much to the northward," he said to
Fritz, who was waiting on the poop, longing to ask him a thousand
questions as to when they would get in, and where they would land, and
so on; "but thet don't matter much, as we are well to win'ard, an' ken
fetch the land as we like."
The island, which at first appeared like a sort of low-lying cloud on
the horizon, was now plainly perceptible, a faint mountain peak being
noticeable, just rising in the centre of the dark patch of haze.
"Is it far off?" asked Fritz.
"'Bout fifty mile or so, I sh'u'd think, mister," answered the
skipper--"thet is more or less, as the air down below the line is
clearer than it is north, so folks ken see further, I guess. I don't
kinder think it's more'n fifty mile, though, sou'-sou'-west o' whar the
shep is now."
"Fifty miles!" repeated Fritz, somewhat disconcerted by the
announcement; for, he would not have thought the object, which all could
now see from the deck, more than half that distance away. "Why, we'll
never get there to-day!"
"Won't we?" said the skipper. "Thet's all you know 'bout it, mister.
The _Pilot's Bride_ 'll walk over thet little bit o' water like a race
hoss, an' 'ill arrive at Tristan 'fore dinner time, you bet!"
The skipper's prognostication as to the time of their arrival did not
turn out quite correct, but Fritz's anxiety was allayed by their
reaching the place the same night; for, the mountain peak, which had
been noticed above the haze that hung over the lower part of the island,
began to rise higher and higher as the ship approached, until its sharp
ridges could be plainly seen beneath a covering of snow that enveloped
the upper cone and which changed its colour from glistening white to a
bright pink hue as it became lit up by the rays of the setting sun--the
latter dipping beneath the western horizon at the same instant that the
_Pilot's Bride_ cast anchor in a shallow bay some little distance off
the land, close to Herald Point, where the English settlement on the
island lies.