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And, suddenly, Herrick was aware that the lagoon and the trees wore again their daylight livery; and he saw, on board the Farallone, Davis extinguishing the lantern, and smoke rising from the galley.
Let who will prefer to have sailed with Jason or Aeneas or Sinbad; but the Farallone and its precious freight of rascality gets my money every time. Think of the three incomparable reprobates afloat, with one case of smallpox and a cargo of champagne, daring to make no port, with over a hundred million square miles of ocean around them, every ten lookout knots of it containing a possible peril!
Attwater looked steadily back over his shoulders as he sat; he did not once remove his eyes from the Farallone and the group on her quarter-deck beside the house, till his boat ground upon the pier. Thence, with an agile pace, he hurried ashore, and they saw his white clothes shining in the chequered dusk of the grove until the house received him.
The boat was gone again, and already half-way to the Farallone, before Herrick turned and went unwillingly up the pier. From the crown of the beach, the figure-head confronted him with what seemed irony, her helmeted head tossed back, her formidable arm apparently hurling something, whether shell or missile, in the direction of the anchored schooner.
In about 14 degrees South and between 134 and 135 degrees West, it fell a dead calm with rather a heavy sea. The captain refused to take in sail, the helm was lashed, no watch was set, and the Farallone rolled and banged for three days, according to observation, in almost the same place. The fourth morning, a little before day, a breeze sprang up and rapidly freshened.
An hour later the Farallone was under all plain sail, the rudder hard a-port, and the cheerfully-clanking windlass had brought the anchor home. "All clear, sir," cried Herrick from the bow. The captain met her with the wheel, as she bounded like a stag from her repose, trembling and bending to the puffs.
We are passing the Farallone Islands, but I feel too bad to sketch them. I get homesick when I think of the dear ones I left behind me. I hope I may see them all in this world again." That was the gray beginning of a voyage that had very little color in it. The coast-line sank apace; the gray rocks the Farallones, the haunt of the crying gull dissolved in the gray mist.
A point of palm trees isolated him from the settlement; and from the place where he knelt, the only work of man's hand that interrupted the expanse, was the schooner Farallone, her berth quite changed, and rocking at anchor some two miles to windward in the midst of the lagoon.
And meanwhile, in the waist up to his knees in water so low the schooner lay the captain was hacking at the foresheet with a pocket knife. It was a question of seconds, for the Farallone drank deep of the encroaching seas.
The guard-boat gave a parting hail, the wake whitened and ran out; the Farallone was under weigh. Her berth had been close to the pass. Even as she forged ahead Davis slewed her for the channel between the pier-ends of the reef, the breakers sounding and whitening to either hand. But they were not yet done with the shore and the horror of the yellow flag.
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