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Here Le Marchant was among friends, having visited the place many times in the way of business, and we were welcomed and made much of. We were anxious to get on, but the wind blew up so strongly from the south-west that we could have made no headway without ratching all the time to windward, and the sea was over high for our small boat.
Moreover, by ratching far enough to the northward to enable the felucca to fetch Barbadoes on the next tack, I should be stretching away in a fairly promising direction for being picked up by one of the many British cruisers that were watching the principal outlets from the Caribbean to the Atlantic.
It's no use ratching up to windward again hunting for Ciudadella, as ten to one we'd miss it a second time. We'll just run along the lee coast here for Port Mahon. There, now she's heading up for it like a steamer." There was silence for a while, and we listened to the swish of the seas and the rattle of the wind through the rigging. Then Haigh delivered himself of further wisdom.
By this time, the Maggie was within a hundred yards of the distressed bark and was ratching slowly backward and forward before her. "In all my born days," quoth Mr. Gibney, speaking a trifle thickly because of the document in his mouth, "I never got such a wallop as Scraggs handed me an' you last night. I don't forget things like that in a hurry.
I accordingly directed my gaze northward; and for some time my eyes searched that vast expanse of seething whiteness for an unbroken channel leading out into blue water from the lagoon-like sheet of water across which the Mercury was then ratching.
She had been newly sheathed with copper, and when she heeled over from the breeze as she stretched through the winding reaches of the river the metal shone like gold above the wool-white line of foam through which the cutter washed, and lazy men in barges would turn their heads to admire her, and red-capped cooks in the cabooses of "ratching" colliers would step to the rail to look, and sometimes a party of gay and gallant Cockneys, male and female, taking their pleasure in a wherry, would salute the passing Tom Bowling with a flourish of hands and pocket handkerchiefs.
In the interim Terence had descended to the collapsible boat bumping at the gangway and fended her off until Sam Daniels, the two cowboys and Mike Murphy joined him; whereupon Terence took one pair of oars, while Murphy handled the other, and the boat crept out from the steamer and headed directly for the submarine, which had been ratching backward and forward under a dead-slow bell, watching the towering black hulk of the Narcissus rolling idly.
"Right afore the wind, I suppose," says I; "there'll be no ratching with the rags we're going to hoist. Right afore the wind," I says; "and we must trust to God to keep us in view till something heaves in sight which is pretty well bound to happen I suppose when there comes some wind along." I opened the canvas parcel, and found a matter of thirty biscuits; all very sweet, good bread.
There was one comfort and only one to be found in the condition of affairs that I have endeavoured to indicate, and that was that the brig, heavily pressed as she was by her canvas, was ratching fast through the water on a course that was not only carrying her off the land but also somewhat to the eastward, so that, with the moderating of the gale, or even a slight shift of wind, we might hope to pass clear into the Atlantic.
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