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Fate seemed to oppose them, as it was certain that, if their purpose was suspected, the hand of every white man whom they might come across would be against them. But they held on over leagues of empty ocean. The season wore away, and at last the wind freshened easterly, and they ran for a week under boom-foresail and a jib, with the big gray combers curling as they foamed by high above her rail.
The wind had moderated, but on all sides was a wild gray waste of heaving, white-crested combers, before which the brig was still scudding under the staysail. Three miles off on the port bow was a large, square-bowed, square-yarded ship, hove to and heading away from them, which might be a frigate or a subsidized Englishman with painted ports; but in either case she could not be investigated now.
"It's lucky, because there's some weight in the wind." Some hours later, when the sea was flecked with white, they closed with a strip of gray-green forest that seemed to run out into the water. The launch rolled and lurched as the foam-tipped combers hove her up and the awning flapped savagely in the whistling breeze. Away on the horizon, there was a dingy trail of smoke.
The long ranks of tumbling combers did not look encouraging, and when the plunges grew sharper and the brine began to splash across the coaming that protected the well he wished that they had hauled down a second reef.
He knew where he was, because he had steamed along the coast on board the cattle boat. The Anglesey shore was fringed by reefs, the tide-races ran in white turmoil across the ledges. The tide had now nearly run out, but when they turned the corner at Carmel Point they would meet the flood stream and the big combers the gale drove up channel. Going to the pilot-house, Lister lighted his pipe.
At times they swam with cleaving fins exposed: again they churned the placid waters until swift combers raced across the shallow bars like tidal waves while the deeper channels were shot through with shadowy forms or pierced by the lightning glint of silvered bellies.
So glorious is the flight of the seagull that it tempts us to fling aside the dry-as-dust theories of mechanism of flexed wings, coefficient of air resistance, and all the abracadabra of the mathematical biologist, and just to give thanks for a sight so inspiring as that of gulls ringing high in the eye of the wind over hissing combers that break on sloping beaches or around jagged rocks.
"Sailboat!" gasped Cop Billings, springing to his feet; "she's no good; bottom's out, a whole patch of her. She's being repaired." But while he talked he was running wildly to the boathouse followed by all the others. As they reached the little wharf they were just in time to see the combers strike the canoe, to see Freddy start, then to see it capsize.
The next sea swept her on, but she did not strike, and after a few moments Kit knew she had crossed the top of the shoal. Her whistle shrieked above the turmoil of the sea, a light blinked in the spray, and she lurched on before the tumbling combers. By and by the water got smooth and an indistinct dark mass grew out of the mist.
Half a mile out, where is the reef, the white-headed combers thrust suddenly skyward out of the placid turquoise-blue and come rolling in to shore. One after another they come, a mile long, with smoking crests, the white battalions of the infinite army of the sea.
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