“To fall in with the boat!  Did you keep off to leeward of it, then, that you expected to fetch it by tacking?”

“Ay, a good bit; and I think the boat is now away here to windward of us, drifting athwart our bows.”

This was important news to Mulford.  Could he only get that boat, the chances of being saved would be increased a hundred fold, nay, would almost amount to a certainty; whereas, so long as the wind held to the southward and eastward, the drift of the wreck must be toward the open water, and consequently so much the further removed from the means of succor.  The general direction of the trades, in that quarter of the world, is east, and should they get round into their old and proper quarter, it would not benefit them much; for the reef running south-west, they could scarcely hope to hit the Dry Tortugas again, in their drift, were life even spared them sufficiently long to float the distance.  Then there might be currents, about which Mulford knew nothing with certainty; they might set them in any direction; and did they exist, as was almost sure to be the case, were much more powerful than the wind in controlling the movements of a wreck.

The mate strained his eyes in the direction pointed out by Jack Tier, in the hope of discovering the boat through the haze of the morning, and he actually did discern something that, it appeared to him, might be the much desired little craft.  If he were right, there was every reason to think the boat would drift down so near them as to enable him to recover it by swimming.  This cheering intelligence was communicated to his companions, who received it with gratitude and delight.  But the approach of day gradually dispelled that hope, the object which Mulford had mistaken for the boat, within two hundred yards of the wreck, turning out to be a small, low, but bare hummock of the reef, at a distance of more than two miles.

“That is a proof that we are not far from the reef, at least,” cried Mulford, willing to encourage those around him all he could, and really much relieved at finding himself so near even this isolated fragment of terra firma.  “This fact is the next encouraging thing to finding ourselves near the boat, or to falling in with a sail.”

“Ay, ay,” said Jack, gloomily; “boat or no boat, ’t will make no great matter of difference now.  There’s customers that’ll be sartain to take all the grists you can send to their mill.”

“What things are those glancing about the vessel?” cried Rose, almost in the same breath; “those dark, sharp-looking sticks—­see, there are five or six of them! and they move as if fastened to something under the water that pulls them about.”

“Them’s the customers I mean, Miss Rose,” answered Jack, in the same strain as that in which he had first spoken; “they’re the same thing at sea as lawyers be ashore, and seem made to live on other folks.  Them’s sharks.”