to the look-out men on the forecastle to keep their eyes wide
open, and their answer came so sharp and prompt as to convince me that
they were fully on the alert, and that I had allowed my imagination to
deceive me. I therefore turned to Saunders with some remark upon my
lips in reply to his, when I saw the corposant suddenly leave the gaff-
end and go driving away to leeward on the wings of the gale. I
naturally expected that it would almost immediately vanish, but it did
not; on the contrary, it had all the appearance of having been arrested
in its flight, for I saw it elongating and collapsing again, as it had
done with the motion of the schooner, and it also appeared to me to be
describing long arcs across the sky. For a moment I was puzzled to
account for so strange a phenomenon, and then the explanation came to me
in a flash. I had not been deceived when I believed I caught sight of a
shadowy something sweeping athwart our bows. I had seen a ship, and
there she was to leeward of us, with the corposant clinging to one of
her spars. I had just time to give the order to bear up in pursuit, and
to get the schooner before the wind, when the corposant seemed to settle
down nearer to the water, and in another instant it had vanished.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

A TERRIBLE ADVENTURE.

With the disappearance of the corposant there was nothing whatever to
betray the presence of a strange sail in our vicinity; for now, strain
my eyes as I would, I could not be at all certain that I saw anything,
although there were times when the same vague, shapeless blot of deeper
darkness that had previously attracted my attention seemed to loom up
momentarily out of the Stygian murkiness ahead. There were times also
when, the water being highly phosphorescent, it appeared to me that,
among the ghostly gleamings of the breaking surges, I could faintly
discern a more symmetrical space of luminosity, corresponding to the
foaming track of a ship moving at a high rate of speed through the
water. But, to make sure of the matter, I ordered the reef to be shaken
out of the foresail, and also set the mainsail, close-reefed, with the
boom topped well up. This increased the speed of the schooner quite as
much as I thought desirable, more, indeed, than was at all prudent; for,
let me tell you, it is risky work to be flying along before a gale of
wind at a speed of fully nine knots an hour on a pitch-black night, with
a suspicion, amounting