"I wonder whether they've seen us," said he, at length. "No--'tain't possible. The fog's too thick--and we're as invisible to them as they are to us. Besides, these words show that they ain't thinkin' about anybody but themselves. Well, all we've got to do is to keep as still as a mouse, an' I'll jest go an' warn the boys."
With these words Zac moved softly away to warn his crew. First he went to Terry, and informed him that the whole fleet of France was around the Parson, and that their only chance of safety was to keep silent--a piece of information which effectually stopped Terry's singing and whistling for some time; then he told Biler, in a friendly way, that if he spoke above a whisper, or made any noise, he'd pitch him overboard with an anchor tied to his neck. Then he warned Jericho. As for Père Michel, he felt that warning was unnecessary, for the priest was too absorbed in his book to be conscious of the external world. After this, he came back to Claude, who had been listening ever since he left, but without hearing anything more.
"We must have drifted nearer together," said Zac. "The voice was a good deal louder than when I fust heerd it. My only hope is, that they'll drift past us, an' we'll git further away from them. But I wonder what they meant by bringin' her head around. P'aps they've seen us, after all--an' then, again, p'aps they haven't."
He said this in a whisper, and Clause answered in another whisper.
"It seems to me," said Claude, "that if they'd seen us, they'd have said something more--or at any rate, they'd have made more noise. But as it is, they've been perfectly silent."
"Wal--I on'y hope we won't hear anythin' more of them."
For more than two hours silence was observed on board the Parson. Terry stopped all whistling, and occupied himself with scratching his bullet head. The priest sat motionless, reading his book. Jericho drew the unhappy Biler down below for safe keeping, and detained him there a melancholy prisoner. Claude and Zac stood listening, but nothing more was heard.
To Claude there seemed something weird and ghostly in this incident--a voice thus sounding suddenly forth out of nothingness, and then dying away into the silence from which it had emerged: there was that in it which made him feel a sensation of involuntary awe; and the longer the silence continued, the more did this incident surround itself with a certain supernatural element, until, at length, he began to fancy that his senses might have deceived him. Yet he knew this had not been the case. Zac had heard the voice as well as he, and the words to him had been perfectly plain. _Put her head a little over this way_! Singular words, too, they seemed to be, as he turned them over in his mind. Under other circumstances they might have been regarded as perfectly commonplace, but now the surroundings gave them the possibility of a varied interpretation. Who was the "her"? What was meant? Was it a ship or a woman? What could the meaning be? Or, again, might not this have been some supernatural voice speaking to them from the Unseen, and conveying to them some sentence either of good or evil omen, giving them some direction, perhaps, about the course of the schooner in which he was?