It was about the hour of six; the sun had just set, and the western sky was all a-blaze with fiery-coloured light, which tinged with roseate hues the waves that rolled upon the bleak and snow-clad shore. Captain Hartly took the wheel, and Reeves stood anxiously close by the binnacle, for we had to weather a long, sharp, and lofty promontory which abutted like a wall of rock into the ocean, and round which there eddied a swift and dangerous current. The wind, though now off the land, was too light to enable us to make headway against the stream.
On the brig we had but little "way," and a general exclamation of satisfaction rose from the hitherto silent crew, when the _Leda_ _shaved_--as they phrased it--past the promontory, and we saw a deep cove of blue water opening beyond it; but lo!
There lay at anchor a schooner--a long, low, sharply prowed and rakish-like craft--with her hull painted black as jet could be, and with a number of rough-looking fellows crowding along her gunwale. We were not three hundred yards apart.
"Reeves, take the wheel," cried Hartly, in an excited voice. "The glass, Cuffy, the spy-glass!" he added with sharp energy, snatching from the hands of Snowball the telescope which usually hung on two hooks in the companion; "a row of ugly dogs they are that man her. By Heaven, she is the _Black Schooner_!"
"The _Black Schooner_!" we all exclaimed with something of dismay in our varying tones; and I felt, that with Paul Reeves's grim legend about Captain Kidd fresh in our memory, we had some cause for alarm in meeting with this robber ship upon those solitary seas.
"Not a doubt of it! see, Reeves--she is a two-topsail schooner!"
A kind of growling cheer, mingled with wild and insolent halloing, rose from her crew on beholding us suddenly come round the abrupt promontory, from the brow of which a fringe of gigantic icicles overhung the sea. A commotion was instantly observable on deck; a man in authority sprang up the companion-ladder, and we heard him in a loud and clear voice ordering sail to be instantly made on the schooner as we altered our course.
"Man the windlass-bars--up anchor--rouse it to the catheads with a will, my boys! Shake out everything fore and aft--every stitch that will draw. Stand by the jib and flying-jib halliards," he shouted.