I threw an oar over the boat's stern, and, getting her head round for my ship, fell to sculling her with might and main. There was now a little more wind, and the rain drove with a sharper slant, but the small ridges of the sea ran softly with the boat, melting with scarce more than a light summer play of froth on either hand of me, as I stood erect sculling at my hardest. The heavier rush of rain had, however, by this time touched the Ocean Ranger, and she now showed as vaguely as a phantom down in the wet dusk. I could barely discern the dim spaces of her canvas, mere dashes of faint pallor upon the gloom, with the black streak of her hull coming and going as my boat rose and sank upon the swell.
I had not been sculling more than three or four minutes when I perceived that Captain Hoste had gathered way upon his ship. She was, in fact, forging ahead fast and rounding away into the west in pursuit of the American, leaving my boat in consequence astern of her out upon her starboard quarter. It was very evident that the boat was not to be seen from the Ocean Ranger--that Captain Hoste imagined me still on board the American, and that, observing the Yankee to be sailing away, he concluded it was about time to follow him--though this was a pursuit I had little doubt Hoste would speedily abandon, for it was not hard to guess that the Ephraim Z. Jackson would outsail the Ocean Ranger by two feet to one.
The consternation that seized me was so excessive that my hands grasped the oar motionlessly, as though my arms had been withered. I could do no more than stand gaping over my shoulder at the receding ships. As to shouting--why, already my vessel had put a long mile and a half between her and my boat; and though I could not tell amid the haze of the rain and the shadow of the evening what canvas she was carrying, I might gather that Captain Hoste was pressing her, by the heel of her tall dim outline, and by the occasional glance of the froth of her wake in the thickness under her counter.
I threw my oar inboards and sat down to collect my mind and think. My consternation, as I have said, was almost paralyzing. The suddenness of the desperate and dreadful situation in which I found myself benumbed my faculties for a while. I was without food; I was without drink; I was also without mast, sail, or compass, in a little open boat in the heart of a wide surface of sea, the night at hand--a night of storm, as I might fear when I cast my eyes up at the wet, near, scowling face of the sky and then looked round at the fast-darkening sea, narrowed to a small horizon by the gloomy walls of rain, in the western quarter of which the American had already vanished, while my own ship, as I stood straining my gaze at the pale blotch she made, slowly melted out like one's breath upon a looking-glass. Yet, heavy as my heart was with the horror of my position, I do not remember that I was then sensible of despair in any degree. When my wits in some measure returned, I thought to myself, rascal as the Yankee captain has proved himself, he surely will not be such a villain as to leave me to perish out here. He will know, by the Ocean Ranger pursuing him, that Captain Hoste has not seen my boat. Then he will shorten sail to enable the Ocean Ranger to approach, and hail Captain Hoste to tell him that I am adrift somewhere astern; so that at any hour I may expect to see the loom of my ship close at hand in search of me, within earshot, with a dozen pairs of eyes on the look-out and a dozen pairs of ears straining for my first cry.