At this Claude was again silent for some time, thinking to himself whether the possibility of a French ship being near was to be wished or dreaded. Much was to be said on both sides. To himself it would, perhaps, be desirable; yet not so to Zac, although he tried to reassure the dejected skipper by telling him that if a French vessel should really be so near, it would be all the better, since his voyage would thereby be made all the shorter, for he himself could go aboard, and the Parson might return to Boston. But Zac refused to be so easily comforted.
"No," said he; "once I git into their clutches, they'll never let me go; and as for the poor old Parson, why, they'll go an' turn her into a Papist priest. And that," he added, with a deep sigh, "would be too--almighty--bad!"
Claude now found that Zac was in too despondent a mood to listen to what he called reason, and therefore he held his tongue. The idea that a French ship might be somewhere near, behind that wall of fog, had in it something which to him was not unpleasant, since it afforded some variety to the monotony of his situation. He stood, therefore, in silence, with his face turned towards the direction indicated by Zac, and listened intently, while the skipper stood in silence by his side, listening also.
There was no wind whatever. The water was quite smooth, and the Parson rose and fell at the slow undulations of the long ocean rollers, while at every motion the spars creaked and the sails flapped idly. All around there arose a gray wall of fog, deep, dense, and fixed, which shut them in on every side, while overhead the sky itself was concealed from view by the same dull-gray canopy. Behind that wall of fog anything might lie concealed; the whole French fleet might be there, without those on board the Parson being anything the wiser. This Claude felt, and as he thought of the possibility of this, he began to see that Zac's anxiety was very well founded, and that if the Parson should be captured it would be no easy task to deliver her from the grasp of the captor. Still there came no further sounds, and Claude, after listening for a long time without hearing anything, began, at length, to conclude that Zac had been deceived.