"Ha!" cried the captain, jumping from the platform, and strutting about with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. "Did you see me? Ha! It is over!"
A cheer broke from the crew. The men ran forward to their stations at the winch.
"Ha!" the captain repeated with intense satisfaction, his ruddy face wreathed in smiles. "Did you see me? Ha-a-a-a! It is a dead w'ale."
The harpoon line was paying out slowly, controlled by a big steam winch--a gigantic fishing reel. The engines were stopped; but the _Viking_ was going forward at a lively rate as the catch plunged down and on. Minute after minute slipped away--five minutes; then the rope slackened somewhat, and, a moment later, the big whale came to the surface and spouted streams of blood--streams as red as the streak of sunset light in the gray sky beyond him. He floundered there in agony, blowing and _hon-g-king_ and beating the sea with his tail: turning the water crimson with his blood.
It took him a long, long time to die, frightfully torn by the bomb though he was. He dived and rose and coughed; and at last he sank slowly down, down, and still down; drawing out a hundred and forty fathom of line: straight down to the bottom of the sea in that place. From time to time the captain touched the rope with his fingers; and when the tremour of life had passed from it he gave the signal to haul away. Half an hour later the carcass of the monster was inflated with gas, lying belly up at the surface of the water, and lashed by the tail to the port bow of the steamer.
Off the starboard quarter--far away where the dusk had gathered--the mate of the dead whale rose, _hon-g-ked_, dived and was seen no more.
_In Which Billy Topsail Goes Fishing in Earnest. Concerning, also, Feather's Folly of the Devil's Teeth, Mary Robinson, and the Wreck of the Fish Killer_
FEATHER'S FOLLY was one of a group of troublesome islands lying off Cape Grief on the way to the Labrador. Surveyed by a generously inaccurate apprentice it might have measured an acre. It was as barren as an old bone; but a painstaking man, with unimpaired eyesight, if he lingered long and lovingly enough over the task, could doubtless have discovered more than one blade of grass. There is no adjective in the English language adequate to describe its forbidding appearance as viewed from the sea in a gale of wind.