"Now take your oar by the middle and stand by to push off if we come too near to the rocks on either side," commanded Wat, from the prow.
"Aye, aye, sir," cried Scarlett, taking good-humoredly the sailor's tone and using words he had heard on his sea voyages. "Belay the binnacle and part the ship's periwig abaft the main-mast!"
He muttered the last part of the sentence below his breath, and Wat, who straddled in the narrow angle of the stem, peering eagerly ahead and paddling to either side, was far too anxious to give heed.
Suddenly the boat bumped heavily on a hidden obstacle. Scarlett went forward over a thwart and his oar fell overboard, and doubtless the latter would have floated away but for Kate's ready hand, which rescued it and brought it aboard, dripping sea-water from blade to handle.
"Let me help," she said; "I can see very well in the dark."
"Agreed," answered Scarlett, with infinite relief. "Old Jack is noways fond of butting at his enemies with a steering-oar in a rabbit-hole."
So he took Kate's place in the stern, while the girl stood erect and picked the words of command from Wat--sometimes even venturing to advise him when with her more delicate perceptions she felt, more than saw, that they were approaching the shadowy-green phosphorescent glimmer where the water floor met the walls of the cave.
No sooner had they struck than a cloud of sea-fowl flew out about them, their wings beating in their faces, and the birds themselves stunning them with deafening cries. But presently, with protesting calls and roopy whistlings, the evicted inhabitants settled back again to their roosting-places.
As they went on the boat began to feel the incoming heave of the outer swell. A new freshness, too, came to them in the air which blew over the low island of Fiara straight into the great archway out of which they were presently floating.
So with Wat and his sweetheart standing erect paddling the boat, they passed out of the rock-fast gloom into the heartsome clatter of the narrow Sound of Fiara. On either side of it the cliffs rose measurelessly above them, and Fiara itself was a blue-black ridge before them. But Wat had crossed the strait too often to have any fear, so bidding Kate sit down, he settled the oars in the rowlocks to cross the stronger current to be expected there.