“And what brings you here, this hour of the night?” he asked.
“That’s not your business,” retorted Negoro insolently.
“It is my business,” replied Dick resolutely; “and I mean to have an answer; what brought you here?”
Negoro answered sullenly that he knew of no rule to prevent his going where he liked and when he liked.
“No rule!” cried Dick; “then I make the rule now. From this time forward, I make the rule that you shall never come astern. Do you understand?”
Roused from his accustomed doggedness, the man seemed to make a threatening movement. Quick as lightning, Dick Sands drew a revolver from his pocket.
“Negoro, one act, one word of insubordination, and I blow out your brains!”
Negoro had no time to reply; before he could speak he was bowed down towards the deck by an irresistible weight. Hercules had grasped him by the shoulder.
“Shall I put him overboard, captain? he will make a meal for the fishes; they are not very particular what they eat,” said the negro, with a grin of contempt.
“Not yet,” quietly answered Dick.
The giant removed his hand, and Negoro stood upright again, and began to retreat to his own quarters, muttering, however, as he passed Hercules—
“You cursed nigger! You shall pay for this!”
The discovery was now made that the wind apparently had taken a sudden shift of no less than forty-five degrees; but what occasioned Dick the greatest perplexity was that there was nothing in the condition of the sea to correspond with the alteration in the current of the air; instead of being directly astern, wind and waves were now beating on the larboard. Progress in this way must necessarily be full of danger, and Dick was obliged to bring his ship up at least four points before he got her straight before the tempest.
The young captain felt that he must be more than ever on the alert; he could not shake off the suspicion that Negoro had been concerned in the loss of the first compass, and had some further designs upon the second. Still he was utterly at a loss to imagine what possible motive the man could have for so criminal an act of malevolence, as there was no plausible reason to be assigned why he should not be as anxious as all the rest to reach the coast of America. The suspicion continued, however, to haunt him, and when he mentioned it to Mrs. Weldon he found that a similar feeling of distrust had agitated her, although she, like himself, was altogether unable to allege a likely motive why the cook should contemplate so strange an act of mischief. It was determined that a strict surveillance should be kept upon all the fellow’s movements.
Negoro, however, manifested no inclination to disobey the captain’s peremptory order; he kept strictly to his own part of the ship; but as Dingo was now regularly quartered on the stern, there was a tolerably sure guarantee that the cook would not be found wandering much in that direction.
A week passed, and still the tempest showed no signs of abating; the barometer continued to fall, and not once did a period of calmer weather afford an opportunity of carrying sail. The Pilgrim still made her way northeast. Her speed could not be less than two hundred miles in twenty-four hours. But no land appeared. Vast as was the range of the American continent, extending for 120 degrees between the Atlantic and the Pacific, it was nowhere to be discerned. Was he dreaming? was he mad? Dick would perpetually ask himself: had he been sailing in a wrong direction? had he failed to steer aright?
But no: he was convinced there was no error in his steering. Although he could not actually see it for the mist, he knew that day after day the sun rose before him, and that it set behind him. Yet he was constrained in bewilderment to ask, what had become of those shores of America upon which, when they came in sight, there was only too great a fear the ship should be dashed? what had become of them? where were they? whither had this incessant hurricane driven them? why did not the expected coast appear?
To all these bewildering inquiries Dick could find no answer except to imagine that his compass had misled him. Yet he was powerless to put his own misgivings to the test; he deplored more than ever the destruction of the duplicate instrument which would have checked his registers. He studied his chart; but all in vain; the position in which he found himself as the result of Negoro’s treachery, seemed to baffle him the more, the more he tried to solve the mystery.
The days were passing on in this chronic state of anxiety, when one morning about eight o’clock, Hercules, who was on watch at the fore, suddenly shouted—
“Land!”
Dick Sands had little reliance upon the negro’s inexperienced eye, but hurried forward to the bow.
“Where’s the land?” he cried; his voice being scarcely audible above the howling of the tempest.
“There! look there!” said Hercules, nodding his head and pointing over the larboard side, to the northeast.
Dick could see nothing.
Mrs. Weldon had heard the shout. Unable to restrain her interest, she had left her cabin and was at Dick’s side. He uttered an expression of surprise at seeing her, but could not hear anything she said, as her voice was unable to rise above the roaring of the elements;
