"What is it?" asked Lestrange.
"A boat," he replied. "Hand me that glass you will find in the sling there."
He levelled the glass, and looked for a long time without speaking.
"It's a boat adrift--a small boat, nothing in her. Stay! I see something white, can't make it out. Hi there!"--to the fellow at the wheel. "Keep her a point more to starboard." He got on to the deck.
"We're going dead on for her."
"Is there any one in her?" asked Lestrange.
"Can't quite make out, but I'll lower the whale-boat and fetch her alongside."
He gave orders for the whale-boat to be slung out and manned.
As they approached nearer, it was evident that the drifting boat, which looked like a ship's dinghy, contained something, but what, could not be made out.
When he had approached near enough, Stannistreet put the helm down and brought the schooner to, with her sails all shivering. He took his place in the bow of the whale-boat and Lestrange in the stern. The boat was lowered, the falls cast off, and the oars bent to the water.
The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking scarcely bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes the whaleboat's nose was touching her quarter. Stannistreet grasped her gunwale.
In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip of coloured striped material. One of her arms was clasped round the neck of a form that was half hidden by her body, the other clasped partly to herself, partly to her companion, the body of a baby. They were natives, evidently, wrecked or lost by some mischance from some inter-island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell gently, and clasped in the girl's hand was a branch of some tree, and on the branch a single withered berry.
"Are they dead?" asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people in the boat, and who was standing up in the stern of the whale-boat trying to see.
"No," said Stannistreet; "they are asleep."