With her single mast rising to the topmast cross-trees, the yards square, the remains of the trysail streaming like white hair from gaff and boltrope, the brig swept under our stern, shooting sheer athwart, seething smoothly as a sleigh over a level plain of snow, and rushing before the wind straight as the flight of an arrow. A coil of thick black smoke, whose base was reddened by sudden tongues of fire, blew over her bow, and coloured the atmosphere into which she rushed with a complexion of thunder. It seemed to rise from the fore-hatch, and it fled straight off the deck. I caught a sight of crowds of men forward and aft, with a couple of fellows leaping into the fore-rigging as the brig rushed by, to gesticulate to us. But the vision came and went in a few breaths like an object seen by lightning. So dense was the gale with spray, that there was scarcely a cable’s length of opening round about us. The brig showed and was gone! a phantasm, with the white waters pouring over her spritsail yard as she rushed through it, and no more of her was to be noted by the eye during the headlong swiftness of her plunge from one wall of spindrift into another, than the delicate lines of her rigging supporting the foremast, the bowsprit vanishing in a cloud of smoke, blowing ahead of her, a length of white deck, a flash of skylight glass, the glimmer, so to speak, of some score of faces turned our way. ‘She is on fire,’ I cried in Miss Temple’s ear: ‘she carries a doomed crew into that thickness!’ She moved, as if to resume her seat, and very carefully I got her on to the hencoop again. But the first terrific spite of the gale was now gone, and the squab form of the Indiaman lifting a little out of the seething cauldron in which she lay with her main-deck rail flush with the yeasty surface, was beginning slowly to pay off. Her decks gradually grew level, and presently she was right before the wind, with the howl of it at her taffrail, and her huge bows heaping up the white sea till the leaps of the summits were at either cathead. Mr. Colledge’s face showed in the companion-way. ‘Oh, there you are, Miss Temple!’ he roared. ‘Mrs. Radcliffe is firmly persuaded you have been blown overboard.’ She rose, but sat again, for the wind was too strong for her. Friend Colledge himself seemed pinned by the weight of it in the hatch. ‘We may be able to manage it between us,’ I shouted; and passing my arm through hers, I drove the pair of us to windward, and got her on to the companion ladder, down which she went. CHAPTER XIII FIRE!