A sort of oozing of light, dimly scarlet, wild and weak and wet as some ghostly star of death hovering over a grave, was visible to windward, a trifle forward of the fore-rigging. "Hark!" cried Hardy, and sure enough amid the greasy slopping of water, falling lazily from the thrust of the ship's bow, they could hear a distant noise of shouting, of cries reëchoed as from one part of a deck to the other, with a deeper threading of some throat hoarse in a speaking-trumpet. "Is the mate forward?" sang out the voice of the ship's carpenter. "Fire one right away off," shouted Hardy, knowing what the fellow had got and meant. In a few heart-beats a stream of sun-bright fire was pouring like water from a hose over the bow, but its lightning illumination touched but a narrow stretch of the dark water. The foresail turned of a sickly yellow, and the staysail soared wan as the wing of the albatross in dying moonlight. All above and abaft, and then forward to the flying-jib boom end, yards and sailcloth lay steeped in the impenetrable smother, and within the area of the light the fog drove slowly in a very Milky Way of silver crystals. But the men could see one another, and helped by the light Hardy sped aft to be near the wheel, and there he found Captain Layard. "There's a ship off the starboard bow, sir," he exclaimed. "They'll never see that port fire," answered the commander. "They're burning flares, or we shouldn't see _her_. A foreigner, by the row. How's she heading?" That question was answered even as he asked it by the revelation of a ship. It had the suddenness of a magic-lantern picture flung swiftly. They saw at the range of a pistol a lurid shape, which they easily distinguished as a barque with painted ports, a tall poop, and a tall topgallant forecastle. She was burning flares upon her main-deck and waist, and the red flames, winding tongues of fire into feathers of soot-black smoke, jewelled the whole apparition with red-hot stars. They pierced through the fog like sunlit rubies from glass and brass, from wet plank and mast, and the grease of spars. She was so close that she shone out clearly, and made light enough for the people of the _York_ to see by. Her helm was hard up and she was slowly paying off, but her flying-jib boom must catch the mizzen-rigging of the Australian clipper. You heard the splintering of wood aloft, the crash of nearer timber, broken off carrot-like betwixt a lazy roll of both ships.