Chapter
4
MONTHS ROLLED INTO YEARS, AND STILL THE DRIFTING DERELICT pursued her tortuous and erratic course at the behest of current, wind, and tide. That she ever was reported is doubtful, as few ships sighted her that might have guessed that anything was wrong aboard her; and she was no particular menace to navigation as her lights burned brightly by night, and by day only the practiced eye of an attentive mariner could have noted any strangeness about her.
When a ship was sighted whose course might bring it close to the derelict the old man would have the boy light a smudge in the fire box in the boiler room. The passing stranger seeing black smoke issuing from the single funnel, and the ship's nose in the wind, would assume that she had hove to for some minor repairs.
On the few oc
