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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Sea-Wolf
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: October 15, 1997 [eBook #1074]
+[Most recently updated: November 24, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Price
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-WOLF ***
+
+
+
+
+                               THE SEA-WOLF
+
+
+                                    BY
+                               JACK LONDON
+
+                                AUTHOR OF
+               “THE CALL OF THE WILD,” “THE FAITH OF MEN,”
+                                   ETC.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                            _POPULAR EDITION_.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                            WILLIAM HEINEMANN
+                                   1917
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_First published_, _November_ 1904.
+
+_New Impression_, _December_ 1904, _April_ 1908.
+
+_Popular Edition_, _July_ 1910; _New Impressions_, _March_ 1912,
+_September_ 1912, _November_ 1913, _May_ 1915, _May_ 1916, _July_ 1917.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+             _Copyright_, _London_, _William Heinemann_, 1904
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the
+cause of it all to Charley Furuseth’s credit.  He kept a summer cottage
+in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied
+it except when he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and
+Schopenhauer to rest his brain.  When summer came on, he elected to sweat
+out a hot and dusty existence in the city and to toil incessantly.  Had
+it not been my custom to run up to see him every Saturday afternoon and
+to stop over till Monday morning, this particular January Monday morning
+would not have found me afloat on San Francisco Bay.
+
+Not but that I was afloat in a safe craft, for the _Martinez_ was a new
+ferry-steamer, making her fourth or fifth trip on the run between
+Sausalito and San Francisco.  The danger lay in the heavy fog which
+blanketed the bay, and of which, as a landsman, I had little
+apprehension.  In fact, I remember the placid exaltation with which I
+took up my position on the forward upper deck, directly beneath the
+pilot-house, and allowed the mystery of the fog to lay hold of my
+imagination.  A fresh breeze was blowing, and for a time I was alone in
+the moist obscurity—yet not alone, for I was dimly conscious of the
+presence of the pilot, and of what I took to be the captain, in the glass
+house above my head.
+
+I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labour which
+made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation,
+in order to visit my friend who lived across an arm of the sea.  It was
+good that men should be specialists, I mused.  The peculiar knowledge of
+the pilot and captain sufficed for many thousands of people who knew no
+more of the sea and navigation than I knew.  On the other hand, instead
+of having to devote my energy to the learning of a multitude of things, I
+concentrated it upon a few particular things, such as, for instance, the
+analysis of Poe’s place in American literature—an essay of mine, by the
+way, in the current _Atlantic_.  Coming aboard, as I passed through the
+cabin, I had noticed with greedy eyes a stout gentleman reading the
+_Atlantic_, which was open at my very essay.  And there it was again, the
+division of labour, the special knowledge of the pilot and captain which
+permitted the stout gentleman to read my special knowledge on Poe while
+they carried him safely from Sausalito to San Francisco.
+
+A red-faced man, slamming the cabin door behind him and stumping out on
+the deck, interrupted my reflections, though I made a mental note of the
+topic for use in a projected essay which I had thought of calling “The
+Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.”  The red-faced man shot a
+glance up at the pilot-house, gazed around at the fog, stumped across the
+deck and back (he evidently had artificial legs), and stood still by my
+side, legs wide apart, and with an expression of keen enjoyment on his
+face.  I was not wrong when I decided that his days had been spent on the
+sea.
+
+“It’s nasty weather like this here that turns heads grey before their
+time,” he said, with a nod toward the pilot-house.
+
+“I had not thought there was any particular strain,” I answered.  “It
+seems as simple as A, B, C.  They know the direction by compass, the
+distance, and the speed.  I should not call it anything more than
+mathematical certainty.”
+
+“Strain!” he snorted.  “Simple as A, B, C!  Mathematical certainty!”
+
+He seemed to brace himself up and lean backward against the air as he
+stared at me.  “How about this here tide that’s rushin’ out through the
+Golden Gate?” he demanded, or bellowed, rather.  “How fast is she ebbin’?
+What’s the drift, eh?  Listen to that, will you?  A bell-buoy, and we’re
+a-top of it!  See ’em alterin’ the course!”
+
+From out of the fog came the mournful tolling of a bell, and I could see
+the pilot turning the wheel with great rapidity.  The bell, which had
+seemed straight ahead, was now sounding from the side.  Our own whistle
+was blowing hoarsely, and from time to time the sound of other whistles
+came to us from out of the fog.
+
+“That’s a ferry-boat of some sort,” the new-comer said, indicating a
+whistle off to the right.  “And there!  D’ye hear that?  Blown by mouth.
+Some scow schooner, most likely.  Better watch out, Mr. Schooner-man.
+Ah, I thought so.  Now hell’s a poppin’ for somebody!”
+
+The unseen ferry-boat was blowing blast after blast, and the mouth-blown
+horn was tooting in terror-stricken fashion.
+
+“And now they’re payin’ their respects to each other and tryin’ to get
+clear,” the red-faced man went on, as the hurried whistling ceased.
+
+His face was shining, his eyes flashing with excitement as he translated
+into articulate language the speech of the horns and sirens.  “That’s a
+steam-siren a-goin’ it over there to the left.  And you hear that fellow
+with a frog in his throat—a steam schooner as near as I can judge,
+crawlin’ in from the Heads against the tide.”
+
+A shrill little whistle, piping as if gone mad, came from directly ahead
+and from very near at hand.  Gongs sounded on the _Martinez_.  Our
+paddle-wheels stopped, their pulsing beat died away, and then they
+started again.  The shrill little whistle, like the chirping of a cricket
+amid the cries of great beasts, shot through the fog from more to the
+side and swiftly grew faint and fainter.  I looked to my companion for
+enlightenment.
+
+“One of them dare-devil launches,” he said.  “I almost wish we’d sunk
+him, the little rip!  They’re the cause of more trouble.  And what good
+are they?  Any jackass gets aboard one and runs it from hell to
+breakfast, blowin’ his whistle to beat the band and tellin’ the rest of
+the world to look out for him, because he’s comin’ and can’t look out for
+himself!  Because he’s comin’!  And you’ve got to look out, too!  Right
+of way!  Common decency!  They don’t know the meanin’ of it!”
+
+I felt quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he stumped
+indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog.
+And romantic it certainly was—the fog, like the grey shadow of infinite
+mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes
+of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their
+steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery, groping their
+way blindly through the Unseen, and clamouring and clanging in confident
+speech the while their hearts are heavy with incertitude and fear.
+
+The voice of my companion brought me back to myself with a laugh.  I too
+had been groping and floundering, the while I thought I rode clear-eyed
+through the mystery.
+
+“Hello! somebody comin’ our way,” he was saying.  “And d’ye hear that?
+He’s comin’ fast.  Walking right along.  Guess he don’t hear us yet.
+Wind’s in wrong direction.”
+
+The fresh breeze was blowing right down upon us, and I could hear the
+whistle plainly, off to one side and a little ahead.
+
+“Ferry-boat?” I asked.
+
+He nodded, then added, “Or he wouldn’t be keepin’ up such a clip.”  He
+gave a short chuckle.  “They’re gettin’ anxious up there.”
+
+I glanced up.  The captain had thrust his head and shoulders out of the
+pilot-house, and was staring intently into the fog as though by sheer
+force of will he could penetrate it.  His face was anxious, as was the
+face of my companion, who had stumped over to the rail and was gazing
+with a like intentness in the direction of the invisible danger.
+
+Then everything happened, and with inconceivable rapidity.  The fog
+seemed to break away as though split by a wedge, and the bow of a
+steamboat emerged, trailing fog-wreaths on either side like seaweed on
+the snout of Leviathan.  I could see the pilot-house and a white-bearded
+man leaning partly out of it, on his elbows.  He was clad in a blue
+uniform, and I remember noting how trim and quiet he was.  His quietness,
+under the circumstances, was terrible.  He accepted Destiny, marched hand
+in hand with it, and coolly measured the stroke.  As he leaned there, he
+ran a calm and speculative eye over us, as though to determine the
+precise point of the collision, and took no notice whatever when our
+pilot, white with rage, shouted, “Now you’ve done it!”
+
+On looking back, I realize that the remark was too obvious to make
+rejoinder necessary.
+
+“Grab hold of something and hang on,” the red-faced man said to me.  All
+his bluster had gone, and he seemed to have caught the contagion of
+preternatural calm.  “And listen to the women scream,” he said
+grimly—almost bitterly, I thought, as though he had been through the
+experience before.
+
+The vessels came together before I could follow his advice.  We must have
+been struck squarely amidships, for I saw nothing, the strange steamboat
+having passed beyond my line of vision.  The _Martinez_ heeled over,
+sharply, and there was a crashing and rending of timber.  I was thrown
+flat on the wet deck, and before I could scramble to my feet I heard the
+scream of the women.  This it was, I am certain,—the most indescribable
+of blood-curdling sounds,—that threw me into a panic.  I remembered the
+life-preservers stored in the cabin, but was met at the door and swept
+backward by a wild rush of men and women.  What happened in the next few
+minutes I do not recollect, though I have a clear remembrance of pulling
+down life-preservers from the overhead racks, while the red-faced man
+fastened them about the bodies of an hysterical group of women.  This
+memory is as distinct and sharp as that of any picture I have seen.  It
+is a picture, and I can see it now,—the jagged edges of the hole in the
+side of the cabin, through which the grey fog swirled and eddied; the
+empty upholstered seats, littered with all the evidences of sudden
+flight, such as packages, hand satchels, umbrellas, and wraps; the stout
+gentleman who had been reading my essay, encased in cork and canvas, the
+magazine still in his hand, and asking me with monotonous insistence if I
+thought there was any danger; the red-faced man, stumping gallantly
+around on his artificial legs and buckling life-preservers on all comers;
+and finally, the screaming bedlam of women.
+
+This it was, the screaming of the women, that most tried my nerves.  It
+must have tried, too, the nerves of the red-faced man, for I have another
+picture which will never fade from my mind.  The stout gentleman is
+stuffing the magazine into his overcoat pocket and looking on curiously.
+A tangled mass of women, with drawn, white faces and open mouths, is
+shrieking like a chorus of lost souls; and the red-faced man, his face
+now purplish with wrath, and with arms extended overhead as in the act of
+hurling thunderbolts, is shouting, “Shut up!  Oh, shut up!”
+
+I remember the scene impelled me to sudden laughter, and in the next
+instant I realized I was becoming hysterical myself; for these were women
+of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, with the fear of death upon
+them and unwilling to die.  And I remember that the sounds they made
+reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the knife of the butcher, and
+I was struck with horror at the vividness of the analogy.  These women,
+capable of the most sublime emotions, of the tenderest sympathies, were
+open-mouthed and screaming.  They wanted to live, they were helpless,
+like rats in a trap, and they screamed.
+
+The horror of it drove me out on deck.  I was feeling sick and squeamish,
+and sat down on a bench.  In a hazy way I saw and heard men rushing and
+shouting as they strove to lower the boats.  It was just as I had read
+descriptions of such scenes in books.  The tackles jammed.  Nothing
+worked.  One boat lowered away with the plugs out, filled with women and
+children and then with water, and capsized.  Another boat had been
+lowered by one end, and still hung in the tackle by the other end, where
+it had been abandoned.  Nothing was to be seen of the strange steamboat
+which had caused the disaster, though I heard men saying that she would
+undoubtedly send boats to our assistance.
+
+I descended to the lower deck.  The _Martinez_ was sinking fast, for the
+water was very near.  Numbers of the passengers were leaping overboard.
+Others, in the water, were clamouring to be taken aboard again.  No one
+heeded them.  A cry arose that we were sinking.  I was seized by the
+consequent panic, and went over the side in a surge of bodies.  How I
+went over I do not know, though I did know, and instantly, why those in
+the water were so desirous of getting back on the steamer.  The water was
+cold—so cold that it was painful.  The pang, as I plunged into it, was as
+quick and sharp as that of fire.  It bit to the marrow.  It was like the
+grip of death.  I gasped with the anguish and shock of it, filling my
+lungs before the life-preserver popped me to the surface.  The taste of
+the salt was strong in my mouth, and I was strangling with the acrid
+stuff in my throat and lungs.
+
+But it was the cold that was most distressing.  I felt that I could
+survive but a few minutes.  People were struggling and floundering in the
+water about me.  I could hear them crying out to one another.  And I
+heard, also, the sound of oars.  Evidently the strange steamboat had
+lowered its boats.  As the time went by I marvelled that I was still
+alive.  I had no sensation whatever in my lower limbs, while a chilling
+numbness was wrapping about my heart and creeping into it.  Small waves,
+with spiteful foaming crests, continually broke over me and into my
+mouth, sending me off into more strangling paroxysms.
+
+The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing chorus
+of screams in the distance, and knew that the _Martinez_ had gone down.
+Later,—how much later I have no knowledge,—I came to myself with a start
+of fear.  I was alone.  I could hear no calls or cries—only the sound of
+the waves, made weirdly hollow and reverberant by the fog.  A panic in a
+crowd, which partakes of a sort of community of interest, is not so
+terrible as a panic when one is by oneself; and such a panic I now
+suffered.  Whither was I drifting?  The red-faced man had said that the
+tide was ebbing through the Golden Gate.  Was I, then, being carried out
+to sea?  And the life-preserver in which I floated?  Was it not liable to
+go to pieces at any moment?  I had heard of such things being made of
+paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all
+buoyancy.  And I could not swim a stroke.  And I was alone, floating,
+apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness.  I confess that a
+madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked, and
+beat the water with my numb hands.
+
+How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness intervened, of
+which I remember no more than one remembers of troubled and painful
+sleep.  When I aroused, it was as after centuries of time; and I saw,
+almost above me and emerging from the fog, the bow of a vessel, and three
+triangular sails, each shrewdly lapping the other and filled with wind.
+Where the bow cut the water there was a great foaming and gurgling, and I
+seemed directly in its path.  I tried to cry out, but was too exhausted.
+The bow plunged down, just missing me and sending a swash of water clear
+over my head.  Then the long, black side of the vessel began slipping
+past, so near that I could have touched it with my hands.  I tried to
+reach it, in a mad resolve to claw into the wood with my nails, but my
+arms were heavy and lifeless.  Again I strove to call out, but made no
+sound.
+
+The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a hollow
+between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing at the wheel,
+and of another man who seemed to be doing little else than smoke a cigar.
+I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he slowly turned his head and
+glanced out over the water in my direction.  It was a careless,
+unpremeditated glance, one of those haphazard things men do when they
+have no immediate call to do anything in particular, but act because they
+are alive and must do something.
+
+But life and death were in that glance.  I could see the vessel being
+swallowed up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the wheel, and the
+head of the other man turning, slowly turning, as his gaze struck the
+water and casually lifted along it toward me.  His face wore an absent
+expression, as of deep thought, and I became afraid that if his eyes did
+light upon me he would nevertheless not see me.  But his eyes did light
+upon me, and looked squarely into mine; and he did see me, for he sprang
+to the wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and whirled it round and
+round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting orders of some sort.
+The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former course and leapt
+almost instantly from view into the fog.
+
+I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the power
+of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and darkness that was
+rising around me.  A little later I heard the stroke of oars, growing
+nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man.  When he was very near I heard
+him crying, in vexed fashion, “Why in hell don’t you sing out?”  This
+meant me, I thought, and then the blankness and darkness rose over me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.  Sparkling
+points of light spluttered and shot past me.  They were stars, I knew,
+and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the suns.  As I reached
+the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, a
+great gong struck and thundered.  For an immeasurable period, lapped in
+the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremendous
+flight.
+
+But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myself
+it must be.  My rhythm grew shorter and shorter.  I was jerked from swing
+to counter swing with irritating haste.  I could scarcely catch my
+breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens.  The gong
+thundered more frequently and more furiously.  I grew to await it with a
+nameless dread.  Then it seemed as though I were being dragged over
+rasping sands, white and hot in the sun.  This gave place to a sense of
+intolerable anguish.  My skin was scorching in the torment of fire.  The
+gong clanged and knelled.  The sparkling points of light flashed past me
+in an interminable stream, as though the whole sidereal system were
+dropping into the void.  I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened
+my eyes.  Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me.  My mighty
+rhythm was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea.  The
+terrific gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and
+clattered with each leap of the ship.  The rasping, scorching sands were
+a man’s hard hands chafing my naked chest.  I squirmed under the pain of
+it, and half lifted my head.  My chest was raw and red, and I could see
+tiny blood globules starting through the torn and inflamed cuticle.
+
+“That’ll do, Yonson,” one of the men said.  “Carn’t yer see you’ve
+bloomin’ well rubbed all the gent’s skin orf?”
+
+The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceased
+chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet.  The man who had spoken to
+him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost
+effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with
+his mother’s milk.  A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirty
+gunny-sack about his slim hips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty
+ship’s galley in which I found myself.
+
+“An’ ’ow yer feelin’ now, sir?” he asked, with the subservient smirk
+which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.
+
+For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped by
+Yonson to my feet.  The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was grating
+horribly on my nerves.  I could not collect my thoughts.  Clutching the
+woodwork of the galley for support,—and I confess the grease with which
+it was scummed put my teeth on edge,—I reached across a hot cooking-range
+to the offending utensil, unhooked it, and wedged it securely into the
+coal-box.
+
+The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my hand a
+steaming mug with an “’Ere, this’ll do yer good.”  It was a nauseous
+mess,—ship’s coffee,—but the heat of it was revivifying.  Between gulps
+of the molten stuff I glanced down at my raw and bleeding chest and
+turned to the Scandinavian.
+
+“Thank you, Mr. Yonson,” I said; “but don’t you think your measures were
+rather heroic?”
+
+It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than of my
+words, that he held up his palm for inspection.  It was remarkably
+calloused.  I passed my hand over the horny projections, and my teeth
+went on edge once more from the horrible rasping sensation produced.
+
+“My name is Johnson, not Yonson,” he said, in very good, though slow,
+English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.
+
+There was mild protest in his pale blue eyes, and withal a timid
+frankness and manliness that quite won me to him.
+
+“Thank you, Mr. Johnson,” I corrected, and reached out my hand for his.
+
+He hesitated, awkward and bashful, shifted his weight from one leg to the
+other, then blunderingly gripped my hand in a hearty shake.
+
+“Have you any dry clothes I may put on?” I asked the cook.
+
+“Yes, sir,” he answered, with cheerful alacrity.  “I’ll run down an’ tyke
+a look over my kit, if you’ve no objections, sir, to wearin’ my things.”
+
+He dived out of the galley door, or glided rather, with a swiftness and
+smoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like as oily.
+In fact, this oiliness, or greasiness, as I was later to learn, was
+probably the most salient expression of his personality.
+
+“And where am I?” I asked Johnson, whom I took, and rightly, to be one of
+the sailors.  “What vessel is this, and where is she bound?”
+
+“Off the Farallones, heading about sou-west,” he answered, slowly and
+methodically, as though groping for his best English, and rigidly
+observing the order of my queries.  “The schooner _Ghost_, bound
+seal-hunting to Japan.”
+
+“And who is the captain?  I must see him as soon as I am dressed.”
+
+Johnson looked puzzled and embarrassed.  He hesitated while he groped in
+his vocabulary and framed a complete answer.  “The cap’n is Wolf Larsen,
+or so men call him.  I never heard his other name.  But you better speak
+soft with him.  He is mad this morning.  The mate—”
+
+But he did not finish.  The cook had glided in.
+
+“Better sling yer ’ook out of ’ere, Yonson,” he said.  “The old man’ll be
+wantin’ yer on deck, an’ this ayn’t no d’y to fall foul of ’im.”
+
+Johnson turned obediently to the door, at the same time, over the cook’s
+shoulder, favouring me with an amazingly solemn and portentous wink as
+though to emphasize his interrupted remark and the need for me to be
+soft-spoken with the captain.
+
+Hanging over the cook’s arm was a loose and crumpled array of
+evil-looking and sour-smelling garments.
+
+“They was put aw’y wet, sir,” he vouchsafed explanation.  “But you’ll
+’ave to make them do till I dry yours out by the fire.”
+
+Clinging to the woodwork, staggering with the roll of the ship, and aided
+by the cook, I managed to slip into a rough woollen undershirt.  On the
+instant my flesh was creeping and crawling from the harsh contact.  He
+noticed my involuntary twitching and grimacing, and smirked:
+
+“I only ’ope yer don’t ever ’ave to get used to such as that in this
+life, ’cos you’ve got a bloomin’ soft skin, that you ’ave, more like a
+lydy’s than any I know of.  I was bloomin’ well sure you was a gentleman
+as soon as I set eyes on yer.”
+
+I had taken a dislike to him at first, and as he helped to dress me this
+dislike increased.  There was something repulsive about his touch.  I
+shrank from his hand; my flesh revolted.  And between this and the smells
+arising from various pots boiling and bubbling on the galley fire, I was
+in haste to get out into the fresh air.  Further, there was the need of
+seeing the captain about what arrangements could be made for getting me
+ashore.
+
+A cheap cotton shirt, with frayed collar and a bosom discoloured with
+what I took to be ancient blood-stains, was put on me amid a running and
+apologetic fire of comment.  A pair of workman’s brogans encased my feet,
+and for trousers I was furnished with a pair of pale blue, washed-out
+overalls, one leg of which was fully ten inches shorter than the other.
+The abbreviated leg looked as though the devil had there clutched for the
+Cockney’s soul and missed the shadow for the substance.
+
+“And whom have I to thank for this kindness?” I asked, when I stood
+completely arrayed, a tiny boy’s cap on my head, and for coat a dirty,
+striped cotton jacket which ended at the small of my back and the sleeves
+of which reached just below my elbows.
+
+The cook drew himself up in a smugly humble fashion, a deprecating smirk
+on his face.  Out of my experience with stewards on the Atlantic liners
+at the end of the voyage, I could have sworn he was waiting for his tip.
+From my fuller knowledge of the creature I now know that the posture was
+unconscious.  An hereditary servility, no doubt, was responsible.
+
+“Mugridge, sir,” he fawned, his effeminate features running into a greasy
+smile.  “Thomas Mugridge, sir, an’ at yer service.”
+
+“All right, Thomas,” I said.  “I shall not forget you—when my clothes are
+dry.”
+
+A soft light suffused his face and his eyes glistened, as though
+somewhere in the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and
+stirred with dim memories of tips received in former lives.
+
+“Thank you, sir,” he said, very gratefully and very humbly indeed.
+
+Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and I
+stepped out on deck.  I was still weak from my prolonged immersion.  A
+puff of wind caught me,—and I staggered across the moving deck to a
+corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support.  The schooner, heeled
+over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing and plunging into the
+long Pacific roll.  If she were heading south-west as Johnson had said,
+the wind, then, I calculated, was blowing nearly from the south.  The fog
+was gone, and in its place the sun sparkled crisply on the surface of the
+water. I turned to the east, where I knew California must lie, but could
+see nothing save low-lying fog-banks—the same fog, doubtless, that had
+brought about the disaster to the _Martinez_ and placed me in my present
+situation.  To the north, and not far away, a group of naked rocks thrust
+above the sea, on one of which I could distinguish a lighthouse.  In the
+south-west, and almost in our course, I saw the pyramidal loom of some
+vessel’s sails.
+
+Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more immediate
+surroundings.  My first thought was that a man who had come through a
+collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than I
+received.  Beyond a sailor at the wheel who stared curiously across the
+top of the cabin, I attracted no notice whatever.
+
+Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships.  There, on a
+hatch, a large man was lying on his back.  He was fully clothed, though
+his shirt was ripped open in front.  Nothing was to be seen of his chest,
+however, for it was covered with a mass of black hair, in appearance like
+the furry coat of a dog.  His face and neck were hidden beneath a black
+beard, intershot with grey, which would have been stiff and bushy had it
+not been limp and draggled and dripping with water.  His eyes were
+closed, and he was apparently unconscious; but his mouth was wide open,
+his breast, heaving as though from suffocation as he laboured noisily for
+breath.  A sailor, from time to time and quite methodically, as a matter
+of routine, dropped a canvas bucket into the ocean at the end of a rope,
+hauled it in hand under hand, and sluiced its contents over the prostrate
+man.
+
+Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely chewing
+the end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had rescued me from
+the sea.  His height was probably five feet ten inches, or ten and a
+half; but my first impression, or feel of the man, was not of this, but
+of his strength.  And yet, while he was of massive build, with broad
+shoulders and deep chest, I could not characterize his strength as
+massive.  It was what might be termed a sinewy, knotty strength, of the
+kind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but which, in him, because of his
+heavy build, partook more of the enlarged gorilla order.  Not that in
+appearance he seemed in the least gorilla-like.  What I am striving to
+express is this strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physical
+semblance.  It was a strength we are wont to associate with things
+primitive, with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine our
+tree-dwelling prototypes to have been—a strength savage, ferocious, alive
+in itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, the
+elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been
+moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the
+head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or which lingers in
+the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prod
+of a finger.
+
+Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who paced up
+and down.  He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet struck the deck
+squarely and with surety; every movement of a muscle, from the heave of
+the shoulders to the tightening of the lips about the cigar, was
+decisive, and seemed to come out of a strength that was excessive and
+overwhelming.  In fact, though this strength pervaded every action of
+his, it seemed but the advertisement of a greater strength that lurked
+within, that lay dormant and no more than stirred from time to time, but
+which might arouse, at any moment, terrible and compelling, like the rage
+of a lion or the wrath of a storm.
+
+The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned encouragingly
+at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the direction of the man who
+paced up and down by the hatchway.  Thus I was given to understand that
+he was the captain, the “Old Man,” in the cook’s vernacular, the
+individual whom I must interview and put to the trouble of somehow
+getting me ashore.  I had half started forward, to get over with what I
+was certain would be a stormy five minutes, when a more violent
+suffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate person who was lying on his
+back.  He wrenched and writhed about convulsively.  The chin, with the
+damp black beard, pointed higher in the air as the back muscles stiffened
+and the chest swelled in an unconscious and instinctive effort to get
+more air.  Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I knew that the skin was
+taking on a purplish hue.
+
+The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and gazed
+down at the dying man.  So fierce had this final struggle become that the
+sailor paused in the act of flinging more water over him and stared
+curiously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and dripping its contents to
+the deck.  The dying man beat a tattoo on the hatch with his heels,
+straightened out his legs, and stiffened in one great tense effort, and
+rolled his head from side to side.  Then the muscles relaxed, the head
+stopped rolling, and a sigh, as of profound relief, floated upward from
+his lips.  The jaw dropped, the upper lip lifted, and two rows of
+tobacco-discoloured teeth appeared.  It seemed as though his features had
+frozen into a diabolical grin at the world he had left and outwitted.
+
+Then a most surprising thing occurred.  The captain broke loose upon the
+dead man like a thunderclap.  Oaths rolled from his lips in a continuous
+stream.  And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or mere expressions of
+indecency.  Each word was a blasphemy, and there were many words.  They
+crisped and crackled like electric sparks.  I had never heard anything
+like it in my life, nor could I have conceived it possible.  With a turn
+for literary expression myself, and a penchant for forcible figures and
+phrases, I appreciated, as no other listener, I dare say, the peculiar
+vividness and strength and absolute blasphemy of his metaphors.  The
+cause of it all, as near as I could make out, was that the man, who was
+mate, had gone on a debauch before leaving San Francisco, and then had
+the poor taste to die at the beginning of the voyage and leave Wolf
+Larsen short-handed.
+
+It should be unnecessary to state, at least to my friends, that I was
+shocked.  Oaths and vile language of any sort had always been repellent
+to me.  I felt a wilting sensation, a sinking at the heart, and, I might
+just as well say, a giddiness.  To me, death had always been invested
+with solemnity and dignity.  It had been peaceful in its occurrence,
+sacred in its ceremonial.  But death in its more sordid and terrible
+aspects was a thing with which I had been unacquainted till now.  As I
+say, while I appreciated the power of the terrific denunciation that
+swept out of Wolf Larsen’s mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked.  The
+scorching torrent was enough to wither the face of the corpse.  I should
+not have been surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled
+and flared up in smoke and flame.  But the dead man was unconcerned.  He
+continued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery and
+defiance.  He was master of the situation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Wolf Larsen ceased swearing as suddenly as he had begun.  He relighted
+his cigar and glanced around.  His eyes chanced upon the cook.
+
+“Well, Cooky?” he began, with a suaveness that was cold and of the temper
+of steel.
+
+“Yes, sir,” the cook eagerly interpolated, with appeasing and apologetic
+servility.
+
+“Don’t you think you’ve stretched that neck of yours just about enough?
+It’s unhealthy, you know.  The mate’s gone, so I can’t afford to lose you
+too.  You must be very, very careful of your health, Cooky.  Understand?”
+
+His last word, in striking contrast with the smoothness of his previous
+utterance, snapped like the lash of a whip.  The cook quailed under it.
+
+“Yes, sir,” was the meek reply, as the offending head disappeared into
+the galley.
+
+At this sweeping rebuke, which the cook had only pointed, the rest of the
+crew became uninterested and fell to work at one task or another.  A
+number of men, however, who were lounging about a companion-way between
+the galley and hatch, and who did not seem to be sailors, continued
+talking in low tones with one another.  These, I afterward learned, were
+the hunters, the men who shot the seals, and a very superior breed to
+common sailor-folk.
+
+“Johansen!” Wolf Larsen called out.  A sailor stepped forward obediently.
+“Get your palm and needle and sew the beggar up.  You’ll find some old
+canvas in the sail-locker.  Make it do.”
+
+“What’ll I put on his feet, sir?” the man asked, after the customary “Ay,
+ay, sir.”
+
+“We’ll see to that,” Wolf Larsen answered, and elevated his voice in a
+call of “Cooky!”
+
+Thomas Mugridge popped out of his galley like a jack-in-the-box.
+
+“Go below and fill a sack with coal.”
+
+“Any of you fellows got a Bible or Prayer-book?” was the captain’s next
+demand, this time of the hunters lounging about the companion-way.
+
+They shook their heads, and some one made a jocular remark which I did
+not catch, but which raised a general laugh.
+
+Wolf Larsen made the same demand of the sailors.  Bibles and Prayer-books
+seemed scarce articles, but one of the men volunteered to pursue the
+quest amongst the watch below, returning in a minute with the information
+that there was none.
+
+The captain shrugged his shoulders.  “Then we’ll drop him over without
+any palavering, unless our clerical-looking castaway has the burial
+service at sea by heart.”
+
+By this time he had swung fully around and was facing me.  “You’re a
+preacher, aren’t you?” he asked.
+
+The hunters,—there were six of them,—to a man, turned and regarded me.  I
+was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow.  A laugh went up at my
+appearance,—a laugh that was not lessened or softened by the dead man
+stretched and grinning on the deck before us; a laugh that was as rough
+and harsh and frank as the sea itself; that arose out of coarse feelings
+and blunted sensibilities, from natures that knew neither courtesy nor
+gentleness.
+
+Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his grey eyes lighted with a slight
+glint of amusement; and in that moment, having stepped forward quite
+close to him, I received my first impression of the man himself, of the
+man as apart from his body, and from the torrent of blasphemy I had heard
+him spew forth.  The face, with large features and strong lines, of the
+square order, yet well filled out, was apparently massive at first sight;
+but again, as with the body, the massiveness seemed to vanish, and a
+conviction to grow of a tremendous and excessive mental or spiritual
+strength that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps of his being.  The jaw,
+the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and swelling heavily above
+the eyes,—these, while strong in themselves, unusually strong, seemed to
+speak an immense vigour or virility of spirit that lay behind and beyond
+and out of sight.  There was no sounding such a spirit, no measuring, no
+determining of metes and bounds, nor neatly classifying in some
+pigeon-hole with others of similar type.
+
+The eyes—and it was my destiny to know them well—were large and handsome,
+wide apart as the true artist’s are wide, sheltering under a heavy brow
+and arched over by thick black eyebrows.  The eyes themselves were of
+that baffling protean grey which is never twice the same; which runs
+through many shades and colourings like intershot silk in sunshine; which
+is grey, dark and light, and greenish-grey, and sometimes of the clear
+azure of the deep sea.  They were eyes that masked the soul with a
+thousand guises, and that sometimes opened, at rare moments, and allowed
+it to rush up as though it were about to fare forth nakedly into the
+world on some wonderful adventure,—eyes that could brood with the
+hopeless sombreness of leaden skies; that could snap and crackle points
+of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that could grow
+chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm and soften
+and be all a-dance with love-lights, intense and masculine, luring and
+compelling, which at the same time fascinate and dominate women till they
+surrender in a gladness of joy and of relief and sacrifice.
+
+But to return.  I told him that, unhappily for the burial service, I was
+not a preacher, when he sharply demanded:
+
+“What do you do for a living?”
+
+I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had I ever
+canvassed it.  I was quite taken aback, and before I could find myself
+had sillily stammered, “I—I am a gentleman.”
+
+His lip curled in a swift sneer.
+
+“I have worked, I do work,” I cried impetuously, as though he were my
+judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of
+my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.
+
+“For your living?”
+
+There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I was
+quite beside myself—“rattled,” as Furuseth would have termed it, like a
+quaking child before a stern school-master.
+
+“Who feeds you?” was his next question.
+
+“I have an income,” I answered stoutly, and could have bitten my tongue
+the next instant.  “All of which, you will pardon my observing, has
+nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to see you about.”
+
+But he disregarded my protest.
+
+“Who earned it?  Eh?  I thought so.  Your father.  You stand on dead
+men’s legs.  You’ve never had any of your own.  You couldn’t walk alone
+between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly for three meals.
+Let me see your hand.”
+
+His tremendous, dormant strength must have stirred, swiftly and
+accurately, or I must have slept a moment, for before I knew it he had
+stepped two paces forward, gripped my right hand in his, and held it up
+for inspection.  I tried to withdraw it, but his fingers tightened,
+without visible effort, till I thought mine would be crushed.  It is hard
+to maintain one’s dignity under such circumstances.  I could not squirm
+or struggle like a schoolboy.  Nor could I attack such a creature who had
+but to twist my arm to break it.  Nothing remained but to stand still and
+accept the indignity.  I had time to notice that the pockets of the dead
+man had been emptied on the deck, and that his body and his grin had been
+wrapped from view in canvas, the folds of which the sailor, Johansen, was
+sewing together with coarse white twine, shoving the needle through with
+a leather contrivance fitted on the palm of his hand.
+
+Wolf Larsen dropped my hand with a flirt of disdain.
+
+“Dead men’s hands have kept it soft.  Good for little else than
+dish-washing and scullion work.”
+
+“I wish to be put ashore,” I said firmly, for I now had myself in
+control.  “I shall pay you whatever you judge your delay and trouble to
+be worth.”
+
+He looked at me curiously.  Mockery shone in his eyes.
+
+“I have a counter proposition to make, and for the good of your soul.  My
+mate’s gone, and there’ll be a lot of promotion.  A sailor comes aft to
+take mate’s place, cabin-boy goes for’ard to take sailor’s place, and you
+take the cabin-boy’s place, sign the articles for the cruise, twenty
+dollars per month and found.  Now what do you say?  And mind you, it’s
+for your own soul’s sake.  It will be the making of you.  You might learn
+in time to stand on your own legs, and perhaps to toddle along a bit.”
+
+But I took no notice.  The sails of the vessel I had seen off to the
+south-west had grown larger and plainer.  They were of the same
+schooner-rig as the _Ghost_, though the hull itself, I could see, was
+smaller.  She was a pretty sight, leaping and flying toward us, and
+evidently bound to pass at close range.  The wind had been momentarily
+increasing, and the sun, after a few angry gleams, had disappeared.  The
+sea had turned a dull leaden grey and grown rougher, and was now tossing
+foaming whitecaps to the sky.  We were travelling faster, and heeled
+farther over.  Once, in a gust, the rail dipped under the sea, and the
+decks on that side were for the moment awash with water that made a
+couple of the hunters hastily lift their feet.
+
+“That vessel will soon be passing us,” I said, after a moment’s pause.
+“As she is going in the opposite direction, she is very probably bound
+for San Francisco.”
+
+“Very probably,” was Wolf Larsen’s answer, as he turned partly away from
+me and cried out, “Cooky!  Oh, Cooky!”
+
+The Cockney popped out of the galley.
+
+“Where’s that boy?  Tell him I want him.”
+
+“Yes, sir;” and Thomas Mugridge fled swiftly aft and disappeared down
+another companion-way near the wheel.  A moment later he emerged, a
+heavy-set young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, with a glowering,
+villainous countenance, trailing at his heels.
+
+“’Ere ’e is, sir,” the cook said.
+
+But Wolf Larsen ignored that worthy, turning at once to the cabin-boy.
+
+“What’s your name, boy?”
+
+“George Leach, sir,” came the sullen answer, and the boy’s bearing showed
+clearly that he divined the reason for which he had been summoned.
+
+“Not an Irish name,” the captain snapped sharply.  “O’Toole or McCarthy
+would suit your mug a damn sight better.  Unless, very likely, there’s an
+Irishman in your mother’s woodpile.”
+
+I saw the young fellow’s hands clench at the insult, and the blood crawl
+scarlet up his neck.
+
+“But let that go,” Wolf Larsen continued.  “You may have very good
+reasons for forgetting your name, and I’ll like you none the worse for it
+as long as you toe the mark.  Telegraph Hill, of course, is your port of
+entry.  It sticks out all over your mug.  Tough as they make them and
+twice as nasty.  I know the kind.  Well, you can make up your mind to
+have it taken out of you on this craft.  Understand?  Who shipped you,
+anyway?”
+
+“McCready and Swanson.”
+
+“Sir!” Wolf Larsen thundered.
+
+“McCready and Swanson, sir,” the boy corrected, his eyes burning with a
+bitter light.
+
+“Who got the advance money?”
+
+“They did, sir.”
+
+“I thought as much.  And damned glad you were to let them have it.
+Couldn’t make yourself scarce too quick, with several gentlemen you may
+have heard of looking for you.”
+
+The boy metamorphosed into a savage on the instant.  His body bunched
+together as though for a spring, and his face became as an infuriated
+beast’s as he snarled, “It’s a—”
+
+“A what?” Wolf Larsen asked, a peculiar softness in his voice, as though
+he were overwhelmingly curious to hear the unspoken word.
+
+The boy hesitated, then mastered his temper.  “Nothin’, sir.  I take it
+back.”
+
+“And you have shown me I was right.”  This with a gratified smile.  “How
+old are you?”
+
+“Just turned sixteen, sir.”
+
+“A lie.  You’ll never see eighteen again.  Big for your age at that, with
+muscles like a horse.  Pack up your kit and go for’ard into the fo’c’sle.
+You’re a boat-puller now.  You’re promoted; see?”
+
+Without waiting for the boy’s acceptance, the captain turned to the
+sailor who had just finished the gruesome task of sewing up the corpse.
+“Johansen, do you know anything about navigation?”
+
+“No, sir.”
+
+“Well, never mind; you’re mate just the same.  Get your traps aft into
+the mate’s berth.”
+
+“Ay, ay, sir,” was the cheery response, as Johansen started forward.
+
+In the meantime the erstwhile cabin-boy had not moved.  “What are you
+waiting for?” Wolf Larsen demanded.
+
+“I didn’t sign for boat-puller, sir,” was the reply.  “I signed for
+cabin-boy.  An’ I don’t want no boat-pullin’ in mine.”
+
+“Pack up and go for’ard.”
+
+This time Wolf Larsen’s command was thrillingly imperative.  The boy
+glowered sullenly, but refused to move.
+
+Then came another stirring of Wolf Larsen’s tremendous strength.  It was
+utterly unexpected, and it was over and done with between the ticks of
+two seconds.  He had sprung fully six feet across the deck and driven his
+fist into the other’s stomach.  At the same moment, as though I had been
+struck myself, I felt a sickening shock in the pit of my stomach.  I
+instance this to show the sensitiveness of my nervous organization at the
+time, and how unused I was to spectacles of brutality.  The cabin-boy—and
+he weighed one hundred and sixty-five at the very least—crumpled up.  His
+body wrapped limply about the fist like a wet rag about a stick.  He
+lifted into the air, described a short curve, and struck the deck
+alongside the corpse on his head and shoulders, where he lay and writhed
+about in agony.
+
+“Well?” Larsen asked of me.  “Have you made up your mind?”
+
+I had glanced occasionally at the approaching schooner, and it was now
+almost abreast of us and not more than a couple of hundred yards away.
+It was a very trim and neat little craft.  I could see a large, black
+number on one of its sails, and I had seen pictures of pilot-boats.
+
+“What vessel is that?” I asked.
+
+“The pilot-boat _Lady Mine_,” Wolf Larsen answered grimly.  “Got rid of
+her pilots and running into San Francisco.  She’ll be there in five or
+six hours with this wind.”
+
+“Will you please signal it, then, so that I may be put ashore.”
+
+“Sorry, but I’ve lost the signal book overboard,” he remarked, and the
+group of hunters grinned.
+
+I debated a moment, looking him squarely in the eyes.  I had seen the
+frightful treatment of the cabin-boy, and knew that I should very
+probably receive the same, if not worse.  As I say, I debated with
+myself, and then I did what I consider the bravest act of my life.  I ran
+to the side, waving my arms and shouting:
+
+“_Lady Mine_ ahoy!  Take me ashore!  A thousand dollars if you take me
+ashore!”
+
+I waited, watching two men who stood by the wheel, one of them steering.
+The other was lifting a megaphone to his lips.  I did not turn my head,
+though I expected every moment a killing blow from the human brute behind
+me.  At last, after what seemed centuries, unable longer to stand the
+strain, I looked around.  He had not moved.  He was standing in the same
+position, swaying easily to the roll of the ship and lighting a fresh
+cigar.
+
+“What is the matter?  Anything wrong?”
+
+This was the cry from the _Lady Mine_.
+
+“Yes!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs.  “Life or death!  One thousand
+dollars if you take me ashore!”
+
+“Too much ’Frisco tanglefoot for the health of my crew!” Wolf Larsen
+shouted after.  “This one”—indicating me with his thumb—“fancies
+sea-serpents and monkeys just now!”
+
+The man on the _Lady Mine_ laughed back through the megaphone.  The
+pilot-boat plunged past.
+
+“Give him hell for me!” came a final cry, and the two men waved their
+arms in farewell.
+
+I leaned despairingly over the rail, watching the trim little schooner
+swiftly increasing the bleak sweep of ocean between us.  And she would
+probably be in San Francisco in five or six hours!  My head seemed
+bursting.  There was an ache in my throat as though my heart were up in
+it.  A curling wave struck the side and splashed salt spray on my lips.
+The wind puffed strongly, and the _Ghost_ heeled far over, burying her
+lee rail.  I could hear the water rushing down upon the deck.
+
+When I turned around, a moment later, I saw the cabin-boy staggering to
+his feet.  His face was ghastly white, twitching with suppressed pain.
+He looked very sick.
+
+“Well, Leach, are you going for’ard?” Wolf Larsen asked.
+
+“Yes, sir,” came the answer of a spirit cowed.
+
+“And you?” I was asked.
+
+“I’ll give you a thousand—” I began, but was interrupted.
+
+“Stow that!  Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy?  Or do I
+have to take you in hand?”
+
+What was I to do?  To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps, would not
+help my case.  I looked steadily into the cruel grey eyes.  They might
+have been granite for all the light and warmth of a human soul they
+contained.  One may see the soul stir in some men’s eyes, but his were
+bleak, and cold, and grey as the sea itself.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Yes,” I said.
+
+“Say ‘yes, sir.’”
+
+“Yes, sir,” I corrected.
+
+“What is your name?”
+
+“Van Weyden, sir.”
+
+“First name?”
+
+“Humphrey, sir; Humphrey Van Weyden.”
+
+“Age?”
+
+“Thirty-five, sir.”
+
+“That’ll do.  Go to the cook and learn your duties.”
+
+And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary servitude to
+Wolf Larsen.  He was stronger than I, that was all.  But it was very
+unreal at the time.  It is no less unreal now that I look back upon it.
+It will always be to me a monstrous, inconceivable thing, a horrible
+nightmare.
+
+“Hold on, don’t go yet.”
+
+I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.
+
+“Johansen, call all hands.  Now that we’ve everything cleaned up, we’ll
+have the funeral and get the decks cleared of useless lumber.”
+
+While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors, under
+the captain’s direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse upon a
+hatch-cover.  On either side the deck, against the rail and bottoms up,
+were lashed a number of small boats.  Several men picked up the
+hatch-cover with its ghastly freight, carried it to the lee side, and
+rested it on the boats, the feet pointing overboard.  To the feet was
+attached the sack of coal which the cook had fetched.
+
+I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and
+awe-inspiring event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial at
+any rate.  One of the hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his mates
+called “Smoke,” was telling stories, liberally intersprinkled with oaths
+and obscenities; and every minute or so the group of hunters gave mouth
+to a laughter that sounded to me like a wolf-chorus or the barking of
+hell-hounds.  The sailors trooped noisily aft, some of the watch below
+rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and talked in low tones together.
+There was an ominous and worried expression on their faces.  It was
+evident that they did not like the outlook of a voyage under such a
+captain and begun so inauspiciously.  From time to time they stole
+glances at Wolf Larsen, and I could see that they were apprehensive of
+the man.
+
+He stepped up to the hatch-cover, and all caps came off.  I ran my eyes
+over them—twenty men all told; twenty-two including the man at the wheel
+and myself.  I was pardonably curious in my survey, for it appeared my
+fate to be pent up with them on this miniature floating world for I knew
+not how many weeks or months.  The sailors, in the main, were English and
+Scandinavian, and their faces seemed of the heavy, stolid order.  The
+hunters, on the other hand, had stronger and more diversified faces, with
+hard lines and the marks of the free play of passions.  Strange to say,
+and I noted it at once, Wolf Larsen’s features showed no such evil
+stamp.  There seemed nothing vicious in them.  True, there were lines,
+but they were the lines of decision and firmness.  It seemed, rather, a
+frank and open countenance, which frankness or openness was enhanced by
+the fact that he was smooth-shaven.  I could hardly believe—until the
+next incident occurred—that it was the face of a man who could behave as
+he had behaved to the cabin-boy.
+
+At this moment, as he opened his mouth to speak, puff after puff struck
+the schooner and pressed her side under.  The wind shrieked a wild song
+through the rigging.  Some of the hunters glanced anxiously aloft.  The
+lee rail, where the dead man lay, was buried in the sea, and as the
+schooner lifted and righted the water swept across the deck wetting us
+above our shoe-tops.  A shower of rain drove down upon us, each drop
+stinging like a hailstone.  As it passed, Wolf Larsen began to speak, the
+bare-headed men swaying in unison, to the heave and lunge of the deck.
+
+“I only remember one part of the service,” he said, “and that is, ‘And
+the body shall be cast into the sea.’  So cast it in.”
+
+He ceased speaking.  The men holding the hatch-cover seemed perplexed,
+puzzled no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony.  He burst upon them in
+a fury.
+
+“Lift up that end there, damn you!  What the hell’s the matter with you?”
+
+They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and, like a
+dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the sea.  The coal
+at his feet dragged him down.  He was gone.
+
+“Johansen,” Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate, “keep all hands on
+deck now they’re here.  Get in the topsails and jibs and make a good job
+of it.  We’re in for a sou’-easter.  Better reef the jib and mainsail
+too, while you’re about it.”
+
+In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders and
+the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts—all naturally
+confusing to a landsman such as myself.  But it was the heartlessness of
+it that especially struck me.  The dead man was an episode that was past,
+an incident that was dropped, in a canvas covering with a sack of coal,
+while the ship sped along and her work went on.  Nobody had been
+affected.  The hunters were laughing at a fresh story of Smoke’s; the men
+pulling and hauling, and two of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was
+studying the clouding sky to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely,
+buried sordidly, and sinking down, down—
+
+Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and
+awfulness, rushed upon me.  Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly
+and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime.  I
+held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across
+the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San
+Francisco and the California coast.  Rain-squalls were driving in
+between, and I could scarcely see the fog.  And this strange vessel, with
+its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and ever leaping up and
+out, was heading away into the south-west, into the great and lonely
+Pacific expanse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner _Ghost_, as I strove to
+fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and pain.  The
+cook, who was called “the doctor” by the crew, “Tommy” by the hunters,
+and “Cooky” by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person.  The difference worked
+in my status brought about a corresponding difference in treatment from
+him.  Servile and fawning as he had been before, he was now as
+domineering and bellicose.  In truth, I was no longer the fine gentleman
+with a skin soft as a “lydy’s,” but only an ordinary and very worthless
+cabin-boy.
+
+He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his
+behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties.
+Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state-rooms, I was
+supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my colossal ignorance
+concerning such things as peeling potatoes or washing greasy pots was a
+source of unending and sarcastic wonder to him.  He refused to take into
+consideration what I was, or, rather, what my life and the things I was
+accustomed to had been.  This was part of the attitude he chose to adopt
+toward me; and I confess, ere the day was done, that I hated him with
+more lively feelings than I had ever hated any one in my life before.
+
+This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that the
+_Ghost_, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn till
+later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an “’owlin’
+sou’-easter.”  At half-past five, under his directions, I set the table
+in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and then carried the tea
+and cooked food down from the galley.  In this connection I cannot
+forbear relating my first experience with a boarding sea.
+
+“Look sharp or you’ll get doused,” was Mr. Mugridge’s parting injunction,
+as I left the galley with a big tea-pot in one hand, and in the hollow of
+the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked bread.  One of the hunters, a
+tall, loose-jointed chap named Henderson, was going aft at the time from
+the steerage (the name the hunters facetiously gave their midships
+sleeping quarters) to the cabin.  Wolf Larsen was on the poop, smoking
+his everlasting cigar.
+
+“’Ere she comes.  Sling yer ’ook!” the cook cried.
+
+I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley door
+slide shut with a bang.  Then I saw Henderson leaping like a madman for
+the main rigging, up which he shot, on the inside, till he was many feet
+higher than my head.  Also I saw a great wave, curling and foaming,
+poised far above the rail.  I was directly under it.  My mind did not
+work quickly, everything was so new and strange.  I grasped that I was in
+danger, but that was all.  I stood still, in trepidation.  Then Wolf
+Larsen shouted from the poop:
+
+“Grab hold something, you—you Hump!”
+
+But it was too late.  I sprang toward the rigging, to which I might have
+clung, and was met by the descending wall of water.  What happened after
+that was very confusing.  I was beneath the water, suffocating and
+drowning.  My feet were out from under me, and I was turning over and
+over and being swept along I knew not where.  Several times I collided
+against hard objects, once striking my right knee a terrible blow.  Then
+the flood seemed suddenly to subside and I was breathing the good air
+again.  I had been swept against the galley and around the steerage
+companion-way from the weather side into the lee scuppers.  The pain from
+my hurt knee was agonizing.  I could not put my weight on it, or, at
+least, I thought I could not put my weight on it; and I felt sure the leg
+was broken.  But the cook was after me, shouting through the lee galley
+door:
+
+“’Ere, you!  Don’t tyke all night about it!  Where’s the pot?  Lost
+overboard?  Serve you bloody well right if yer neck was broke!”
+
+I managed to struggle to my feet.  The great tea-pot was still in my
+hand.  I limped to the galley and handed it to him.  But he was consumed
+with indignation, real or feigned.
+
+“Gawd blime me if you ayn’t a slob.  Wot ’re you good for anyw’y, I’d
+like to know?  Eh?  Wot ’re you good for any’wy?  Cawn’t even carry a bit
+of tea aft without losin’ it.  Now I’ll ’ave to boil some more.
+
+“An’ wot ’re you snifflin’ about?” he burst out at me, with renewed rage.
+“’Cos you’ve ’urt yer pore little leg, pore little mamma’s darlin’.”
+
+I was not sniffling, though my face might well have been drawn and
+twitching from the pain.  But I called up all my resolution, set my
+teeth, and hobbled back and forth from galley to cabin and cabin to
+galley without further mishap.  Two things I had acquired by my accident:
+an injured knee-cap that went undressed and from which I suffered for
+weary months, and the name of “Hump,” which Wolf Larsen had called me
+from the poop.  Thereafter, fore and aft, I was known by no other name,
+until the term became a part of my thought-processes and I identified it
+with myself, thought of myself as Hump, as though Hump were I and had
+always been I.
+
+It was no easy task, waiting on the cabin table, where sat Wolf Larsen,
+Johansen, and the six hunters.  The cabin was small, to begin with, and
+to move around, as I was compelled to, was not made easier by the
+schooner’s violent pitching and wallowing.  But what struck me most
+forcibly was the total lack of sympathy on the part of the men whom I
+served.  I could feel my knee through my clothes, swelling, and swelling,
+and I was sick and faint from the pain of it.  I could catch glimpses of
+my face, white and ghastly, distorted with pain, in the cabin mirror.
+All the men must have seen my condition, but not one spoke or took notice
+of me, till I was almost grateful to Wolf Larsen, later on (I was washing
+the dishes), when he said:
+
+“Don’t let a little thing like that bother you.  You’ll get used to such
+things in time.  It may cripple you some, but all the same you’ll be
+learning to walk.
+
+“That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?” he added.
+
+He seemed pleased when I nodded my head with the customary “Yes, sir.”
+
+“I suppose you know a bit about literary things?  Eh?  Good.  I’ll have
+some talks with you some time.”
+
+And then, taking no further account of me, he turned his back and went up
+on deck.
+
+That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was sent to
+sleep in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk.  I was glad to get
+out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be off my feet.  To my
+surprise, my clothes had dried on me and there seemed no indications of
+catching cold, either from the last soaking or from the prolonged soaking
+from the foundering of the _Martinez_.  Under ordinary circumstances,
+after all that I had undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a
+trained nurse.
+
+But my knee was bothering me terribly.  As well as I could make out, the
+kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the swelling.  As I sat
+in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were all in the steerage,
+smoking and talking in loud voices), Henderson took a passing glance at
+it.
+
+“Looks nasty,” he commented.  “Tie a rag around it, and it’ll be all
+right.”
+
+That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad of my
+back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict injunctions to do
+nothing but rest.  But I must do these men justice.  Callous as they were
+to my suffering, they were equally callous to their own when anything
+befell them.  And this was due, I believe, first, to habit; and second,
+to the fact that they were less sensitively organized.  I really believe
+that a finely-organized, high-strung man would suffer twice and thrice as
+much as they from a like injury.
+
+Tired as I was,—exhausted, in fact,—I was prevented from sleeping by the
+pain in my knee.  It was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud.  At
+home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new and
+elemental environment seemed to call for a savage repression.  Like the
+savage, the attitude of these men was stoical in great things, childish
+in little things.  I remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot,
+another of the hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly;
+and he did not even murmur or change the expression on his face.  Yet I
+have seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous
+passion over a trifle.
+
+He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and
+cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another
+hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim.  He held
+that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born.  The other
+hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd,
+narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born on
+the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its mother
+was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their
+nestlings how to fly.
+
+For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay
+in their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists.  But they
+were supremely interested, for every little while they ardently took
+sides, and sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices surged
+back and forth in waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined
+space.  Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their
+reasoning was still more childish and immaterial.  In truth, there was
+very little reasoning or none at all.  Their method was one of assertion,
+assumption, and denunciation.  They proved that a seal pup could swim or
+not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then
+following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common
+sense, nationality, or past history.  Rebuttal was precisely similar.  I
+have related this in order to show the mental calibre of the men with
+whom I was thrown in contact.  Intellectually they were children,
+inhabiting the physical forms of men.
+
+And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and
+offensive-smelling tobacco.  The air was thick and murky with the smoke
+of it; and this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she
+struggled through the storm, would surely have made me sea-sick had I
+been a victim to that malady.  As it was, it made me quite squeamish,
+though this nausea might have been due to the pain of my leg and
+exhaustion.
+
+As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation.
+It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar
+and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should
+be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner.  Cabin-boy!  I had
+never done any hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life.  I had
+lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days—the life of a
+scholar and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income.  Violent life
+and athletic sports had never appealed to me.  I had always been a
+book-worm; so my sisters and father had called me during my childhood.  I
+had gone camping but once in my life, and then I left the party almost at
+its start and returned to the comforts and conveniences of a roof.  And
+here I was, with dreary and endless vistas before me of table-setting,
+potato-peeling, and dish-washing.  And I was not strong.  The doctors had
+always said that I had a remarkable constitution, but I had never
+developed it or my body through exercise.  My muscles were small and
+soft, like a woman’s, or so the doctors had said time and again in the
+course of their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture
+fads.  But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I
+was, in no fit condition for the rough life in prospect.
+
+These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and are
+related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak and
+helpless _rôle_ I was destined to play.  But I thought, also, of my
+mother and sisters, and pictured their grief.  I was among the missing
+dead of the _Martinez_ disaster, an unrecovered body.  I could see the
+head-lines in the papers; the fellows at the University Club and the
+Bibelot shaking their heads and saying, “Poor chap!”  And I could see
+Charley Furuseth, as I had said good-bye to him that morning, lounging in
+a dressing-gown on the be-pillowed window couch and delivering himself of
+oracular and pessimistic epigrams.
+
+And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains and
+falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner _Ghost_ was
+fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of the Pacific—and I
+was on her.  I could hear the wind above.  It came to my ears as a
+muffled roar.  Now and again feet stamped overhead.  An endless creaking
+was going on all about me, the woodwork and the fittings groaning and
+squeaking and complaining in a thousand keys.  The hunters were still
+arguing and roaring like some semi-human amphibious breed.  The air was
+filled with oaths and indecent expressions.  I could see their faces,
+flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly
+yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship.
+Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping dens of
+animals in a menagerie.  Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging from the
+walls, and here and there rifles and shotguns rested securely in the
+racks.  It was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and pirates of by-gone
+years.  My imagination ran riot, and still I could not sleep.  And it was
+a long, long night, weary and dreary and long.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+But my first night in the hunters’ steerage was also my last.  Next day
+Johansen, the new mate, was routed from the cabin by Wolf Larsen, and
+sent into the steerage to sleep thereafter, while I took possession of
+the tiny cabin state-room, which, on the first day of the voyage, had
+already had two occupants.  The reason for this change was quickly
+learned by the hunters, and became the cause of a deal of grumbling on
+their part.  It seemed that Johansen, in his sleep, lived over each night
+the events of the day.  His incessant talking and shouting and bellowing
+of orders had been too much for Wolf Larsen, who had accordingly foisted
+the nuisance upon his hunters.
+
+After a sleepless night, I arose weak and in agony, to hobble through my
+second day on the _Ghost_.  Thomas Mugridge routed me out at half-past
+five, much in the fashion that Bill Sykes must have routed out his dog;
+but Mr. Mugridge’s brutality to me was paid back in kind and with
+interest.  The unnecessary noise he made (I had lain wide-eyed the whole
+night) must have awakened one of the hunters; for a heavy shoe whizzed
+through the semi-darkness, and Mr. Mugridge, with a sharp howl of pain,
+humbly begged everybody’s pardon.  Later on, in the galley, I noticed
+that his ear was bruised and swollen.  It never went entirely back to its
+normal shape, and was called a “cauliflower ear” by the sailors.
+
+The day was filled with miserable variety.  I had taken my dried clothes
+down from the galley the night before, and the first thing I did was to
+exchange the cook’s garments for them.  I looked for my purse.  In
+addition to some small change (and I have a good memory for such things),
+it had contained one hundred and eighty-five dollars in gold and paper.
+The purse I found, but its contents, with the exception of the small
+silver, had been abstracted.  I spoke to the cook about it, when I went
+on deck to take up my duties in the galley, and though I had looked
+forward to a surly answer, I had not expected the belligerent harangue
+that I received.
+
+“Look ’ere, ’Ump,” he began, a malicious light in his eyes and a snarl in
+his throat; “d’ye want yer nose punched?  If you think I’m a thief, just
+keep it to yerself, or you’ll find ’ow bloody well mistyken you are.
+Strike me blind if this ayn’t gratitude for yer!  ’Ere you come, a pore
+mis’rable specimen of ’uman scum, an’ I tykes yer into my galley an’
+treats yer ’ansom, an’ this is wot I get for it.  Nex’ time you can go to
+’ell, say I, an’ I’ve a good mind to give you what-for anyw’y.”
+
+So saying, he put up his fists and started for me.  To my shame be it, I
+cowered away from the blow and ran out the galley door.  What else was I
+to do?  Force, nothing but force, obtained on this brute-ship.  Moral
+suasion was a thing unknown.  Picture it to yourself: a man of ordinary
+stature, slender of build, and with weak, undeveloped muscles, who has
+lived a peaceful, placid life, and is unused to violence of any sort—what
+could such a man possibly do?  There was no more reason that I should
+stand and face these human beasts than that I should stand and face an
+infuriated bull.
+
+So I thought it out at the time, feeling the need for vindication and
+desiring to be at peace with my conscience.  But this vindication did not
+satisfy.  Nor, to this day can I permit my manhood to look back upon
+those events and feel entirely exonerated.  The situation was something
+that really exceeded rational formulas for conduct and demanded more than
+the cold conclusions of reason.  When viewed in the light of formal
+logic, there is not one thing of which to be ashamed; but nevertheless a
+shame rises within me at the recollection, and in the pride of my manhood
+I feel that my manhood has in unaccountable ways been smirched and
+sullied.
+
+All of which is neither here nor there.  The speed with which I ran from
+the galley caused excruciating pain in my knee, and I sank down
+helplessly at the break of the poop.  But the Cockney had not pursued me.
+
+“Look at ’im run!  Look at ’im run!” I could hear him crying.  “An’ with
+a gyme leg at that!  Come on back, you pore little mamma’s darling.  I
+won’t ’it yer; no, I won’t.”
+
+I came back and went on with my work; and here the episode ended for the
+time, though further developments were yet to take place.  I set the
+breakfast-table in the cabin, and at seven o’clock waited on the hunters
+and officers.  The storm had evidently broken during the night, though a
+huge sea was still running and a stiff wind blowing.  Sail had been made
+in the early watches, so that the _Ghost_ was racing along under
+everything except the two topsails and the flying jib.  These three
+sails, I gathered from the conversation, were to be set immediately after
+breakfast.  I learned, also, that Wolf Larsen was anxious to make the
+most of the storm, which was driving him to the south-west into that
+portion of the sea where he expected to pick up with the north-east
+trades.  It was before this steady wind that he hoped to make the major
+portion of the run to Japan, curving south into the tropics and north
+again as he approached the coast of Asia.
+
+After breakfast I had another unenviable experience.  When I had finished
+washing the dishes, I cleaned the cabin stove and carried the ashes up on
+deck to empty them.  Wolf Larsen and Henderson were standing near the
+wheel, deep in conversation.  The sailor, Johnson, was steering.  As I
+started toward the weather side I saw him make a sudden motion with his
+head, which I mistook for a token of recognition and good-morning.  In
+reality, he was attempting to warn me to throw my ashes over the lee
+side.  Unconscious of my blunder, I passed by Wolf Larsen and the hunter
+and flung the ashes over the side to windward.  The wind drove them back,
+and not only over me, but over Henderson and Wolf Larsen.  The next
+instant the latter kicked me, violently, as a cur is kicked.  I had not
+realized there could be so much pain in a kick.  I reeled away from him
+and leaned against the cabin in a half-fainting condition.  Everything
+was swimming before my eyes, and I turned sick.  The nausea overpowered
+me, and I managed to crawl to the side of the vessel.  But Wolf Larsen
+did not follow me up.  Brushing the ashes from his clothes, he had
+resumed his conversation with Henderson.  Johansen, who had seen the
+affair from the break of the poop, sent a couple of sailors aft to clean
+up the mess.
+
+Later in the morning I received a surprise of a totally different sort.
+Following the cook’s instructions, I had gone into Wolf Larsen’s
+state-room to put it to rights and make the bed.  Against the wall, near
+the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books.  I glanced over them,
+noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De
+Quincey.  There were scientific works, too, among which were represented
+men such as Tyndall, Proctor, and Darwin.  Astronomy and physics were
+represented, and I remarked Bulfinch’s _Age of Fable_, Shaw’s _History of
+English and American Literature_, and Johnson’s _Natural History_ in two
+large volumes.  Then there were a number of grammars, such as Metcalf’s,
+and Reed and Kellogg’s; and I smiled as I saw a copy of _The Dean’s
+English_.
+
+I could not reconcile these books with the man from what I had seen of
+him, and I wondered if he could possibly read them.  But when I came to
+make the bed I found, between the blankets, dropped apparently as he had
+sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning, the Cambridge Edition.  It was
+open at “In a Balcony,” and I noticed, here and there, passages
+underlined in pencil.  Further, letting drop the volume during a lurch of
+the ship, a sheet of paper fell out.  It was scrawled over with
+geometrical diagrams and calculations of some sort.
+
+It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one
+would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality.  At
+once he became an enigma.  One side or the other of his nature was
+perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering.  I
+had already remarked that his language was excellent, marred with an
+occasional slight inaccuracy.  Of course, in common speech with the
+sailors and hunters, it sometimes fairly bristled with errors, which was
+due to the vernacular itself; but in the few words he had held with me it
+had been clear and correct.
+
+This glimpse I had caught of his other side must have emboldened me, for
+I resolved to speak to him about the money I had lost.
+
+“I have been robbed,” I said to him, a little later, when I found him
+pacing up and down the poop alone.
+
+“Sir,” he corrected, not harshly, but sternly.
+
+“I have been robbed, sir,” I amended.
+
+“How did it happen?” he asked.
+
+Then I told him the whole circumstance, how my clothes had been left to
+dry in the galley, and how, later, I was nearly beaten by the cook when I
+mentioned the matter.
+
+He smiled at my recital.  “Pickings,” he concluded; “Cooky’s pickings.
+And don’t you think your miserable life worth the price?  Besides,
+consider it a lesson.  You’ll learn in time how to take care of your
+money for yourself.  I suppose, up to now, your lawyer has done it for
+you, or your business agent.”
+
+I could feel the quiet sneer through his words, but demanded, “How can I
+get it back again?”
+
+“That’s your look-out.  You haven’t any lawyer or business agent now, so
+you’ll have to depend on yourself.  When you get a dollar, hang on to it.
+A man who leaves his money lying around, the way you did, deserves to
+lose it.  Besides, you have sinned.  You have no right to put temptation
+in the way of your fellow-creatures.  You tempted Cooky, and he fell.
+You have placed his immortal soul in jeopardy.  By the way, do you
+believe in the immortal soul?”
+
+His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that the
+deeps were opening to me and that I was gazing into his soul.  But it was
+an illusion.  Far as it might have seemed, no man has ever seen very far
+into Wolf Larsen’s soul, or seen it at all,—of this I am convinced.  It
+was a very lonely soul, I was to learn, that never unmasked, though at
+rare moments it played at doing so.
+
+“I read immortality in your eyes,” I answered, dropping the “sir,”—an
+experiment, for I thought the intimacy of the conversation warranted it.
+
+He took no notice.  “By that, I take it, you see something that is alive,
+but that necessarily does not have to live for ever.”
+
+“I read more than that,” I continued boldly.
+
+“Then you read consciousness.  You read the consciousness of life that it
+is alive; but still no further away, no endlessness of life.”
+
+How clearly he thought, and how well he expressed what he thought!  From
+regarding me curiously, he turned his head and glanced out over the
+leaden sea to windward.  A bleakness came into his eyes, and the lines of
+his mouth grew severe and harsh.  He was evidently in a pessimistic mood.
+
+“Then to what end?” he demanded abruptly, turning back to me.  “If I am
+immortal—why?”
+
+I halted.  How could I explain my idealism to this man?  How could I put
+into speech a something felt, a something like the strains of music heard
+in sleep, a something that convinced yet transcended utterance?
+
+“What do you believe, then?” I countered.
+
+“I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly.  “It is like
+yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour,
+a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move.  The
+big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the
+weak that they may retain their strength.  The lucky eat the most and
+move the longest, that is all.  What do you make of those things?”
+
+He swept his arm in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors
+who were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships.
+
+“They move, so does the jelly-fish move.  They move in order to eat in
+order that they may keep moving.  There you have it.  They live for their
+belly’s sake, and the belly is for their sake.  It’s a circle; you get
+nowhere.  Neither do they.  In the end they come to a standstill.  They
+move no more.  They are dead.”
+
+“They have dreams,” I interrupted, “radiant, flashing dreams—”
+
+“Of grub,” he concluded sententiously.
+
+“And of more—”
+
+“Grub.  Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying it.”  His voice
+sounded harsh.  There was no levity in it.  “For, look you, they dream of
+making lucky voyages which will bring them more money, of becoming the
+mates of ships, of finding fortunes—in short, of being in a better
+position for preying on their fellows, of having all night in, good grub
+and somebody else to do the dirty work.  You and I are just like them.
+There is no difference, except that we have eaten more and better.  I am
+eating them now, and you too.  But in the past you have eaten more than I
+have.  You have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes, and eaten good
+meals.  Who made those beds? and those clothes? and those meals?  Not
+you.  You never made anything in your own sweat.  You live on an income
+which your father earned.  You are like a frigate bird swooping down upon
+the boobies and robbing them of the fish they have caught.  You are one
+with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are
+masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and
+would like to eat themselves.  You wear the warm clothes.  They made the
+clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business
+agent who handles your money, for a job.”
+
+“But that is beside the matter,” I cried.
+
+“Not at all.”  He was speaking rapidly now, and his eyes were flashing.
+“It is piggishness, and it is life.  Of what use or sense is an
+immortality of piggishness?  What is the end?  What is it all about?  You
+have made no food.  Yet the food you have eaten or wasted might have
+saved the lives of a score of wretches who made the food but did not eat
+it.  What immortal end did you serve? or did they?  Consider yourself and
+me.  What does your boasted immortality amount to when your life runs
+foul of mine?  You would like to go back to the land, which is a
+favourable place for your kind of piggishness.  It is a whim of mine to
+keep you aboard this ship, where my piggishness flourishes.  And keep you
+I will.  I may make or break you.  You may die to-day, this week, or next
+month.  I could kill you now, with a blow of my fist, for you are a
+miserable weakling.  But if we are immortal, what is the reason for this?
+To be piggish as you and I have been all our lives does not seem to be
+just the thing for immortals to be doing.  Again, what’s it all about?
+Why have I kept you here?—”
+
+“Because you are stronger,” I managed to blurt out.
+
+“But why stronger?” he went on at once with his perpetual queries.
+“Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you?  Don’t you see?
+Don’t you see?”
+
+“But the hopelessness of it,” I protested.
+
+“I agree with you,” he answered.  “Then why move at all, since moving is
+living?  Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be no
+hopelessness.  But,—and there it is,—we want to live and move, though we
+have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to
+live and move, to want to live and move.  If it were not for this, life
+would be dead.  It is because of this life that is in you that you dream
+of your immortality.  The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on
+being alive for ever.  Bah!  An eternity of piggishness!”
+
+He abruptly turned on his heel and started forward.  He stopped at the
+break of the poop and called me to him.
+
+“By the way, how much was it that Cooky got away with?” he asked.
+
+“One hundred and eighty-five dollars, sir,” I answered.
+
+He nodded his head.  A moment later, as I started down the companion
+stairs to lay the table for dinner, I heard him loudly cursing some men
+amidships.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+By the following morning the storm had blown itself quite out and the
+_Ghost_ was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath of wind.
+Occasional light airs were felt, however, and Wolf Larsen patrolled the
+poop constantly, his eyes ever searching the sea to the north-eastward,
+from which direction the great trade-wind must blow.
+
+The men were all on deck and busy preparing their various boats for the
+season’s hunting.  There are seven boats aboard, the captain’s dingey,
+and the six which the hunters will use.  Three, a hunter, a boat-puller,
+and a boat-steerer, compose a boat’s crew.  On board the schooner the
+boat-pullers and steerers are the crew.  The hunters, too, are supposed
+to be in command of the watches, subject, always, to the orders of Wolf
+Larsen.
+
+All this, and more, I have learned.  The _Ghost_ is considered the
+fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets.  In fact,
+she was once a private yacht, and was built for speed.  Her lines and
+fittings—though I know nothing about such things—speak for themselves.
+Johnson was telling me about her in a short chat I had with him during
+yesterday’s second dog-watch.  He spoke enthusiastically, with the love
+for a fine craft such as some men feel for horses.  He is greatly
+disgusted with the outlook, and I am given to understand that Wolf Larsen
+bears a very unsavoury reputation among the sealing captains.  It was the
+_Ghost_ herself that lured Johnson into signing for the voyage, but he is
+already beginning to repent.
+
+As he told me, the _Ghost_ is an eighty-ton schooner of a remarkably fine
+model.  Her beam, or width, is twenty-three feet, and her length a little
+over ninety feet.  A lead keel of fabulous but unknown weight makes her
+very stable, while she carries an immense spread of canvas.  From the
+deck to the truck of the maintopmast is something over a hundred feet,
+while the foremast with its topmast is eight or ten feet shorter.  I am
+giving these details so that the size of this little floating world which
+holds twenty-two men may be appreciated.  It is a very little world, a
+mote, a speck, and I marvel that men should dare to venture the sea on a
+contrivance so small and fragile.
+
+Wolf Larsen has, also, a reputation for reckless carrying on of sail.  I
+overheard Henderson and another of the hunters, Standish, a Californian,
+talking about it.  Two years ago he dismasted the _Ghost_ in a gale on
+Bering Sea, whereupon the present masts were put in, which are stronger
+and heavier in every way.  He is said to have remarked, when he put them
+in, that he preferred turning her over to losing the sticks.
+
+Every man aboard, with the exception of Johansen, who is rather overcome
+by his promotion, seems to have an excuse for having sailed on the
+_Ghost_.  Half the men forward are deep-water sailors, and their excuse
+is that they did not know anything about her or her captain.  And those
+who do know, whisper that the hunters, while excellent shots, were so
+notorious for their quarrelsome and rascally proclivities that they could
+not sign on any decent schooner.
+
+I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew,—Louis he is
+called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a very
+sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a listener.  In the
+afternoon, while the cook was below asleep and I was peeling the
+everlasting potatoes, Louis dropped into the galley for a “yarn.”  His
+excuse for being aboard was that he was drunk when he signed.  He assured
+me again and again that it was the last thing in the world he would dream
+of doing in a sober moment.  It seems that he has been seal-hunting
+regularly each season for a dozen years, and is accounted one of the two
+or three very best boat-steerers in both fleets.
+
+“Ah, my boy,” he shook his head ominously at me, “’tis the worst schooner
+ye could iv selected, nor were ye drunk at the time as was I.  ’Tis
+sealin’ is the sailor’s paradise—on other ships than this.  The mate was
+the first, but mark me words, there’ll be more dead men before the trip
+is done with.  Hist, now, between you an’ meself and the stanchion there,
+this Wolf Larsen is a regular devil, an’ the _Ghost’ll_ be a hell-ship
+like she’s always ben since he had hold iv her.  Don’t I know?  Don’t I
+know?  Don’t I remember him in Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row
+an’ shot four iv his men?  Wasn’t I a-layin’ on the _Emma L._, not three
+hundred yards away?  An’ there was a man the same year he killed with a
+blow iv his fist.  Yes, sir, killed ’im dead-oh.  His head must iv
+smashed like an eggshell.  An’ wasn’t there the Governor of Kura Island,
+an’ the Chief iv Police, Japanese gentlemen, sir, an’ didn’t they come
+aboard the _Ghost_ as his guests, a-bringin’ their wives along—wee an’
+pretty little bits of things like you see ’em painted on fans.  An’ as he
+was a-gettin’ under way, didn’t the fond husbands get left astern-like in
+their sampan, as it might be by accident?  An’ wasn’t it a week later
+that the poor little ladies was put ashore on the other side of the
+island, with nothin’ before ’em but to walk home acrost the mountains on
+their weeny-teeny little straw sandals which wouldn’t hang together a
+mile?  Don’t I know?  ’Tis the beast he is, this Wolf Larsen—the great
+big beast mentioned iv in Revelation; an’ no good end will he ever come
+to.  But I’ve said nothin’ to ye, mind ye.  I’ve whispered never a word;
+for old fat Louis’ll live the voyage out if the last mother’s son of yez
+go to the fishes.”
+
+“Wolf Larsen!” he snorted a moment later.  “Listen to the word, will ye!
+Wolf—’tis what he is.  He’s not black-hearted like some men.  ’Tis no
+heart he has at all.  Wolf, just wolf, ’tis what he is.  D’ye wonder he’s
+well named?”
+
+“But if he is so well-known for what he is,” I queried, “how is it that
+he can get men to ship with him?”
+
+“An’ how is it ye can get men to do anything on God’s earth an’ sea?”
+Louis demanded with Celtic fire.  “How d’ye find me aboard if ’twasn’t
+that I was drunk as a pig when I put me name down?  There’s them that
+can’t sail with better men, like the hunters, and them that don’t know,
+like the poor devils of wind-jammers for’ard there.  But they’ll come to
+it, they’ll come to it, an’ be sorry the day they was born.  I could weep
+for the poor creatures, did I but forget poor old fat Louis and the
+troubles before him.  But ’tis not a whisper I’ve dropped, mind ye, not a
+whisper.”
+
+“Them hunters is the wicked boys,” he broke forth again, for he suffered
+from a constitutional plethora of speech.  “But wait till they get to
+cutting up iv jinks and rowin’ ’round.  He’s the boy’ll fix ’em.  ’Tis
+him that’ll put the fear of God in their rotten black hearts.  Look at
+that hunter iv mine, Horner.  ‘Jock’ Horner they call him, so quiet-like
+an’ easy-goin’, soft-spoken as a girl, till ye’d think butter wouldn’t
+melt in the mouth iv him.  Didn’t he kill his boat-steerer last year?
+’Twas called a sad accident, but I met the boat-puller in Yokohama an’
+the straight iv it was given me.  An’ there’s Smoke, the black little
+devil—didn’t the Roosians have him for three years in the salt mines of
+Siberia, for poachin’ on Copper Island, which is a Roosian preserve?
+Shackled he was, hand an’ foot, with his mate.  An’ didn’t they have
+words or a ruction of some kind?—for ’twas the other fellow Smoke sent up
+in the buckets to the top of the mine; an’ a piece at a time he went up,
+a leg to-day, an’ to-morrow an arm, the next day the head, an’ so on.”
+
+“But you can’t mean it!” I cried out, overcome with the horror of it.
+
+“Mean what!” he demanded, quick as a flash.  “’Tis nothin’ I’ve said.
+Deef I am, and dumb, as ye should be for the sake iv your mother; an’
+never once have I opened me lips but to say fine things iv them an’ him,
+God curse his soul, an’ may he rot in purgatory ten thousand years, and
+then go down to the last an’ deepest hell iv all!”
+
+Johnson, the man who had chafed me raw when I first came aboard, seemed
+the least equivocal of the men forward or aft.  In fact, there was
+nothing equivocal about him.  One was struck at once by his
+straightforwardness and manliness, which, in turn, were tempered by a
+modesty which might be mistaken for timidity.  But timid he was not.  He
+seemed, rather, to have the courage of his convictions, the certainty of
+his manhood.  It was this that made him protest, at the commencement of
+our acquaintance, against being called Yonson.  And upon this, and him,
+Louis passed judgment and prophecy.
+
+“’Tis a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we’ve for’ard with us,” he
+said.  “The best sailorman in the fo’c’sle.  He’s my boat-puller.  But
+it’s to trouble he’ll come with Wolf Larsen, as the sparks fly upward.
+It’s meself that knows.  I can see it brewin’ an’ comin’ up like a storm
+in the sky.  I’ve talked to him like a brother, but it’s little he sees
+in takin’ in his lights or flyin’ false signals.  He grumbles out when
+things don’t go to suit him, and there’ll be always some tell-tale
+carryin’ word iv it aft to the Wolf.  The Wolf is strong, and it’s the
+way of a wolf to hate strength, an’ strength it is he’ll see in
+Johnson—no knucklin’ under, and a ‘Yes, sir, thank ye kindly, sir,’ for a
+curse or a blow.  Oh, she’s a-comin’!  She’s a-comin’!  An’ God knows
+where I’ll get another boat-puller!  What does the fool up an’ say, when
+the old man calls him Yonson, but ‘Me name is Johnson, sir,’ an’ then
+spells it out, letter for letter.  Ye should iv seen the old man’s face!
+I thought he’d let drive at him on the spot.  He didn’t, but he will, an’
+he’ll break that squarehead’s heart, or it’s little I know iv the ways iv
+men on the ships iv the sea.”
+
+Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable.  I am compelled to Mister him
+and to Sir him with every speech.  One reason for this is that Wolf
+Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him.  It is an unprecedented thing,
+I take it, for a captain to be chummy with the cook; but this is
+certainly what Wolf Larsen is doing.  Two or three times he put his head
+into the galley and chaffed Mugridge good-naturedly, and once, this
+afternoon, he stood by the break of the poop and chatted with him for
+fully fifteen minutes.  When it was over, and Mugridge was back in the
+galley, he became greasily radiant, and went about his work, humming
+coster songs in a nerve-racking and discordant falsetto.
+
+“I always get along with the officers,” he remarked to me in a
+confidential tone.  “I know the w’y, I do, to myke myself uppreci-yted.
+There was my last skipper—w’y I thought nothin’ of droppin’ down in the
+cabin for a little chat and a friendly glass.  ‘Mugridge,’ sez ’e to me,
+‘Mugridge,’ sez ’e, ‘you’ve missed yer vokytion.’  ‘An’ ’ow’s that?’ sez
+I.  ‘Yer should ’a been born a gentleman, an’ never ’ad to work for yer
+livin’.’  God strike me dead, ’Ump, if that ayn’t wot ’e sez, an’ me
+a-sittin’ there in ’is own cabin, jolly-like an’ comfortable, a-smokin’
+’is cigars an’ drinkin’ ’is rum.”
+
+This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction.  I never heard a voice I
+hated so.  His oily, insinuating tones, his greasy smile and his
+monstrous self-conceit grated on my nerves till sometimes I was all in a
+tremble.  Positively, he was the most disgusting and loathsome person I
+have ever met.  The filth of his cooking was indescribable; and, as he
+cooked everything that was eaten aboard, I was compelled to select what I
+ate with great circumspection, choosing from the least dirty of his
+concoctions.
+
+My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work.  The
+nails were discoloured and black, while the skin was already grained with
+dirt which even a scrubbing-brush could not remove.  Then blisters came,
+in a painful and never-ending procession, and I had a great burn on my
+forearm, acquired by losing my balance in a roll of the ship and pitching
+against the galley stove.  Nor was my knee any better.  The swelling had
+not gone down, and the cap was still up on edge.  Hobbling about on it
+from morning till night was not helping it any.  What I needed was rest,
+if it were ever to get well.
+
+Rest!  I never before knew the meaning of the word.  I had been resting
+all my life and did not know it.  But now, could I sit still for one
+half-hour and do nothing, not even think, it would be the most
+pleasurable thing in the world.  But it is a revelation, on the other
+hand.  I shall be able to appreciate the lives of the working people
+hereafter.  I did not dream that work was so terrible a thing.  From
+half-past five in the morning till ten o’clock at night I am everybody’s
+slave, with not one moment to myself, except such as I can steal near the
+end of the second dog-watch.  Let me pause for a minute to look out over
+the sea sparkling in the sun, or to gaze at a sailor going aloft to the
+gaff-topsails, or running out the bowsprit, and I am sure to hear the
+hateful voice, “’Ere, you, ’Ump, no sodgerin’.  I’ve got my peepers on
+yer.”
+
+There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the gossip is
+going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight.  Henderson seems
+the best of the hunters, a slow-going fellow, and hard to rouse; but
+roused he must have been, for Smoke had a bruised and discoloured eye,
+and looked particularly vicious when he came into the cabin for supper.
+
+A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the callousness
+and brutishness of these men.  There is one green hand in the crew,
+Harrison by name, a clumsy-looking country boy, mastered, I imagine, by
+the spirit of adventure, and making his first voyage.  In the light
+baffling airs the schooner had been tacking about a great deal, at which
+times the sails pass from one side to the other and a man is sent aloft
+to shift over the fore-gaff-topsail.  In some way, when Harrison was
+aloft, the sheet jammed in the block through which it runs at the end of
+the gaff.  As I understood it, there were two ways of getting it
+cleared,—first, by lowering the foresail, which was comparatively easy
+and without danger; and second, by climbing out the peak-halyards to the
+end of the gaff itself, an exceedingly hazardous performance.
+
+Johansen called out to Harrison to go out the halyards.  It was patent to
+everybody that the boy was afraid.  And well he might be, eighty feet
+above the deck, to trust himself on those thin and jerking ropes.  Had
+there been a steady breeze it would not have been so bad, but the _Ghost_
+was rolling emptily in a long sea, and with each roll the canvas flapped
+and boomed and the halyards slacked and jerked taut.  They were capable
+of snapping a man off like a fly from a whip-lash.
+
+Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of him, but
+hesitated.  It was probably the first time he had been aloft in his life.
+Johansen, who had caught the contagion of Wolf Larsen’s masterfulness,
+burst out with a volley of abuse and curses.
+
+“That’ll do, Johansen,” Wolf Larsen said brusquely.  “I’ll have you know
+that I do the swearing on this ship.  If I need your assistance, I’ll
+call you in.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” the mate acknowledged submissively.
+
+In the meantime Harrison had started out on the halyards.  I was looking
+up from the galley door, and I could see him trembling, as if with ague,
+in every limb.  He proceeded very slowly and cautiously, an inch at a
+time.  Outlined against the clear blue of the sky, he had the appearance
+of an enormous spider crawling along the tracery of its web.
+
+It was a slight uphill climb, for the foresail peaked high; and the
+halyards, running through various blocks on the gaff and mast, gave him
+separate holds for hands and feet.  But the trouble lay in that the wind
+was not strong enough nor steady enough to keep the sail full.  When he
+was half-way out, the _Ghost_ took a long roll to windward and back again
+into the hollow between two seas.  Harrison ceased his progress and held
+on tightly.  Eighty feet beneath, I could see the agonized strain of his
+muscles as he gripped for very life.  The sail emptied and the gaff swung
+amid-ships.  The halyards slackened, and, though it all happened very
+quickly, I could see them sag beneath the weight of his body.  Then the
+gaff swung to the side with an abrupt swiftness, the great sail boomed
+like a cannon, and the three rows of reef-points slatted against the
+canvas like a volley of rifles.  Harrison, clinging on, made the giddy
+rush through the air.  This rush ceased abruptly.  The halyards became
+instantly taut.  It was the snap of the whip.  His clutch was broken.
+One hand was torn loose from its hold.  The other lingered desperately
+for a moment, and followed.  His body pitched out and down, but in some
+way he managed to save himself with his legs.  He was hanging by them,
+head downward.  A quick effort brought his hands up to the halyards
+again; but he was a long time regaining his former position, where he
+hung, a pitiable object.
+
+“I’ll bet he has no appetite for supper,” I heard Wolf Larsen’s voice,
+which came to me from around the corner of the galley.  “Stand from
+under, you, Johansen!  Watch out!  Here she comes!”
+
+In truth, Harrison was very sick, as a person is sea-sick; and for a long
+time he clung to his precarious perch without attempting to move.
+Johansen, however, continued violently to urge him on to the completion
+of his task.
+
+“It is a shame,” I heard Johnson growling in painfully slow and correct
+English.  He was standing by the main rigging, a few feet away from me.
+“The boy is willing enough.  He will learn if he has a chance.  But this
+is—”  He paused awhile, for the word “murder” was his final judgment.
+
+“Hist, will ye!” Louis whispered to him, “For the love iv your mother
+hold your mouth!”
+
+But Johnson, looking on, still continued his grumbling.
+
+“Look here,” the hunter Standish spoke to Wolf Larsen, “that’s my
+boat-puller, and I don’t want to lose him.”
+
+“That’s all right, Standish,” was the reply.  “He’s your boat-puller when
+you’ve got him in the boat; but he’s my sailor when I have him aboard,
+and I’ll do what I damn well please with him.”
+
+“But that’s no reason—” Standish began in a torrent of speech.
+
+“That’ll do, easy as she goes,” Wolf Larsen counselled back.  “I’ve told
+you what’s what, and let it stop at that.  The man’s mine, and I’ll make
+soup of him and eat it if I want to.”
+
+There was an angry gleam in the hunter’s eye, but he turned on his heel
+and entered the steerage companion-way, where he remained, looking
+upward.  All hands were on deck now, and all eyes were aloft, where a
+human life was at grapples with death.  The callousness of these men, to
+whom industrial organization gave control of the lives of other men, was
+appalling.  I, who had lived out of the whirl of the world, had never
+dreamed that its work was carried on in such fashion.  Life had always
+seemed a peculiarly sacred thing, but here it counted for nothing, was a
+cipher in the arithmetic of commerce.  I must say, however, that the
+sailors themselves were sympathetic, as instance the case of Johnson; but
+the masters (the hunters and the captain) were heartlessly indifferent.
+Even the protest of Standish arose out of the fact that he did not wish
+to lose his boat-puller.  Had it been some other hunter’s boat-puller,
+he, like them, would have been no more than amused.
+
+But to return to Harrison.  It took Johansen, insulting and reviling the
+poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started again.  A little later
+he made the end of the gaff, where, astride the spar itself, he had a
+better chance for holding on.  He cleared the sheet, and was free to
+return, slightly downhill now, along the halyards to the mast.  But he
+had lost his nerve.  Unsafe as was his present position, he was loath to
+forsake it for the more unsafe position on the halyards.
+
+He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down to the
+deck.  His eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling violently.  I
+had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human face.  Johansen
+called vainly for him to come down.  At any moment he was liable to be
+snapped off the gaff, but he was helpless with fright.  Wolf Larsen,
+walking up and down with Smoke and in conversation, took no more notice
+of him, though he cried sharply, once, to the man at the wheel:
+
+“You’re off your course, my man!  Be careful, unless you’re looking for
+trouble!”
+
+“Ay, ay, sir,” the helmsman responded, putting a couple of spokes down.
+
+He had been guilty of running the _Ghost_ several points off her course
+in order that what little wind there was should fill the foresail and
+hold it steady.  He had striven to help the unfortunate Harrison at the
+risk of incurring Wolf Larsen’s anger.
+
+The time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible.  Thomas
+Mugridge, on the other hand, considered it a laughable affair, and was
+continually bobbing his head out the galley door to make jocose remarks.
+How I hated him!  And how my hatred for him grew and grew, during that
+fearful time, to cyclopean dimensions.  For the first time in my life I
+experienced the desire to murder—“saw red,” as some of our picturesque
+writers phrase it.  Life in general might still be sacred, but life in
+the particular case of Thomas Mugridge had become very profane indeed.  I
+was frightened when I became conscious that I was seeing red, and the
+thought flashed through my mind: was I, too, becoming tainted by the
+brutality of my environment?—I, who even in the most flagrant crimes had
+denied the justice and righteousness of capital punishment?
+
+Fully half-an-hour went by, and then I saw Johnson and Louis in some sort
+of altercation.  It ended with Johnson flinging off Louis’s detaining arm
+and starting forward.  He crossed the deck, sprang into the fore rigging,
+and began to climb.  But the quick eye of Wolf Larsen caught him.
+
+“Here, you, what are you up to?” he cried.
+
+Johnson’s ascent was arrested.  He looked his captain in the eyes and
+replied slowly:
+
+“I am going to get that boy down.”
+
+“You’ll get down out of that rigging, and damn lively about it!  D’ye
+hear?  Get down!”
+
+Johnson hesitated, but the long years of obedience to the masters of
+ships overpowered him, and he dropped sullenly to the deck and went on
+forward.
+
+At half after five I went below to set the cabin table, but I hardly knew
+what I did, for my eyes and my brain were filled with the vision of a
+man, white-faced and trembling, comically like a bug, clinging to the
+thrashing gaff.  At six o’clock, when I served supper, going on deck to
+get the food from the galley, I saw Harrison, still in the same position.
+The conversation at the table was of other things.  Nobody seemed
+interested in the wantonly imperilled life.  But making an extra trip to
+the galley a little later, I was gladdened by the sight of Harrison
+staggering weakly from the rigging to the forecastle scuttle.  He had
+finally summoned the courage to descend.
+
+Before closing this incident, I must give a scrap of conversation I had
+with Wolf Larsen in the cabin, while I was washing the dishes.
+
+“You were looking squeamish this afternoon,” he began.  “What was the
+matter?”
+
+I could see that he knew what had made me possibly as sick as Harrison,
+that he was trying to draw me, and I answered, “It was because of the
+brutal treatment of that boy.”
+
+He gave a short laugh.  “Like sea-sickness, I suppose.  Some men are
+subject to it, and others are not.”
+
+“Not so,” I objected.
+
+“Just so,” he went on.  “The earth is as full of brutality as the sea is
+full of motion.  And some men are made sick by the one, and some by the
+other.  That’s the only reason.”
+
+“But you, who make a mock of human life, don’t you place any value upon
+it whatever?” I demanded.
+
+“Value?  What value?”  He looked at me, and though his eyes were steady
+and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile in them.  “What kind of
+value?  How do you measure it?  Who values it?”
+
+“I do,” I made answer.
+
+“Then what is it worth to you?  Another man’s life, I mean.  Come now,
+what is it worth?”
+
+The value of life?  How could I put a tangible value upon it?  Somehow,
+I, who have always had expression, lacked expression when with Wolf
+Larsen.  I have since determined that a part of it was due to the man’s
+personality, but that the greater part was due to his totally different
+outlook.  Unlike other materialists I had met and with whom I had
+something in common to start on, I had nothing in common with him.
+Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity of his mind that baffled
+me.  He drove so directly to the core of the matter, divesting a question
+always of all superfluous details, and with such an air of finality, that
+I seemed to find myself struggling in deep water, with no footing under
+me.  Value of life?  How could I answer the question on the spur of the
+moment?  The sacredness of life I had accepted as axiomatic.  That it was
+intrinsically valuable was a truism I had never questioned.  But when he
+challenged the truism I was speechless.
+
+“We were talking about this yesterday,” he said.  “I held that life was a
+ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might live, and
+that living was merely successful piggishness.  Why, if there is anything
+in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world.  There is
+only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is
+demanding to be born is limitless.  Nature is a spendthrift.  Look at the
+fish and their millions of eggs.  For that matter, look at you and me.
+In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives.  Could we but
+find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the
+unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and
+populate continents.  Life?  Bah!  It has no value.  Of cheap things it
+is the cheapest.  Everywhere it goes begging.  Nature spills it out with
+a lavish hand.  Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand
+lives, and it’s life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life
+is left.”
+
+“You have read Darwin,” I said.  “But you read him misunderstandingly
+when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your wanton
+destruction of life.”
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.  “You know you only mean that in relation to
+human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish you destroy as
+much as I or any other man.  And human life is in no wise different,
+though you feel it is and think that you reason why it is.  Why should I
+be parsimonious with this life which is cheap and without value?  There
+are more sailors than there are ships on the sea for them, more workers
+than there are factories or machines for them.  Why, you who live on the
+land know that you house your poor people in the slums of cities and
+loose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there still remain more
+poor people, dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which
+is life destroyed), than you know what to do with.  Have you ever seen
+the London dockers fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work?”
+
+He started for the companion stairs, but turned his head for a final
+word.  “Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon
+itself?  And it is of course over-estimated since it is of necessity
+prejudiced in its own favour.  Take that man I had aloft.  He held on as
+if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds or rubies.  To
+you?  No.  To me?  Not at all.  To himself?  Yes.  But I do not accept
+his estimate.  He sadly overrates himself.  There is plenty more life
+demanding to be born.  Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck
+like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world.  He
+was worth nothing to the world.  The supply is too large.  To himself
+only was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was,
+being dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself.  He alone rated
+himself beyond diamonds and rubies.  Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread
+out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-water, and he does
+not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone.  He does not lose
+anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss.
+Don’t you see?  And what have you to say?”
+
+“That you are at least consistent,” was all I could say, and I went on
+washing the dishes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the
+north-east trades.  I came on deck, after a good night’s rest in spite of
+my poor knee, to find the _Ghost_ foaming along, wing-and-wing, and every
+sail drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze astern.  Oh, the wonder
+of the great trade-wind!  All day we sailed, and all night, and the next
+day, and the next, day after day, the wind always astern and blowing
+steadily and strong.  The schooner sailed herself.  There was no pulling
+and hauling on sheets and tackles, no shifting of topsails, no work at
+all for the sailors to do except to steer.  At night when the sun went
+down, the sheets were slackened; in the morning, when they yielded up the
+damp of the dew and relaxed, they were pulled tight again—and that was
+all.
+
+Ten knots, twelve knots, eleven knots, varying from time to time, is the
+speed we are making.  And ever out of the north-east the brave wind
+blows, driving us on our course two hundred and fifty miles between the
+dawns.  It saddens me and gladdens me, the gait with which we are leaving
+San Francisco behind and with which we are foaming down upon the tropics.
+Each day grows perceptibly warmer.  In the second dog-watch the sailors
+come on deck, stripped, and heave buckets of water upon one another from
+overside.  Flying-fish are beginning to be seen, and during the night the
+watch above scrambles over the deck in pursuit of those that fall aboard.
+In the morning, Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the galley is
+pleasantly areek with the odour of their frying; while dolphin meat is
+served fore and aft on such occasions as Johnson catches the blazing
+beauties from the bowsprit end.
+
+Johnson seems to spend all his spare time there or aloft at the
+crosstrees, watching the _Ghost_ cleaving the water under press of sail.
+There is passion, adoration, in his eyes, and he goes about in a sort of
+trance, gazing in ecstasy at the swelling sails, the foaming wake, and
+the heave and the run of her over the liquid mountains that are moving
+with us in stately procession.
+
+The days and nights are “all a wonder and a wild delight,” and though I
+have little time from my dreary work, I steal odd moments to gaze and
+gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the world possessed.
+Above, the sky is stainless blue—blue as the sea itself, which under the
+forefoot is of the colour and sheen of azure satin.  All around the
+horizon are pale, fleecy clouds, never changing, never moving, like a
+silver setting for the flawless turquoise sky.
+
+I do not forget one night, when I should have been asleep, of lying on
+the forecastle-head and gazing down at the spectral ripple of foam thrust
+aside by the _Ghost’s_ forefoot.  It sounded like the gurgling of a brook
+over mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the crooning song of it lured
+me away and out of myself till I was no longer Hump the cabin-boy, nor
+Van Weyden, the man who had dreamed away thirty-five years among books.
+But a voice behind me, the unmistakable voice of Wolf Larsen, strong with
+the invincible certitude of the man and mellow with appreciation of the
+words he was quoting, aroused me.
+
+   “‘O the blazing tropic night, when the wake’s a welt of light
+      That holds the hot sky tame,
+   And the steady forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors
+      Where the scared whale flukes in flame.
+   Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass,
+      And her ropes are taut with the dew,
+   For we’re booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
+      We’re sagging south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always
+   new.’”
+
+“Eh, Hump?  How’s it strike you?” he asked, after the due pause which
+words and setting demanded.
+
+I looked into his face.  It was aglow with light, as the sea itself, and
+the eyes were flashing in the starshine.
+
+“It strikes me as remarkable, to say the least, that you should show
+enthusiasm,” I answered coldly.
+
+“Why, man, it’s living! it’s life!” he cried.
+
+“Which is a cheap thing and without value.”  I flung his words at him.
+
+He laughed, and it was the first time I had heard honest mirth in his
+voice.
+
+“Ah, I cannot get you to understand, cannot drive it into your head, what
+a thing this life is.  Of course life is valueless, except to itself.
+And I can tell you that my life is pretty valuable just now—to myself.
+It is beyond price, which you will acknowledge is a terrific overrating,
+but which I cannot help, for it is the life that is in me that makes the
+rating.”
+
+He appeared waiting for the words with which to express the thought that
+was in him, and finally went on.
+
+“Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all time
+were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine.  I know truth,
+divine good from evil, right from wrong.  My vision is clear and far.  I
+could almost believe in God.  But,” and his voice changed and the light
+went out of his face,—“what is this condition in which I find myself?
+this joy of living? this exultation of life? this inspiration, I may well
+call it?  It is what comes when there is nothing wrong with one’s
+digestion, when his stomach is in trim and his appetite has an edge, and
+all goes well.  It is the bribe for living, the champagne of the blood,
+the effervescence of the ferment—that makes some men think holy thoughts,
+and other men to see God or to create him when they cannot see him.  That
+is all, the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast,
+the babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness that it is
+alive.  And—bah!  To-morrow I shall pay for it as the drunkard pays.  And
+I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely, cease crawling of
+myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon,
+to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles
+that it may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of
+fishes.  Bah!  And bah! again.  The champagne is already flat.  The
+sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.”
+
+He left me as suddenly as he had come, springing to the deck with the
+weight and softness of a tiger.  The _Ghost_ ploughed on her way.  I
+noted the gurgling forefoot was very like a snore, and as I listened to
+it the effect of Wolf Larsen’s swift rush from sublime exultation to
+despair slowly left me.  Then some deep-water sailor, from the waist of
+the ship, lifted a rich tenor voice in the “Song of the Trade Wind”:
+
+   “Oh, I am the wind the seamen love—
+      I am steady, and strong, and true;
+   They follow my track by the clouds above,
+      O’er the fathomless tropic blue.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+   Through daylight and dark I follow the bark
+      I keep like a hound on her trail;
+   I’m strongest at noon, yet under the moon,
+      I stiffen the bunt of her sail.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of his
+strange moods and vagaries.  At other times I take him for a great man, a
+genius who has never arrived.  And, finally, I am convinced that he is
+the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years or
+generations too late and an anachronism in this culminating century of
+civilization.  He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced
+type.  Not only that, but he is very lonely.  There is no congeniality
+between him and the rest of the men aboard ship.  His tremendous virility
+and mental strength wall him apart.  They are more like children to him,
+even the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to
+their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies.  Or else
+he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in
+their mental processes and examining their souls as though to see of what
+soul-stuff is made.
+
+I have seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter or
+that, with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of interest,
+pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a curiosity almost
+laughable to me who stood onlooker and who understood.  Concerning his
+own rages, I am convinced that they are not real, that they are sometimes
+experiments, but that in the main they are the habits of a pose or
+attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellow-men.  I know, with the
+possible exception of the incident of the dead mate, that I have not seen
+him really angry; nor do I wish ever to see him in a genuine rage, when
+all the force of him is called into play.
+
+While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas
+Mugridge in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident upon
+which I have already touched once or twice.  The twelve o’clock dinner
+was over, one day, and I had just finished putting the cabin in order,
+when Wolf Larsen and Thomas Mugridge descended the companion stairs.
+Though the cook had a cubby-hole of a state-room opening off from the
+cabin, in the cabin itself he had never dared to linger or to be seen,
+and he flitted to and fro, once or twice a day, a timid spectre.
+
+“So you know how to play ‘Nap,’” Wolf Larsen was saying in a pleased sort
+of voice.  “I might have guessed an Englishman would know.  I learned it
+myself in English ships.”
+
+Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile, so pleased was
+he at chumming thus with the captain.  The little airs he put on and the
+painful striving to assume the easy carriage of a man born to a dignified
+place in life would have been sickening had they not been ludicrous.  He
+quite ignored my presence, though I credited him with being simply unable
+to see me.  His pale, wishy-washy eyes were swimming like lazy summer
+seas, though what blissful visions they beheld were beyond my
+imagination.
+
+“Get the cards, Hump,” Wolf Larsen ordered, as they took seats at the
+table.  “And bring out the cigars and the whisky you’ll find in my
+berth.”
+
+I returned with the articles in time to hear the Cockney hinting broadly
+that there was a mystery about him, that he might be a gentleman’s son
+gone wrong or something or other; also, that he was a remittance man and
+was paid to keep away from England—“p’yed ’ansomely, sir,” was the way he
+put it; “p’yed ’ansomely to sling my ’ook an’ keep slingin’ it.”
+
+I had brought the customary liquor glasses, but Wolf Larsen frowned,
+shook his head, and signalled with his hands for me to bring the
+tumblers.  These he filled two-thirds full with undiluted whisky—“a
+gentleman’s drink?” quoth Thomas Mugridge,—and they clinked their glasses
+to the glorious game of “Nap,” lighted cigars, and fell to shuffling and
+dealing the cards.
+
+They played for money.  They increased the amounts of the bets.  They
+drank whisky, they drank it neat, and I fetched more.  I do not know
+whether Wolf Larsen cheated or not,—a thing he was thoroughly capable of
+doing,—but he won steadily.  The cook made repeated journeys to his bunk
+for money.  Each time he performed the journey with greater swagger, but
+he never brought more than a few dollars at a time.  He grew maudlin,
+familiar, could hardly see the cards or sit upright.  As a preliminary to
+another journey to his bunk, he hooked Wolf Larsen’s buttonhole with a
+greasy forefinger and vacuously proclaimed and reiterated, “I got money,
+I got money, I tell yer, an’ I’m a gentleman’s son.”
+
+Wolf Larsen was unaffected by the drink, yet he drank glass for glass,
+and if anything his glasses were fuller.  There was no change in him.  He
+did not appear even amused at the other’s antics.
+
+In the end, with loud protestations that he could lose like a gentleman,
+the cook’s last money was staked on the game—and lost.  Whereupon he
+leaned his head on his hands and wept.  Wolf Larsen looked curiously at
+him, as though about to probe and vivisect him, then changed his mind, as
+from the foregone conclusion that there was nothing there to probe.
+
+“Hump,” he said to me, elaborately polite, “kindly take Mr. Mugridge’s
+arm and help him up on deck.  He is not feeling very well.”
+
+“And tell Johnson to douse him with a few buckets of salt water,” he
+added, in a lower tone for my ear alone.
+
+I left Mr. Mugridge on deck, in the hands of a couple of grinning sailors
+who had been told off for the purpose.  Mr. Mugridge was sleepily
+spluttering that he was a gentleman’s son.  But as I descended the
+companion stairs to clear the table I heard him shriek as the first
+bucket of water struck him.
+
+Wolf Larsen was counting his winnings.
+
+“One hundred and eighty-five dollars even,” he said aloud.  “Just as I
+thought.  The beggar came aboard without a cent.”
+
+“And what you have won is mine, sir,” I said boldly.
+
+He favoured me with a quizzical smile.  “Hump, I have studied some
+grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled.  ‘Was mine,’ you
+should have said, not ’is mine.’”
+
+“It is a question, not of grammar, but of ethics,” I answered.
+
+It was possibly a minute before he spoke.
+
+“D’ye know, Hump,” he said, with a slow seriousness which had in it an
+indefinable strain of sadness, “that this is the first time I have heard
+the word ‘ethics’ in the mouth of a man.  You and I are the only men on
+this ship who know its meaning.”
+
+“At one time in my life,” he continued, after another pause, “I dreamed
+that I might some day talk with men who used such language, that I might
+lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born, and hold
+conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as
+ethics.  And this is the first time I have ever heard the word
+pronounced.  Which is all by the way, for you are wrong.  It is a
+question neither of grammar nor ethics, but of fact.”
+
+“I understand,” I said.  “The fact is that you have the money.”
+
+His face brightened.  He seemed pleased at my perspicacity.  “But it is
+avoiding the real question,” I continued, “which is one of right.”
+
+“Ah,” he remarked, with a wry pucker of his mouth, “I see you still
+believe in such things as right and wrong.”
+
+“But don’t you?—at all?” I demanded.
+
+“Not the least bit.  Might is right, and that is all there is to it.
+Weakness is wrong.  Which is a very poor way of saying that it is good
+for oneself to be strong, and evil for oneself to be weak—or better yet,
+it is pleasurable to be strong, because of the profits; painful to be
+weak, because of the penalties.  Just now the possession of this money is
+a pleasurable thing.  It is good for one to possess it.  Being able to
+possess it, I wrong myself and the life that is in me if I give it to you
+and forego the pleasure of possessing it.”
+
+“But you wrong me by withholding it,” I objected.
+
+“Not at all.  One man cannot wrong another man.  He can only wrong
+himself.  As I see it, I do wrong always when I consider the interests of
+others.  Don’t you see?  How can two particles of the yeast wrong each
+other by striving to devour each other?  It is their inborn heritage to
+strive to devour, and to strive not to be devoured.  When they depart
+from this they sin.”
+
+“Then you don’t believe in altruism?” I asked.
+
+He received the word as if it had a familiar ring, though he pondered it
+thoughtfully.  “Let me see, it means something about coöperation, doesn’t
+it?”
+
+“Well, in a way there has come to be a sort of connection,” I answered
+unsurprised by this time at such gaps in his vocabulary, which, like his
+knowledge, was the acquirement of a self-read, self-educated man, whom no
+one had directed in his studies, and who had thought much and talked
+little or not at all.  “An altruistic act is an act performed for the
+welfare of others.  It is unselfish, as opposed to an act performed for
+self, which is selfish.”
+
+He nodded his head.  “Oh, yes, I remember it now.  I ran across it in
+Spencer.”
+
+“Spencer!” I cried.  “Have you read him?”
+
+“Not very much,” was his confession.  “I understood quite a good deal of
+_First Principles_, but his _Biology_ took the wind out of my sails, and
+his _Psychology_ left me butting around in the doldrums for many a day.
+I honestly could not understand what he was driving at.  I put it down to
+mental deficiency on my part, but since then I have decided that it was
+for want of preparation.  I had no proper basis.  Only Spencer and myself
+know how hard I hammered.  But I did get something out of his _Data of
+Ethics_.  There’s where I ran across ‘altruism,’ and I remember now how
+it was used.”
+
+I wondered what this man could have got from such a work.  Spencer I
+remembered enough to know that altruism was imperative to his ideal of
+highest conduct.  Wolf Larsen, evidently, had sifted the great
+philosopher’s teachings, rejecting and selecting according to his needs
+and desires.
+
+“What else did you run across?” I asked.
+
+His brows drew in slightly with the mental effort of suitably phrasing
+thoughts which he had never before put into speech.  I felt an elation of
+spirit.  I was groping into his soul-stuff as he made a practice of
+groping in the soul-stuff of others.  I was exploring virgin territory.
+A strange, a terribly strange, region was unrolling itself before my
+eyes.
+
+“In as few words as possible,” he began, “Spencer puts it something like
+this: First, a man must act for his own benefit—to do this is to be moral
+and good.  Next, he must act for the benefit of his children.  And third,
+he must act for the benefit of his race.”
+
+“And the highest, finest, right conduct,” I interjected, “is that act
+which benefits at the same time the man, his children, and his race.”
+
+“I wouldn’t stand for that,” he replied.  “Couldn’t see the necessity for
+it, nor the common sense.  I cut out the race and the children.  I would
+sacrifice nothing for them.  It’s just so much slush and sentiment, and
+you must see it yourself, at least for one who does not believe in
+eternal life.  With immortality before me, altruism would be a paying
+business proposition.  I might elevate my soul to all kinds of altitudes.
+But with nothing eternal before me but death, given for a brief spell
+this yeasty crawling and squirming which is called life, why, it would be
+immoral for me to perform any act that was a sacrifice.  Any sacrifice
+that makes me lose one crawl or squirm is foolish,—and not only foolish,
+for it is a wrong against myself and a wicked thing.  I must not lose one
+crawl or squirm if I am to get the most out of the ferment.  Nor will the
+eternal movelessness that is coming to me be made easier or harder by the
+sacrifices or selfishnesses of the time when I was yeasty and acrawl.”
+
+“Then you are an individualist, a materialist, and, logically, a
+hedonist.”
+
+“Big words,” he smiled.  “But what is a hedonist?”
+
+He nodded agreement when I had given the definition.  “And you are also,”
+I continued, “a man one could not trust in the least thing where it was
+possible for a selfish interest to intervene?”
+
+“Now you’re beginning to understand,” he said, brightening.
+
+“You are a man utterly without what the world calls morals?”
+
+“That’s it.”
+
+“A man of whom to be always afraid—”
+
+“That’s the way to put it.”
+
+“As one is afraid of a snake, or a tiger, or a shark?”
+
+“Now you know me,” he said.  “And you know me as I am generally known.
+Other men call me ‘Wolf.’”
+
+“You are a sort of monster,” I added audaciously, “a Caliban who has
+pondered Setebos, and who acts as you act, in idle moments, by whim and
+fancy.”
+
+His brow clouded at the allusion.  He did not understand, and I quickly
+learned that he did not know the poem.
+
+“I’m just reading Browning,” he confessed, “and it’s pretty tough.  I
+haven’t got very far along, and as it is I’ve about lost my bearings.”
+
+Not to be tiresome, I shall say that I fetched the book from his
+state-room and read “Caliban” aloud.  He was delighted.  It was a
+primitive mode of reasoning and of looking at things that he understood
+thoroughly.  He interrupted again and again with comment and criticism.
+When I finished, he had me read it over a second time, and a third.  We
+fell into discussion—philosophy, science, evolution, religion.  He
+betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read man, and, it must be granted,
+the sureness and directness of the primitive mind.  The very simplicity
+of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more
+compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth.  Not
+that I—a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental
+idealist—was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last
+strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received respect, while not
+accorded conviction.
+
+Time passed.  Supper was at hand and the table not laid.  I became
+restless and anxious, and when Thomas Mugridge glared down the
+companion-way, sick and angry of countenance, I prepared to go about my
+duties.  But Wolf Larsen cried out to him:
+
+“Cooky, you’ve got to hustle to-night.  I’m busy with Hump, and you’ll do
+the best you can without him.”
+
+And again the unprecedented was established.  That night I sat at table
+with the captain and the hunters, while Thomas Mugridge waited on us and
+washed the dishes afterward—a whim, a Caliban-mood of Wolf Larsen’s, and
+one I foresaw would bring me trouble.  In the meantime we talked and
+talked, much to the disgust of the hunters, who could not understand a
+word.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Three days of rest, three blessed days of rest, are what I had with Wolf
+Larsen, eating at the cabin table and doing nothing but discuss life,
+literature, and the universe, the while Thomas Mugridge fumed and raged
+and did my work as well as his own.
+
+“Watch out for squalls, is all I can say to you,” was Louis’s warning,
+given during a spare half-hour on deck while Wolf Larsen was engaged in
+straightening out a row among the hunters.
+
+“Ye can’t tell what’ll be happenin’,” Louis went on, in response to my
+query for more definite information.  “The man’s as contrary as air
+currents or water currents.  You can never guess the ways iv him.  ’Tis
+just as you’re thinkin’ you know him and are makin’ a favourable slant
+along him, that he whirls around, dead ahead and comes howlin’ down upon
+you and a-rippin’ all iv your fine-weather sails to rags.”
+
+So I was not altogether surprised when the squall foretold by Louis smote
+me.  We had been having a heated discussion,—upon life, of course,—and,
+grown over-bold, I was passing stiff strictures upon Wolf Larsen and the
+life of Wolf Larsen.  In fact, I was vivisecting him and turning over his
+soul-stuff as keenly and thoroughly as it was his custom to do it to
+others.  It may be a weakness of mine that I have an incisive way of
+speech; but I threw all restraint to the winds and cut and slashed until
+the whole man of him was snarling.  The dark sun-bronze of his face went
+black with wrath, his eyes were ablaze.  There was no clearness or sanity
+in them—nothing but the terrific rage of a madman.  It was the wolf in
+him that I saw, and a mad wolf at that.
+
+He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm.  I had steeled myself
+to brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly; but the enormous
+strength of the man was too much for my fortitude.  He had gripped me by
+the biceps with his single hand, and when that grip tightened I wilted
+and shrieked aloud.  My feet went out from under me.  I simply could not
+stand upright and endure the agony.  The muscles refused their duty.  The
+pain was too great.  My biceps was being crushed to a pulp.
+
+He seemed to recover himself, for a lucid gleam came into his eyes, and
+he relaxed his hold with a short laugh that was more like a growl.  I
+fell to the floor, feeling very faint, while he sat down, lighted a
+cigar, and watched me as a cat watches a mouse.  As I writhed about I
+could see in his eyes that curiosity I had so often noted, that wonder
+and perplexity, that questing, that everlasting query of his as to what
+it was all about.
+
+I finally crawled to my feet and ascended the companion stairs.  Fair
+weather was over, and there was nothing left but to return to the galley.
+My left arm was numb, as though paralysed, and days passed before I could
+use it, while weeks went by before the last stiffness and pain went out
+of it.  And he had done nothing but put his hand upon my arm and squeeze.
+There had been no wrenching or jerking.  He had just closed his hand with
+a steady pressure.  What he might have done I did not fully realize till
+next day, when he put his head into the galley, and, as a sign of renewed
+friendliness, asked me how my arm was getting on.
+
+“It might have been worse,” he smiled.
+
+I was peeling potatoes.  He picked one up from the pan.  It was
+fair-sized, firm, and unpeeled.  He closed his hand upon it, squeezed,
+and the potato squirted out between his fingers in mushy streams.  The
+pulpy remnant he dropped back into the pan and turned away, and I had a
+sharp vision of how it might have fared with me had the monster put his
+real strength upon me.
+
+But the three days’ rest was good in spite of it all, for it had given my
+knee the very chance it needed.  It felt much better, the swelling had
+materially decreased, and the cap seemed descending into its proper
+place.  Also, the three days’ rest brought the trouble I had foreseen.
+It was plainly Thomas Mugridge’s intention to make me pay for those three
+days.  He treated me vilely, cursed me continually, and heaped his own
+work upon me.  He even ventured to raise his fist to me, but I was
+becoming animal-like myself, and I snarled in his face so terribly that
+it must have frightened him back.  It is no pleasant picture I can
+conjure up of myself, Humphrey Van Weyden, in that noisome ship’s galley,
+crouched in a corner over my task, my face raised to the face of the
+creature about to strike me, my lips lifted and snarling like a dog’s, my
+eyes gleaming with fear and helplessness and the courage that comes of
+fear and helplessness.  I do not like the picture.  It reminds me too
+strongly of a rat in a trap.  I do not care to think of it; but it was
+effective, for the threatened blow did not descend.
+
+Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as I
+glared.  A pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and showing
+our teeth.  He was a coward, afraid to strike me because I had not
+quailed sufficiently in advance; so he chose a new way to intimidate me.
+There was only one galley knife that, as a knife, amounted to anything.
+This, through many years of service and wear, had acquired a long, lean
+blade.  It was unusually cruel-looking, and at first I had shuddered
+every time I used it.  The cook borrowed a stone from Johansen and
+proceeded to sharpen the knife.  He did it with great ostentation,
+glancing significantly at me the while.  He whetted it up and down all
+day long.  Every odd moment he could find he had the knife and stone out
+and was whetting away.  The steel acquired a razor edge.  He tried it
+with the ball of his thumb or across the nail.  He shaved hairs from the
+back of his hand, glanced along the edge with microscopic acuteness, and
+found, or feigned that he found, always, a slight inequality in its edge
+somewhere.  Then he would put it on the stone again and whet, whet, whet,
+till I could have laughed aloud, it was so very ludicrous.
+
+It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using it, that
+under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice, like mine, that
+would impel him to do the very thing his whole nature protested against
+doing and was afraid of doing.  “Cooky’s sharpening his knife for Hump,”
+was being whispered about among the sailors, and some of them twitted him
+about it.  This he took in good part, and was really pleased, nodding his
+head with direful foreknowledge and mystery, until George Leach, the
+erstwhile cabin-boy, ventured some rough pleasantry on the subject.
+
+Now it happened that Leach was one of the sailors told off to douse
+Mugridge after his game of cards with the captain.  Leach had evidently
+done his task with a thoroughness that Mugridge had not forgiven, for
+words followed and evil names involving smirched ancestries.  Mugridge
+menaced with the knife he was sharpening for me.  Leach laughed and
+hurled more of his Telegraph Hill Billingsgate, and before either he or I
+knew what had happened, his right arm had been ripped open from elbow to
+wrist by a quick slash of the knife.  The cook backed away, a fiendish
+expression on his face, the knife held before him in a position of
+defence.  But Leach took it quite calmly, though blood was spouting upon
+the deck as generously as water from a fountain.
+
+“I’m goin’ to get you, Cooky,” he said, “and I’ll get you hard.  And I
+won’t be in no hurry about it.  You’ll be without that knife when I come
+for you.”
+
+So saying, he turned and walked quietly forward.  Mugridge’s face was
+livid with fear at what he had done and at what he might expect sooner or
+later from the man he had stabbed.  But his demeanour toward me was more
+ferocious than ever.  In spite of his fear at the reckoning he must
+expect to pay for what he had done, he could see that it had been an
+object-lesson to me, and he became more domineering and exultant.  Also
+there was a lust in him, akin to madness, which had come with sight of
+the blood he had drawn.  He was beginning to see red in whatever
+direction he looked.  The psychology of it is sadly tangled, and yet I
+could read the workings of his mind as clearly as though it were a
+printed book.
+
+Several days went by, the _Ghost_ still foaming down the trades, and I
+could swear I saw madness growing in Thomas Mugridge’s eyes.  And I
+confess that I became afraid, very much afraid.  Whet, whet, whet, it
+went all day long.  The look in his eyes as he felt the keen edge and
+glared at me was positively carnivorous.  I was afraid to turn my
+shoulder to him, and when I left the galley I went out backwards—to the
+amusement of the sailors and hunters, who made a point of gathering in
+groups to witness my exit.  The strain was too great.  I sometimes
+thought my mind would give way under it—a meet thing on this ship of
+madmen and brutes.  Every hour, every minute of my existence was in
+jeopardy.  I was a human soul in distress, and yet no soul, fore or aft,
+betrayed sufficient sympathy to come to my aid.  At times I thought of
+throwing myself on the mercy of Wolf Larsen, but the vision of the
+mocking devil in his eyes that questioned life and sneered at it would
+come strong upon me and compel me to refrain.  At other times I seriously
+contemplated suicide, and the whole force of my hopeful philosophy was
+required to keep me from going over the side in the darkness of night.
+
+Several times Wolf Larsen tried to inveigle me into discussion, but I
+gave him short answers and eluded him.  Finally, he commanded me to
+resume my seat at the cabin table for a time and let the cook do my work.
+Then I spoke frankly, telling him what I was enduring from Thomas
+Mugridge because of the three days of favouritism which had been shown
+me.  Wolf Larsen regarded me with smiling eyes.
+
+“So you’re afraid, eh?” he sneered.
+
+“Yes,” I said defiantly and honestly, “I am afraid.”
+
+“That’s the way with you fellows,” he cried, half angrily,
+“sentimentalizing about your immortal souls and afraid to die.  At sight
+of a sharp knife and a cowardly Cockney the clinging of life to life
+overcomes all your fond foolishness.  Why, my dear fellow, you will live
+for ever.  You are a god, and God cannot be killed.  Cooky cannot hurt
+you.  You are sure of your resurrection.  What’s there to be afraid of?
+
+“You have eternal life before you.  You are a millionaire in immortality,
+and a millionaire whose fortune cannot be lost, whose fortune is less
+perishable than the stars and as lasting as space or time.  It is
+impossible for you to diminish your principal.  Immortality is a thing
+without beginning or end.  Eternity is eternity, and though you die here
+and now you will go on living somewhere else and hereafter.  And it is
+all very beautiful, this shaking off of the flesh and soaring of the
+imprisoned spirit.  Cooky cannot hurt you.  He can only give you a boost
+on the path you eternally must tread.
+
+“Or, if you do not wish to be boosted just yet, why not boost Cooky?
+According to your ideas, he, too, must be an immortal millionaire.  You
+cannot bankrupt him.  His paper will always circulate at par.  You cannot
+diminish the length of his living by killing him, for he is without
+beginning or end.  He’s bound to go on living, somewhere, somehow.  Then
+boost him.  Stick a knife in him and let his spirit free.  As it is, it’s
+in a nasty prison, and you’ll do him only a kindness by breaking down the
+door.  And who knows?—it may be a very beautiful spirit that will go
+soaring up into the blue from that ugly carcass.  Boost him along, and
+I’ll promote you to his place, and he’s getting forty-five dollars a
+month.”
+
+It was plain that I could look for no help or mercy from Wolf Larsen.
+Whatever was to be done I must do for myself; and out of the courage of
+fear I evolved the plan of fighting Thomas Mugridge with his own weapons.
+I borrowed a whetstone from Johansen.  Louis, the boat-steerer, had
+already begged me for condensed milk and sugar.  The lazarette, where
+such delicacies were stored, was situated beneath the cabin floor.
+Watching my chance, I stole five cans of the milk, and that night, when
+it was Louis’s watch on deck, I traded them with him for a dirk as lean
+and cruel-looking as Thomas Mugridge’s vegetable knife.  It was rusty and
+dull, but I turned the grindstone while Louis gave it an edge.  I slept
+more soundly than usual that night.
+
+Next morning, after breakfast, Thomas Mugridge began his whet, whet,
+whet.  I glanced warily at him, for I was on my knees taking the ashes
+from the stove.  When I returned from throwing them overside, he was
+talking to Harrison, whose honest yokel’s face was filled with
+fascination and wonder.
+
+“Yes,” Mugridge was saying, “an’ wot does ’is worship do but give me two
+years in Reading.  But blimey if I cared.  The other mug was fixed
+plenty.  Should ’a seen ’im.  Knife just like this.  I stuck it in, like
+into soft butter, an’ the w’y ’e squealed was better’n a tu-penny gaff.”
+He shot a glance in my direction to see if I was taking it in, and went
+on.  “‘I didn’t mean it Tommy,’ ’e was snifflin’; ‘so ’elp me Gawd, I
+didn’t mean it!’  ‘I’ll fix yer bloody well right,’ I sez, an’ kept right
+after ’im.  I cut ’im in ribbons, that’s wot I did, an’ ’e a-squealin’
+all the time.  Once ’e got ’is ’and on the knife an’ tried to ’old it.
+‘Ad ’is fingers around it, but I pulled it through, cuttin’ to the bone.
+O, ’e was a sight, I can tell yer.”
+
+A call from the mate interrupted the gory narrative, and Harrison went
+aft.  Mugridge sat down on the raised threshold to the galley and went on
+with his knife-sharpening.  I put the shovel away and calmly sat down on
+the coal-box facing him.  He favoured me with a vicious stare.  Still
+calmly, though my heart was going pitapat, I pulled out Louis’s dirk and
+began to whet it on the stone.  I had looked for almost any sort of
+explosion on the Cockney’s part, but to my surprise he did not appear
+aware of what I was doing.  He went on whetting his knife.  So did I.
+And for two hours we sat there, face to face, whet, whet, whet, till the
+news of it spread abroad and half the ship’s company was crowding the
+galley doors to see the sight.
+
+Encouragement and advice were freely tendered, and Jock Horner, the
+quiet, self-spoken hunter who looked as though he would not harm a mouse,
+advised me to leave the ribs alone and to thrust upward for the abdomen,
+at the same time giving what he called the “Spanish twist” to the blade.
+Leach, his bandaged arm prominently to the fore, begged me to leave a few
+remnants of the cook for him; and Wolf Larsen paused once or twice at the
+break of the poop to glance curiously at what must have been to him a
+stirring and crawling of the yeasty thing he knew as life.
+
+And I make free to say that for the time being life assumed the same
+sordid values to me.  There was nothing pretty about it, nothing
+divine—only two cowardly moving things that sat whetting steel upon
+stone, and a group of other moving things, cowardly and otherwise, that
+looked on.  Half of them, I am sure, were anxious to see us shedding each
+other’s blood.  It would have been entertainment.  And I do not think
+there was one who would have interfered had we closed in a
+death-struggle.
+
+On the other hand, the whole thing was laughable and childish.  Whet,
+whet, whet,—Humphrey Van Weyden sharpening his knife in a ship’s galley
+and trying its edge with his thumb!  Of all situations this was the most
+inconceivable.  I know that my own kind could not have believed it
+possible.  I had not been called “Sissy” Van Weyden all my days without
+reason, and that “Sissy” Van Weyden should be capable of doing this thing
+was a revelation to Humphrey Van Weyden, who knew not whether to be
+exultant or ashamed.
+
+But nothing happened.  At the end of two hours Thomas Mugridge put away
+knife and stone and held out his hand.
+
+“Wot’s the good of mykin’ a ’oly show of ourselves for them mugs?” he
+demanded.  “They don’t love us, an’ bloody well glad they’d be a-seein’
+us cuttin’ our throats.  Yer not ’arf bad, ’Ump!  You’ve got spunk, as
+you Yanks s’y, an’ I like yer in a w’y.  So come on an’ shyke.”
+
+Coward that I might be, I was less a coward than he.  It was a distinct
+victory I had gained, and I refused to forego any of it by shaking his
+detestable hand.
+
+“All right,” he said pridelessly, “tyke it or leave it, I’ll like yer
+none the less for it.”  And to save his face he turned fiercely upon the
+onlookers.  “Get outa my galley-doors, you bloomin’ swabs!”
+
+This command was reinforced by a steaming kettle of water, and at sight
+of it the sailors scrambled out of the way.  This was a sort of victory
+for Thomas Mugridge, and enabled him to accept more gracefully the defeat
+I had given him, though, of course, he was too discreet to attempt to
+drive the hunters away.
+
+“I see Cooky’s finish,” I heard Smoke say to Horner.
+
+“You bet,” was the reply.  “Hump runs the galley from now on, and Cooky
+pulls in his horns.”
+
+Mugridge heard and shot a swift glance at me, but I gave no sign that the
+conversation had reached me.  I had not thought my victory was so
+far-reaching and complete, but I resolved to let go nothing I had gained.
+As the days went by, Smoke’s prophecy was verified.  The Cockney became
+more humble and slavish to me than even to Wolf Larsen.  I mistered him
+and sirred him no longer, washed no more greasy pots, and peeled no more
+potatoes.  I did my own work, and my own work only, and when and in what
+fashion I saw fit.  Also I carried the dirk in a sheath at my hip,
+sailor-fashion, and maintained toward Thomas Mugridge a constant attitude
+which was composed of equal parts of domineering, insult, and contempt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases—if by intimacy may be denoted
+those relations which exist between master and man, or, better yet,
+between king and jester.  I am to him no more than a toy, and he values
+me no more than a child values a toy.  My function is to amuse, and so
+long as I amuse all goes well; but let him become bored, or let him have
+one of his black moods come upon him, and at once I am relegated from
+cabin table to galley, while, at the same time, I am fortunate to escape
+with my life and a whole body.
+
+The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me.  There is not
+a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not
+despise.  He seems consuming with the tremendous power that is in him and
+that seems never to have found adequate expression in works.  He is as
+Lucifer would be, were that proud spirit banished to a society of
+soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.
+
+This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he is
+oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race.  Knowing him, I review
+the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding.  The
+white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible pantheon
+were of the same fibre as he.  The frivolity of the laughter-loving
+Latins is no part of him.  When he laughs it is from a humour that is
+nothing else than ferocious.  But he laughs rarely; he is too often sad.
+And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of the race.  It is the
+race heritage, the sadness which has made the race sober-minded,
+clean-lived and fanatically moral, and which, in this latter connection,
+has culminated among the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.
+
+In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been
+religion in its more agonizing forms.  But the compensations of such
+religion are denied Wolf Larsen.  His brutal materialism will not permit
+it.  So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remains for him, but to be
+devilish.  Were he not so terrible a man, I could sometimes feel sorry
+for him, as instance three mornings ago, when I went into his stateroom
+to fill his water-bottle and came unexpectedly upon him.  He did not see
+me.  His head was buried in his hands, and his shoulders were heaving
+convulsively as with sobs.  He seemed torn by some mighty grief.  As I
+softly withdrew I could hear him groaning, “God!  God!  God!”  Not that
+he was calling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from his
+soul.
+
+At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by evening,
+strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling about the cabin.
+
+“I’ve never been sick in my life, Hump,” he said, as I guided him to his
+room.  “Nor did I ever have a headache except the time my head was
+healing after having been laid open for six inches by a capstan-bar.”
+
+For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as wild
+animals suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer, without plaint,
+without sympathy, utterly alone.
+
+This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed and put
+things in order, I found him well and hard at work.  Table and bunk were
+littered with designs and calculations.  On a large transparent sheet,
+compass and square in hand, he was copying what appeared to be a scale of
+some sort or other.
+
+“Hello, Hump,” he greeted me genially.  “I’m just finishing the finishing
+touches.  Want to see it work?”
+
+“But what is it?” I asked.
+
+“A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to kindergarten
+simplicity,” he answered gaily.  “From to-day a child will be able to
+navigate a ship.  No more long-winded calculations.  All you need is one
+star in the sky on a dirty night to know instantly where you are.  Look.
+I place the transparent scale on this star-map, revolving the scale on
+the North Pole.  On the scale I’ve worked out the circles of altitude and
+the lines of bearing.  All I do is to put it on a star, revolve the scale
+till it is opposite those figures on the map underneath, and presto!
+there you are, the ship’s precise location!”
+
+There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear blue this
+morning as the sea, were sparkling with light.
+
+“You must be well up in mathematics,” I said.  “Where did you go to
+school?”
+
+“Never saw the inside of one, worse luck,” was the answer.  “I had to dig
+it out for myself.”
+
+“And why do you think I have made this thing?” he demanded, abruptly.
+“Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?”  He laughed one of
+his horrible mocking laughs.  “Not at all.  To get it patented, to make
+money from it, to revel in piggishness with all night in while other men
+do the work.  That’s my purpose.  Also, I have enjoyed working it out.”
+
+“The creative joy,” I murmured.
+
+“I guess that’s what it ought to be called.  Which is another way of
+expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of movement
+over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the yeast because
+it is yeast and crawls.”
+
+I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate
+materialism and went about making the bed.  He continued copying lines
+and figures upon the transparent scale.  It was a task requiring the
+utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but admire the way he
+tempered his strength to the fineness and delicacy of the need.
+
+When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a
+fascinated sort of way.  He was certainly a handsome man—beautiful in the
+masculine sense.  And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked the
+total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness in his face.  It
+was the face, I am convinced, of a man who did no wrong.  And by this I
+do not wish to be misunderstood.  What I mean is that it was the face of
+a man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience,
+or who had no conscience.  I am inclined to the latter way of accounting
+for it.  He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he
+was of the type that came into the world before the development of the
+moral nature.  He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.
+
+As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face.
+Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and sharp
+as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a
+dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added both to his
+savagery and his beauty.  The lips were full, yet possessed of the
+firmness, almost harshness, which is characteristic of thin lips.  The
+set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all
+the fierceness and indomitableness of the male—the nose also.  It was the
+nose of a being born to conquer and command.  It just hinted of the eagle
+beak.  It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, only it was
+a shade too massive for the one, a shade too delicate for the other.  And
+while the whole face was the incarnation of fierceness and strength, the
+primal melancholy from which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines of
+mouth and eye and brow, seemed to give a largeness and completeness which
+otherwise the face would have lacked.
+
+And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him.  I cannot say how
+greatly the man had come to interest me.  Who was he?  What was he?  How
+had he happened to be?  All powers seemed his, all potentialities—why,
+then, was he no more than the obscure master of a seal-hunting schooner
+with a reputation for frightful brutality amongst the men who hunted
+seals?
+
+My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech.
+
+“Why is it that you have not done great things in this world?  With the
+power that is yours you might have risen to any height.  Unpossessed of
+conscience or moral instinct, you might have mastered the world, broken
+it to your hand.  And yet here you are, at the top of your life, where
+diminishing and dying begin, living an obscure and sordid existence,
+hunting sea animals for the satisfaction of woman’s vanity and love of
+decoration, revelling in a piggishness, to use your own words, which is
+anything and everything except splendid.  Why, with all that wonderful
+strength, have you not done something?  There was nothing to stop you,
+nothing that could stop you.  What was wrong?  Did you lack ambition?
+Did you fall under temptation?  What was the matter?  What was the
+matter?”
+
+He had lifted his eyes to me at the commencement of my outburst, and
+followed me complacently until I had done and stood before him breathless
+and dismayed.  He waited a moment, as though seeking where to begin, and
+then said:
+
+“Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth to sow?  If
+you will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony places, where there
+was not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up because they had no
+deepness of earth.  And when the sun was up they were scorched, and
+because they had no root they withered away.  And some fell among thorns,
+and the thorns sprung up and choked them.”
+
+“Well?” I said.
+
+“Well?” he queried, half petulantly.  “It was not well.  I was one of
+those seeds.”
+
+He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying.  I finished my
+work and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke to me.
+
+“Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway you will
+see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord.  I was born within a hundred
+miles of that stretch of water.  But I was not born Norwegian.  I am a
+Dane.  My father and mother were Danes, and how they ever came to that
+bleak bight of land on the west coast I do not know.  I never heard.
+Outside of that there is nothing mysterious.  They were poor people and
+unlettered.  They came of generations of poor unlettered people—peasants
+of the sea who sowed their sons on the waves as has been their custom
+since time began.  There is no more to tell.”
+
+“But there is,” I objected.  “It is still obscure to me.”
+
+“What can I tell you?” he demanded, with a recrudescence of fierceness.
+“Of the meagreness of a child’s life? of fish diet and coarse living? of
+going out with the boats from the time I could crawl? of my brothers, who
+went away one by one to the deep-sea farming and never came back? of
+myself, unable to read or write, cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on
+the coastwise, old-country ships? of the rough fare and rougher usage,
+where kicks and blows were bed and breakfast and took the place of
+speech, and fear and hatred and pain were my only soul-experiences?  I do
+not care to remember.  A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think
+of it.  But there were coastwise skippers I would have returned and
+killed when a man’s strength came to me, only the lines of my life were
+cast at the time in other places.  I did return, not long ago, but
+unfortunately the skippers were dead, all but one, a mate in the old
+days, a skipper when I met him, and when I left him a cripple who would
+never walk again.”
+
+“But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the inside of a
+school, how did you learn to read and write?” I queried.
+
+“In the English merchant service.  Cabin-boy at twelve, ship’s boy at
+fourteen, ordinary seaman at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen, and cock
+of the fo’c’sle, infinite ambition and infinite loneliness, receiving
+neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for myself—navigation,
+mathematics, science, literature, and what not.  And of what use has it
+been?  Master and owner of a ship at the top of my life, as you say, when
+I am beginning to diminish and die.  Paltry, isn’t it?  And when the sun
+was up I was scorched, and because I had no root I withered away.”
+
+“But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple,” I chided.
+
+“And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who rose to
+the purple,” he answered grimly.  “No man makes opportunity.  All the
+great men ever did was to know it when it came to them.  The Corsican
+knew.  I have dreamed as greatly as the Corsican.  I should have known
+the opportunity, but it never came.  The thorns sprung up and choked me.
+And, Hump, I can tell you that you know more about me than any living
+man, except my own brother.”
+
+“And what is he?  And where is he?”
+
+“Master of the steamship _Macedonia_, seal-hunter,” was the answer.  “We
+will meet him most probably on the Japan coast.  Men call him ‘Death’
+Larsen.”
+
+“Death Larsen!” I involuntarily cried.  “Is he like you?”
+
+“Hardly.  He is a lump of an animal without any head.  He has all my—my—”
+
+“Brutishness,” I suggested.
+
+“Yes,—thank you for the word,—all my brutishness, but he can scarcely
+read or write.”
+
+“And he has never philosophized on life,” I added.
+
+“No,” Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness.  “And
+he is all the happier for leaving life alone.  He is too busy living it
+to think about it.  My mistake was in ever opening the books.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+The _Ghost_ has attained the southernmost point of the arc she is
+describing across the Pacific, and is already beginning to edge away to
+the west and north toward some lone island, it is rumoured, where she
+will fill her water-casks before proceeding to the season’s hunt along
+the coast of Japan.  The hunters have experimented and practised with
+their rifles and shotguns till they are satisfied, and the boat-pullers
+and steerers have made their spritsails, bound the oars and rowlocks in
+leather and sennit so that they will make no noise when creeping on the
+seals, and put their boats in apple-pie order—to use Leach’s homely
+phrase.
+
+His arm, by the way, has healed nicely, though the scar will remain all
+his life.  Thomas Mugridge lives in mortal fear of him, and is afraid to
+venture on deck after dark.  There are two or three standing quarrels in
+the forecastle.  Louis tells me that the gossip of the sailors finds its
+way aft, and that two of the telltales have been badly beaten by their
+mates.  He shakes his head dubiously over the outlook for the man
+Johnson, who is boat-puller in the same boat with him.  Johnson has been
+guilty of speaking his mind too freely, and has collided two or three
+times with Wolf Larsen over the pronunciation of his name.  Johansen he
+thrashed on the amidships deck the other night, since which time the mate
+has called him by his proper name.  But of course it is out of the
+question that Johnson should thrash Wolf Larsen.
+
+Louis has also given me additional information about Death Larsen, which
+tallies with the captain’s brief description.  We may expect to meet
+Death Larsen on the Japan coast.  “And look out for squalls,” is Louis’s
+prophecy, “for they hate one another like the wolf whelps they are.”
+Death Larsen is in command of the only sealing steamer in the fleet, the
+_Macedonia_, which carries fourteen boats, whereas the rest of the
+schooners carry only six.  There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of
+strange raids and expeditions she may make, ranging from opium smuggling
+into the States and arms smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open
+piracy.  Yet I cannot but believe for I have never yet caught him in a
+lie, while he has a cyclopædic knowledge of sealing and the men of the
+sealing fleets.
+
+As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and aft, on
+this veritable hell-ship.  Men fight and struggle ferociously for one
+another’s lives.  The hunters are looking for a shooting scrape at any
+moment between Smoke and Henderson, whose old quarrel has not healed,
+while Wolf Larsen says positively that he will kill the survivor of the
+affair, if such affair comes off.  He frankly states that the position he
+takes is based on no moral grounds, that all the hunters could kill and
+eat one another so far as he is concerned, were it not that he needs them
+alive for the hunting.  If they will only hold their hands until the
+season is over, he promises them a royal carnival, when all grudges can
+be settled and the survivors may toss the non-survivors overboard and
+arrange a story as to how the missing men were lost at sea.  I think even
+the hunters are appalled at his cold-bloodedness.  Wicked men though they
+be, they are certainly very much afraid of him.
+
+Thomas Mugridge is cur-like in his subjection to me, while I go about in
+secret dread of him.  His is the courage of fear,—a strange thing I know
+well of myself,—and at any moment it may master the fear and impel him to
+the taking of my life.  My knee is much better, though it often aches for
+long periods, and the stiffness is gradually leaving the arm which Wolf
+Larsen squeezed.  Otherwise I am in splendid condition, feel that I am in
+splendid condition.  My muscles are growing harder and increasing in
+size.  My hands, however, are a spectacle for grief.  They have a
+parboiled appearance, are afflicted with hang-nails, while the nails are
+broken and discoloured, and the edges of the quick seem to be assuming a
+fungoid sort of growth.  Also, I am suffering from boils, due to the
+diet, most likely, for I was never afflicted in this manner before.
+
+I was amused, a couple of evenings back, by seeing Wolf Larsen reading
+the Bible, a copy of which, after the futile search for one at the
+beginning of the voyage, had been found in the dead mate’s sea-chest.  I
+wondered what Wolf Larsen could get from it, and he read aloud to me from
+Ecclesiastes.  I could imagine he was speaking the thoughts of his own
+mind as he read to me, and his voice, reverberating deeply and mournfully
+in the confined cabin, charmed and held me.  He may be uneducated, but he
+certainly knows how to express the significance of the written word.  I
+can hear him now, as I shall always hear him, the primal melancholy
+vibrant in his voice as he read:
+
+    “I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of
+    kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers,
+    and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that
+    of all sorts.
+
+    “So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in
+    Jerusalem; also my wisdom returned with me.
+
+    “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on the
+    labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity and
+    vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.
+
+    “All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous
+    and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
+    to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the
+    good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
+    oath.
+
+    “This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that
+    there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men
+    is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and
+    after that they go to the dead.
+
+    “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a
+    living dog is better than a dead lion.
+
+    “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not
+    anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them
+    is forgotten.
+
+    “Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;
+    neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is
+    done under the sun.”
+
+“There you have it, Hump,” he said, closing the book upon his finger and
+looking up at me.  “The Preacher who was king over Israel in Jerusalem
+thought as I think.  You call me a pessimist.  Is not this pessimism of
+the blackest?—‘All is vanity and vexation of spirit,’ ‘There is no profit
+under the sun,’ ‘There is one event unto all,’ to the fool and the wise,
+the clean and the unclean, the sinner and the saint, and that event is
+death, and an evil thing, he says.  For the Preacher loved life, and did
+not want to die, saying, ‘For a living dog is better than a dead lion.’
+He preferred the vanity and vexation to the silence and unmovableness of
+the grave.  And so I.  To crawl is piggish; but to not crawl, to be as
+the clod and rock, is loathsome to contemplate.  It is loathsome to the
+life that is in me, the very essence of which is movement, the power of
+movement, and the consciousness of the power of movement.  Life itself is
+unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is greater unsatisfaction.”
+
+“You are worse off than Omar,” I said.  “He, at least, after the
+customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his materialism a
+joyous thing.”
+
+“Who was Omar?” Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more work that day, nor
+the next, nor the next.
+
+In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rubáiyát, and it was
+to him like a great find of treasure.  Much I remembered, possibly
+two-thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out the remainder
+without difficulty.  We talked for hours over single stanzas, and I found
+him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion which, for the
+life of me, I could not discover myself.  Possibly I recited with a
+certain joyous lilt which was my own, for—his memory was good, and at a
+second rendering, very often the first, he made a quatrain his own—he
+recited the same lines and invested them with an unrest and passionate
+revolt that was well-nigh convincing.
+
+I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was not
+surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant’s irritability, and
+quite at variance with the Persian’s complacent philosophy and genial
+code of life:
+
+   “What, without asking, hither hurried _Whence_?
+   And, without asking, _Whither_ hurried hence!
+      Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
+   Must drown the memory of that insolence!”
+
+“Great!” Wolf Larsen cried.  “Great!  That’s the keynote.  Insolence!  He
+could not have used a better word.”
+
+In vain I objected and denied.  He deluged me, overwhelmed me with
+argument.
+
+“It’s not the nature of life to be otherwise.  Life, when it knows that
+it must cease living, will always rebel.  It cannot help itself.  The
+Preacher found life and the works of life all a vanity and vexation, an
+evil thing; but death, the ceasing to be able to be vain and vexed, he
+found an eviler thing.  Through chapter after chapter he is worried by
+the one event that cometh to all alike.  So Omar, so I, so you, even you,
+for you rebelled against dying when Cooky sharpened a knife for you.  You
+were afraid to die; the life that was in you, that composes you, that is
+greater than you, did not want to die.  You have talked of the instinct
+of immortality.  I talk of the instinct of life, which is to live, and
+which, when death looms near and large, masters the instinct, so called,
+of immortality.  It mastered it in you (you cannot deny it), because a
+crazy Cockney cook sharpened a knife.
+
+“You are afraid of him now.  You are afraid of me.  You cannot deny it.
+If I should catch you by the throat, thus,”—his hand was about my throat
+and my breath was shut off,—“and began to press the life out of you thus,
+and thus, your instinct of immortality will go glimmering, and your
+instinct of life, which is longing for life, will flutter up, and you
+will struggle to save yourself.  Eh?  I see the fear of death in your
+eyes.  You beat the air with your arms.  You exert all your puny strength
+to struggle to live.  Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as
+a butterfly resting there.  Your chest is heaving, your tongue
+protruding, your skin turning dark, your eyes swimming.  ‘To live!  To
+live!  To live!’ you are crying; and you are crying to live here and now,
+not hereafter.  You doubt your immortality, eh?  Ha! ha!  You are not
+sure of it.  You won’t chance it.  This life only you are certain is
+real.  Ah, it is growing dark and darker.  It is the darkness of death,
+the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is
+gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around you.  Your eyes
+are becoming set.  They are glazing.  My voice sounds faint and far.  You
+cannot see my face.  And still you struggle in my grip.  You kick with
+your legs.  Your body draws itself up in knots like a snake’s.  Your
+chest heaves and strains.  To live!  To live!  To live—”
+
+I heard no more.  Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he had so
+graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on the floor
+and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully with that old
+familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.
+
+“Well, have I convinced you?” he demanded.  “Here take a drink of this.
+I want to ask you some questions.”
+
+I rolled my head negatively on the floor.  “Your arguments are
+too—er—forcible,” I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to my
+aching throat.
+
+“You’ll be all right in half-an-hour,” he assured me.  “And I promise I
+won’t use any more physical demonstrations.  Get up now.  You can sit on
+a chair.”
+
+And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the
+Preacher was resumed.  And half the night we sat up over it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The last twenty-four hours have witnessed a carnival of brutality.  From
+cabin to forecastle it seems to have broken out like a contagion.  I
+scarcely know where to begin.  Wolf Larsen was really the cause of it.
+The relations among the men, strained and made tense by feuds, quarrels
+and grudges, were in a state of unstable equilibrium, and evil passions
+flared up in flame like prairie-grass.
+
+Thomas Mugridge is a sneak, a spy, an informer.  He has been attempting
+to curry favour and reinstate himself in the good graces of the captain
+by carrying tales of the men forward.  He it was, I know, that carried
+some of Johnson’s hasty talk to Wolf Larsen.  Johnson, it seems, bought a
+suit of oilskins from the slop-chest and found them to be of greatly
+inferior quality.  Nor was he slow in advertising the fact.  The
+slop-chest is a sort of miniature dry-goods store which is carried by all
+sealing schooners and which is stocked with articles peculiar to the
+needs of the sailors.  Whatever a sailor purchases is taken from his
+subsequent earnings on the sealing grounds; for, as it is with the
+hunters so it is with the boat-pullers and steerers—in the place of wages
+they receive a “lay,” a rate of so much per skin for every skin captured
+in their particular boat.
+
+But of Johnson’s grumbling at the slop-chest I knew nothing, so that what
+I witnessed came with a shock of sudden surprise.  I had just finished
+sweeping the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf Larsen into a
+discussion of Hamlet, his favourite Shakespearian character, when
+Johansen descended the companion stairs followed by Johnson.  The
+latter’s cap came off after the custom of the sea, and he stood
+respectfully in the centre of the cabin, swaying heavily and uneasily to
+the roll of the schooner and facing the captain.
+
+“Shut the doors and draw the slide,” Wolf Larsen said to me.
+
+As I obeyed I noticed an anxious light come into Johnson’s eyes, but I
+did not dream of its cause.  I did not dream of what was to occur until
+it did occur, but he knew from the very first what was coming and awaited
+it bravely.  And in his action I found complete refutation of all Wolf
+Larsen’s materialism.  The sailor Johnson was swayed by idea, by
+principle, and truth, and sincerity.  He was right, he knew he was right,
+and he was unafraid.  He would die for the right if needs be, he would be
+true to himself, sincere with his soul.  And in this was portrayed the
+victory of the spirit over the flesh, the indomitability and moral
+grandeur of the soul that knows no restriction and rises above time and
+space and matter with a surety and invincibleness born of nothing else
+than eternity and immortality.
+
+But to return.  I noticed the anxious light in Johnson’s eyes, but
+mistook it for the native shyness and embarrassment of the man.  The
+mate, Johansen, stood away several feet to the side of him, and fully
+three yards in front of him sat Wolf Larsen on one of the pivotal cabin
+chairs.  An appreciable pause fell after I had closed the doors and drawn
+the slide, a pause that must have lasted fully a minute.  It was broken
+by Wolf Larsen.
+
+“Yonson,” he began.
+
+“My name is Johnson, sir,” the sailor boldly corrected.
+
+“Well, Johnson, then, damn you!  Can you guess why I have sent for you?”
+
+“Yes, and no, sir,” was the slow reply.  “My work is done well.  The mate
+knows that, and you know it, sir.  So there cannot be any complaint.”
+
+“And is that all?” Wolf Larsen queried, his voice soft, and low, and
+purring.
+
+“I know you have it in for me,” Johnson continued with his unalterable
+and ponderous slowness.  “You do not like me.  You—you—”
+
+“Go on,” Wolf Larsen prompted.  “Don’t be afraid of my feelings.”
+
+“I am not afraid,” the sailor retorted, a slight angry flush rising
+through his sunburn.  “If I speak not fast, it is because I have not been
+from the old country as long as you.  You do not like me because I am too
+much of a man; that is why, sir.”
+
+“You are too much of a man for ship discipline, if that is what you mean,
+and if you know what I mean,” was Wolf Larsen’s retort.
+
+“I know English, and I know what you mean, sir,” Johnson answered, his
+flush deepening at the slur on his knowledge of the English language.
+
+“Johnson,” Wolf Larsen said, with an air of dismissing all that had gone
+before as introductory to the main business in hand, “I understand you’re
+not quite satisfied with those oilskins?”
+
+“No, I am not.  They are no good, sir.”
+
+“And you’ve been shooting off your mouth about them.”
+
+“I say what I think, sir,” the sailor answered courageously, not failing
+at the same time in ship courtesy, which demanded that “sir” be appended
+to each speech he made.
+
+It was at this moment that I chanced to glance at Johansen.  His big
+fists were clenching and unclenching, and his face was positively
+fiendish, so malignantly did he look at Johnson.  I noticed a black
+discoloration, still faintly visible, under Johansen’s eye, a mark of the
+thrashing he had received a few nights before from the sailor.  For the
+first time I began to divine that something terrible was about to be
+enacted,—what, I could not imagine.
+
+“Do you know what happens to men who say what you’ve said about my
+slop-chest and me?” Wolf Larsen was demanding.
+
+“I know, sir,” was the answer.
+
+“What?” Wolf Larsen demanded, sharply and imperatively.
+
+“What you and the mate there are going to do to me, sir.”
+
+“Look at him, Hump,” Wolf Larsen said to me, “look at this bit of
+animated dust, this aggregation of matter that moves and breathes and
+defies me and thoroughly believes itself to be compounded of something
+good; that is impressed with certain human fictions such as righteousness
+and honesty, and that will live up to them in spite of all personal
+discomforts and menaces.  What do you think of him, Hump?  What do you
+think of him?”
+
+“I think that he is a better man than you are,” I answered, impelled,
+somehow, with a desire to draw upon myself a portion of the wrath I felt
+was about to break upon his head.  “His human fictions, as you choose to
+call them, make for nobility and manhood.  You have no fictions, no
+dreams, no ideals.  You are a pauper.”
+
+He nodded his head with a savage pleasantness.  “Quite true, Hump, quite
+true.  I have no fictions that make for nobility and manhood.  A living
+dog is better than a dead lion, say I with the Preacher.  My only
+doctrine is the doctrine of expediency, and it makes for surviving.  This
+bit of the ferment we call ‘Johnson,’ when he is no longer a bit of the
+ferment, only dust and ashes, will have no more nobility than any dust
+and ashes, while I shall still be alive and roaring.”
+
+“Do you know what I am going to do?” he questioned.
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“Well, I am going to exercise my prerogative of roaring and show you how
+fares nobility.  Watch me.”
+
+Three yards away from Johnson he was, and sitting down.  Nine feet!  And
+yet he left the chair in full leap, without first gaining a standing
+position.  He left the chair, just as he sat in it, squarely, springing
+from the sitting posture like a wild animal, a tiger, and like a tiger
+covered the intervening space.  It was an avalanche of fury that Johnson
+strove vainly to fend off.  He threw one arm down to protect the stomach,
+the other arm up to protect the head; but Wolf Larsen’s fist drove midway
+between, on the chest, with a crushing, resounding impact.  Johnson’s
+breath, suddenly expelled, shot from his mouth and as suddenly checked,
+with the forced, audible expiration of a man wielding an axe.  He almost
+fell backward, and swayed from side to side in an effort to recover his
+balance.
+
+I cannot give the further particulars of the horrible scene that
+followed.  It was too revolting.  It turns me sick even now when I think
+of it.  Johnson fought bravely enough, but he was no match for Wolf
+Larsen, much less for Wolf Larsen and the mate.  It was frightful.  I had
+not imagined a human being could endure so much and still live and
+struggle on.  And struggle on Johnson did.  Of course there was no hope
+for him, not the slightest, and he knew it as well as I, but by the
+manhood that was in him he could not cease from fighting for that
+manhood.
+
+It was too much for me to witness.  I felt that I should lose my mind,
+and I ran up the companion stairs to open the doors and escape on deck.
+But Wolf Larsen, leaving his victim for the moment, and with one of his
+tremendous springs, gained my side and flung me into the far corner of
+the cabin.
+
+“The phenomena of life, Hump,” he girded at me.  “Stay and watch it.  You
+may gather data on the immortality of the soul.  Besides, you know, we
+can’t hurt Johnson’s soul.  It’s only the fleeting form we may demolish.”
+
+It seemed centuries—possibly it was no more than ten minutes that the
+beating continued.  Wolf Larsen and Johansen were all about the poor
+fellow.  They struck him with their fists, kicked him with their heavy
+shoes, knocked him down, and dragged him to his feet to knock him down
+again.  His eyes were blinded so that he could not see, and the blood
+running from ears and nose and mouth turned the cabin into a shambles.
+And when he could no longer rise they still continued to beat and kick
+him where he lay.
+
+“Easy, Johansen; easy as she goes,” Wolf Larsen finally said.
+
+But the beast in the mate was up and rampant, and Wolf Larsen was
+compelled to brush him away with a back-handed sweep of the arm, gentle
+enough, apparently, but which hurled Johansen back like a cork, driving
+his head against the wall with a crash.  He fell to the floor, half
+stunned for the moment, breathing heavily and blinking his eyes in a
+stupid sort of way.
+
+“Jerk open the doors, Hump,” I was commanded.
+
+I obeyed, and the two brutes picked up the senseless man like a sack of
+rubbish and hove him clear up the companion stairs, through the narrow
+doorway, and out on deck.  The blood from his nose gushed in a scarlet
+stream over the feet of the helmsman, who was none other than Louis, his
+boat-mate.  But Louis took and gave a spoke and gazed imperturbably into
+the binnacle.
+
+Not so was the conduct of George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy.  Fore
+and aft there was nothing that could have surprised us more than his
+consequent behaviour.  He it was that came up on the poop without orders
+and dragged Johnson forward, where he set about dressing his wounds as
+well as he could and making him comfortable.  Johnson, as Johnson, was
+unrecognizable; and not only that, for his features, as human features at
+all, were unrecognizable, so discoloured and swollen had they become in
+the few minutes which had elapsed between the beginning of the beating
+and the dragging forward of the body.
+
+But of Leach’s behaviour—By the time I had finished cleansing the cabin
+he had taken care of Johnson.  I had come up on deck for a breath of
+fresh air and to try to get some repose for my overwrought nerves.  Wolf
+Larsen was smoking a cigar and examining the patent log which the _Ghost_
+usually towed astern, but which had been hauled in for some purpose.
+Suddenly Leach’s voice came to my ears.  It was tense and hoarse with an
+overmastering rage.  I turned and saw him standing just beneath the break
+of the poop on the port side of the galley.  His face was convulsed and
+white, his eyes were flashing, his clenched fists raised overhead.
+
+“May God damn your soul to hell, Wolf Larsen, only hell’s too good for
+you, you coward, you murderer, you pig!” was his opening salutation.
+
+I was thunderstruck.  I looked for his instant annihilation.  But it was
+not Wolf Larsen’s whim to annihilate him.  He sauntered slowly forward to
+the break of the poop, and, leaning his elbow on the corner of the cabin,
+gazed down thoughtfully and curiously at the excited boy.
+
+And the boy indicted Wolf Larsen as he had never been indicted before.
+The sailors assembled in a fearful group just outside the forecastle
+scuttle and watched and listened.  The hunters piled pell-mell out of the
+steerage, but as Leach’s tirade continued I saw that there was no levity
+in their faces.  Even they were frightened, not at the boy’s terrible
+words, but at his terrible audacity.  It did not seem possible that any
+living creature could thus beard Wolf Larsen in his teeth.  I know for
+myself that I was shocked into admiration of the boy, and I saw in him
+the splendid invincibleness of immortality rising above the flesh and the
+fears of the flesh, as in the prophets of old, to condemn
+unrighteousness.
+
+And such condemnation!  He haled forth Wolf Larsen’s soul naked to the
+scorn of men.  He rained upon it curses from God and High Heaven, and
+withered it with a heat of invective that savoured of a mediæval
+excommunication of the Catholic Church.  He ran the gamut of
+denunciation, rising to heights of wrath that were sublime and almost
+Godlike, and from sheer exhaustion sinking to the vilest and most
+indecent abuse.
+
+His rage was a madness.  His lips were flecked with a soapy froth, and
+sometimes he choked and gurgled and became inarticulate.  And through it
+all, calm and impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing down, Wolf
+Larsen seemed lost in a great curiosity.  This wild stirring of yeasty
+life, this terrific revolt and defiance of matter that moved, perplexed
+and interested him.
+
+Each moment I looked, and everybody looked, for him to leap upon the boy
+and destroy him.  But it was not his whim.  His cigar went out, and he
+continued to gaze silently and curiously.
+
+Leach had worked himself into an ecstasy of impotent rage.
+
+“Pig!  Pig!  Pig!” he was reiterating at the top of his lungs.  “Why
+don’t you come down and kill me, you murderer?  You can do it!  I ain’t
+afraid!  There’s no one to stop you!  Damn sight better dead and outa
+your reach than alive and in your clutches!  Come on, you coward!  Kill
+me!  Kill me!  Kill me!”
+
+It was at this stage that Thomas Mugridge’s erratic soul brought him into
+the scene.  He had been listening at the galley door, but he now came
+out, ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side, but obviously to see
+the killing he was certain would take place.  He smirked greasily up into
+the face of Wolf Larsen, who seemed not to see him.  But the Cockney was
+unabashed, though mad, stark mad.  He turned to Leach, saying:
+
+“Such langwidge!  Shockin’!”
+
+Leach’s rage was no longer impotent.  Here at last was something ready to
+hand.  And for the first time since the stabbing the Cockney had appeared
+outside the galley without his knife.  The words had barely left his
+mouth when he was knocked down by Leach.  Three times he struggled to his
+feet, striving to gain the galley, and each time was knocked down.
+
+“Oh, Lord!” he cried.  “’Elp!  ’Elp!  Tyke ’im aw’y, carn’t yer?  Tyke
+’im aw’y!”
+
+The hunters laughed from sheer relief.  Tragedy had dwindled, the farce
+had begun.  The sailors now crowded boldly aft, grinning and shuffling,
+to watch the pummelling of the hated Cockney.  And even I felt a great
+joy surge up within me.  I confess that I delighted in this beating Leach
+was giving to Thomas Mugridge, though it was as terrible, almost, as the
+one Mugridge had caused to be given to Johnson.  But the expression of
+Wolf Larsen’s face never changed.  He did not change his position either,
+but continued to gaze down with a great curiosity.  For all his pragmatic
+certitude, it seemed as if he watched the play and movement of life in
+the hope of discovering something more about it, of discerning in its
+maddest writhings a something which had hitherto escaped him,—the key to
+its mystery, as it were, which would make all clear and plain.
+
+But the beating!  It was quite similar to the one I had witnessed in the
+cabin.  The Cockney strove in vain to protect himself from the infuriated
+boy.  And in vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin.  He rolled
+toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down.
+But blow followed blow with bewildering rapidity.  He was knocked about
+like a shuttlecock, until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and
+kicked as he lay helpless on the deck.  And no one interfered.  Leach
+could have killed him, but, having evidently filled the measure of his
+vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate foe, who was whimpering and
+wailing in a puppyish sort of way, and walked forward.
+
+But these two affairs were only the opening events of the day’s
+programme.  In the afternoon Smoke and Henderson fell foul of each other,
+and a fusillade of shots came up from the steerage, followed by a
+stampede of the other four hunters for the deck.  A column of thick,
+acrid smoke—the kind always made by black powder—was arising through the
+open companion-way, and down through it leaped Wolf Larsen.  The sound of
+blows and scuffling came to our ears.  Both men were wounded, and he was
+thrashing them both for having disobeyed his orders and crippled
+themselves in advance of the hunting season.  In fact, they were badly
+wounded, and, having thrashed them, he proceeded to operate upon them in
+a rough surgical fashion and to dress their wounds.  I served as
+assistant while he probed and cleansed the passages made by the bullets,
+and I saw the two men endure his crude surgery without anæsthetics and
+with no more to uphold them than a stiff tumbler of whisky.
+
+Then, in the first dog-watch, trouble came to a head in the forecastle.
+It took its rise out of the tittle-tattle and tale-bearing which had been
+the cause of Johnson’s beating, and from the noise we heard, and from the
+sight of the bruised men next day, it was patent that half the forecastle
+had soundly drubbed the other half.
+
+The second dog-watch and the day were wound up by a fight between
+Johansen and the lean, Yankee-looking hunter, Latimer.  It was caused by
+remarks of Latimer’s concerning the noises made by the mate in his sleep,
+and though Johansen was whipped, he kept the steerage awake for the rest
+of the night while he blissfully slumbered and fought the fight over and
+over again.
+
+As for myself, I was oppressed with nightmare.  The day had been like
+some horrible dream.  Brutality had followed brutality, and flaming
+passions and cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek one another’s
+lives, and to strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy.  My nerves were
+shocked.  My mind itself was shocked.  All my days had been passed in
+comparative ignorance of the animality of man.  In fact, I had known life
+only in its intellectual phases.  Brutality I had experienced, but it was
+the brutality of the intellect—the cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth,
+the cruel epigrams and occasional harsh witticisms of the fellows at the
+Bibelot, and the nasty remarks of some of the professors during my
+undergraduate days.
+
+That was all.  But that men should wreak their anger on others by the
+bruising of the flesh and the letting of blood was something strangely
+and fearfully new to me.  Not for nothing had I been called “Sissy” Van
+Weyden, I thought, as I tossed restlessly on my bunk between one
+nightmare and another.  And it seemed to me that my innocence of the
+realities of life had been complete indeed.  I laughed bitterly to
+myself, and seemed to find in Wolf Larsen’s forbidding philosophy a more
+adequate explanation of life than I found in my own.
+
+And I was frightened when I became conscious of the trend of my thought.
+The continual brutality around me was degenerative in its effect.  It bid
+fair to destroy for me all that was best and brightest in life.  My
+reason dictated that the beating Thomas Mugridge had received was an ill
+thing, and yet for the life of me I could not prevent my soul joying in
+it.  And even while I was oppressed by the enormity of my sin,—for sin it
+was,—I chuckled with an insane delight.  I was no longer Humphrey Van
+Weyden.  I was Hump, cabin-boy on the schooner _Ghost_.  Wolf Larsen was
+my captain, Thomas Mugridge and the rest were my companions, and I was
+receiving repeated impresses from the die which had stamped them all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+For three days I did my own work and Thomas Mugridge’s too; and I flatter
+myself that I did his work well.  I know that it won Wolf Larsen’s
+approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction during the brief
+time my _régime_ lasted.
+
+“The first clean bite since I come aboard,” Harrison said to me at the
+galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans from the forecastle.
+“Somehow Tommy’s grub always tastes of grease, stale grease, and I reckon
+he ain’t changed his shirt since he left ’Frisco.”
+
+“I know he hasn’t,” I answered.
+
+“And I’ll bet he sleeps in it,” Harrison added.
+
+“And you won’t lose,” I agreed.  “The same shirt, and he hasn’t had it
+off once in all this time.”
+
+But three days was all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to recover from
+the effects of the beating.  On the fourth day, lame and sore, scarcely
+able to see, so closed were his eyes, he was haled from his bunk by the
+nape of the neck and set to his duty.  He sniffled and wept, but Wolf
+Larsen was pitiless.
+
+“And see that you serve no more slops,” was his parting injunction.  “No
+more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean shirt occasionally, or you’ll get
+a tow over the side.  Understand?”
+
+Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and a short lurch
+of the _Ghost_ sent him staggering.  In attempting to recover himself, he
+reached for the iron railing which surrounded the stove and kept the pots
+from sliding off; but he missed the railing, and his hand, with his
+weight behind it, landed squarely on the hot surface.  There was a sizzle
+and odour of burning flesh, and a sharp cry of pain.
+
+“Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot ’ave I done?” he wailed; sitting down in the
+coal-box and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth.  “W’y ’as
+all this come on me?  It mykes me fair sick, it does, an’ I try so ’ard
+to go through life ’armless an’ ’urtin’ nobody.”
+
+The tears were running down his puffed and discoloured cheeks, and his
+face was drawn with pain.  A savage expression flitted across it.
+
+“Oh, ’ow I ’ate ’im!  ’Ow I ’ate ’im!” he gritted out.
+
+“Whom?” I asked; but the poor wretch was weeping again over his
+misfortunes.  Less difficult it was to guess whom he hated than whom he
+did not hate.  For I had come to see a malignant devil in him which
+impelled him to hate all the world.  I sometimes thought that he hated
+even himself, so grotesquely had life dealt with him, and so monstrously.
+At such moments a great sympathy welled up within me, and I felt shame
+that I had ever joyed in his discomfiture or pain.  Life had been unfair
+to him.  It had played him a scurvy trick when it fashioned him into the
+thing he was, and it had played him scurvy tricks ever since.  What
+chance had he to be anything else than he was?  And as though answering
+my unspoken thought, he wailed:
+
+“I never ’ad no chance, not ’arf a chance!  ’Oo was there to send me to
+school, or put tommy in my ’ungry belly, or wipe my bloody nose for me,
+w’en I was a kiddy?  ’Oo ever did anything for me, heh?  ’Oo, I s’y?”
+
+“Never mind, Tommy,” I said, placing a soothing hand on his shoulder.
+“Cheer up.  It’ll all come right in the end.  You’ve long years before
+you, and you can make anything you please of yourself.”
+
+“It’s a lie! a bloody lie!” he shouted in my face, flinging off the hand.
+“It’s a lie, and you know it.  I’m already myde, an’ myde out of leavin’s
+an’ scraps.  It’s all right for you, ’Ump.  You was born a gentleman.
+You never knew wot it was to go ’ungry, to cry yerself asleep with yer
+little belly gnawin’ an’ gnawin’, like a rat inside yer.  It carn’t come
+right.  If I was President of the United Stytes to-morrer, ’ow would it
+fill my belly for one time w’en I was a kiddy and it went empty?
+
+“’Ow could it, I s’y?  I was born to sufferin’ and sorrer.  I’ve had more
+cruel sufferin’ than any ten men, I ’ave.  I’ve been in orspital arf my
+bleedin’ life.  I’ve ’ad the fever in Aspinwall, in ’Avana, in New
+Orleans.  I near died of the scurvy and was rotten with it six months in
+Barbadoes.  Smallpox in ’Onolulu, two broken legs in Shanghai, pnuemonia
+in Unalaska, three busted ribs an’ my insides all twisted in ’Frisco.
+An’ ’ere I am now.  Look at me!  Look at me!  My ribs kicked loose from
+my back again.  I’ll be coughin’ blood before eyght bells.  ’Ow can it be
+myde up to me, I arsk?  ’Oo’s goin’ to do it?  Gawd?  ’Ow Gawd must ’ave
+’ated me w’en ’e signed me on for a voyage in this bloomin’ world of
+’is!”
+
+This tirade against destiny went on for an hour or more, and then he
+buckled to his work, limping and groaning, and in his eyes a great hatred
+for all created things.  His diagnosis was correct, however, for he was
+seized with occasional sicknesses, during which he vomited blood and
+suffered great pain.  And as he said, it seemed God hated him too much to
+let him die, for he ultimately grew better and waxed more malignant than
+ever.
+
+Several days more passed before Johnson crawled on deck and went about
+his work in a half-hearted way.  He was still a sick man, and I more than
+once observed him creeping painfully aloft to a topsail, or drooping
+wearily as he stood at the wheel.  But, still worse, it seemed that his
+spirit was broken.  He was abject before Wolf Larsen and almost grovelled
+to Johansen.  Not so was the conduct of Leach.  He went about the deck
+like a tiger cub, glaring his hatred openly at Wolf Larsen and Johansen.
+
+“I’ll do for you yet, you slab-footed Swede,” I heard him say to Johansen
+one night on deck.
+
+The mate cursed him in the darkness, and the next moment some missile
+struck the galley a sharp rap.  There was more cursing, and a mocking
+laugh, and when all was quiet I stole outside and found a heavy knife
+imbedded over an inch in the solid wood.  A few minutes later the mate
+came fumbling about in search of it, but I returned it privily to Leach
+next day.  He grinned when I handed it over, yet it was a grin that
+contained more sincere thanks than a multitude of the verbosities of
+speech common to the members of my own class.
+
+Unlike any one else in the ship’s company, I now found myself with no
+quarrels on my hands and in the good graces of all.  The hunters possibly
+no more than tolerated me, though none of them disliked me; while Smoke
+and Henderson, convalescent under a deck awning and swinging day and
+night in their hammocks, assured me that I was better than any hospital
+nurse, and that they would not forget me at the end of the voyage when
+they were paid off.  (As though I stood in need of their money!  I, who
+could have bought them out, bag and baggage, and the schooner and its
+equipment, a score of times over!)  But upon me had devolved the task of
+tending their wounds, and pulling them through, and I did my best by
+them.
+
+Wolf Larsen underwent another bad attack of headache which lasted two
+days.  He must have suffered severely, for he called me in and obeyed my
+commands like a sick child.  But nothing I could do seemed to relieve
+him.  At my suggestion, however, he gave up smoking and drinking; though
+why such a magnificent animal as he should have headaches at all puzzles
+me.
+
+“’Tis the hand of God, I’m tellin’ you,” is the way Louis sees it.  “’Tis
+a visitation for his black-hearted deeds, and there’s more behind and
+comin’, or else—”
+
+“Or else,” I prompted.
+
+“God is noddin’ and not doin’ his duty, though it’s me as shouldn’t say
+it.”
+
+I was mistaken when I said that I was in the good graces of all.  Not
+only does Thomas Mugridge continue to hate me, but he has discovered a
+new reason for hating me.  It took me no little while to puzzle it out,
+but I finally discovered that it was because I was more luckily born than
+he—“gentleman born,” he put it.
+
+“And still no more dead men,” I twitted Louis, when Smoke and Henderson,
+side by side, in friendly conversation, took their first exercise on
+deck.
+
+Louis surveyed me with his shrewd grey eyes, and shook his head
+portentously.  “She’s a-comin’, I tell you, and it’ll be sheets and
+halyards, stand by all hands, when she begins to howl.  I’ve had the feel
+iv it this long time, and I can feel it now as plainly as I feel the
+rigging iv a dark night.  She’s close, she’s close.”
+
+“Who goes first?” I queried.
+
+“Not fat old Louis, I promise you,” he laughed.  “For ’tis in the bones
+iv me I know that come this time next year I’ll be gazin’ in the old
+mother’s eyes, weary with watchin’ iv the sea for the five sons she gave
+to it.”
+
+“Wot’s ’e been s’yin’ to yer?” Thomas Mugridge demanded a moment later.
+
+“That he’s going home some day to see his mother,” I answered
+diplomatically.
+
+“I never ’ad none,” was the Cockney’s comment, as he gazed with
+lustreless, hopeless eyes into mine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+It has dawned upon me that I have never placed a proper valuation upon
+womankind.  For that matter, though not amative to any considerable
+degree so far as I have discovered, I was never outside the atmosphere of
+women until now.  My mother and sisters were always about me, and I was
+always trying to escape them; for they worried me to distraction with
+their solicitude for my health and with their periodic inroads on my den,
+when my orderly confusion, upon which I prided myself, was turned into
+worse confusion and less order, though it looked neat enough to the eye.
+I never could find anything when they had departed.  But now, alas, how
+welcome would have been the feel of their presence, the frou-frou and
+swish-swish of their skirts which I had so cordially detested!  I am
+sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be irritable with them
+again.  They may dose me and doctor me morning, noon, and night, and dust
+and sweep and put my den to rights every minute of the day, and I shall
+only lean back and survey it all and be thankful in that I am possessed
+of a mother and some several sisters.
+
+All of which has set me wondering.  Where are the mothers of these twenty
+and odd men on the _Ghost_?  It strikes me as unnatural and unhealthful
+that men should be totally separated from women and herd through the
+world by themselves.  Coarseness and savagery are the inevitable results.
+These men about me should have wives, and sisters, and daughters; then
+would they be capable of softness, and tenderness, and sympathy.  As it
+is, not one of them is married.  In years and years not one of them has
+been in contact with a good woman, or within the influence, or
+redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a creature.  There is
+no balance in their lives.  Their masculinity, which in itself is of the
+brute, has been over-developed.  The other and spiritual side of their
+natures has been dwarfed—atrophied, in fact.
+
+They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one another and
+growing daily more calloused from the grinding.  It seems to me
+impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers.  It would appear that
+they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race apart, wherein there is
+no such thing as sex; that they are hatched out by the sun like turtle
+eggs, or receive life in some similar and sordid fashion; and that all
+their days they fester in brutality and viciousness, and in the end die
+as unlovely as they have lived.
+
+Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with Johansen
+last night—the first superfluous words with which he has favoured me
+since the voyage began.  He left Sweden when he was eighteen, is now
+thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once.  He
+had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in some sailor
+boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.
+
+“She must be a pretty old woman now,” he said, staring meditatively into
+the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who was
+steering a point off the course.
+
+“When did you last write to her?”
+
+He performed his mental arithmetic aloud.  “Eighty-one; no—eighty-two,
+eh? no—eighty-three?  Yes, eighty-three.  Ten years ago.  From some
+little port in Madagascar.  I was trading.
+
+“You see,” he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother across
+half the girth of the earth, “each year I was going home.  So what was
+the good to write?  It was only a year.  And each year something
+happened, and I did not go.  But I am mate, now, and when I pay off at
+’Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a
+windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money;
+and then I will pay my passage from there home.  Then she will not do any
+more work.”
+
+“But does she work? now?  How old is she?”
+
+“About seventy,” he answered.  And then, boastingly, “We work from the
+time we are born until we die, in my country.  That’s why we live so
+long.  I will live to a hundred.”
+
+I shall never forget this conversation.  The words were the last I ever
+heard him utter.  Perhaps they were the last he did utter, too.  For,
+going down into the cabin to turn in, I decided that it was too stuffy to
+sleep below.  It was a calm night.  We were out of the Trades, and the
+_Ghost_ was forging ahead barely a knot an hour.  So I tucked a blanket
+and pillow under my arm and went up on deck.
+
+As I passed between Harrison and the binnacle, which was built into the
+top of the cabin, I noticed that he was this time fully three points off.
+Thinking that he was asleep, and wishing him to escape reprimand or
+worse, I spoke to him.  But he was not asleep.  His eyes were wide and
+staring.  He seemed greatly perturbed, unable to reply to me.
+
+“What’s the matter?” I asked.  “Are you sick?”
+
+He shook his head, and with a deep sign as of awakening, caught his
+breath.
+
+“You’d better get on your course, then,” I chided.
+
+He put a few spokes over, and I watched the compass-card swing slowly to
+N.N.W. and steady itself with slight oscillations.
+
+I took a fresh hold on my bedclothes and was preparing to start on, when
+some movement caught my eye and I looked astern to the rail.  A sinewy
+hand, dripping with water, was clutching the rail.  A second hand took
+form in the darkness beside it.  I watched, fascinated.  What visitant
+from the gloom of the deep was I to behold?  Whatever it was, I knew that
+it was climbing aboard by the log-line.  I saw a head, the hair wet and
+straight, shape itself, and then the unmistakable eyes and face of Wolf
+Larsen.  His right cheek was red with blood, which flowed from some wound
+in the head.
+
+He drew himself inboard with a quick effort, and arose to his feet,
+glancing swiftly, as he did so, at the man at the wheel, as though to
+assure himself of his identity and that there was nothing to fear from
+him.  The sea-water was streaming from him.  It made little audible
+gurgles which distracted me.  As he stepped toward me I shrank back
+instinctively, for I saw that in his eyes which spelled death.
+
+“All right, Hump,” he said in a low voice.  “Where’s the mate?”
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“Johansen!” he called softly.  “Johansen!”
+
+“Where is he?” he demanded of Harrison.
+
+The young fellow seemed to have recovered his composure, for he answered
+steadily enough, “I don’t know, sir.  I saw him go for’ard a little while
+ago.”
+
+“So did I go for’ard.  But you will observe that I didn’t come back the
+way I went.  Can you explain it?”
+
+“You must have been overboard, sir.”
+
+“Shall I look for him in the steerage, sir?” I asked.
+
+Wolf Larsen shook his head.  “You wouldn’t find him, Hump.  But you’ll
+do.  Come on.  Never mind your bedding.  Leave it where it is.”
+
+I followed at his heels.  There was nothing stirring amidships.
+
+“Those cursed hunters,” was his comment.  “Too damned fat and lazy to
+stand a four-hour watch.”
+
+But on the forecastle-head we found three sailors asleep.  He turned them
+over and looked at their faces.  They composed the watch on deck, and it
+was the ship’s custom, in good weather, to let the watch sleep with the
+exception of the officer, the helmsman, and the look-out.
+
+“Who’s look-out?” he demanded.
+
+“Me, sir,” answered Holyoak, one of the deep-water sailors, a slight
+tremor in his voice.  “I winked off just this very minute, sir.  I’m
+sorry, sir.  It won’t happen again.”
+
+“Did you hear or see anything on deck?”
+
+“No, sir, I—”
+
+But Wolf Larsen had turned away with a snort of disgust, leaving the
+sailor rubbing his eyes with surprise at having been let off so easily.
+
+“Softly, now,” Wolf Larsen warned me in a whisper, as he doubled his body
+into the forecastle scuttle and prepared to descend.
+
+I followed with a quaking heart.  What was to happen I knew no more than
+did I know what had happened.  But blood had been shed, and it was
+through no whim of Wolf Larsen that he had gone over the side with his
+scalp laid open.  Besides, Johansen was missing.
+
+It was my first descent into the forecastle, and I shall not soon forget
+my impression of it, caught as I stood on my feet at the bottom of the
+ladder.  Built directly in the eyes of the schooner, it was of the shape
+of a triangle, along the three sides of which stood the bunks, in
+double-tier, twelve of them.  It was no larger than a hall bedroom in
+Grub Street, and yet twelve men were herded into it to eat and sleep and
+carry on all the functions of living.  My bedroom at home was not large,
+yet it could have contained a dozen similar forecastles, and taking into
+consideration the height of the ceiling, a score at least.
+
+It smelled sour and musty, and by the dim light of the swinging sea-lamp
+I saw every bit of available wall-space hung deep with sea-boots,
+oilskins, and garments, clean and dirty, of various sorts.  These swung
+back and forth with every roll of the vessel, giving rise to a brushing
+sound, as of trees against a roof or wall.  Somewhere a boot thumped
+loudly and at irregular intervals against the wall; and, though it was a
+mild night on the sea, there was a continual chorus of the creaking
+timbers and bulkheads and of abysmal noises beneath the flooring.
+
+The sleepers did not mind.  There were eight of them,—the two watches
+below,—and the air was thick with the warmth and odour of their
+breathing, and the ear was filled with the noise of their snoring and of
+their sighs and half-groans, tokens plain of the rest of the animal-man.
+But were they sleeping? all of them?  Or had they been sleeping?  This
+was evidently Wolf Larsen’s quest—to find the men who appeared to be
+asleep and who were not asleep or who had not been asleep very recently.
+And he went about it in a way that reminded me of a story out of
+Boccaccio.
+
+He took the sea-lamp from its swinging frame and handed it to me.  He
+began at the first bunks forward on the star-board side.  In the top one
+lay Oofty-Oofty, a Kanaka and splendid seaman, so named by his mates.  He
+was asleep on his back and breathing as placidly as a woman.  One arm was
+under his head, the other lay on top of the blankets.  Wolf Larsen put
+thumb and forefinger to the wrist and counted the pulse.  In the midst of
+it the Kanaka roused.  He awoke as gently as he slept.  There was no
+movement of the body whatever.  The eyes, only, moved.  They flashed wide
+open, big and black, and stared, unblinking, into our faces.  Wolf Larsen
+put his finger to his lips as a sign for silence, and the eyes closed
+again.
+
+In the lower bunk lay Louis, grossly fat and warm and sweaty, asleep
+unfeignedly and sleeping laboriously.  While Wolf Larsen held his wrist
+he stirred uneasily, bowing his body so that for a moment it rested on
+shoulders and heels.  His lips moved, and he gave voice to this enigmatic
+utterance:
+
+“A shilling’s worth a quarter; but keep your lamps out for
+thruppenny-bits, or the publicans ’ll shove ’em on you for sixpence.”
+
+Then he rolled over on his side with a heavy, sobbing sigh, saying:
+
+“A sixpence is a tanner, and a shilling a bob; but what a pony is I don’t
+know.”
+
+Satisfied with the honesty of his and the Kanaka’s sleep, Wolf Larsen
+passed on to the next two bunks on the starboard side, occupied top and
+bottom, as we saw in the light of the sea-lamp, by Leach and Johnson.
+
+As Wolf Larsen bent down to the lower bunk to take Johnson’s pulse, I,
+standing erect and holding the lamp, saw Leach’s head rise stealthily as
+he peered over the side of his bunk to see what was going on.  He must
+have divined Wolf Larsen’s trick and the sureness of detection, for the
+light was at once dashed from my hand and the forecastle was left in
+darkness.  He must have leaped, also, at the same instant, straight down
+on Wolf Larsen.
+
+The first sounds were those of a conflict between a bull and a wolf.  I
+heard a great infuriated bellow go up from Wolf Larsen, and from Leach a
+snarling that was desperate and blood-curdling.  Johnson must have joined
+him immediately, so that his abject and grovelling conduct on deck for
+the past few days had been no more than planned deception.
+
+I was so terror-stricken by this fight in the dark that I leaned against
+the ladder, trembling and unable to ascend.  And upon me was that old
+sickness at the pit of the stomach, caused always by the spectacle of
+physical violence.  In this instance I could not see, but I could hear
+the impact of the blows—the soft crushing sound made by flesh striking
+forcibly against flesh.  Then there was the crashing about of the
+entwined bodies, the laboured breathing, the short quick gasps of sudden
+pain.
+
+There must have been more men in the conspiracy to murder the captain and
+mate, for by the sounds I knew that Leach and Johnson had been quickly
+reinforced by some of their mates.
+
+“Get a knife somebody!” Leach was shouting.
+
+“Pound him on the head!  Mash his brains out!” was Johnson’s cry.
+
+But after his first bellow, Wolf Larsen made no noise.  He was fighting
+grimly and silently for life.  He was sore beset.  Down at the very
+first, he had been unable to gain his feet, and for all of his tremendous
+strength I felt that there was no hope for him.
+
+The force with which they struggled was vividly impressed on me; for I
+was knocked down by their surging bodies and badly bruised.  But in the
+confusion I managed to crawl into an empty lower bunk out of the way.
+
+“All hands!  We’ve got him!  We’ve got him!” I could hear Leach crying.
+
+“Who?” demanded those who had been really asleep, and who had wakened to
+they knew not what.
+
+“It’s the bloody mate!” was Leach’s crafty answer, strained from him in a
+smothered sort of way.
+
+This was greeted with whoops of joy, and from then on Wolf Larsen had
+seven strong men on top of him, Louis, I believe, taking no part in it.
+The forecastle was like an angry hive of bees aroused by some marauder.
+
+“What ho! below there!” I heard Latimer shout down the scuttle, too
+cautious to descend into the inferno of passion he could hear raging
+beneath him in the darkness.
+
+“Won’t somebody get a knife?  Oh, won’t somebody get a knife?” Leach
+pleaded in the first interval of comparative silence.
+
+The number of the assailants was a cause of confusion.  They blocked
+their own efforts, while Wolf Larsen, with but a single purpose, achieved
+his.  This was to fight his way across the floor to the ladder.  Though
+in total darkness, I followed his progress by its sound.  No man less
+than a giant could have done what he did, once he had gained the foot of
+the ladder.  Step by step, by the might of his arms, the whole pack of
+men striving to drag him back and down, he drew his body up from the
+floor till he stood erect.  And then, step by step, hand and foot, he
+slowly struggled up the ladder.
+
+The very last of all, I saw.  For Latimer, having finally gone for a
+lantern, held it so that its light shone down the scuttle.  Wolf Larsen
+was nearly to the top, though I could not see him.  All that was visible
+was the mass of men fastened upon him.  It squirmed about, like some huge
+many-legged spider, and swayed back and forth to the regular roll of the
+vessel.  And still, step by step with long intervals between, the mass
+ascended.  Once it tottered, about to fall back, but the broken hold was
+regained and it still went up.
+
+“Who is it?” Latimer cried.
+
+In the rays of the lantern I could see his perplexed face peering down.
+
+“Larsen,” I heard a muffled voice from within the mass.
+
+Latimer reached down with his free hand.  I saw a hand shoot up to clasp
+his.  Latimer pulled, and the next couple of steps were made with a rush.
+Then Wolf Larsen’s other hand reached up and clutched the edge of the
+scuttle.  The mass swung clear of the ladder, the men still clinging to
+their escaping foe.  They began to drop off, to be brushed off against
+the sharp edge of the scuttle, to be knocked off by the legs which were
+now kicking powerfully.  Leach was the last to go, falling sheer back
+from the top of the scuttle and striking on head and shoulders upon his
+sprawling mates beneath.  Wolf Larsen and the lantern disappeared, and we
+were left in darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+There was a deal of cursing and groaning as the men at the bottom of the
+ladder crawled to their feet.
+
+“Somebody strike a light, my thumb’s out of joint,” said one of the men,
+Parsons, a swarthy, saturnine man, boat-steerer in Standish’s boat, in
+which Harrison was puller.
+
+“You’ll find it knockin’ about by the bitts,” Leach said, sitting down on
+the edge of the bunk in which I was concealed.
+
+There was a fumbling and a scratching of matches, and the sea-lamp flared
+up, dim and smoky, and in its weird light bare-legged men moved about
+nursing their bruises and caring for their hurts.  Oofty-Oofty laid hold
+of Parsons’s thumb, pulling it out stoutly and snapping it back into
+place.  I noticed at the same time that the Kanaka’s knuckles were laid
+open clear across and to the bone.  He exhibited them, exposing beautiful
+white teeth in a grin as he did so, and explaining that the wounds had
+come from striking Wolf Larsen in the mouth.
+
+“So it was you, was it, you black beggar?” belligerently demanded one
+Kelly, an Irish-American and a longshoreman, making his first trip to
+sea, and boat-puller for Kerfoot.
+
+As he made the demand he spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth and
+shoved his pugnacious face close to Oofty-Oofty.  The Kanaka leaped
+backward to his bunk, to return with a second leap, flourishing a long
+knife.
+
+“Aw, go lay down, you make me tired,” Leach interfered.  He was
+evidently, for all of his youth and inexperience, cock of the forecastle.
+“G’wan, you Kelly.  You leave Oofty alone.  How in hell did he know it
+was you in the dark?”
+
+Kelly subsided with some muttering, and the Kanaka flashed his white
+teeth in a grateful smile.  He was a beautiful creature, almost feminine
+in the pleasing lines of his figure, and there was a softness and
+dreaminess in his large eyes which seemed to contradict his well-earned
+reputation for strife and action.
+
+“How did he get away?” Johnson asked.
+
+He was sitting on the side of his bunk, the whole pose of his figure
+indicating utter dejection and hopelessness.  He was still breathing
+heavily from the exertion he had made.  His shirt had been ripped
+entirely from him in the struggle, and blood from a gash in the cheek was
+flowing down his naked chest, marking a red path across his white thigh
+and dripping to the floor.
+
+“Because he is the devil, as I told you before,” was Leach’s answer; and
+thereat he was on his feet and raging his disappointment with tears in
+his eyes.
+
+“And not one of you to get a knife!” was his unceasing lament.
+
+But the rest of the hands had a lively fear of consequences to come and
+gave no heed to him.
+
+“How’ll he know which was which?” Kelly asked, and as he went on he
+looked murderously about him—“unless one of us peaches.”
+
+“He’ll know as soon as ever he claps eyes on us,” Parsons replied.  “One
+look at you’d be enough.”
+
+“Tell him the deck flopped up and gouged yer teeth out iv yer jaw,” Louis
+grinned.  He was the only man who was not out of his bunk, and he was
+jubilant in that he possessed no bruises to advertise that he had had a
+hand in the night’s work.  “Just wait till he gets a glimpse iv yer mugs
+to-morrow, the gang iv ye,” he chuckled.
+
+“We’ll say we thought it was the mate,” said one.  And another, “I know
+what I’ll say—that I heered a row, jumped out of my bunk, got a jolly
+good crack on the jaw for my pains, and sailed in myself.  Couldn’t tell
+who or what it was in the dark and just hit out.”
+
+“An’ ’twas me you hit, of course,” Kelly seconded, his face brightening
+for the moment.
+
+Leach and Johnson took no part in the discussion, and it was plain to see
+that their mates looked upon them as men for whom the worst was
+inevitable, who were beyond hope and already dead.  Leach stood their
+fears and reproaches for some time.  Then he broke out:
+
+“You make me tired!  A nice lot of gazabas you are!  If you talked less
+with yer mouth and did something with yer hands, he’d a-ben done with by
+now.  Why couldn’t one of you, just one of you, get me a knife when I
+sung out?  You make me sick!  A-beefin’ and bellerin’ ’round, as though
+he’d kill you when he gets you!  You know damn well he wont.  Can’t
+afford to.  No shipping masters or beach-combers over here, and he wants
+yer in his business, and he wants yer bad.  Who’s to pull or steer or
+sail ship if he loses yer?  It’s me and Johnson have to face the music.
+Get into yer bunks, now, and shut yer faces; I want to get some sleep.”
+
+“That’s all right all right,” Parsons spoke up.  “Mebbe he won’t do for
+us, but mark my words, hell ’ll be an ice-box to this ship from now on.”
+
+All the while I had been apprehensive concerning my own predicament.
+What would happen to me when these men discovered my presence?  I could
+never fight my way out as Wolf Larsen had done.  And at this moment
+Latimer called down the scuttles:
+
+“Hump!  The old man wants you!”
+
+“He ain’t down here!” Parsons called back.
+
+“Yes, he is,” I said, sliding out of the bunk and striving my hardest to
+keep my voice steady and bold.
+
+The sailors looked at me in consternation.  Fear was strong in their
+faces, and the devilishness which comes of fear.
+
+“I’m coming!” I shouted up to Latimer.
+
+“No you don’t!” Kelly cried, stepping between me and the ladder, his
+right hand shaped into a veritable strangler’s clutch.  “You damn little
+sneak!  I’ll shut yer mouth!”
+
+“Let him go,” Leach commanded.
+
+“Not on yer life,” was the angry retort.
+
+Leach never changed his position on the edge of the bunk.  “Let him go, I
+say,” he repeated; but this time his voice was gritty and metallic.
+
+The Irishman wavered.  I made to step by him, and he stood aside.  When I
+had gained the ladder, I turned to the circle of brutal and malignant
+faces peering at me through the semi-darkness.  A sudden and deep
+sympathy welled up in me.  I remembered the Cockney’s way of putting it.
+How God must have hated them that they should be tortured so!
+
+“I have seen and heard nothing, believe me,” I said quietly.
+
+“I tell yer, he’s all right,” I could hear Leach saying as I went up the
+ladder.  “He don’t like the old man no more nor you or me.”
+
+I found Wolf Larsen in the cabin, stripped and bloody, waiting for me.
+He greeted me with one of his whimsical smiles.
+
+“Come, get to work, Doctor.  The signs are favourable for an extensive
+practice this voyage.  I don’t know what the _Ghost_ would have been
+without you, and if I could only cherish such noble sentiments I would
+tell you her master is deeply grateful.”
+
+I knew the run of the simple medicine-chest the _Ghost_ carried, and
+while I was heating water on the cabin stove and getting the things ready
+for dressing his wounds, he moved about, laughing and chatting, and
+examining his hurts with a calculating eye.  I had never before seen him
+stripped, and the sight of his body quite took my breath away.  It has
+never been my weakness to exalt the flesh—far from it; but there is
+enough of the artist in me to appreciate its wonder.
+
+I must say that I was fascinated by the perfect lines of Wolf Larsen’s
+figure, and by what I may term the terrible beauty of it.  I had noted
+the men in the forecastle.  Powerfully muscled though some of them were,
+there had been something wrong with all of them, an insufficient
+development here, an undue development there, a twist or a crook that
+destroyed symmetry, legs too short or too long, or too much sinew or bone
+exposed, or too little.  Oofty-Oofty had been the only one whose lines
+were at all pleasing, while, in so far as they pleased, that far had they
+been what I should call feminine.
+
+But Wolf Larsen was the man-type, the masculine, and almost a god in his
+perfectness.  As he moved about or raised his arms the great muscles
+leapt and moved under the satiny skin.  I have forgotten to say that the
+bronze ended with his face.  His body, thanks to his Scandinavian stock,
+was fair as the fairest woman’s.  I remember his putting his hand up to
+feel of the wound on his head, and my watching the biceps move like a
+living thing under its white sheath.  It was the biceps that had nearly
+crushed out my life once, that I had seen strike so many killing blows.
+I could not take my eyes from him.  I stood motionless, a roll of
+antiseptic cotton in my hand unwinding and spilling itself down to the
+floor.
+
+He noticed me, and I became conscious that I was staring at him.
+
+“God made you well,” I said.
+
+“Did he?” he answered.  “I have often thought so myself, and wondered
+why.”
+
+“Purpose—” I began.
+
+“Utility,” he interrupted.  “This body was made for use.  These muscles
+were made to grip, and tear, and destroy living things that get between
+me and life.  But have you thought of the other living things?  They,
+too, have muscles, of one kind and another, made to grip, and tear, and
+destroy; and when they come between me and life, I out-grip them,
+out-tear them, out-destroy them.  Purpose does not explain that.  Utility
+does.”
+
+“It is not beautiful,” I protested.
+
+“Life isn’t, you mean,” he smiled.  “Yet you say I was made well.  Do you
+see this?”
+
+He braced his legs and feet, pressing the cabin floor with his toes in a
+clutching sort of way.  Knots and ridges and mounds of muscles writhed
+and bunched under the skin.
+
+“Feel them,” he commanded.
+
+They were hard as iron.  And I observed, also, that his whole body had
+unconsciously drawn itself together, tense and alert; that muscles were
+softly crawling and shaping about the hips, along the back, and across
+the shoulders; that the arms were slightly lifted, their muscles
+contracting, the fingers crooking till the hands were like talons; and
+that even the eyes had changed expression and into them were coming
+watchfulness and measurement and a light none other than of battle.
+
+“Stability, equilibrium,” he said, relaxing on the instant and sinking
+his body back into repose.  “Feet with which to clutch the ground, legs
+to stand on and to help withstand, while with arms and hands, teeth and
+nails, I struggle to kill and to be not killed.  Purpose?  Utility is the
+better word.”
+
+I did not argue.  I had seen the mechanism of the primitive fighting
+beast, and I was as strongly impressed as if I had seen the engines of a
+great battleship or Atlantic liner.
+
+I was surprised, considering the fierce struggle in the forecastle, at
+the superficiality of his hurts, and I pride myself that I dressed them
+dexterously.  With the exception of several bad wounds, the rest were
+merely severe bruises and lacerations.  The blow which he had received
+before going overboard had laid his scalp open several inches.  This,
+under his direction, I cleansed and sewed together, having first shaved
+the edges of the wound.  Then the calf of his leg was badly lacerated and
+looked as though it had been mangled by a bulldog.  Some sailor, he told
+me, had laid hold of it by his teeth, at the beginning of the fight, and
+hung on and been dragged to the top of the forecastle ladder, when he was
+kicked loose.
+
+“By the way, Hump, as I have remarked, you are a handy man,” Wolf Larsen
+began, when my work was done.  “As you know, we’re short a mate.
+Hereafter you shall stand watches, receive seventy-five dollars per
+month, and be addressed fore and aft as Mr. Van Weyden.”
+
+“I—I don’t understand navigation, you know,” I gasped.
+
+“Not necessary at all.”
+
+“I really do not care to sit in the high places,” I objected.  “I find
+life precarious enough in my present humble situation.  I have no
+experience.  Mediocrity, you see, has its compensations.”
+
+He smiled as though it were all settled.
+
+“I won’t be mate on this hell-ship!” I cried defiantly.
+
+I saw his face grow hard and the merciless glitter come into his eyes.
+He walked to the door of his room, saying:
+
+“And now, Mr. Van Weyden, good-night.”
+
+“Good-night, Mr. Larsen,” I answered weakly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+I cannot say that the position of mate carried with it anything more
+joyful than that there were no more dishes to wash.  I was ignorant of
+the simplest duties of mate, and would have fared badly indeed, had the
+sailors not sympathized with me.  I knew nothing of the minutiæ of ropes
+and rigging, of the trimming and setting of sails; but the sailors took
+pains to put me to rights,—Louis proving an especially good teacher,—and
+I had little trouble with those under me.
+
+With the hunters it was otherwise.  Familiar in varying degree with the
+sea, they took me as a sort of joke.  In truth, it was a joke to me, that
+I, the veriest landsman, should be filling the office of mate; but to be
+taken as a joke by others was a different matter.  I made no complaint,
+but Wolf Larsen demanded the most punctilious sea etiquette in my
+case,—far more than poor Johansen had ever received; and at the expense
+of several rows, threats, and much grumbling, he brought the hunters to
+time.  I was “Mr. Van Weyden” fore and aft, and it was only unofficially
+that Wolf Larsen himself ever addressed me as “Hump.”
+
+It was amusing.  Perhaps the wind would haul a few points while we were
+at dinner, and as I left the table he would say, “Mr. Van Weyden, will
+you kindly put about on the port tack.”  And I would go on deck, beckon
+Louis to me, and learn from him what was to be done.  Then, a few minutes
+later, having digested his instructions and thoroughly mastered the
+manœuvre, I would proceed to issue my orders.  I remember an early
+instance of this kind, when Wolf Larsen appeared on the scene just as I
+had begun to give orders.  He smoked his cigar and looked on quietly till
+the thing was accomplished, and then paced aft by my side along the
+weather poop.
+
+“Hump,” he said, “I beg pardon, Mr. Van Weyden, I congratulate you.  I
+think you can now fire your father’s legs back into the grave to him.
+You’ve discovered your own and learned to stand on them.  A little
+rope-work, sail-making, and experience with storms and such things, and
+by the end of the voyage you could ship on any coasting schooner.”
+
+It was during this period, between the death of Johansen and the arrival
+on the sealing grounds, that I passed my pleasantest hours on the
+_Ghost_.  Wolf Larsen was quite considerate, the sailors helped me, and I
+was no longer in irritating contact with Thomas Mugridge.  And I make
+free to say, as the days went by, that I found I was taking a certain
+secret pride in myself.  Fantastic as the situation was,—a land-lubber
+second in command,—I was, nevertheless, carrying it off well; and during
+that brief time I was proud of myself, and I grew to love the heave and
+roll of the _Ghost_ under my feet as she wallowed north and west through
+the tropic sea to the islet where we filled our water-casks.
+
+But my happiness was not unalloyed.  It was comparative, a period of less
+misery slipped in between a past of great miseries and a future of great
+miseries.  For the _Ghost_, so far as the seamen were concerned, was a
+hell-ship of the worst description.  They never had a moment’s rest or
+peace.  Wolf Larsen treasured against them the attempt on his life and
+the drubbing he had received in the forecastle; and morning, noon, and
+night, and all night as well, he devoted himself to making life unlivable
+for them.
+
+He knew well the psychology of the little thing, and it was the little
+things by which he kept the crew worked up to the verge of madness.  I
+have seen Harrison called from his bunk to put properly away a misplaced
+paintbrush, and the two watches below haled from their tired sleep to
+accompany him and see him do it.  A little thing, truly, but when
+multiplied by the thousand ingenious devices of such a mind, the mental
+state of the men in the forecastle may be slightly comprehended.
+
+Of course much grumbling went on, and little outbursts were continually
+occurring.  Blows were struck, and there were always two or three men
+nursing injuries at the hands of the human beast who was their master.
+Concerted action was impossible in face of the heavy arsenal of weapons
+carried in the steerage and cabin.  Leach and Johnson were the two
+particular victims of Wolf Larsen’s diabolic temper, and the look of
+profound melancholy which had settled on Johnson’s face and in his eyes
+made my heart bleed.
+
+With Leach it was different.  There was too much of the fighting beast in
+him.  He seemed possessed by an insatiable fury which gave no time for
+grief.  His lips had become distorted into a permanent snarl, which at
+mere sight of Wolf Larsen broke out in sound, horrible and menacing and,
+I do believe, unconsciously.  I have seen him follow Wolf Larsen about
+with his eyes, like an animal its keeper, the while the animal-like snarl
+sounded deep in his throat and vibrated forth between his teeth.
+
+I remember once, on deck, in bright day, touching him on the shoulder as
+preliminary to giving an order.  His back was toward me, and at the first
+feel of my hand he leaped upright in the air and away from me, snarling
+and turning his head as he leaped.  He had for the moment mistaken me for
+the man he hated.
+
+Both he and Johnson would have killed Wolf Larsen at the slightest
+opportunity, but the opportunity never came.  Wolf Larsen was too wise
+for that, and, besides, they had no adequate weapons.  With their fists
+alone they had no chance whatever.  Time and again he fought it out with
+Leach who fought back always, like a wildcat, tooth and nail and fist,
+until stretched, exhausted or unconscious, on the deck.  And he was never
+averse to another encounter.  All the devil that was in him challenged
+the devil in Wolf Larsen.  They had but to appear on deck at the same
+time, when they would be at it, cursing, snarling, striking; and I have
+seen Leach fling himself upon Wolf Larsen without warning or provocation.
+Once he threw his heavy sheath-knife, missing Wolf Larsen’s throat by an
+inch.  Another time he dropped a steel marlinspike from the mizzen
+crosstree.  It was a difficult cast to make on a rolling ship, but the
+sharp point of the spike, whistling seventy-five feet through the air,
+barely missed Wolf Larsen’s head as he emerged from the cabin
+companion-way and drove its length two inches and over into the solid
+deck-planking.  Still another time, he stole into the steerage, possessed
+himself of a loaded shot-gun, and was making a rush for the deck with it
+when caught by Kerfoot and disarmed.
+
+I often wondered why Wolf Larsen did not kill him and make an end of it.
+But he only laughed and seemed to enjoy it.  There seemed a certain spice
+about it, such as men must feel who take delight in making pets of
+ferocious animals.
+
+“It gives a thrill to life,” he explained to me, “when life is carried in
+one’s hand.  Man is a natural gambler, and life is the biggest stake he
+can lay.  The greater the odds, the greater the thrill.  Why should I
+deny myself the joy of exciting Leach’s soul to fever-pitch?  For that
+matter, I do him a kindness.  The greatness of sensation is mutual.  He
+is living more royally than any man for’ard, though he does not know it.
+For he has what they have not—purpose, something to do and be done, an
+all-absorbing end to strive to attain, the desire to kill me, the hope
+that he may kill me.  Really, Hump, he is living deep and high.  I doubt
+that he has ever lived so swiftly and keenly before, and I honestly envy
+him, sometimes, when I see him raging at the summit of passion and
+sensibility.”
+
+“Ah, but it is cowardly, cowardly!” I cried.  “You have all the
+advantage.”
+
+“Of the two of us, you and I, who is the greater coward?” he asked
+seriously.  “If the situation is unpleasing, you compromise with your
+conscience when you make yourself a party to it.  If you were really
+great, really true to yourself, you would join forces with Leach and
+Johnson.  But you are afraid, you are afraid.  You want to live.  The
+life that is in you cries out that it must live, no matter what the cost;
+so you live ignominiously, untrue to the best you dream of, sinning
+against your whole pitiful little code, and, if there were a hell,
+heading your soul straight for it.  Bah!  I play the braver part.  I do
+no sin, for I am true to the promptings of the life that is in me.  I am
+sincere with my soul at least, and that is what you are not.”
+
+There was a sting in what he said.  Perhaps, after all, I was playing a
+cowardly part.  And the more I thought about it the more it appeared that
+my duty to myself lay in doing what he had advised, lay in joining forces
+with Johnson and Leach and working for his death.  Right here, I think,
+entered the austere conscience of my Puritan ancestry, impelling me
+toward lurid deeds and sanctioning even murder as right conduct.  I dwelt
+upon the idea.  It would be a most moral act to rid the world of such a
+monster.  Humanity would be better and happier for it, life fairer and
+sweeter.
+
+I pondered it long, lying sleepless in my bunk and reviewing in endless
+procession the facts of the situation.  I talked with Johnson and Leach,
+during the night watches when Wolf Larsen was below.  Both men had lost
+hope—Johnson, because of temperamental despondency; Leach, because he had
+beaten himself out in the vain struggle and was exhausted.  But he caught
+my hand in a passionate grip one night, saying:
+
+“I think yer square, Mr. Van Weyden.  But stay where you are and keep yer
+mouth shut.  Say nothin’ but saw wood.  We’re dead men, I know it; but
+all the same you might be able to do us a favour some time when we need
+it damn bad.”
+
+It was only next day, when Wainwright Island loomed to windward, close
+abeam, that Wolf Larsen opened his mouth in prophecy.  He had attacked
+Johnson, been attacked by Leach, and had just finished whipping the pair
+of them.
+
+“Leach,” he said, “you know I’m going to kill you some time or other,
+don’t you?”
+
+A snarl was the answer.
+
+“And as for you, Johnson, you’ll get so tired of life before I’m through
+with you that you’ll fling yourself over the side.  See if you don’t.”
+
+“That’s a suggestion,” he added, in an aside to me.  “I’ll bet you a
+month’s pay he acts upon it.”
+
+I had cherished a hope that his victims would find an opportunity to
+escape while filling our water-barrels, but Wolf Larsen had selected his
+spot well.  The _Ghost_ lay half-a-mile beyond the surf-line of a lonely
+beach.  Here debouched a deep gorge, with precipitous, volcanic walls
+which no man could scale.  And here, under his direct supervision—for he
+went ashore himself—Leach and Johnson filled the small casks and rolled
+them down to the beach.  They had no chance to make a break for liberty
+in one of the boats.
+
+Harrison and Kelly, however, made such an attempt.  They composed one of
+the boats’ crews, and their task was to ply between the schooner and the
+shore, carrying a single cask each trip.  Just before dinner, starting
+for the beach with an empty barrel, they altered their course and bore
+away to the left to round the promontory which jutted into the sea
+between them and liberty.  Beyond its foaming base lay the pretty
+villages of the Japanese colonists and smiling valleys which penetrated
+deep into the interior.  Once in the fastnesses they promised, and the
+two men could defy Wolf Larsen.
+
+I had observed Henderson and Smoke loitering about the deck all morning,
+and I now learned why they were there.  Procuring their rifles, they
+opened fire in a leisurely manner, upon the deserters.  It was a
+cold-blooded exhibition of marksmanship.  At first their bullets zipped
+harmlessly along the surface of the water on either side the boat; but,
+as the men continued to pull lustily, they struck closer and closer.
+
+“Now, watch me take Kelly’s right oar,” Smoke said, drawing a more
+careful aim.
+
+I was looking through the glasses, and I saw the oar-blade shatter as he
+shot.  Henderson duplicated it, selecting Harrison’s right oar.  The boat
+slewed around.  The two remaining oars were quickly broken.  The men
+tried to row with the splinters, and had them shot out of their hands.
+Kelly ripped up a bottom board and began paddling, but dropped it with a
+cry of pain as its splinters drove into his hands.  Then they gave up,
+letting the boat drift till a second boat, sent from the shore by Wolf
+Larsen, took them in tow and brought them aboard.
+
+Late that afternoon we hove up anchor and got away.  Nothing was before
+us but the three or four months’ hunting on the sealing grounds.  The
+outlook was black indeed, and I went about my work with a heavy heart.
+An almost funereal gloom seemed to have descended upon the _Ghost_.  Wolf
+Larsen had taken to his bunk with one of his strange, splitting
+headaches.  Harrison stood listlessly at the wheel, half supporting
+himself by it, as though wearied by the weight of his flesh.  The rest of
+the men were morose and silent.  I came upon Kelly crouching to the lee
+of the forecastle scuttle, his head on his knees, his arms about his
+head, in an attitude of unutterable despondency.
+
+Johnson I found lying full length on the forecastle head, staring at the
+troubled churn of the forefoot, and I remembered with horror the
+suggestion Wolf Larsen had made.  It seemed likely to bear fruit.  I
+tried to break in on the man’s morbid thoughts by calling him away, but
+he smiled sadly at me and refused to obey.
+
+Leach approached me as I returned aft.
+
+“I want to ask a favour, Mr. Van Weyden,” he said.  “If it’s yer luck to
+ever make ’Frisco once more, will you hunt up Matt McCarthy?  He’s my old
+man.  He lives on the Hill, back of the Mayfair bakery, runnin’ a
+cobbler’s shop that everybody knows, and you’ll have no trouble.  Tell
+him I lived to be sorry for the trouble I brought him and the things I
+done, and—and just tell him ‘God bless him,’ for me.”
+
+I nodded my head, but said, “We’ll all win back to San Francisco, Leach,
+and you’ll be with me when I go to see Matt McCarthy.”
+
+“I’d like to believe you,” he answered, shaking my hand, “but I can’t.
+Wolf Larsen ’ll do for me, I know it; and all I can hope is, he’ll do it
+quick.”
+
+And as he left me I was aware of the same desire at my heart.  Since it
+was to be done, let it be done with despatch.  The general gloom had
+gathered me into its folds.  The worst appeared inevitable; and as I
+paced the deck, hour after hour, I found myself afflicted with Wolf
+Larsen’s repulsive ideas.  What was it all about?  Where was the grandeur
+of life that it should permit such wanton destruction of human souls?  It
+was a cheap and sordid thing after all, this life, and the sooner over
+the better.  Over and done with!  I, too, leaned upon the rail and gazed
+longingly into the sea, with the certainty that sooner or later I should
+be sinking down, down, through the cool green depths of its oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Strange to say, in spite of the general foreboding, nothing of especial
+moment happened on the _Ghost_.  We ran on to the north and west till we
+raised the coast of Japan and picked up with the great seal herd.  Coming
+from no man knew where in the illimitable Pacific, it was travelling
+north on its annual migration to the rookeries of Bering Sea.  And north
+we travelled with it, ravaging and destroying, flinging the naked
+carcasses to the shark and salting down the skins so that they might
+later adorn the fair shoulders of the women of the cities.
+
+It was wanton slaughter, and all for woman’s sake.  No man ate of the
+seal meat or the oil.  After a good day’s killing I have seen our decks
+covered with hides and bodies, slippery with fat and blood, the scuppers
+running red; masts, ropes, and rails spattered with the sanguinary
+colour; and the men, like butchers plying their trade, naked and red of
+arm and hand, hard at work with ripping and flensing-knives, removing the
+skins from the pretty sea-creatures they had killed.
+
+It was my task to tally the pelts as they came aboard from the boats, to
+oversee the skinning and afterward the cleansing of the decks and
+bringing things ship-shape again.  It was not pleasant work.  My soul and
+my stomach revolted at it; and yet, in a way, this handling and directing
+of many men was good for me.  It developed what little executive ability
+I possessed, and I was aware of a toughening or hardening which I was
+undergoing and which could not be anything but wholesome for “Sissy” Van
+Weyden.
+
+One thing I was beginning to feel, and that was that I could never again
+be quite the same man I had been.  While my hope and faith in human life
+still survived Wolf Larsen’s destructive criticism, he had nevertheless
+been a cause of change in minor matters.  He had opened up for me the
+world of the real, of which I had known practically nothing and from
+which I had always shrunk.  I had learned to look more closely at life as
+it was lived, to recognize that there were such things as facts in the
+world, to emerge from the realm of mind and idea and to place certain
+values on the concrete and objective phases of existence.
+
+I saw more of Wolf Larsen than ever when we had gained the grounds.  For
+when the weather was fair and we were in the midst of the herd, all hands
+were away in the boats, and left on board were only he and I, and Thomas
+Mugridge, who did not count.  But there was no play about it.  The six
+boats, spreading out fan-wise from the schooner until the first weather
+boat and the last lee boat were anywhere from ten to twenty miles apart,
+cruised along a straight course over the sea till nightfall or bad
+weather drove them in.  It was our duty to sail the _Ghost_ well to
+leeward of the last lee boat, so that all the boats should have fair wind
+to run for us in case of squalls or threatening weather.
+
+It is no slight matter for two men, particularly when a stiff wind has
+sprung up, to handle a vessel like the _Ghost_, steering, keeping
+look-out for the boats, and setting or taking in sail; so it devolved
+upon me to learn, and learn quickly.  Steering I picked up easily, but
+running aloft to the crosstrees and swinging my whole weight by my arms
+when I left the ratlines and climbed still higher, was more difficult.
+This, too, I learned, and quickly, for I felt somehow a wild desire to
+vindicate myself in Wolf Larsen’s eyes, to prove my right to live in ways
+other than of the mind.  Nay, the time came when I took joy in the run of
+the masthead and in the clinging on by my legs at that precarious height
+while I swept the sea with glasses in search of the boats.
+
+I remember one beautiful day, when the boats left early and the reports
+of the hunters’ guns grew dim and distant and died away as they scattered
+far and wide over the sea.  There was just the faintest wind from the
+westward; but it breathed its last by the time we managed to get to
+leeward of the last lee boat.  One by one—I was at the masthead and
+saw—the six boats disappeared over the bulge of the earth as they
+followed the seal into the west.  We lay, scarcely rolling on the placid
+sea, unable to follow.  Wolf Larsen was apprehensive.  The barometer was
+down, and the sky to the east did not please him.  He studied it with
+unceasing vigilance.
+
+“If she comes out of there,” he said, “hard and snappy, putting us to
+windward of the boats, it’s likely there’ll be empty bunks in steerage
+and fo’c’sle.”
+
+By eleven o’clock the sea had become glass.  By midday, though we were
+well up in the northerly latitudes, the heat was sickening.  There was no
+freshness in the air.  It was sultry and oppressive, reminding me of what
+the old Californians term “earthquake weather.”  There was something
+ominous about it, and in intangible ways one was made to feel that the
+worst was about to come.  Slowly the whole eastern sky filled with clouds
+that over-towered us like some black sierra of the infernal regions.  So
+clearly could one see cañon, gorge, and precipice, and the shadows that
+lie therein, that one looked unconsciously for the white surf-line and
+bellowing caverns where the sea charges on the land.  And still we rocked
+gently, and there was no wind.
+
+“It’s no squall,” Wolf Larsen said.  “Old Mother Nature’s going to get
+up on her hind legs and howl for all that’s in her, and it’ll keep us
+jumping, Hump, to pull through with half our boats.  You’d better run up
+and loosen the topsails.”
+
+“But if it is going to howl, and there are only two of us?” I asked, a
+note of protest in my voice.
+
+“Why we’ve got to make the best of the first of it and run down to our
+boats before our canvas is ripped out of us.  After that I don’t give a
+rap what happens.  The sticks ’ll stand it, and you and I will have to,
+though we’ve plenty cut out for us.”
+
+Still the calm continued.  We ate dinner, a hurried and anxious meal for
+me with eighteen men abroad on the sea and beyond the bulge of the earth,
+and with that heaven-rolling mountain range of clouds moving slowly down
+upon us.  Wolf Larsen did not seem affected, however; though I noticed,
+when we returned to the deck, a slight twitching of the nostrils, a
+perceptible quickness of movement.  His face was stern, the lines of it
+had grown hard, and yet in his eyes—blue, clear blue this day—there was a
+strange brilliancy, a bright scintillating light.  It struck me that he
+was joyous, in a ferocious sort of way; that he was glad there was an
+impending struggle; that he was thrilled and upborne with knowledge that
+one of the great moments of living, when the tide of life surges up in
+flood, was upon him.
+
+Once, and unwitting that he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud,
+mockingly and defiantly, at the advancing storm.  I see him yet standing
+there like a pigmy out of the _Arabian Nights_ before the huge front of
+some malignant genie.  He was daring destiny, and he was unafraid.
+
+He walked to the galley.  “Cooky, by the time you’ve finished pots and
+pans you’ll be wanted on deck.  Stand ready for a call.”
+
+“Hump,” he said, becoming cognizant of the fascinated gaze I bent upon
+him, “this beats whisky and is where your Omar misses.  I think he only
+half lived after all.”
+
+The western half of the sky had by now grown murky.  The sun had dimmed
+and faded out of sight.  It was two in the afternoon, and a ghostly
+twilight, shot through by wandering purplish lights, had descended upon
+us.  In this purplish light Wolf Larsen’s face glowed and glowed, and to
+my excited fancy he appeared encircled by a halo.  We lay in the midst of
+an unearthly quiet, while all about us were signs and omens of oncoming
+sound and movement.  The sultry heat had become unendurable.  The sweat
+was standing on my forehead, and I could feel it trickling down my nose.
+I felt as though I should faint, and reached out to the rail for support.
+
+And then, just then, the faintest possible whisper of air passed by.  It
+was from the east, and like a whisper it came and went.  The drooping
+canvas was not stirred, and yet my face had felt the air and been cooled.
+
+“Cooky,” Wolf Larsen called in a low voice.  Thomas Mugridge turned a
+pitiable scared face.  “Let go that foreboom tackle and pass it across,
+and when she’s willing let go the sheet and come in snug with the tackle.
+And if you make a mess of it, it will be the last you ever make.
+Understand?”
+
+“Mr. Van Weyden, stand by to pass the head-sails over.  Then jump for the
+topsails and spread them quick as God’ll let you—the quicker you do it
+the easier you’ll find it.  As for Cooky, if he isn’t lively bat him
+between the eyes.”
+
+I was aware of the compliment and pleased, in that no threat had
+accompanied my instructions.  We were lying head to north-west, and it
+was his intention to jibe over all with the first puff.
+
+“We’ll have the breeze on our quarter,” he explained to me.  “By the last
+guns the boats were bearing away slightly to the south’ard.”
+
+He turned and walked aft to the wheel.  I went forward and took my
+station at the jibs.  Another whisper of wind, and another, passed by.
+The canvas flapped lazily.
+
+“Thank Gawd she’s not comin’ all of a bunch, Mr. Van Weyden,” was the
+Cockney’s fervent ejaculation.
+
+And I was indeed thankful, for I had by this time learned enough to know,
+with all our canvas spread, what disaster in such event awaited us.  The
+whispers of wind became puffs, the sails filled, the _Ghost_ moved.  Wolf
+Larsen put the wheel hard up, to port, and we began to pay off.  The wind
+was now dead astern, muttering and puffing stronger and stronger, and my
+head-sails were pounding lustily.  I did not see what went on elsewhere,
+though I felt the sudden surge and heel of the schooner as the
+wind-pressures changed to the jibing of the fore- and main-sails.  My
+hands were full with the flying-jib, jib, and staysail; and by the time
+this part of my task was accomplished the _Ghost_ was leaping into the
+south-west, the wind on her quarter and all her sheets to starboard.
+Without pausing for breath, though my heart was beating like a
+trip-hammer from my exertions, I sprang to the topsails, and before the
+wind had become too strong we had them fairly set and were coiling down.
+Then I went aft for orders.
+
+Wolf Larsen nodded approval and relinquished the wheel to me.  The wind
+was strengthening steadily and the sea rising.  For an hour I steered,
+each moment becoming more difficult.  I had not the experience to steer
+at the gait we were going on a quartering course.
+
+“Now take a run up with the glasses and raise some of the boats.  We’ve
+made at least ten knots, and we’re going twelve or thirteen now.  The old
+girl knows how to walk.”
+
+I contested myself with the fore crosstrees, some seventy feet above the
+deck.  As I searched the vacant stretch of water before me, I
+comprehended thoroughly the need for haste if we were to recover any of
+our men.  Indeed, as I gazed at the heavy sea through which we were
+running, I doubted that there was a boat afloat.  It did not seem
+possible that such frail craft could survive such stress of wind and
+water.
+
+I could not feel the full force of the wind, for we were running with it;
+but from my lofty perch I looked down as though outside the _Ghost_ and
+apart from her, and saw the shape of her outlined sharply against the
+foaming sea as she tore along instinct with life.  Sometimes she would
+lift and send across some great wave, burying her starboard-rail from
+view, and covering her deck to the hatches with the boiling ocean.  At
+such moments, starting from a windward roll, I would go flying through
+the air with dizzying swiftness, as though I clung to the end of a huge,
+inverted pendulum, the arc of which, between the greater rolls, must have
+been seventy feet or more.  Once, the terror of this giddy sweep
+overpowered me, and for a while I clung on, hand and foot, weak and
+trembling, unable to search the sea for the missing boats or to behold
+aught of the sea but that which roared beneath and strove to overwhelm
+the _Ghost_.
+
+But the thought of the men in the midst of it steadied me, and in my
+quest for them I forgot myself.  For an hour I saw nothing but the naked,
+desolate sea.  And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight struck the
+ocean and turned its surface to wrathful silver, I caught a small black
+speck thrust skyward for an instant and swallowed up.  I waited
+patiently.  Again the tiny point of black projected itself through the
+wrathful blaze a couple of points off our port-bow.  I did not attempt to
+shout, but communicated the news to Wolf Larsen by waving my arm.  He
+changed the course, and I signalled affirmation when the speck showed
+dead ahead.
+
+It grew larger, and so swiftly that for the first time I fully
+appreciated the speed of our flight.  Wolf Larsen motioned for me to come
+down, and when I stood beside him at the wheel gave me instructions for
+heaving to.
+
+“Expect all hell to break loose,” he cautioned me, “but don’t mind it.
+Yours is to do your own work and to have Cooky stand by the fore-sheet.”
+
+I managed to make my way forward, but there was little choice of sides,
+for the weather-rail seemed buried as often as the lee.  Having
+instructed Thomas Mugridge as to what he was to do, I clambered into the
+fore-rigging a few feet.  The boat was now very close, and I could make
+out plainly that it was lying head to wind and sea and dragging on its
+mast and sail, which had been thrown overboard and made to serve as a
+sea-anchor.  The three men were bailing.  Each rolling mountain whelmed
+them from view, and I would wait with sickening anxiety, fearing that
+they would never appear again.  Then, and with black suddenness, the boat
+would shoot clear through the foaming crest, bow pointed to the sky, and
+the whole length of her bottom showing, wet and dark, till she seemed on
+end.  There would be a fleeting glimpse of the three men flinging water
+in frantic haste, when she would topple over and fall into the yawning
+valley, bow down and showing her full inside length to the stern upreared
+almost directly above the bow.  Each time that she reappeared was a
+miracle.
+
+The _Ghost_ suddenly changed her course, keeping away, and it came to me
+with a shock that Wolf Larsen was giving up the rescue as impossible.
+Then I realized that he was preparing to heave to, and dropped to the
+deck to be in readiness.  We were now dead before the wind, the boat far
+away and abreast of us.  I felt an abrupt easing of the schooner, a loss
+for the moment of all strain and pressure, coupled with a swift
+acceleration of speed.  She was rushing around on her heel into the wind.
+
+As she arrived at right angles to the sea, the full force of the wind
+(from which we had hitherto run away) caught us.  I was unfortunately and
+ignorantly facing it.  It stood up against me like a wall, filling my
+lungs with air which I could not expel.  And as I choked and strangled,
+and as the _Ghost_ wallowed for an instant, broadside on and rolling
+straight over and far into the wind, I beheld a huge sea rise far above
+my head.  I turned aside, caught my breath, and looked again.  The wave
+over-topped the _Ghost_, and I gazed sheer up and into it.  A shaft of
+sunlight smote the over-curl, and I caught a glimpse of translucent,
+rushing green, backed by a milky smother of foam.
+
+Then it descended, pandemonium broke loose, everything happened at once.
+I was struck a crushing, stunning blow, nowhere in particular and yet
+everywhere.  My hold had been broken loose, I was under water, and the
+thought passed through my mind that this was the terrible thing of which
+I had heard, the being swept in the trough of the sea.  My body struck
+and pounded as it was dashed helplessly along and turned over and over,
+and when I could hold my breath no longer, I breathed the stinging salt
+water into my lungs.  But through it all I clung to the one idea—_I must
+get the jib backed over to windward_.  I had no fear of death.  I had no
+doubt but that I should come through somehow.  And as this idea of
+fulfilling Wolf Larsen’s order persisted in my dazed consciousness, I
+seemed to see him standing at the wheel in the midst of the wild welter,
+pitting his will against the will of the storm and defying it.
+
+I brought up violently against what I took to be the rail, breathed, and
+breathed the sweet air again.  I tried to rise, but struck my head and
+was knocked back on hands and knees.  By some freak of the waters I had
+been swept clear under the forecastle-head and into the eyes.  As I
+scrambled out on all fours, I passed over the body of Thomas Mugridge,
+who lay in a groaning heap.  There was no time to investigate.  I must
+get the jib backed over.
+
+When I emerged on deck it seemed that the end of everything had come.  On
+all sides there was a rending and crashing of wood and steel and canvas.
+The _Ghost_ was being wrenched and torn to fragments.  The foresail and
+fore-topsail, emptied of the wind by the manœuvre, and with no one to
+bring in the sheet in time, were thundering into ribbons, the heavy boom
+threshing and splintering from rail to rail.  The air was thick with
+flying wreckage, detached ropes and stays were hissing and coiling like
+snakes, and down through it all crashed the gaff of the foresail.
+
+The spar could not have missed me by many inches, while it spurred me to
+action.  Perhaps the situation was not hopeless.  I remembered Wolf
+Larsen’s caution.  He had expected all hell to break loose, and here it
+was.  And where was he?  I caught sight of him toiling at the main-sheet,
+heaving it in and flat with his tremendous muscles, the stern of the
+schooner lifted high in the air and his body outlined against a white
+surge of sea sweeping past.  All this, and more,—a whole world of chaos
+and wreck,—in possibly fifteen seconds I had seen and heard and grasped.
+
+I did not stop to see what had become of the small boat, but sprang to
+the jib-sheet.  The jib itself was beginning to slap, partially filling
+and emptying with sharp reports; but with a turn of the sheet and the
+application of my whole strength each time it slapped, I slowly backed
+it.  This I know: I did my best.  I pulled till I burst open the ends of
+all my fingers; and while I pulled, the flying-jib and staysail split
+their cloths apart and thundered into nothingness.
+
+Still I pulled, holding what I gained each time with a double turn until
+the next slap gave me more.  Then the sheet gave with greater ease, and
+Wolf Larsen was beside me, heaving in alone while I was busied taking up
+the slack.
+
+“Make fast!” he shouted.  “And come on!”
+
+As I followed him, I noted that in spite of rack and ruin a rough order
+obtained.  The _Ghost_ was hove to.  She was still in working order, and
+she was still working.  Though the rest of her sails were gone, the jib,
+backed to windward, and the mainsail hauled down flat, were themselves
+holding, and holding her bow to the furious sea as well.
+
+I looked for the boat, and, while Wolf Larsen cleared the boat-tackles,
+saw it lift to leeward on a big sea and not a score of feet away.  And, so
+nicely had he made his calculation, we drifted fairly down upon it, so
+that nothing remained to do but hook the tackles to either end and hoist
+it aboard.  But this was not done so easily as it is written.
+
+In the bow was Kerfoot, Oofty-Oofty in the stern, and Kelly amidships.
+As we drifted closer the boat would rise on a wave while we sank in the
+trough, till almost straight above me I could see the heads of the three
+men craned overside and looking down.  Then, the next moment, we would
+lift and soar upward while they sank far down beneath us.  It seemed
+incredible that the next surge should not crush the _Ghost_ down upon the
+tiny eggshell.
+
+But, at the right moment, I passed the tackle to the Kanaka, while Wolf
+Larsen did the same thing forward to Kerfoot.  Both tackles were hooked
+in a trice, and the three men, deftly timing the roll, made a
+simultaneous leap aboard the schooner.  As the _Ghost_ rolled her side
+out of water, the boat was lifted snugly against her, and before the
+return roll came, we had heaved it in over the side and turned it bottom
+up on the deck.  I noticed blood spouting from Kerfoot’s left hand.  In
+some way the third finger had been crushed to a pulp.  But he gave no
+sign of pain, and with his single right hand helped us lash the boat in
+its place.
+
+“Stand by to let that jib over, you Oofty!” Wolf Larsen commanded, the
+very second we had finished with the boat.  “Kelly, come aft and slack
+off the main-sheet!  You, Kerfoot, go for’ard and see what’s become of
+Cooky!  Mr. Van Weyden, run aloft again, and cut away any stray stuff on
+your way!”
+
+And having commanded, he went aft with his peculiar tigerish leaps to the
+wheel.  While I toiled up the fore-shrouds the _Ghost_ slowly paid off.
+This time, as we went into the trough of the sea and were swept, there
+were no sails to carry away.  And, halfway to the crosstrees and
+flattened against the rigging by the full force of the wind so that it
+would have been impossible for me to have fallen, the _Ghost_ almost on
+her beam-ends and the masts parallel with the water, I looked, not down,
+but at almost right angles from the perpendicular, to the deck of the
+_Ghost_.  But I saw, not the deck, but where the deck should have been,
+for it was buried beneath a wild tumbling of water.  Out of this water I
+could see the two masts rising, and that was all.  The _Ghost_, for the
+moment, was buried beneath the sea.  As she squared off more and more,
+escaping from the side pressure, she righted herself and broke her deck,
+like a whale’s back, through the ocean surface.
+
+Then we raced, and wildly, across the wild sea, the while I hung like a
+fly in the crosstrees and searched for the other boats.  In half-an-hour
+I sighted the second one, swamped and bottom up, to which were
+desperately clinging Jock Horner, fat Louis, and Johnson.  This time I
+remained aloft, and Wolf Larsen succeeded in heaving to without being
+swept.  As before, we drifted down upon it.  Tackles were made fast and
+lines flung to the men, who scrambled aboard like monkeys.  The boat
+itself was crushed and splintered against the schooner’s side as it came
+inboard; but the wreck was securely lashed, for it could be patched and
+made whole again.
+
+Once more the _Ghost_ bore away before the storm, this time so submerging
+herself that for some seconds I thought she would never reappear.  Even
+the wheel, quite a deal higher than the waist, was covered and swept
+again and again.  At such moments I felt strangely alone with God, alone
+with him and watching the chaos of his wrath.  And then the wheel would
+reappear, and Wolf Larsen’s broad shoulders, his hands gripping the
+spokes and holding the schooner to the course of his will, himself an
+earth-god, dominating the storm, flinging its descending waters from him
+and riding it to his own ends.  And oh, the marvel of it! the marvel of
+it!  That tiny men should live and breathe and work, and drive so frail a
+contrivance of wood and cloth through so tremendous an elemental strife.
+
+As before, the _Ghost_ swung out of the trough, lifting her deck again
+out of the sea, and dashed before the howling blast.  It was now
+half-past five, and half-an-hour later, when the last of the day lost
+itself in a dim and furious twilight, I sighted a third boat.  It was
+bottom up, and there was no sign of its crew.  Wolf Larsen repeated his
+manœuvre, holding off and then rounding up to windward and drifting down
+upon it.  But this time he missed by forty feet, the boat passing astern.
+
+“Number four boat!” Oofty-Oofty cried, his keen eyes reading its number
+in the one second when it lifted clear of the foam, and upside down.
+
+It was Henderson’s boat and with him had been lost Holyoak and Williams,
+another of the deep-water crowd.  Lost they indubitably were; but the
+boat remained, and Wolf Larsen made one more reckless effort to recover
+it.  I had come down to the deck, and I saw Horner and Kerfoot vainly
+protest against the attempt.
+
+“By God, I’ll not be robbed of my boat by any storm that ever blew out of
+hell!” he shouted, and though we four stood with our heads together that
+we might hear, his voice seemed faint and far, as though removed from us
+an immense distance.
+
+“Mr. Van Weyden!” he cried, and I heard through the tumult as one might
+hear a whisper.  “Stand by that jib with Johnson and Oofty!  The rest of
+you tail aft to the mainsheet!  Lively now! or I’ll sail you all into
+Kingdom Come!  Understand?”
+
+And when he put the wheel hard over and the _Ghost’s_ bow swung off,
+there was nothing for the hunters to do but obey and make the best of a
+risky chance.  How great the risk I realized when I was once more buried
+beneath the pounding seas and clinging for life to the pinrail at the
+foot of the foremast.  My fingers were torn loose, and I swept across to
+the side and over the side into the sea.  I could not swim, but before I
+could sink I was swept back again.  A strong hand gripped me, and when
+the _Ghost_ finally emerged, I found that I owed my life to Johnson.  I
+saw him looking anxiously about him, and noted that Kelly, who had come
+forward at the last moment, was missing.
+
+This time, having missed the boat, and not being in the same position as
+in the previous instances, Wolf Larsen was compelled to resort to a
+different manœuvre.  Running off before the wind with everything to
+starboard, he came about, and returned close-hauled on the port tack.
+
+“Grand!” Johnson shouted in my ear, as we successfully came through the
+attendant deluge, and I knew he referred, not to Wolf Larsen’s
+seamanship, but to the performance of the _Ghost_ herself.
+
+It was now so dark that there was no sign of the boat; but Wolf Larsen
+held back through the frightful turmoil as if guided by unerring
+instinct.  This time, though we were continually half-buried, there was
+no trough in which to be swept, and we drifted squarely down upon the
+upturned boat, badly smashing it as it was heaved inboard.
+
+Two hours of terrible work followed, in which all hands of us—two
+hunters, three sailors, Wolf Larsen and I—reefed, first one and then the
+other, the jib and mainsail.  Hove to under this short canvas, our decks
+were comparatively free of water, while the _Ghost_ bobbed and ducked
+amongst the combers like a cork.
+
+I had burst open the ends of my fingers at the very first, and during the
+reefing I had worked with tears of pain running down my cheeks.  And when
+all was done, I gave up like a woman and rolled upon the deck in the
+agony of exhaustion.
+
+In the meantime Thomas Mugridge, like a drowned rat, was being dragged
+out from under the forecastle head where he had cravenly ensconced
+himself.  I saw him pulled aft to the cabin, and noted with a shock of
+surprise that the galley had disappeared.  A clean space of deck showed
+where it had stood.
+
+In the cabin I found all hands assembled, sailors as well, and while
+coffee was being cooked over the small stove we drank whisky and crunched
+hard-tack.  Never in my life had food been so welcome.  And never had hot
+coffee tasted so good.  So violently did the _Ghost_ pitch and toss and
+tumble that it was impossible for even the sailors to move about without
+holding on, and several times, after a cry of “Now she takes it!” we were
+heaped upon the wall of the port cabins as though it had been the deck.
+
+“To hell with a look-out,” I heard Wolf Larsen say when we had eaten and
+drunk our fill.  “There’s nothing can be done on deck.  If anything’s
+going to run us down we couldn’t get out of its way.  Turn in, all hands,
+and get some sleep.”
+
+The sailors slipped forward, setting the side-lights as they went, while
+the two hunters remained to sleep in the cabin, it not being deemed
+advisable to open the slide to the steerage companion-way.  Wolf Larsen
+and I, between us, cut off Kerfoot’s crushed finger and sewed up the
+stump.  Mugridge, who, during all the time he had been compelled to cook
+and serve coffee and keep the fire going, had complained of internal
+pains, now swore that he had a broken rib or two.  On examination we
+found that he had three.  But his case was deferred to next day,
+principally for the reason that I did not know anything about broken ribs
+and would first have to read it up.
+
+“I don’t think it was worth it,” I said to Wolf Larsen, “a broken boat
+for Kelly’s life.”
+
+“But Kelly didn’t amount to much,” was the reply.  “Good-night.”
+
+After all that had passed, suffering intolerable anguish in my
+finger-ends, and with three boats missing, to say nothing of the wild
+capers the _Ghost_ was cutting, I should have thought it impossible to
+sleep.  But my eyes must have closed the instant my head touched the
+pillow, and in utter exhaustion I slept throughout the night, the while
+the _Ghost_, lonely and undirected, fought her way through the storm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+The next day, while the storm was blowing itself out, Wolf Larsen and I
+crammed anatomy and surgery and set Mugridge’s ribs.  Then, when the
+storm broke, Wolf Larsen cruised back and forth over that portion of the
+ocean where we had encountered it, and somewhat more to the westward,
+while the boats were being repaired and new sails made and bent.  Sealing
+schooner after sealing schooner we sighted and boarded, most of which
+were in search of lost boats, and most of which were carrying boats and
+crews they had picked up and which did not belong to them.  For the thick
+of the fleet had been to the westward of us, and the boats, scattered far
+and wide, had headed in mad flight for the nearest refuge.
+
+Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the _Cisco_, and, to
+Wolf Larsen’s huge delight and my own grief, he culled Smoke, with Nilson
+and Leach, from the _San Diego_.  So that, at the end of five days, we
+found ourselves short but four men—Henderson, Holyoak, Williams, and
+Kelly,—and were once more hunting on the flanks of the herd.
+
+As we followed it north we began to encounter the dreaded sea-fogs.  Day
+after day the boats lowered and were swallowed up almost ere they touched
+the water, while we on board pumped the horn at regular intervals and
+every fifteen minutes fired the bomb gun.  Boats were continually being
+lost and found, it being the custom for a boat to hunt, on lay, with
+whatever schooner picked it up, until such time it was recovered by its
+own schooner.  But Wolf Larsen, as was to be expected, being a boat
+short, took possession of the first stray one and compelled its men to
+hunt with the _Ghost_, not permitting them to return to their own
+schooner when we sighted it.  I remember how he forced the hunter and his
+two men below, a rifle at their breasts, when their captain passed by at
+biscuit-toss and hailed us for information.
+
+Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life, was
+soon limping about again and performing his double duties of cook and
+cabin-boy.  Johnson and Leach were bullied and beaten as much as ever,
+and they looked for their lives to end with the end of the hunting
+season; while the rest of the crew lived the lives of dogs and were
+worked like dogs by their pitiless master.  As for Wolf Larsen and
+myself, we got along fairly well; though I could not quite rid myself of
+the idea that right conduct, for me, lay in killing him.  He fascinated
+me immeasurably, and I feared him immeasurably.  And yet, I could not
+imagine him lying prone in death.  There was an endurance, as of
+perpetual youth, about him, which rose up and forbade the picture.  I
+could see him only as living always, and dominating always, fighting and
+destroying, himself surviving.
+
+One diversion of his, when we were in the midst of the herd and the sea
+was too rough to lower the boats, was to lower with two boat-pullers and
+a steerer and go out himself.  He was a good shot, too, and brought many
+a skin aboard under what the hunters termed impossible hunting
+conditions.  It seemed the breath of his nostrils, this carrying his life
+in his hands and struggling for it against tremendous odds.
+
+I was learning more and more seamanship; and one clear day—a thing we
+rarely encountered now—I had the satisfaction of running and handling the
+_Ghost_ and picking up the boats myself.  Wolf Larsen had been smitten
+with one of his headaches, and I stood at the wheel from morning until
+evening, sailing across the ocean after the last lee boat, and heaving to
+and picking it and the other five up without command or suggestion from
+him.
+
+Gales we encountered now and again, for it was a raw and stormy region,
+and, in the middle of June, a typhoon most memorable to me and most
+important because of the changes wrought through it upon my future.  We
+must have been caught nearly at the centre of this circular storm, and
+Wolf Larsen ran out of it and to the southward, first under a
+double-reefed jib, and finally under bare poles.  Never had I imagined so
+great a sea.  The seas previously encountered were as ripples compared
+with these, which ran a half-mile from crest to crest and which upreared,
+I am confident, above our masthead.  So great was it that Wolf Larsen
+himself did not dare heave to, though he was being driven far to the
+southward and out of the seal herd.
+
+We must have been well in the path of the trans-Pacific steamships when
+the typhoon moderated, and here, to the surprise of the hunters, we found
+ourselves in the midst of seals—a second herd, or sort of rear-guard,
+they declared, and a most unusual thing.  But it was “Boats over!” the
+boom-boom of guns, and the pitiful slaughter through the long day.
+
+It was at this time that I was approached by Leach.  I had just finished
+tallying the skins of the last boat aboard, when he came to my side, in
+the darkness, and said in a low tone:
+
+“Can you tell me, Mr. Van Weyden, how far we are off the coast, and what
+the bearings of Yokohama are?”
+
+My heart leaped with gladness, for I knew what he had in mind, and I gave
+him the bearings—west-north-west, and five hundred miles away.
+
+“Thank you, sir,” was all he said as he slipped back into the darkness.
+
+Next morning No. 3 boat and Johnson and Leach were missing.  The
+water-breakers and grub-boxes from all the other boats were likewise
+missing, as were the beds and sea bags of the two men.  Wolf Larsen was
+furious.  He set sail and bore away into the west-north-west, two hunters
+constantly at the mastheads and sweeping the sea with glasses, himself
+pacing the deck like an angry lion.  He knew too well my sympathy for the
+runaways to send me aloft as look-out.
+
+The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle in a
+haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity.  But he put
+the _Ghost_ through her best paces so as to get between the deserters and
+the land.  This accomplished, he cruised back and forth across what he
+knew must be their course.
+
+On the morning of the third day, shortly after eight bells, a cry that
+the boat was sighted came down from Smoke at the masthead.  All hands
+lined the rail.  A snappy breeze was blowing from the west with the
+promise of more wind behind it; and there, to leeward, in the troubled
+silver of the rising sun, appeared and disappeared a black speck.
+
+We squared away and ran for it.  My heart was as lead.  I felt myself
+turning sick in anticipation; and as I looked at the gleam of triumph in
+Wolf Larsen’s eyes, his form swam before me, and I felt almost
+irresistibly impelled to fling myself upon him.  So unnerved was I by the
+thought of impending violence to Leach and Johnson that my reason must
+have left me.  I know that I slipped down into the steerage in a daze,
+and that I was just beginning the ascent to the deck, a loaded shot-gun
+in my hands, when I heard the startled cry:
+
+“There’s five men in that boat!”
+
+I supported myself in the companion-way, weak and trembling, while the
+observation was being verified by the remarks of the rest of the men.
+Then my knees gave from under me and I sank down, myself again, but
+overcome by shock at knowledge of what I had so nearly done.  Also, I was
+very thankful as I put the gun away and slipped back on deck.
+
+No one had remarked my absence.  The boat was near enough for us to make
+out that it was larger than any sealing boat and built on different
+lines.  As we drew closer, the sail was taken in and the mast unstepped.
+Oars were shipped, and its occupants waited for us to heave to and take
+them aboard.
+
+Smoke, who had descended to the deck and was now standing by my side,
+began to chuckle in a significant way.  I looked at him inquiringly.
+
+“Talk of a mess!” he giggled.
+
+“What’s wrong?” I demanded.
+
+Again he chuckled.  “Don’t you see there, in the stern-sheets, on the
+bottom?  May I never shoot a seal again if that ain’t a woman!”
+
+I looked closely, but was not sure until exclamations broke out on all
+sides.  The boat contained four men, and its fifth occupant was certainly
+a woman.  We were agog with excitement, all except Wolf Larsen, who was
+too evidently disappointed in that it was not his own boat with the two
+victims of his malice.
+
+We ran down the flying jib, hauled the jib-sheets to wind-ward and the
+main-sheet flat, and came up into the wind.  The oars struck the water,
+and with a few strokes the boat was alongside.  I now caught my first
+fair glimpse of the woman.  She was wrapped in a long ulster, for the
+morning was raw; and I could see nothing but her face and a mass of light
+brown hair escaping from under the seaman’s cap on her head.  The eyes
+were large and brown and lustrous, the mouth sweet and sensitive, and the
+face itself a delicate oval, though sun and exposure to briny wind had
+burnt the face scarlet.
+
+She seemed to me like a being from another world.  I was aware of a
+hungry out-reaching for her, as of a starving man for bread.  But then, I
+had not seen a woman for a very long time.  I know that I was lost in a
+great wonder, almost a stupor,—this, then, was a woman?—so that I forgot
+myself and my mate’s duties, and took no part in helping the new-comers
+aboard.  For when one of the sailors lifted her into Wolf Larsen’s
+downstretched arms, she looked up into our curious faces and smiled
+amusedly and sweetly, as only a woman can smile, and as I had seen no one
+smile for so long that I had forgotten such smiles existed.
+
+“Mr. Van Weyden!”
+
+Wolf Larsen’s voice brought me sharply back to myself.
+
+“Will you take the lady below and see to her comfort?  Make up that spare
+port cabin.  Put Cooky to work on it.  And see what you can do for that
+face.  It’s burned badly.”
+
+He turned brusquely away from us and began to question the new men.  The
+boat was cast adrift, though one of them called it a “bloody shame” with
+Yokohama so near.
+
+I found myself strangely afraid of this woman I was escorting aft.  Also
+I was awkward.  It seemed to me that I was realizing for the first time
+what a delicate, fragile creature a woman is; and as I caught her arm to
+help her down the companion stairs, I was startled by its smallness and
+softness.  Indeed, she was a slender, delicate woman as women go, but to
+me she was so ethereally slender and delicate that I was quite prepared
+for her arm to crumble in my grasp.  All this, in frankness, to show my
+first impression, after long denial of women in general and of Maud
+Brewster in particular.
+
+“No need to go to any great trouble for me,” she protested, when I had
+seated her in Wolf Larsen’s arm-chair, which I had dragged hastily from
+his cabin.  “The men were looking for land at any moment this morning,
+and the vessel should be in by night; don’t you think so?”
+
+Her simple faith in the immediate future took me aback.  How could I
+explain to her the situation, the strange man who stalked the sea like
+Destiny, all that it had taken me months to learn?  But I answered
+honestly:
+
+“If it were any other captain except ours, I should say you would be
+ashore in Yokohama to-morrow.  But our captain is a strange man, and I
+beg of you to be prepared for anything—understand?—for anything.”
+
+“I—I confess I hardly do understand,” she hesitated, a perturbed but not
+frightened expression in her eyes.  “Or is it a misconception of mine
+that shipwrecked people are always shown every consideration?  This is
+such a little thing, you know.  We are so close to land.”
+
+“Candidly, I do not know,” I strove to reassure her.  “I wished merely to
+prepare you for the worst, if the worst is to come.  This man, this
+captain, is a brute, a demon, and one can never tell what will be his
+next fantastic act.”
+
+I was growing excited, but she interrupted me with an “Oh, I see,” and
+her voice sounded weary.  To think was patently an effort.  She was
+clearly on the verge of physical collapse.
+
+She asked no further questions, and I vouchsafed no remark, devoting
+myself to Wolf Larsen’s command, which was to make her comfortable.  I
+bustled about in quite housewifely fashion, procuring soothing lotions
+for her sunburn, raiding Wolf Larsen’s private stores for a bottle of
+port I knew to be there, and directing Thomas Mugridge in the preparation
+of the spare state-room.
+
+The wind was freshening rapidly, the _Ghost_ heeling over more and more,
+and by the time the state-room was ready she was dashing through the
+water at a lively clip.  I had quite forgotten the existence of Leach and
+Johnson, when suddenly, like a thunderclap, “Boat ho!” came down the open
+companion-way.  It was Smoke’s unmistakable voice, crying from the
+masthead.  I shot a glance at the woman, but she was leaning back in the
+arm-chair, her eyes closed, unutterably tired.  I doubted that she had
+heard, and I resolved to prevent her seeing the brutality I knew would
+follow the capture of the deserters.  She was tired.  Very good.  She
+should sleep.
+
+There were swift commands on deck, a stamping of feet and a slapping of
+reef-points as the _Ghost_ shot into the wind and about on the other
+tack.  As she filled away and heeled, the arm-chair began to slide across
+the cabin floor, and I sprang for it just in time to prevent the rescued
+woman from being spilled out.
+
+Her eyes were too heavy to suggest more than a hint of the sleepy
+surprise that perplexed her as she looked up at me, and she half
+stumbled, half tottered, as I led her to her cabin.  Mugridge grinned
+insinuatingly in my face as I shoved him out and ordered him back to his
+galley work; and he won his revenge by spreading glowing reports among
+the hunters as to what an excellent “lydy’s-myde” I was proving myself to
+be.
+
+She leaned heavily against me, and I do believe that she had fallen
+asleep again between the arm-chair and the state-room.  This I discovered
+when she nearly fell into the bunk during a sudden lurch of the schooner.
+She aroused, smiled drowsily, and was off to sleep again; and asleep I
+left her, under a heavy pair of sailor’s blankets, her head resting on a
+pillow I had appropriated from Wolf Larsen’s bunk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+I came on deck to find the _Ghost_ heading up close on the port tack and
+cutting in to windward of a familiar spritsail close-hauled on the same
+tack ahead of us.  All hands were on deck, for they knew that something
+was to happen when Leach and Johnson were dragged aboard.
+
+It was four bells.  Louis came aft to relieve the wheel.  There was a
+dampness in the air, and I noticed he had on his oilskins.
+
+“What are we going to have?” I asked him.
+
+“A healthy young slip of a gale from the breath iv it, sir,” he answered,
+“with a splatter iv rain just to wet our gills an’ no more.”
+
+“Too bad we sighted them,” I said, as the _Ghost’s_ bow was flung off a
+point by a large sea and the boat leaped for a moment past the jibs and
+into our line of vision.
+
+Louis gave a spoke and temporized.  “They’d never iv made the land, sir,
+I’m thinkin’.”
+
+“Think not?” I queried.
+
+“No, sir.  Did you feel that?”  (A puff had caught the schooner, and he
+was forced to put the wheel up rapidly to keep her out of the wind.)
+“’Tis no egg-shell’ll float on this sea an hour come, an’ it’s a stroke
+iv luck for them we’re here to pick ’em up.”
+
+Wolf Larsen strode aft from amidships, where he had been talking with the
+rescued men.  The cat-like springiness in his tread was a little more
+pronounced than usual, and his eyes were bright and snappy.
+
+“Three oilers and a fourth engineer,” was his greeting.  “But we’ll make
+sailors out of them, or boat-pullers at any rate.  Now, what of the
+lady?”
+
+I know not why, but I was aware of a twinge or pang like the cut of a
+knife when he mentioned her.  I thought it a certain silly fastidiousness
+on my part, but it persisted in spite of me, and I merely shrugged my
+shoulders in answer.
+
+Wolf Larsen pursed his lips in a long, quizzical whistle.
+
+“What’s her name, then?” he demanded.
+
+“I don’t know,” I replied.  “She is asleep.  She was very tired.  In
+fact, I am waiting to hear the news from you.  What vessel was it?”
+
+“Mail steamer,” he answered shortly.  “_The City of Tokio_, from ’Frisco,
+bound for Yokohama.  Disabled in that typhoon.  Old tub.  Opened up top
+and bottom like a sieve.  They were adrift four days.  And you don’t know
+who or what she is, eh?—maid, wife, or widow?  Well, well.”
+
+He shook his head in a bantering way, and regarded me with laughing eyes.
+
+“Are you—” I began.  It was on the verge of my tongue to ask if he were
+going to take the castaways into Yokohama.
+
+“Am I what?” he asked.
+
+“What do you intend doing with Leach and Johnson?”
+
+He shook his head.  “Really, Hump, I don’t know.  You see, with these
+additions I’ve about all the crew I want.”
+
+“And they’ve about all the escaping they want,” I said.  “Why not give
+them a change of treatment?  Take them aboard, and deal gently with them.
+Whatever they have done they have been hounded into doing.”
+
+“By me?”
+
+“By you,” I answered steadily.  “And I give you warning, Wolf Larsen,
+that I may forget love of my own life in the desire to kill you if you go
+too far in maltreating those poor wretches.”
+
+“Bravo!” he cried.  “You do me proud, Hump!  You’ve found your legs with
+a vengeance.  You’re quite an individual.  You were unfortunate in having
+your life cast in easy places, but you’re developing, and I like you the
+better for it.”
+
+His voice and expression changed.  His face was serious.  “Do you believe
+in promises?” he asked.  “Are they sacred things?”
+
+“Of course,” I answered.
+
+“Then here’s a compact,” he went on, consummate actor.  “If I promise not
+to lay my hands upon Leach will you promise, in turn, not to attempt to
+kill me?”
+
+“Oh, not that I’m afraid of you, not that I’m afraid of you,” he hastened
+to add.
+
+I could hardly believe my ears.  What was coming over the man?
+
+“Is it a go?” he asked impatiently.
+
+“A go,” I answered.
+
+His hand went out to mine, and as I shook it heartily I could have sworn
+I saw the mocking devil shine up for a moment in his eyes.
+
+We strolled across the poop to the lee side.  The boat was close at hand
+now, and in desperate plight.  Johnson was steering, Leach bailing.  We
+overhauled them about two feet to their one.  Wolf Larsen motioned Louis
+to keep off slightly, and we dashed abreast of the boat, not a score of
+feet to windward.  The _Ghost_ blanketed it.  The spritsail flapped
+emptily and the boat righted to an even keel, causing the two men swiftly
+to change position.  The boat lost headway, and, as we lifted on a huge
+surge, toppled and fell into the trough.
+
+It was at this moment that Leach and Johnson looked up into the faces of
+their shipmates, who lined the rail amidships.  There was no greeting.
+They were as dead men in their comrades’ eyes, and between them was the
+gulf that parts the living and the dead.
+
+The next instant they were opposite the poop, where stood Wolf Larsen and
+I.  We were falling in the trough, they were rising on the surge.
+Johnson looked at me, and I could see that his face was worn and haggard.
+I waved my hand to him, and he answered the greeting, but with a wave
+that was hopeless and despairing.  It was as if he were saying farewell.
+I did not see into the eyes of Leach, for he was looking at Wolf Larsen,
+the old and implacable snarl of hatred strong as ever on his face.
+
+Then they were gone astern.  The spritsail filled with the wind,
+suddenly, careening the frail open craft till it seemed it would surely
+capsize.  A whitecap foamed above it and broke across in a snow-white
+smother.  Then the boat emerged, half swamped, Leach flinging the water
+out and Johnson clinging to the steering-oar, his face white and anxious.
+
+Wolf Larsen barked a short laugh in my ear and strode away to the weather
+side of the poop.  I expected him to give orders for the _Ghost_ to heave
+to, but she kept on her course and he made no sign.  Louis stood
+imperturbably at the wheel, but I noticed the grouped sailors forward
+turning troubled faces in our direction.  Still the _Ghost_ tore along,
+till the boat dwindled to a speck, when Wolf Larsen’s voice rang out in
+command and he went about on the starboard tack.
+
+Back we held, two miles and more to windward of the struggling
+cockle-shell, when the flying jib was run down and the schooner hove to.
+The sealing boats are not made for windward work.  Their hope lies in
+keeping a weather position so that they may run before the wind for the
+schooner when it breezes up.  But in all that wild waste there was no
+refuge for Leach and Johnson save on the _Ghost_, and they resolutely
+began the windward beat.  It was slow work in the heavy sea that was
+running.  At any moment they were liable to be overwhelmed by the hissing
+combers.  Time and again and countless times we watched the boat luff
+into the big whitecaps, lose headway, and be flung back like a cork.
+
+Johnson was a splendid seaman, and he knew as much about small boats as
+he did about ships.  At the end of an hour and a half he was nearly
+alongside, standing past our stern on the last leg out, aiming to fetch
+us on the next leg back.
+
+“So you’ve changed your mind?” I heard Wolf Larsen mutter, half to
+himself, half to them as though they could hear.  “You want to come
+aboard, eh?  Well, then, just keep a-coming.”
+
+“Hard up with that helm!” he commanded Oofty-Oofty, the Kanaka, who had
+in the meantime relieved Louis at the wheel.
+
+Command followed command.  As the schooner paid off, the fore- and
+main-sheets were slacked away for fair wind.  And before the wind we
+were, and leaping, when Johnson, easing his sheet at imminent peril, cut
+across our wake a hundred feet away.  Again Wolf Larsen laughed, at the
+same time beckoning them with his arm to follow.  It was evidently his
+intention to play with them,—a lesson, I took it, in lieu of a beating,
+though a dangerous lesson, for the frail craft stood in momentary danger
+of being overwhelmed.
+
+Johnson squared away promptly and ran after us.  There was nothing else
+for him to do.  Death stalked everywhere, and it was only a matter of
+time when some one of those many huge seas would fall upon the boat, roll
+over it, and pass on.
+
+“’Tis the fear iv death at the hearts iv them,” Louis muttered in my ear,
+as I passed forward to see to taking in the flying jib and staysail.
+
+“Oh, he’ll heave to in a little while and pick them up,” I answered
+cheerfully.  “He’s bent upon giving them a lesson, that’s all.”
+
+Louis looked at me shrewdly.  “Think so?” he asked.
+
+“Surely,” I answered.  “Don’t you?”
+
+“I think nothing but iv my own skin, these days,” was his answer.  “An’
+’tis with wonder I’m filled as to the workin’ out iv things.  A pretty
+mess that ’Frisco whisky got me into, an’ a prettier mess that woman’s
+got you into aft there.  Ah, it’s myself that knows ye for a blitherin’
+fool.”
+
+“What do you mean?” I demanded; for, having sped his shaft, he was
+turning away.
+
+“What do I mean?” he cried.  “And it’s you that asks me!  ’Tis not what I
+mean, but what the Wolf ’ll mean.  The Wolf, I said, the Wolf!”
+
+“If trouble comes, will you stand by?” I asked impulsively, for he had
+voiced my own fear.
+
+“Stand by?  ’Tis old fat Louis I stand by, an’ trouble enough it’ll be.
+We’re at the beginnin’ iv things, I’m tellin’ ye, the bare beginnin’ iv
+things.”
+
+“I had not thought you so great a coward,” I sneered.
+
+He favoured me with a contemptuous stare.  “If I raised never a hand for
+that poor fool,”—pointing astern to the tiny sail,—“d’ye think I’m
+hungerin’ for a broken head for a woman I never laid me eyes upon before
+this day?”
+
+I turned scornfully away and went aft.
+
+“Better get in those topsails, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen said, as I
+came on the poop.
+
+I felt relief, at least as far as the two men were concerned.  It was
+clear he did not wish to run too far away from them.  I picked up hope at
+the thought and put the order swiftly into execution.  I had scarcely
+opened my mouth to issue the necessary commands, when eager men were
+springing to halyards and downhauls, and others were racing aloft.  This
+eagerness on their part was noted by Wolf Larsen with a grim smile.
+
+Still we increased our lead, and when the boat had dropped astern several
+miles we hove to and waited.  All eyes watched it coming, even Wolf
+Larsen’s; but he was the only unperturbed man aboard.  Louis, gazing
+fixedly, betrayed a trouble in his face he was not quite able to hide.
+
+The boat drew closer and closer, hurling along through the seething green
+like a thing alive, lifting and sending and uptossing across the
+huge-backed breakers, or disappearing behind them only to rush into sight
+again and shoot skyward.  It seemed impossible that it could continue to
+live, yet with each dizzying sweep it did achieve the impossible.  A
+rain-squall drove past, and out of the flying wet the boat emerged,
+almost upon us.
+
+“Hard up, there!” Wolf Larsen shouted, himself springing to the wheel and
+whirling it over.
+
+Again the _Ghost_ sprang away and raced before the wind, and for two
+hours Johnson and Leach pursued us.  We hove to and ran away, hove to and
+ran away, and ever astern the struggling patch of sail tossed skyward and
+fell into the rushing valleys.  It was a quarter of a mile away when a
+thick squall of rain veiled it from view.  It never emerged.  The wind
+blew the air clear again, but no patch of sail broke the troubled
+surface.  I thought I saw, for an instant, the boat’s bottom show black
+in a breaking crest.  At the best, that was all.  For Johnson and Leach
+the travail of existence had ceased.
+
+The men remained grouped amidships.  No one had gone below, and no one
+was speaking.  Nor were any looks being exchanged.  Each man seemed
+stunned—deeply contemplative, as it were, and, not quite sure, trying to
+realize just what had taken place.  Wolf Larsen gave them little time for
+thought.  He at once put the _Ghost_ upon her course—a course which meant
+the seal herd and not Yokohama harbour.  But the men were no longer eager
+as they pulled and hauled, and I heard curses amongst them, which left
+their lips smothered and as heavy and lifeless as were they.  Not so was
+it with the hunters.  Smoke the irrepressible related a story, and they
+descended into the steerage, bellowing with laughter.
+
+As I passed to leeward of the galley on my way aft I was approached by
+the engineer we had rescued.  His face was white, his lips were
+trembling.
+
+“Good God! sir, what kind of a craft is this?” he cried.
+
+“You have eyes, you have seen,” I answered, almost brutally, what of the
+pain and fear at my own heart.
+
+“Your promise?” I said to Wolf Larsen.
+
+“I was not thinking of taking them aboard when I made that promise,” he
+answered.  “And anyway, you’ll agree I’ve not laid my hands upon them.”
+
+“Far from it, far from it,” he laughed a moment later.
+
+I made no reply.  I was incapable of speaking, my mind was too confused.
+I must have time to think, I knew.  This woman, sleeping even now in the
+spare cabin, was a responsibility, which I must consider, and the only
+rational thought that flickered through my mind was that I must do
+nothing hastily if I were to be any help to her at all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+The remainder of the day passed uneventfully.  The young slip of a gale,
+having wetted our gills, proceeded to moderate.  The fourth engineer and
+the three oilers, after a warm interview with Wolf Larsen, were furnished
+with outfits from the slop-chests, assigned places under the hunters in
+the various boats and watches on the vessel, and bundled forward into the
+forecastle.  They went protestingly, but their voices were not loud.
+They were awed by what they had already seen of Wolf Larsen’s character,
+while the tale of woe they speedily heard in the forecastle took the last
+bit of rebellion out of them.
+
+Miss Brewster—we had learned her name from the engineer—slept on and on.
+At supper I requested the hunters to lower their voices, so she was not
+disturbed; and it was not till next morning that she made her appearance.
+It had been my intention to have her meals served apart, but Wolf Larsen
+put down his foot.  Who was she that she should be too good for cabin
+table and cabin society? had been his demand.
+
+But her coming to the table had something amusing in it.  The hunters
+fell silent as clams.  Jock Horner and Smoke alone were unabashed,
+stealing stealthy glances at her now and again, and even taking part in
+the conversation.  The other four men glued their eyes on their plates
+and chewed steadily and with thoughtful precision, their ears moving and
+wobbling, in time with their jaws, like the ears of so many animals.
+
+Wolf Larsen had little to say at first, doing no more than reply when he
+was addressed.  Not that he was abashed.  Far from it.  This woman was a
+new type to him, a different breed from any he had ever known, and he was
+curious.  He studied her, his eyes rarely leaving her face unless to
+follow the movements of her hands or shoulders.  I studied her myself,
+and though it was I who maintained the conversation, I know that I was a
+bit shy, not quite self-possessed.  His was the perfect poise, the
+supreme confidence in self, which nothing could shake; and he was no more
+timid of a woman than he was of storm and battle.
+
+“And when shall we arrive at Yokohama?” she asked, turning to him and
+looking him squarely in the eyes.
+
+There it was, the question flat.  The jaws stopped working, the ears
+ceased wobbling, and though eyes remained glued on plates, each man
+listened greedily for the answer.
+
+“In four months, possibly three if the season closes early,” Wolf Larsen
+said.
+
+She caught her breath and stammered, “I—I thought—I was given to
+understand that Yokohama was only a day’s sail away.  It—”  Here she
+paused and looked about the table at the circle of unsympathetic faces
+staring hard at the plates.  “It is not right,” she concluded.
+
+“That is a question you must settle with Mr. Van Weyden there,” he
+replied, nodding to me with a mischievous twinkle.  “Mr. Van Weyden is
+what you may call an authority on such things as rights.  Now I, who am
+only a sailor, would look upon the situation somewhat differently.  It
+may possibly be your misfortune that you have to remain with us, but it
+is certainly our good fortune.”
+
+He regarded her smilingly.  Her eyes fell before his gaze, but she lifted
+them again, and defiantly, to mine.  I read the unspoken question there:
+was it right?  But I had decided that the part I was to play must be a
+neutral one, so I did not answer.
+
+“What do you think?” she demanded.
+
+“That it is unfortunate, especially if you have any engagements falling
+due in the course of the next several months.  But, since you say that
+you were voyaging to Japan for your health, I can assure you that it will
+improve no better anywhere than aboard the _Ghost_.”
+
+I saw her eyes flash with indignation, and this time it was I who dropped
+mine, while I felt my face flushing under her gaze.  It was cowardly, but
+what else could I do?
+
+“Mr. Van Weyden speaks with the voice of authority,” Wolf Larsen laughed.
+
+I nodded my head, and she, having recovered herself, waited expectantly.
+
+“Not that he is much to speak of now,” Wolf Larsen went on, “but he has
+improved wonderfully.  You should have seen him when he came on board.  A
+more scrawny, pitiful specimen of humanity one could hardly conceive.
+Isn’t that so, Kerfoot?”
+
+Kerfoot, thus directly addressed, was startled into dropping his knife on
+the floor, though he managed to grunt affirmation.
+
+“Developed himself by peeling potatoes and washing dishes.  Eh, Kerfoot?”
+
+Again that worthy grunted.
+
+“Look at him now.  True, he is not what you would term muscular, but
+still he has muscles, which is more than he had when he came aboard.
+Also, he has legs to stand on.  You would not think so to look at him,
+but he was quite unable to stand alone at first.”
+
+The hunters were snickering, but she looked at me with a sympathy in her
+eyes which more than compensated for Wolf Larsen’s nastiness.  In truth,
+it had been so long since I had received sympathy that I was softened,
+and I became then, and gladly, her willing slave.  But I was angry with
+Wolf Larsen.  He was challenging my manhood with his slurs, challenging
+the very legs he claimed to be instrumental in getting for me.
+
+“I may have learned to stand on my own legs,” I retorted.  “But I have
+yet to stamp upon others with them.”
+
+He looked at me insolently.  “Your education is only half completed,
+then,” he said dryly, and turned to her.
+
+“We are very hospitable upon the _Ghost_.  Mr. Van Weyden has discovered
+that.  We do everything to make our guests feel at home, eh, Mr. Van
+Weyden?”
+
+“Even to the peeling of potatoes and the washing of dishes,” I answered,
+“to say nothing to wringing their necks out of very fellowship.”
+
+“I beg of you not to receive false impressions of us from Mr. Van
+Weyden,” he interposed with mock anxiety.  “You will observe, Miss
+Brewster, that he carries a dirk in his belt, a—ahem—a most unusual thing
+for a ship’s officer to do.  While really very estimable, Mr. Van Weyden
+is sometimes—how shall I say?—er—quarrelsome, and harsh measures are
+necessary.  He is quite reasonable and fair in his calm moments, and as
+he is calm now he will not deny that only yesterday he threatened my
+life.”
+
+I was well-nigh choking, and my eyes were certainly fiery.  He drew
+attention to me.
+
+“Look at him now.  He can scarcely control himself in your presence.  He
+is not accustomed to the presence of ladies anyway.  I shall have to arm
+myself before I dare go on deck with him.”
+
+He shook his head sadly, murmuring, “Too bad, too bad,” while the hunters
+burst into guffaws of laughter.
+
+The deep-sea voices of these men, rumbling and bellowing in the confined
+space, produced a wild effect.  The whole setting was wild, and for the
+first time, regarding this strange woman and realizing how incongruous
+she was in it, I was aware of how much a part of it I was myself.  I knew
+these men and their mental processes, was one of them myself, living the
+seal-hunting life, eating the seal-hunting fare, thinking, largely, the
+seal-hunting thoughts.  There was for me no strangeness to it, to the
+rough clothes, the coarse faces, the wild laughter, and the lurching
+cabin walls and swaying sea-lamps.
+
+As I buttered a piece of bread my eyes chanced to rest upon my hand.  The
+knuckles were skinned and inflamed clear across, the fingers swollen, the
+nails rimmed with black.  I felt the mattress-like growth of beard on my
+neck, knew that the sleeve of my coat was ripped, that a button was
+missing from the throat of the blue shirt I wore.  The dirk mentioned by
+Wolf Larsen rested in its sheath on my hip.  It was very natural that it
+should be there,—how natural I had not imagined until now, when I looked
+upon it with her eyes and knew how strange it and all that went with it
+must appear to her.
+
+But she divined the mockery in Wolf Larsen’s words, and again favoured me
+with a sympathetic glance.  But there was a look of bewilderment also in
+her eyes.  That it was mockery made the situation more puzzling to her.
+
+“I may be taken off by some passing vessel, perhaps,” she suggested.
+
+“There will be no passing vessels, except other sealing-schooners,” Wolf
+Larsen made answer.
+
+“I have no clothes, nothing,” she objected.  “You hardly realize, sir,
+that I am not a man, or that I am unaccustomed to the vagrant, careless
+life which you and your men seem to lead.”
+
+“The sooner you get accustomed to it, the better,” he said.
+
+“I’ll furnish you with cloth, needles, and thread,” he added.  “I hope it
+will not be too dreadful a hardship for you to make yourself a dress or
+two.”
+
+She made a wry pucker with her mouth, as though to advertise her
+ignorance of dressmaking.  That she was frightened and bewildered, and
+that she was bravely striving to hide it, was quite plain to me.
+
+“I suppose you’re like Mr. Van Weyden there, accustomed to having things
+done for you.  Well, I think doing a few things for yourself will hardly
+dislocate any joints.  By the way, what do you do for a living?”
+
+She regarded him with amazement unconcealed.
+
+“I mean no offence, believe me.  People eat, therefore they must procure
+the wherewithal.  These men here shoot seals in order to live; for the
+same reason I sail this schooner; and Mr. Van Weyden, for the present at
+any rate, earns his salty grub by assisting me.  Now what do you do?”
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“Do you feed yourself?  Or does some one else feed you?”
+
+“I’m afraid some one else has fed me most of my life,” she laughed,
+trying bravely to enter into the spirit of his quizzing, though I could
+see a terror dawning and growing in her eyes as she watched Wolf Larsen.
+
+“And I suppose some one else makes your bed for you?”
+
+“I _have_ made beds,” she replied.
+
+“Very often?”
+
+She shook her head with mock ruefulness.
+
+“Do you know what they do to poor men in the States, who, like you, do
+not work for their living?”
+
+“I am very ignorant,” she pleaded.  “What do they do to the poor men who
+are like me?”
+
+“They send them to jail.  The crime of not earning a living, in their
+case, is called vagrancy.  If I were Mr. Van Weyden, who harps eternally
+on questions of right and wrong, I’d ask, by what right do you live when
+you do nothing to deserve living?”
+
+“But as you are not Mr. Van Weyden, I don’t have to answer, do I?”
+
+She beamed upon him through her terror-filled eyes, and the pathos of it
+cut me to the heart.  I must in some way break in and lead the
+conversation into other channels.
+
+“Have you ever earned a dollar by your own labour?” he demanded, certain
+of her answer, a triumphant vindictiveness in his voice.
+
+“Yes, I have,” she answered slowly, and I could have laughed aloud at his
+crestfallen visage.  “I remember my father giving me a dollar once, when
+I was a little girl, for remaining absolutely quiet for five minutes.”
+
+He smiled indulgently.
+
+“But that was long ago,” she continued.  “And you would scarcely demand a
+little girl of nine to earn her own living.”
+
+“At present, however,” she said, after another slight pause, “I earn
+about eighteen hundred dollars a year.”
+
+With one accord, all eyes left the plates and settled on her.  A woman
+who earned eighteen hundred dollars a year was worth looking at.  Wolf
+Larsen was undisguised in his admiration.
+
+“Salary, or piece-work?” he asked.
+
+“Piece-work,” she answered promptly.
+
+“Eighteen hundred,” he calculated.  “That’s a hundred and fifty dollars a
+month.  Well, Miss Brewster, there is nothing small about the _Ghost_.
+Consider yourself on salary during the time you remain with us.”
+
+She made no acknowledgment.  She was too unused as yet to the whims of
+the man to accept them with equanimity.
+
+“I forgot to inquire,” he went on suavely, “as to the nature of your
+occupation.  What commodities do you turn out?  What tools and materials
+do you require?”
+
+“Paper and ink,” she laughed.  “And, oh! also a typewriter.”
+
+“You are Maud Brewster,” I said slowly and with certainty, almost as
+though I were charging her with a crime.
+
+Her eyes lifted curiously to mine.  “How do you know?”
+
+“Aren’t you?” I demanded.
+
+She acknowledged her identity with a nod.  It was Wolf Larsen’s turn to
+be puzzled.  The name and its magic signified nothing to him.  I was
+proud that it did mean something to me, and for the first time in a weary
+while I was convincingly conscious of a superiority over him.
+
+“I remember writing a review of a thin little volume—” I had begun
+carelessly, when she interrupted me.
+
+“You!” she cried.  “You are—”
+
+She was now staring at me in wide-eyed wonder.
+
+I nodded my identity, in turn.
+
+“Humphrey Van Weyden,” she concluded; then added with a sigh of relief,
+and unaware that she had glanced that relief at Wolf Larsen, “I am so
+glad.”
+
+“I remember the review,” she went on hastily, becoming aware of the
+awkwardness of her remark; “that too, too flattering review.”
+
+“Not at all,” I denied valiantly.  “You impeach my sober judgment and
+make my canons of little worth.  Besides, all my brother critics were
+with me.  Didn’t Lang include your ‘Kiss Endured’ among the four supreme
+sonnets by women in the English language?”
+
+“But you called me the American Mrs. Meynell!”
+
+“Was it not true?” I demanded.
+
+“No, not that,” she answered.  “I was hurt.”
+
+“We can measure the unknown only by the known,” I replied, in my finest
+academic manner.  “As a critic I was compelled to place you.  You have
+now become a yardstick yourself.  Seven of your thin little volumes are
+on my shelves; and there are two thicker volumes, the essays, which, you
+will pardon my saying, and I know not which is flattered more, fully
+equal your verse.  The time is not far distant when some unknown will
+arise in England and the critics will name her the English Maud
+Brewster.”
+
+“You are very kind, I am sure,” she murmured; and the very
+conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of associations it
+aroused of the old life on the other side of the world, gave me a quick
+thrill—rich with remembrance but stinging sharp with home-sickness.
+
+“And you are Maud Brewster,” I said solemnly, gazing across at her.
+
+“And you are Humphrey Van Weyden,” she said, gazing back at me with equal
+solemnity and awe.  “How unusual!  I don’t understand.  We surely are not
+to expect some wildly romantic sea-story from your sober pen.”
+
+“No, I am not gathering material, I assure you,” was my answer.  “I have
+neither aptitude nor inclination for fiction.”
+
+“Tell me, why have you always buried yourself in California?” she next
+asked.  “It has not been kind of you.  We of the East have seen so very
+little of you—too little, indeed, of the Dean of American Letters, the
+Second.”
+
+I bowed to, and disclaimed, the compliment.  “I nearly met you, once, in
+Philadelphia, some Browning affair or other—you were to lecture, you
+know.  My train was four hours late.”
+
+And then we quite forgot where we were, leaving Wolf Larsen stranded and
+silent in the midst of our flood of gossip.  The hunters left the table
+and went on deck, and still we talked.  Wolf Larsen alone remained.
+Suddenly I became aware of him, leaning back from the table and listening
+curiously to our alien speech of a world he did not know.
+
+I broke short off in the middle of a sentence.  The present, with all its
+perils and anxieties, rushed upon me with stunning force.  It smote Miss
+Brewster likewise, a vague and nameless terror rushing into her eyes as
+she regarded Wolf Larsen.
+
+He rose to his feet and laughed awkwardly.  The sound of it was metallic.
+
+“Oh, don’t mind me,” he said, with a self-depreciatory wave of his hand.
+“I don’t count.  Go on, go on, I pray you.”
+
+But the gates of speech were closed, and we, too, rose from the table and
+laughed awkwardly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+The chagrin Wolf Larsen felt from being ignored by Maud Brewster and me
+in the conversation at table had to express itself in some fashion, and
+it fell to Thomas Mugridge to be the victim.  He had not mended his ways
+nor his shirt, though the latter he contended he had changed.  The
+garment itself did not bear out the assertion, nor did the accumulations
+of grease on stove and pot and pan attest a general cleanliness.
+
+“I’ve given you warning, Cooky,” Wolf Larsen said, “and now you’ve got to
+take your medicine.”
+
+Mugridge’s face turned white under its sooty veneer, and when Wolf Larsen
+called for a rope and a couple of men, the miserable Cockney fled wildly
+out of the galley and dodged and ducked about the deck with the grinning
+crew in pursuit.  Few things could have been more to their liking than to
+give him a tow over the side, for to the forecastle he had sent messes
+and concoctions of the vilest order.  Conditions favoured the
+undertaking.  The _Ghost_ was slipping through the water at no more than
+three miles an hour, and the sea was fairly calm.  But Mugridge had
+little stomach for a dip in it.  Possibly he had seen men towed before.
+Besides, the water was frightfully cold, and his was anything but a
+rugged constitution.
+
+As usual, the watches below and the hunters turned out for what promised
+sport.  Mugridge seemed to be in rabid fear of the water, and he
+exhibited a nimbleness and speed we did not dream he possessed.  Cornered
+in the right-angle of the poop and galley, he sprang like a cat to the
+top of the cabin and ran aft.  But his pursuers forestalling him, he
+doubled back across the cabin, passed over the galley, and gained the
+deck by means of the steerage-scuttle.  Straight forward he raced, the
+boat-puller Harrison at his heels and gaining on him.  But Mugridge,
+leaping suddenly, caught the jib-boom-lift.  It happened in an instant.
+Holding his weight by his arms, and in mid-air doubling his body at the
+hips, he let fly with both feet.  The oncoming Harrison caught the kick
+squarely in the pit of the stomach, groaned involuntarily, and doubled up
+and sank backward to the deck.
+
+Hand-clapping and roars of laughter from the hunters greeted the exploit,
+while Mugridge, eluding half of his pursuers at the foremast, ran aft and
+through the remainder like a runner on the football field.  Straight aft
+he held, to the poop and along the poop to the stern.  So great was his
+speed that as he curved past the corner of the cabin he slipped and fell.
+Nilson was standing at the wheel, and the Cockney’s hurtling body struck
+his legs.  Both went down together, but Mugridge alone arose.  By some
+freak of pressures, his frail body had snapped the strong man’s leg like
+a pipe-stem.
+
+Parsons took the wheel, and the pursuit continued.  Round and round the
+decks they went, Mugridge sick with fear, the sailors hallooing and
+shouting directions to one another, and the hunters bellowing
+encouragement and laughter.  Mugridge went down on the fore-hatch under
+three men; but he emerged from the mass like an eel, bleeding at the
+mouth, the offending shirt ripped into tatters, and sprang for the
+main-rigging.  Up he went, clear up, beyond the ratlines, to the very
+masthead.
+
+Half-a-dozen sailors swarmed to the crosstrees after him, where they
+clustered and waited while two of their number, Oofty-Oofty and Black
+(who was Latimer’s boat-steerer), continued up the thin steel stays,
+lifting their bodies higher and higher by means of their arms.
+
+It was a perilous undertaking, for, at a height of over a hundred feet
+from the deck, holding on by their hands, they were not in the best of
+positions to protect themselves from Mugridge’s feet.  And Mugridge
+kicked savagely, till the Kanaka, hanging on with one hand, seized the
+Cockney’s foot with the other.  Black duplicated the performance a moment
+later with the other foot.  Then the three writhed together in a swaying
+tangle, struggling, sliding, and falling into the arms of their mates on
+the crosstrees.
+
+The aërial battle was over, and Thomas Mugridge, whining and gibbering,
+his mouth flecked with bloody foam, was brought down to deck.  Wolf
+Larsen rove a bowline in a piece of rope and slipped it under his
+shoulders.  Then he was carried aft and flung into the sea.
+Forty,—fifty,—sixty feet of line ran out, when Wolf Larsen cried “Belay!”
+Oofty-Oofty took a turn on a bitt, the rope tautened, and the _Ghost_,
+lunging onward, jerked the cook to the surface.
+
+It was a pitiful spectacle.  Though he could not drown, and was
+nine-lived in addition, he was suffering all the agonies of
+half-drowning.  The _Ghost_ was going very slowly, and when her stern
+lifted on a wave and she slipped forward she pulled the wretch to the
+surface and gave him a moment in which to breathe; but between each lift
+the stern fell, and while the bow lazily climbed the next wave the line
+slacked and he sank beneath.
+
+I had forgotten the existence of Maud Brewster, and I remembered her with
+a start as she stepped lightly beside me.  It was her first time on deck
+since she had come aboard.  A dead silence greeted her appearance.
+
+“What is the cause of the merriment?” she asked.
+
+“Ask Captain Larsen,” I answered composedly and coldly, though inwardly
+my blood was boiling at the thought that she should be witness to such
+brutality.
+
+She took my advice and was turning to put it into execution, when her
+eyes lighted on Oofty-Oofty, immediately before her, his body instinct
+with alertness and grace as he held the turn of the rope.
+
+“Are you fishing?” she asked him.
+
+He made no reply.  His eyes, fixed intently on the sea astern, suddenly
+flashed.
+
+“Shark ho, sir!” he cried.
+
+“Heave in!  Lively!  All hands tail on!” Wolf Larsen shouted, springing
+himself to the rope in advance of the quickest.
+
+Mugridge had heard the Kanaka’s warning cry and was screaming madly.  I
+could see a black fin cutting the water and making for him with greater
+swiftness than he was being pulled aboard.  It was an even toss whether
+the shark or we would get him, and it was a matter of moments.  When
+Mugridge was directly beneath us, the stern descended the slope of a
+passing wave, thus giving the advantage to the shark.  The fin
+disappeared.  The belly flashed white in swift upward rush.  Almost
+equally swift, but not quite, was Wolf Larsen.  He threw his strength
+into one tremendous jerk.  The Cockney’s body left the water; so did part
+of the shark’s.  He drew up his legs, and the man-eater seemed no more
+than barely to touch one foot, sinking back into the water with a splash.
+But at the moment of contact Thomas Mugridge cried out.  Then he came in
+like a fresh-caught fish on a line, clearing the rail generously and
+striking the deck in a heap, on hands and knees, and rolling over.
+
+But a fountain of blood was gushing forth.  The right foot was missing,
+amputated neatly at the ankle.  I looked instantly to Maud Brewster.  Her
+face was white, her eyes dilated with horror.  She was gazing, not at
+Thomas Mugridge, but at Wolf Larsen.  And he was aware of it, for he
+said, with one of his short laughs:
+
+“Man-play, Miss Brewster.  Somewhat rougher, I warrant, than what you
+have been used to, but still-man-play.  The shark was not in the
+reckoning.  It—”
+
+But at this juncture, Mugridge, who had lifted his head and ascertained
+the extent of his loss, floundered over on the deck and buried his teeth
+in Wolf Larsen’s leg.  Wolf Larsen stooped, coolly, to the Cockney, and
+pressed with thumb and finger at the rear of the jaws and below the ears.
+The jaws opened with reluctance, and Wolf Larsen stepped free.
+
+“As I was saying,” he went on, as though nothing unwonted had happened,
+“the shark was not in the reckoning.  It was—ahem—shall we say
+Providence?”
+
+She gave no sign that she had heard, though the expression of her eyes
+changed to one of inexpressible loathing as she started to turn away.
+She no more than started, for she swayed and tottered, and reached her
+hand weakly out to mine.  I caught her in time to save her from falling,
+and helped her to a seat on the cabin.  I thought she might faint
+outright, but she controlled herself.
+
+“Will you get a tourniquet, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen called to me.
+
+I hesitated.  Her lips moved, and though they formed no words, she
+commanded me with her eyes, plainly as speech, to go to the help of the
+unfortunate man.  “Please,” she managed to whisper, and I could but obey.
+
+By now I had developed such skill at surgery that Wolf Larsen, with a few
+words of advice, left me to my task with a couple of sailors for
+assistants.  For his task he elected a vengeance on the shark.  A heavy
+swivel-hook, baited with fat salt-pork, was dropped overside; and by the
+time I had compressed the severed veins and arteries, the sailors were
+singing and heaving in the offending monster.  I did not see it myself,
+but my assistants, first one and then the other, deserted me for a few
+moments to run amidships and look at what was going on.  The shark, a
+sixteen-footer, was hoisted up against the main-rigging.  Its jaws were
+pried apart to their greatest extension, and a stout stake, sharpened at
+both ends, was so inserted that when the pries were removed the spread
+jaws were fixed upon it.  This accomplished, the hook was cut out.  The
+shark dropped back into the sea, helpless, yet with its full strength,
+doomed—to lingering starvation—a living death less meet for it than for
+the man who devised the punishment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+I knew what it was as she came toward me.  For ten minutes I had watched
+her talking earnestly with the engineer, and now, with a sign for
+silence, I drew her out of earshot of the helmsman.  Her face was white
+and set; her large eyes, larger than usual what of the purpose in them,
+looked penetratingly into mine.  I felt rather timid and apprehensive,
+for she had come to search Humphrey Van Weyden’s soul, and Humphrey Van
+Weyden had nothing of which to be particularly proud since his advent on
+the _Ghost_.
+
+We walked to the break of the poop, where she turned and faced me.  I
+glanced around to see that no one was within hearing distance.
+
+“What is it?” I asked gently; but the expression of determination on her
+face did not relax.
+
+“I can readily understand,” she began, “that this morning’s affair was
+largely an accident; but I have been talking with Mr. Haskins.  He tells
+me that the day we were rescued, even while I was in the cabin, two men
+were drowned, deliberately drowned—murdered.”
+
+There was a query in her voice, and she faced me accusingly, as though I
+were guilty of the deed, or at least a party to it.
+
+“The information is quite correct,” I answered.  “The two men were
+murdered.”
+
+“And you permitted it!” she cried.
+
+“I was unable to prevent it, is a better way of phrasing it,” I replied,
+still gently.
+
+“But you tried to prevent it?”  There was an emphasis on the “tried,” and
+a pleading little note in her voice.
+
+“Oh, but you didn’t,” she hurried on, divining my answer.  “But why
+didn’t you?”
+
+I shrugged my shoulders.  “You must remember, Miss Brewster, that you are
+a new inhabitant of this little world, and that you do not yet understand
+the laws which operate within it.  You bring with you certain fine
+conceptions of humanity, manhood, conduct, and such things; but here you
+will find them misconceptions.  I have found it so,” I added, with an
+involuntary sigh.
+
+She shook her head incredulously.
+
+“What would you advise, then?” I asked.  “That I should take a knife, or
+a gun, or an axe, and kill this man?”
+
+She half started back.
+
+“No, not that!”
+
+“Then what should I do?  Kill myself?”
+
+“You speak in purely materialistic terms,” she objected.  “There is such
+a thing as moral courage, and moral courage is never without effect.”
+
+“Ah,” I smiled, “you advise me to kill neither him nor myself, but to let
+him kill me.”  I held up my hand as she was about to speak.  “For moral
+courage is a worthless asset on this little floating world.  Leach, one
+of the men who were murdered, had moral courage to an unusual degree.  So
+had the other man, Johnson.  Not only did it not stand them in good
+stead, but it destroyed them.  And so with me if I should exercise what
+little moral courage I may possess.
+
+“You must understand, Miss Brewster, and understand clearly, that this
+man is a monster.  He is without conscience.  Nothing is sacred to him,
+nothing is too terrible for him to do.  It was due to his whim that I was
+detained aboard in the first place.  It is due to his whim that I am
+still alive.  I do nothing, can do nothing, because I am a slave to this
+monster, as you are now a slave to him; because I desire to live, as you
+will desire to live; because I cannot fight and overcome him, just as you
+will not be able to fight and overcome him.”
+
+She waited for me to go on.
+
+“What remains?  Mine is the role of the weak.  I remain silent and suffer
+ignominy, as you will remain silent and suffer ignominy.  And it is well.
+It is the best we can do if we wish to live.  The battle is not always to
+the strong.  We have not the strength with which to fight this man; we
+must dissimulate, and win, if win we can, by craft.  If you will be
+advised by me, this is what you will do.  I know my position is perilous,
+and I may say frankly that yours is even more perilous.  We must stand
+together, without appearing to do so, in secret alliance.  I shall not be
+able to side with you openly, and, no matter what indignities may be put
+upon me, you are to remain likewise silent.  We must provoke no scenes
+with this man, nor cross his will.  And we must keep smiling faces and be
+friendly with him no matter how repulsive it may be.”
+
+She brushed her hand across her forehead in a puzzled way, saying, “Still
+I do not understand.”
+
+“You must do as I say,” I interrupted authoritatively, for I saw Wolf
+Larsen’s gaze wandering toward us from where he paced up and down with
+Latimer amidships.  “Do as I say, and ere long you will find I am right.”
+
+“What shall I do, then?” she asked, detecting the anxious glance I had
+shot at the object of our conversation, and impressed, I flatter myself,
+with the earnestness of my manner.
+
+“Dispense with all the moral courage you can,” I said briskly.  “Don’t
+arouse this man’s animosity.  Be quite friendly with him, talk with him,
+discuss literature and art with him—he is fond of such things.  You will
+find him an interested listener and no fool.  And for your own sake try
+to avoid witnessing, as much as you can, the brutalities of the ship.  It
+will make it easier for you to act your part.”
+
+“I am to lie,” she said in steady, rebellious tones, “by speech and
+action to lie.”
+
+Wolf Larsen had separated from Latimer and was coming toward us.  I was
+desperate.
+
+“Please, please understand me,” I said hurriedly, lowering my voice.
+“All your experience of men and things is worthless here.  You must begin
+over again.  I know,—I can see it—you have, among other ways, been used
+to managing people with your eyes, letting your moral courage speak out
+through them, as it were.  You have already managed me with your eyes,
+commanded me with them.  But don’t try it on Wolf Larsen.  You could as
+easily control a lion, while he would make a mock of you.  He would—I
+have always been proud of the fact that I discovered him,” I said,
+turning the conversation as Wolf Larsen stepped on the poop and joined
+us.  “The editors were afraid of him and the publishers would have none
+of him.  But I knew, and his genius and my judgment were vindicated when
+he made that magnificent hit with his ‘Forge.’”
+
+“And it was a newspaper poem,” she said glibly.
+
+“It did happen to see the light in a newspaper,” I replied, “but not
+because the magazine editors had been denied a glimpse at it.”
+
+“We were talking of Harris,” I said to Wolf Larsen.
+
+“Oh, yes,” he acknowledged.  “I remember the ‘Forge.’  Filled with pretty
+sentiments and an almighty faith in human illusions.  By the way, Mr. Van
+Weyden, you’d better look in on Cooky.  He’s complaining and restless.”
+
+Thus was I bluntly dismissed from the poop, only to find Mugridge
+sleeping soundly from the morphine I had given him.  I made no haste to
+return on deck, and when I did I was gratified to see Miss Brewster in
+animated conversation with Wolf Larsen.  As I say, the sight gratified
+me.  She was following my advice.  And yet I was conscious of a slight
+shock or hurt in that she was able to do the thing I had begged her to do
+and which she had notably disliked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+Brave winds, blowing fair, swiftly drove the _Ghost_ northward into the
+seal herd.  We encountered it well up to the forty-fourth parallel, in a
+raw and stormy sea across which the wind harried the fog-banks in eternal
+flight.  For days at a time we could never see the sun nor take an
+observation; then the wind would sweep the face of the ocean clean, the
+waves would ripple and flash, and we would learn where we were.  A day of
+clear weather might follow, or three days or four, and then the fog would
+settle down upon us, seemingly thicker than ever.
+
+The hunting was perilous; yet the boats, lowered day after day, were
+swallowed up in the grey obscurity, and were seen no more till nightfall,
+and often not till long after, when they would creep in like sea-wraiths,
+one by one, out of the grey.  Wainwright—the hunter whom Wolf Larsen had
+stolen with boat and men—took advantage of the veiled sea and escaped.
+He disappeared one morning in the encircling fog with his two men, and we
+never saw them again, though it was not many days when we learned that
+they had passed from schooner to schooner until they finally regained
+their own.
+
+This was the thing I had set my mind upon doing, but the opportunity
+never offered.  It was not in the mate’s province to go out in the boats,
+and though I manœuvred cunningly for it, Wolf Larsen never granted me the
+privilege.  Had he done so, I should have managed somehow to carry Miss
+Brewster away with me.  As it was, the situation was approaching a stage
+which I was afraid to consider.  I involuntarily shunned the thought of
+it, and yet the thought continually arose in my mind like a haunting
+spectre.
+
+I had read sea-romances in my time, wherein figured, as a matter of
+course, the lone woman in the midst of a shipload of men; but I learned,
+now, that I had never comprehended the deeper significance of such a
+situation—the thing the writers harped upon and exploited so thoroughly.
+And here it was, now, and I was face to face with it.  That it should be
+as vital as possible, it required no more than that the woman should be
+Maud Brewster, who now charmed me in person as she had long charmed me
+through her work.
+
+No one more out of environment could be imagined.  She was a delicate,
+ethereal creature, swaying and willowy, light and graceful of movement.
+It never seemed to me that she walked, or, at least, walked after the
+ordinary manner of mortals.  Hers was an extreme lithesomeness, and she
+moved with a certain indefinable airiness, approaching one as down might
+float or as a bird on noiseless wings.
+
+She was like a bit of Dresden china, and I was continually impressed with
+what I may call her fragility.  As at the time I caught her arm when
+helping her below, so at any time I was quite prepared, should stress or
+rough handling befall her, to see her crumble away.  I have never seen
+body and spirit in such perfect accord.  Describe her verse, as the
+critics have described it, as sublimated and spiritual, and you have
+described her body.  It seemed to partake of her soul, to have analogous
+attributes, and to link it to life with the slenderest of chains.
+Indeed, she trod the earth lightly, and in her constitution there was
+little of the robust clay.
+
+She was in striking contrast to Wolf Larsen.  Each was nothing that the
+other was, everything that the other was not.  I noted them walking the
+deck together one morning, and I likened them to the extreme ends of the
+human ladder of evolution—the one the culmination of all savagery, the
+other the finished product of the finest civilization.  True, Wolf Larsen
+possessed intellect to an unusual degree, but it was directed solely to
+the exercise of his savage instincts and made him but the more formidable
+a savage.  He was splendidly muscled, a heavy man, and though he strode
+with the certitude and directness of the physical man, there was nothing
+heavy about his stride.  The jungle and the wilderness lurked in the
+uplift and downput of his feet.  He was cat-footed, and lithe, and
+strong, always strong.  I likened him to some great tiger, a beast of
+prowess and prey.  He looked it, and the piercing glitter that arose at
+times in his eyes was the same piercing glitter I had observed in the
+eyes of caged leopards and other preying creatures of the wild.
+
+But this day, as I noted them pacing up and down, I saw that it was she
+who terminated the walk.  They came up to where I was standing by the
+entrance to the companion-way.  Though she betrayed it by no outward
+sign, I felt, somehow, that she was greatly perturbed.  She made some
+idle remark, looking at me, and laughed lightly enough; but I saw her
+eyes return to his, involuntarily, as though fascinated; then they fell,
+but not swiftly enough to veil the rush of terror that filled them.
+
+It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation.  Ordinarily
+grey and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all
+a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till the
+full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance.  Perhaps it was to this
+that the golden colour was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and
+masterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and speaking a demand
+and clamour of the blood which no woman, much less Maud Brewster, could
+misunderstand.
+
+Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear—the most
+terrible fear a man can experience—I knew that in inexpressible ways she
+was dear to me.  The knowledge that I loved her rushed upon me with the
+terror, and with both emotions gripping at my heart and causing my blood
+at the same time to chill and to leap riotously, I felt myself drawn by a
+power without me and beyond me, and found my eyes returning against my
+will to gaze into the eyes of Wolf Larsen.  But he had recovered himself.
+The golden colour and the dancing lights were gone.  Cold and grey and
+glittering they were as he bowed brusquely and turned away.
+
+“I am afraid,” she whispered, with a shiver.  “I am so afraid.”
+
+I, too, was afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant to me
+my mind was in a turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite calmly:
+
+“All will come right, Miss Brewster.  Trust me, it will come right.”
+
+She answered with a grateful little smile that sent my heart pounding,
+and started to descend the companion-stairs.
+
+For a long while I remained standing where she had left me.  There was
+imperative need to adjust myself, to consider the significance of the
+changed aspect of things.  It had come, at last, love had come, when I
+least expected it and under the most forbidding conditions.  Of course,
+my philosophy had always recognized the inevitableness of the love-call
+sooner or later; but long years of bookish silence had made me
+inattentive and unprepared.
+
+And now it had come!  Maud Brewster!  My memory flashed back to that
+first thin little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as though in
+the concrete, the row of thin little volumes on my library shelf.  How I
+had welcomed each of them!  Each year one had come from the press, and to
+me each was the advent of the year.  They had voiced a kindred intellect
+and spirit, and as such I had received them into a camaraderie of the
+mind; but now their place was in my heart.
+
+My heart?  A revulsion of feeling came over me.  I seemed to stand
+outside myself and to look at myself incredulously.  Maud Brewster!
+Humphrey Van Weyden, “the cold-blooded fish,” the “emotionless monster,”
+the “analytical demon,” of Charley Furuseth’s christening, in love!  And
+then, without rhyme or reason, all sceptical, my mind flew back to a
+small biographical note in the red-bound _Who’s Who_, and I said to
+myself, “She was born in Cambridge, and she is twenty-seven years old.”
+And then I said, “Twenty-seven years old and still free and fancy free?”
+But how did I know she was fancy free?  And the pang of new-born jealousy
+put all incredulity to flight.  There was no doubt about it.  I was
+jealous; therefore I loved.  And the woman I loved was Maud Brewster.
+
+I, Humphrey Van Weyden, was in love!  And again the doubt assailed me.
+Not that I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet it.  On the
+contrary, idealist that I was to the most pronounced degree, my
+philosophy had always recognized and guerdoned love as the greatest thing
+in the world, the aim and the summit of being, the most exquisite pitch
+of joy and happiness to which life could thrill, the thing of all things
+to be hailed and welcomed and taken into the heart.  But now that it had
+come I could not believe.  I could not be so fortunate.  It was too good,
+too good to be true.  Symons’s lines came into my head:
+
+   “I wandered all these years among
+   A world of women, seeking you.”
+
+And then I had ceased seeking.  It was not for me, this greatest thing in
+the world, I had decided.  Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an
+“emotionless monster,” a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuring
+in sensations only of the mind.  And though I had been surrounded by
+women all my days, my appreciation of them had been æsthetic and nothing
+more.  I had actually, at times, considered myself outside the pale, a
+monkish fellow denied the eternal or the passing passions I saw and
+understood so well in others.  And now it had come!  Undreamed of and
+unheralded, it had come.  In what could have been no less than an
+ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the companion-way and started
+along the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs.
+Browning:
+
+   “I lived with visions for my company
+   Instead of men and women years ago,
+   And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
+   A sweeter music than they played to me.”
+
+But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and
+oblivious to all about me.  The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me.
+
+“What the hell are you up to?” he was demanding.
+
+I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came to
+myself to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.
+
+“Sleep-walking, sunstroke,—what?” he barked.
+
+“No; indigestion,” I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing
+untoward had occurred.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+Among the most vivid memories of my life are those of the events on the
+_Ghost_ which occurred during the forty hours succeeding the discovery of
+my love for Maud Brewster.  I, who had lived my life in quiet places,
+only to enter at the age of thirty-five upon a course of the most
+irrational adventure I could have imagined, never had more incident and
+excitement crammed into any forty hours of my experience.  Nor can I
+quite close my ears to a small voice of pride which tells me I did not do
+so badly, all things considered.
+
+To begin with, at the midday dinner, Wolf Larsen informed the hunters
+that they were to eat thenceforth in the steerage.  It was an
+unprecedented thing on sealing-schooners, where it is the custom for the
+hunters to rank, unofficially as officers.  He gave no reason, but his
+motive was obvious enough.  Horner and Smoke had been displaying a
+gallantry toward Maud Brewster, ludicrous in itself and inoffensive to
+her, but to him evidently distasteful.
+
+The announcement was received with black silence, though the other four
+hunters glanced significantly at the two who had been the cause of their
+banishment.  Jock Horner, quiet as was his way, gave no sign; but the
+blood surged darkly across Smoke’s forehead, and he half opened his mouth
+to speak.  Wolf Larsen was watching him, waiting for him, the steely
+glitter in his eyes; but Smoke closed his mouth again without having said
+anything.
+
+“Anything to say?” the other demanded aggressively.
+
+It was a challenge, but Smoke refused to accept it.
+
+“About what?” he asked, so innocently that Wolf Larsen was disconcerted,
+while the others smiled.
+
+“Oh, nothing,” Wolf Larsen said lamely.  “I just thought you might want
+to register a kick.”
+
+“About what?” asked the imperturbable Smoke.
+
+Smoke’s mates were now smiling broadly.  His captain could have killed
+him, and I doubt not that blood would have flowed had not Maud Brewster
+been present.  For that matter, it was her presence which enabled Smoke
+to act as he did.  He was too discreet and cautious a man to incur Wolf
+Larsen’s anger at a time when that anger could be expressed in terms
+stronger than words.  I was in fear that a struggle might take place, but
+a cry from the helmsman made it easy for the situation to save itself.
+
+“Smoke ho!” the cry came down the open companion-way.
+
+“How’s it bear?” Wolf Larsen called up.
+
+“Dead astern, sir.”
+
+“Maybe it’s a Russian,” suggested Latimer.
+
+His words brought anxiety into the faces of the other hunters.  A Russian
+could mean but one thing—a cruiser.  The hunters, never more than roughly
+aware of the position of the ship, nevertheless knew that we were close
+to the boundaries of the forbidden sea, while Wolf Larsen’s record as a
+poacher was notorious.  All eyes centred upon him.
+
+“We’re dead safe,” he assured them with a laugh.  “No salt mines this
+time, Smoke.  But I’ll tell you what—I’ll lay odds of five to one it’s
+the _Macedonia_.”
+
+No one accepted his offer, and he went on: “In which event, I’ll lay ten
+to one there’s trouble breezing up.”
+
+“No, thank you,” Latimer spoke up.  “I don’t object to losing my money,
+but I like to get a run for it anyway.  There never was a time when there
+wasn’t trouble when you and that brother of yours got together, and I’ll
+lay twenty to one on that.”
+
+A general smile followed, in which Wolf Larsen joined, and the dinner
+went on smoothly, thanks to me, for he treated me abominably the rest of
+the meal, sneering at me and patronizing me till I was all a-tremble with
+suppressed rage.  Yet I knew I must control myself for Maud Brewster’s
+sake, and I received my reward when her eyes caught mine for a fleeting
+second, and they said, as distinctly as if she spoke, “Be brave, be
+brave.”
+
+We left the table to go on deck, for a steamer was a welcome break in the
+monotony of the sea on which we floated, while the conviction that it was
+Death Larsen and the _Macedonia_ added to the excitement.  The stiff
+breeze and heavy sea which had sprung up the previous afternoon had been
+moderating all morning, so that it was now possible to lower the boats
+for an afternoon’s hunt.  The hunting promised to be profitable.  We had
+sailed since daylight across a sea barren of seals, and were now running
+into the herd.
+
+The smoke was still miles astern, but overhauling us rapidly, when we
+lowered our boats.  They spread out and struck a northerly course across
+the ocean.  Now and again we saw a sail lower, heard the reports of the
+shot-guns, and saw the sail go up again.  The seals were thick, the wind
+was dying away; everything favoured a big catch.  As we ran off to get
+our leeward position of the last lee boat, we found the ocean fairly
+carpeted with sleeping seals.  They were all about us, thicker than I had
+ever seen them before, in twos and threes and bunches, stretched full
+length on the surface and sleeping for all the world like so many lazy
+young dogs.
+
+Under the approaching smoke the hull and upper-works of a steamer were
+growing larger.  It was the _Macedonia_.  I read her name through the
+glasses as she passed by scarcely a mile to starboard.  Wolf Larsen
+looked savagely at the vessel, while Maud Brewster was curious.
+
+“Where is the trouble you were so sure was breezing up, Captain Larsen?”
+she asked gaily.
+
+He glanced at her, a moment’s amusement softening his features.
+
+“What did you expect?  That they’d come aboard and cut our throats?”
+
+“Something like that,” she confessed.  “You understand, seal-hunters are
+so new and strange to me that I am quite ready to expect anything.”
+
+He nodded his head.  “Quite right, quite right.  Your error is that you
+failed to expect the worst.”
+
+“Why, what can be worse than cutting our throats?” she asked, with pretty
+naïve surprise.
+
+“Cutting our purses,” he answered.  “Man is so made these days that his
+capacity for living is determined by the money he possesses.”
+
+“’Who steals my purse steals trash,’” she quoted.
+
+“Who steals my purse steals my right to live,” was the reply, “old saws
+to the contrary.  For he steals my bread and meat and bed, and in so
+doing imperils my life.  There are not enough soup-kitchens and
+bread-lines to go around, you know, and when men have nothing in their
+purses they usually die, and die miserably—unless they are able to fill
+their purses pretty speedily.”
+
+“But I fail to see that this steamer has any designs on your purse.”
+
+“Wait and you will see,” he answered grimly.
+
+We did not have long to wait.  Having passed several miles beyond our
+line of boats, the _Macedonia_ proceeded to lower her own.  We knew she
+carried fourteen boats to our five (we were one short through the
+desertion of Wainwright), and she began dropping them far to leeward of
+our last boat, continued dropping them athwart our course, and finished
+dropping them far to windward of our first weather boat.  The hunting,
+for us, was spoiled.  There were no seals behind us, and ahead of us the
+line of fourteen boats, like a huge broom, swept the herd before it.
+
+Our boats hunted across the two or three miles of water between them and
+the point where the _Macedonia’s_ had been dropped, and then headed for
+home.  The wind had fallen to a whisper, the ocean was growing calmer and
+calmer, and this, coupled with the presence of the great herd, made a
+perfect hunting day—one of the two or three days to be encountered in the
+whole of a lucky season.  An angry lot of men, boat-pullers and steerers
+as well as hunters, swarmed over our side.  Each man felt that he had
+been robbed; and the boats were hoisted in amid curses, which, if curses
+had power, would have settled Death Larsen for all eternity—“Dead and
+damned for a dozen iv eternities,” commented Louis, his eyes twinkling up
+at me as he rested from hauling taut the lashings of his boat.
+
+“Listen to them, and find if it is hard to discover the most vital thing
+in their souls,” said Wolf Larsen.  “Faith? and love? and high ideals?
+The good? the beautiful? the true?”
+
+“Their innate sense of right has been violated,” Maud Brewster said,
+joining the conversation.
+
+She was standing a dozen feet away, one hand resting on the main-shrouds
+and her body swaying gently to the slight roll of the ship.  She had not
+raised her voice, and yet I was struck by its clear and bell-like tone.
+Ah, it was sweet in my ears!  I scarcely dared look at her just then, for
+the fear of betraying myself.  A boy’s cap was perched on her head, and
+her hair, light brown and arranged in a loose and fluffy order that
+caught the sun, seemed an aureole about the delicate oval of her face.
+She was positively bewitching, and, withal, sweetly spirituelle, if not
+saintly.  All my old-time marvel at life returned to me at sight of this
+splendid incarnation of it, and Wolf Larsen’s cold explanation of life
+and its meaning was truly ridiculous and laughable.
+
+“A sentimentalist,” he sneered, “like Mr. Van Weyden.  Those men are
+cursing because their desires have been outraged.  That is all.  What
+desires?  The desires for the good grub and soft beds ashore which a
+handsome pay-day brings them—the women and the drink, the gorging and the
+beastliness which so truly expresses them, the best that is in them,
+their highest aspirations, their ideals, if you please.  The exhibition
+they make of their feelings is not a touching sight, yet it shows how
+deeply they have been touched, how deeply their purses have been touched,
+for to lay hands on their purses is to lay hands on their souls.”
+
+“’You hardly behave as if your purse had been touched,” she said,
+smilingly.
+
+“Then it so happens that I am behaving differently, for my purse and my
+soul have both been touched.  At the current price of skins in the London
+market, and based on a fair estimate of what the afternoon’s catch would
+have been had not the _Macedonia_ hogged it, the _Ghost_ has lost about
+fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of skins.”
+
+“You speak so calmly—” she began.
+
+“But I do not feel calm; I could kill the man who robbed me,” he
+interrupted.  “Yes, yes, I know, and that man my brother—more sentiment!
+Bah!”
+
+His face underwent a sudden change.  His voice was less harsh and wholly
+sincere as he said:
+
+“You must be happy, you sentimentalists, really and truly happy at
+dreaming and finding things good, and, because you find some of them
+good, feeling good yourself.  Now, tell me, you two, do you find me
+good?”
+
+“You are good to look upon—in a way,” I qualified.
+
+“There are in you all powers for good,” was Maud Brewster’s answer.
+
+“There you are!” he cried at her, half angrily.  “Your words are empty to
+me.  There is nothing clear and sharp and definite about the thought you
+have expressed.  You cannot pick it up in your two hands and look at it.
+In point of fact, it is not a thought.  It is a feeling, a sentiment, a
+something based upon illusion and not a product of the intellect at all.”
+
+As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came into
+it.  “Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were
+blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions.
+They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the
+face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and
+live illusions gives greater delight.  And after all, delight is the wage
+for living.  Without delight, living is a worthless act.  To labour at
+living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead.  He who delights the most
+lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to
+you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”
+
+He shook his head slowly, pondering.
+
+“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason.  Dreams must
+be more substantial and satisfying.  Emotional delight is more filling
+and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your
+moments of intellectual delight by having the blues.  Emotional delight
+is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate.  I
+envy you, I envy you.”
+
+He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange
+quizzical smiles, as he added:
+
+“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart.  My
+reason dictates it.  The envy is an intellectual product.  I am like a
+sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too,
+were drunk.”
+
+“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,”
+I laughed.
+
+“Quite so,” he said.  “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools.  You
+have no facts in your pocketbook.”
+
+“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.
+
+“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”
+
+“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.
+
+“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing.  You spend what you
+haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you
+haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have
+sweated to get.”
+
+“Why don’t you change the basis of your coinage, then?” she queried
+teasingly.
+
+He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully:
+“Too late.  I’d like to, perhaps, but I can’t.  My pocketbook is stuffed
+with the old coinage, and it’s a stubborn thing.  I can never bring
+myself to recognize anything else as valid.”
+
+He ceased speaking, and his gaze wandered absently past her and became
+lost in the placid sea.  The old primal melancholy was strong upon him.
+He was quivering to it.  He had reasoned himself into a spell of the
+blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil within him to be
+up and stirring.  I remembered Charley Furuseth, and knew this man’s
+sadness as the penalty which the materialist ever pays for his
+materialism.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+“You’ve been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen said, the following
+morning at the breakfast-table, “How do things look?”
+
+“Clear enough,” I answered, glancing at the sunshine which streamed down
+the open companion-way.  “Fair westerly breeze, with a promise of
+stiffening, if Louis predicts correctly.”
+
+He nodded his head in a pleased way.  “Any signs of fog?”
+
+“Thick banks in the north and north-west.”
+
+He nodded his head again, evincing even greater satisfaction than before.
+
+“What of the _Macedonia_?”
+
+“Not sighted,” I answered.
+
+I could have sworn his face fell at the intelligence, but why he should
+be disappointed I could not conceive.
+
+I was soon to learn.  “Smoke ho!” came the hail from on deck, and his
+face brightened.
+
+“Good!” he exclaimed, and left the table at once to go on deck and into
+the steerage, where the hunters were taking the first breakfast of their
+exile.
+
+Maud Brewster and I scarcely touched the food before us, gazing, instead,
+in silent anxiety at each other, and listening to Wolf Larsen’s voice,
+which easily penetrated the cabin through the intervening bulkhead.  He
+spoke at length, and his conclusion was greeted with a wild roar of
+cheers.  The bulkhead was too thick for us to hear what he said; but
+whatever it was it affected the hunters strongly, for the cheering was
+followed by loud exclamations and shouts of joy.
+
+From the sounds on deck I knew that the sailors had been routed out and
+were preparing to lower the boats.  Maud Brewster accompanied me on deck,
+but I left her at the break of the poop, where she might watch the scene
+and not be in it.  The sailors must have learned whatever project was on
+hand, and the vim and snap they put into their work attested their
+enthusiasm.  The hunters came trooping on deck with shot-guns and
+ammunition-boxes, and, most unusual, their rifles.  The latter were
+rarely taken in the boats, for a seal shot at long range with a rifle
+invariably sank before a boat could reach it.  But each hunter this day
+had his rifle and a large supply of cartridges.  I noticed they grinned
+with satisfaction whenever they looked at the _Macedonia’s_ smoke, which
+was rising higher and higher as she approached from the west.
+
+The five boats went over the side with a rush, spread out like the ribs
+of a fan, and set a northerly course, as on the preceding afternoon, for
+us to follow.  I watched for some time, curiously, but there seemed
+nothing extraordinary about their behaviour.  They lowered sails, shot
+seals, and hoisted sails again, and continued on their way as I had
+always seen them do.  The _Macedonia_ repeated her performance of
+yesterday, “hogging” the sea by dropping her line of boats in advance of
+ours and across our course.  Fourteen boats require a considerable spread
+of ocean for comfortable hunting, and when she had completely lapped our
+line she continued steaming into the north-east, dropping more boats as
+she went.
+
+“What’s up?” I asked Wolf Larsen, unable longer to keep my curiosity in
+check.
+
+“Never mind what’s up,” he answered gruffly.  “You won’t be a thousand
+years in finding out, and in the meantime just pray for plenty of wind.”
+
+“Oh, well, I don’t mind telling you,” he said the next moment.  “I’m
+going to give that brother of mine a taste of his own medicine.  In
+short, I’m going to play the hog myself, and not for one day, but for the
+rest of the season,—if we’re in luck.”
+
+“And if we’re not?” I queried.
+
+“Not to be considered,” he laughed.  “We simply must be in luck, or it’s
+all up with us.”
+
+He had the wheel at the time, and I went forward to my hospital in the
+forecastle, where lay the two crippled men, Nilson and Thomas Mugridge.
+Nilson was as cheerful as could be expected, for his broken leg was
+knitting nicely; but the Cockney was desperately melancholy, and I was
+aware of a great sympathy for the unfortunate creature.  And the marvel
+of it was that still he lived and clung to life.  The brutal years had
+reduced his meagre body to splintered wreckage, and yet the spark of life
+within burned brightly as ever.
+
+“With an artificial foot—and they make excellent ones—you will be
+stumping ships’ galleys to the end of time,” I assured him jovially.
+
+But his answer was serious, nay, solemn.  “I don’t know about wot you
+s’y, Mr. Van W’yden, but I do know I’ll never rest ’appy till I see that
+’ell-’ound bloody well dead.  ’E cawn’t live as long as me.  ’E’s got no
+right to live, an’ as the Good Word puts it, ‘’E shall shorely die,’ an’
+I s’y, ‘Amen, an’ damn soon at that.’”
+
+When I returned on deck I found Wolf Larsen steering mainly with one
+hand, while with the other hand he held the marine glasses and studied
+the situation of the boats, paying particular attention to the position
+of the _Macedonia_.  The only change noticeable in our boats was that
+they had hauled close on the wind and were heading several points west of
+north.  Still, I could not see the expediency of the manœuvre, for the
+free sea was still intercepted by the _Macedonia’s_ five weather boats,
+which, in turn, had hauled close on the wind.  Thus they slowly diverged
+toward the west, drawing farther away from the remainder of the boats in
+their line.  Our boats were rowing as well as sailing.  Even the hunters
+were pulling, and with three pairs of oars in the water they rapidly
+overhauled what I may appropriately term the enemy.
+
+The smoke of the _Macedonia_ had dwindled to a dim blot on the
+north-eastern horizon.  Of the steamer herself nothing was to be seen.
+We had been loafing along, till now, our sails shaking half the time and
+spilling the wind; and twice, for short periods, we had been hove to.
+But there was no more loafing.  Sheets were trimmed, and Wolf Larsen
+proceeded to put the _Ghost_ through her paces.  We ran past our line of
+boats and bore down upon the first weather boat of the other line.
+
+“Down that flying jib, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen commanded.  “And
+stand by to back over the jibs.”
+
+I ran forward and had the downhaul of the flying jib all in and fast as
+we slipped by the boat a hundred feet to leeward.  The three men in it
+gazed at us suspiciously.  They had been hogging the sea, and they knew
+Wolf Larsen, by reputation at any rate.  I noted that the hunter, a huge
+Scandinavian sitting in the bow, held his rifle, ready to hand, across
+his knees.  It should have been in its proper place in the rack.  When
+they came opposite our stern, Wolf Larsen greeted them with a wave of the
+hand, and cried:
+
+“Come on board and have a ’gam’!”
+
+“To gam,” among the sealing-schooners, is a substitute for the verbs “to
+visit,” “to gossip.”  It expresses the garrulity of the sea, and is a
+pleasant break in the monotony of the life.
+
+The _Ghost_ swung around into the wind, and I finished my work forward in
+time to run aft and lend a hand with the mainsheet.
+
+“You will please stay on deck, Miss Brewster,” Wolf Larsen said, as he
+started forward to meet his guest.  “And you too, Mr. Van Weyden.”
+
+The boat had lowered its sail and run alongside.  The hunter, golden
+bearded like a sea-king, came over the rail and dropped on deck.  But his
+hugeness could not quite overcome his apprehensiveness.  Doubt and
+distrust showed strongly in his face.  It was a transparent face, for all
+of its hairy shield, and advertised instant relief when he glanced from
+Wolf Larsen to me, noted that there was only the pair of us, and then
+glanced over his own two men who had joined him.  Surely he had little
+reason to be afraid.  He towered like a Goliath above Wolf Larsen.  He
+must have measured six feet eight or nine inches in stature, and I
+subsequently learned his weight—240 pounds.  And there was no fat about
+him.  It was all bone and muscle.
+
+A return of apprehension was apparent when, at the top of the
+companion-way, Wolf Larsen invited him below.  But he reassured himself
+with a glance down at his host—a big man himself but dwarfed by the
+propinquity of the giant.  So all hesitancy vanished, and the pair
+descended into the cabin.  In the meantime, his two men, as was the wont
+of visiting sailors, had gone forward into the forecastle to do some
+visiting themselves.
+
+Suddenly, from the cabin came a great, choking bellow, followed by all
+the sounds of a furious struggle.  It was the leopard and the lion, and
+the lion made all the noise.  Wolf Larsen was the leopard.
+
+“You see the sacredness of our hospitality,” I said bitterly to Maud
+Brewster.
+
+She nodded her head that she heard, and I noted in her face the signs of
+the same sickness at sight or sound of violent struggle from which I had
+suffered so severely during my first weeks on the _Ghost_.
+
+“Wouldn’t it be better if you went forward, say by the steerage
+companion-way, until it is over?” I suggested.
+
+She shook her head and gazed at me pitifully.  She was not frightened,
+but appalled, rather, at the human animality of it.
+
+“You will understand,” I took advantage of the opportunity to say,
+“whatever part I take in what is going on and what is to come, that I am
+compelled to take it—if you and I are ever to get out of this scrape with
+our lives.”
+
+“It is not nice—for me,” I added.
+
+“I understand,” she said, in a weak, far-away voice, and her eyes showed
+me that she did understand.
+
+The sounds from below soon died away.  Then Wolf Larsen came alone on
+deck.  There was a slight flush under his bronze, but otherwise he bore
+no signs of the battle.
+
+“Send those two men aft, Mr. Van Weyden,” he said.
+
+I obeyed, and a minute or two later they stood before him.  “Hoist in
+your boat,” he said to them.  “Your hunter’s decided to stay aboard
+awhile and doesn’t want it pounding alongside.”
+
+“Hoist in your boat, I said,” he repeated, this time in sharper tones as
+they hesitated to do his bidding.
+
+“Who knows? you may have to sail with me for a time,” he said, quite
+softly, with a silken threat that belied the softness, as they moved
+slowly to comply, “and we might as well start with a friendly
+understanding.  Lively now!  Death Larsen makes you jump better than
+that, and you know it!”
+
+Their movements perceptibly quickened under his coaching, and as the boat
+swung inboard I was sent forward to let go the jibs.  Wolf Larsen, at the
+wheel, directed the _Ghost_ after the _Macedonia’s_ second weather boat.
+
+Under way, and with nothing for the time being to do, I turned my
+attention to the situation of the boats.  The _Macedonia’s_ third weather
+boat was being attacked by two of ours, the fourth by our remaining
+three; and the fifth, turn about, was taking a hand in the defence of its
+nearest mate.  The fight had opened at long distance, and the rifles were
+cracking steadily.  A quick, snappy sea was being kicked up by the wind,
+a condition which prevented fine shooting; and now and again, as we drew
+closer, we could see the bullets zip-zipping from wave to wave.
+
+The boat we were pursuing had squared away and was running before the
+wind to escape us, and, in the course of its flight, to take part in
+repulsing our general boat attack.
+
+Attending to sheets and tacks now left me little time to see what was
+taking place, but I happened to be on the poop when Wolf Larsen ordered
+the two strange sailors forward and into the forecastle.  They went
+sullenly, but they went.  He next ordered Miss Brewster below, and smiled
+at the instant horror that leapt into her eyes.
+
+“You’ll find nothing gruesome down there,” he said, “only an unhurt man
+securely made fast to the ring-bolts.  Bullets are liable to come aboard,
+and I don’t want you killed, you know.”
+
+Even as he spoke, a bullet was deflected by a brass-capped spoke of the
+wheel between his hands and screeched off through the air to windward.
+
+“You see,” he said to her; and then to me, “Mr. Van Weyden, will you take
+the wheel?”
+
+Maud Brewster had stepped inside the companion-way so that only her head
+was exposed.  Wolf Larsen had procured a rifle and was throwing a
+cartridge into the barrel.  I begged her with my eyes to go below, but
+she smiled and said:
+
+“We may be feeble land-creatures without legs, but we can show Captain
+Larsen that we are at least as brave as he.”
+
+He gave her a quick look of admiration.
+
+“I like you a hundred per cent. better for that,” he said.  “Books, and
+brains, and bravery.  You are well-rounded, a blue-stocking fit to be the
+wife of a pirate chief.  Ahem, we’ll discuss that later,” he smiled, as a
+bullet struck solidly into the cabin wall.
+
+I saw his eyes flash golden as he spoke, and I saw the terror mount in
+her own.
+
+“We are braver,” I hastened to say.  “At least, speaking for myself, I
+know I am braver than Captain Larsen.”
+
+It was I who was now favoured by a quick look.  He was wondering if I
+were making fun of him.  I put three or four spokes over to counteract a
+sheer toward the wind on the part of the _Ghost_, and then steadied her.
+Wolf Larsen was still waiting an explanation, and I pointed down to my
+knees.
+
+“You will observe there,” I said, “a slight trembling.  It is because I
+am afraid, the flesh is afraid; and I am afraid in my mind because I do
+not wish to die.  But my spirit masters the trembling flesh and the
+qualms of the mind.  I am more than brave.  I am courageous.  Your flesh
+is not afraid.  You are not afraid.  On the one hand, it costs you
+nothing to encounter danger; on the other hand, it even gives you
+delight.  You enjoy it.  You may be unafraid, Mr. Larsen, but you must
+grant that the bravery is mine.”
+
+“You’re right,” he acknowledged at once.  “I never thought of it in that
+way before.  But is the opposite true?  If you are braver than I, am I
+more cowardly than you?”
+
+We both laughed at the absurdity, and he dropped down to the deck and
+rested his rifle across the rail.  The bullets we had received had
+travelled nearly a mile, but by now we had cut that distance in half.  He
+fired three careful shots.  The first struck fifty feet to windward of
+the boat, the second alongside; and at the third the boat-steerer let
+loose his steering-oar and crumpled up in the bottom of the boat.
+
+“I guess that’ll fix them,” Wolf Larsen said, rising to his feet.  “I
+couldn’t afford to let the hunter have it, and there is a chance the
+boat-puller doesn’t know how to steer.  In which case, the hunter cannot
+steer and shoot at the same time.”
+
+His reasoning was justified, for the boat rushed at once into the wind
+and the hunter sprang aft to take the boat-steerer’s place.  There was no
+more shooting, though the rifles were still cracking merrily from the
+other boats.
+
+The hunter had managed to get the boat before the wind again, but we ran
+down upon it, going at least two feet to its one.  A hundred yards away,
+I saw the boat-puller pass a rifle to the hunter.  Wolf Larsen went
+amidships and took the coil of the throat-halyards from its pin.  Then he
+peered over the rail with levelled rifle.  Twice I saw the hunter let go
+the steering-oar with one hand, reach for his rifle, and hesitate.  We
+were now alongside and foaming past.
+
+“Here, you!” Wolf Larsen cried suddenly to the boat-puller.  “Take a
+turn!”
+
+At the same time he flung the coil of rope.  It struck fairly, nearly
+knocking the man over, but he did not obey.  Instead, he looked to his
+hunter for orders.  The hunter, in turn, was in a quandary.  His rifle
+was between his knees, but if he let go the steering-oar in order to
+shoot, the boat would sweep around and collide with the schooner.  Also
+he saw Wolf Larsen’s rifle bearing upon him and knew he would be shot ere
+he could get his rifle into play.
+
+“Take a turn,” he said quietly to the man.
+
+The boat-puller obeyed, taking a turn around the little forward thwart
+and paying the line as it jerked taut.  The boat sheered out with a rush,
+and the hunter steadied it to a parallel course some twenty feet from the
+side of the _Ghost_.
+
+“Now, get that sail down and come alongside!” Wolf Larsen ordered.
+
+He never let go his rifle, even passing down the tackles with one hand.
+When they were fast, bow and stern, and the two uninjured men prepared to
+come aboard, the hunter picked up his rifle as if to place it in a secure
+position.
+
+“Drop it!” Wolf Larsen cried, and the hunter dropped it as though it were
+hot and had burned him.
+
+Once aboard, the two prisoners hoisted in the boat and under Wolf
+Larsen’s direction carried the wounded boat-steerer down into the
+forecastle.
+
+“If our five boats do as well as you and I have done, we’ll have a pretty
+full crew,” Wolf Larsen said to me.
+
+“The man you shot—he is—I hope?” Maud Brewster quavered.
+
+“In the shoulder,” he answered.  “Nothing serious, Mr. Van Weyden will
+pull him around as good as ever in three or four weeks.”
+
+“But he won’t pull those chaps around, from the look of it,” he added,
+pointing at the _Macedonia’s_ third boat, for which I had been steering
+and which was now nearly abreast of us.  “That’s Horner’s and Smoke’s
+work.  I told them we wanted live men, not carcasses.  But the joy of
+shooting to hit is a most compelling thing, when once you’ve learned how
+to shoot.  Ever experienced it, Mr. Van Weyden?”
+
+I shook my head and regarded their work.  It had indeed been bloody, for
+they had drawn off and joined our other three boats in the attack on the
+remaining two of the enemy.  The deserted boat was in the trough of the
+sea, rolling drunkenly across each comber, its loose spritsail out at
+right angles to it and fluttering and flapping in the wind.  The hunter
+and boat-puller were both lying awkwardly in the bottom, but the
+boat-steerer lay across the gunwale, half in and half out, his arms
+trailing in the water and his head rolling from side to side.
+
+“Don’t look, Miss Brewster, please don’t look,” I had begged of her, and
+I was glad that she had minded me and been spared the sight.
+
+“Head right into the bunch, Mr. Van Weyden,” was Wolf Larsen’s command.
+
+As we drew nearer, the firing ceased, and we saw that the fight was over.
+The remaining two boats had been captured by our five, and the seven were
+grouped together, waiting to be picked up.
+
+“Look at that!” I cried involuntarily, pointing to the north-east.
+
+The blot of smoke which indicated the _Macedonia’s_ position had
+reappeared.
+
+“Yes, I’ve been watching it,” was Wolf Larsen’s calm reply.  He measured
+the distance away to the fog-bank, and for an instant paused to feel the
+weight of the wind on his cheek.  “We’ll make it, I think; but you can
+depend upon it that blessed brother of mine has twigged our little game
+and is just a-humping for us.  Ah, look at that!”
+
+The blot of smoke had suddenly grown larger, and it was very black.
+
+“I’ll beat you out, though, brother mine,” he chuckled.  “I’ll beat you
+out, and I hope you no worse than that you rack your old engines into
+scrap.”
+
+When we hove to, a hasty though orderly confusion reigned.  The boats
+came aboard from every side at once.  As fast as the prisoners came over
+the rail they were marshalled forward to the forecastle by our hunters,
+while our sailors hoisted in the boats, pell-mell, dropping them anywhere
+upon the deck and not stopping to lash them.  We were already under way,
+all sails set and drawing, and the sheets being slacked off for a wind
+abeam, as the last boat lifted clear of the water and swung in the
+tackles.
+
+There was need for haste.  The _Macedonia_, belching the blackest of
+smoke from her funnel, was charging down upon us from out of the
+north-east.  Neglecting the boats that remained to her, she had altered
+her course so as to anticipate ours.  She was not running straight for
+us, but ahead of us.  Our courses were converging like the sides of an
+angle, the vertex of which was at the edge of the fog-bank.  It was
+there, or not at all, that the _Macedonia_ could hope to catch us.  The
+hope for the _Ghost_ lay in that she should pass that point before the
+_Macedonia_ arrived at it.
+
+Wolf Larsen was steering, his eyes glistening and snapping as they dwelt
+upon and leaped from detail to detail of the chase.  Now he studied the
+sea to windward for signs of the wind slackening or freshening, now the
+_Macedonia_; and again, his eyes roved over every sail, and he gave
+commands to slack a sheet here a trifle, to come in on one there a
+trifle, till he was drawing out of the _Ghost_ the last bit of speed she
+possessed.  All feuds and grudges were forgotten, and I was surprised at
+the alacrity with which the men who had so long endured his brutality
+sprang to execute his orders.  Strange to say, the unfortunate Johnson
+came into my mind as we lifted and surged and heeled along, and I was
+aware of a regret that he was not alive and present; he had so loved the
+_Ghost_ and delighted in her sailing powers.
+
+“Better get your rifles, you fellows,” Wolf Larsen called to our hunters;
+and the five men lined the lee rail, guns in hand, and waited.
+
+The _Macedonia_ was now but a mile away, the black smoke pouring from her
+funnel at a right angle, so madly she raced, pounding through the sea at
+a seventeen-knot gait—“’Sky-hooting through the brine,” as Wolf Larsen
+quoted while gazing at her.  We were not making more than nine knots, but
+the fog-bank was very near.
+
+A puff of smoke broke from the _Macedonia’s_ deck, we heard a heavy
+report, and a round hole took form in the stretched canvas of our
+mainsail.  They were shooting at us with one of the small cannon which
+rumour had said they carried on board.  Our men, clustering amidships,
+waved their hats and raised a derisive cheer.  Again there was a puff of
+smoke and a loud report, this time the cannon-ball striking not more than
+twenty feet astern and glancing twice from sea to sea to windward ere it
+sank.
+
+But there was no rifle-firing for the reason that all their hunters were
+out in the boats or our prisoners.  When the two vessels were half-a-mile
+apart, a third shot made another hole in our mainsail.  Then we entered
+the fog.  It was about us, veiling and hiding us in its dense wet gauze.
+
+The sudden transition was startling.  The moment before we had been
+leaping through the sunshine, the clear sky above us, the sea breaking
+and rolling wide to the horizon, and a ship, vomiting smoke and fire and
+iron missiles, rushing madly upon us.  And at once, as in an instant’s
+leap, the sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were
+lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see.  The
+grey mist drove by us like a rain.  Every woollen filament of our
+garments, every hair of our heads and faces, was jewelled with a crystal
+globule.  The shrouds were wet with moisture; it dripped from our rigging
+overhead; and on the underside of our booms drops of water took shape in
+long swaying lines, which were detached and flung to the deck in mimic
+showers at each surge of the schooner.  I was aware of a pent, stifled
+feeling.  As the sounds of the ship thrusting herself through the waves
+were hurled back upon us by the fog, so were one’s thoughts.  The mind
+recoiled from contemplation of a world beyond this wet veil which wrapped
+us around.  This was the world, the universe itself, its bounds so near
+one felt impelled to reach out both arms and push them back.  It was
+impossible, that the rest could be beyond these walls of grey.  The rest
+was a dream, no more than the memory of a dream.
+
+It was weird, strangely weird.  I looked at Maud Brewster and knew that
+she was similarly affected.  Then I looked at Wolf Larsen, but there was
+nothing subjective about his state of consciousness.  His whole concern
+was with the immediate, objective present.  He still held the wheel, and
+I felt that he was timing Time, reckoning the passage of the minutes with
+each forward lunge and leeward roll of the _Ghost_.
+
+“Go for’ard and hard alee without any noise,” he said to me in a low
+voice.  “Clew up the topsails first.  Set men at all the sheets.  Let
+there be no rattling of blocks, no sound of voices.  No noise,
+understand, no noise.”
+
+When all was ready, the word “hard-a-lee” was passed forward to me from
+man to man; and the _Ghost_ heeled about on the port tack with
+practically no noise at all.  And what little there was,—the slapping of
+a few reef-points and the creaking of a sheave in a block or two,—was
+ghostly under the hollow echoing pall in which we were swathed.
+
+We had scarcely filled away, it seemed, when the fog thinned abruptly and
+we were again in the sunshine, the wide-stretching sea breaking before us
+to the sky-line.  But the ocean was bare.  No wrathful _Macedonia_ broke
+its surface nor blackened the sky with her smoke.
+
+Wolf Larsen at once squared away and ran down along the rim of the
+fog-bank.  His trick was obvious.  He had entered the fog to windward of
+the steamer, and while the steamer had blindly driven on into the fog in
+the chance of catching him, he had come about and out of his shelter and
+was now running down to re-enter to leeward.  Successful in this, the old
+simile of the needle in the haystack would be mild indeed compared with
+his brother’s chance of finding him.  He did not run long.  Jibing the
+fore- and main-sails and setting the topsails again, we headed back into
+the bank.  As we entered I could have sworn I saw a vague bulk emerging
+to windward.  I looked quickly at Wolf Larsen.  Already we were ourselves
+buried in the fog, but he nodded his head.  He, too, had seen it—the
+_Macedonia_, guessing his manœuvre and failing by a moment in
+anticipating it.  There was no doubt that we had escaped unseen.
+
+“He can’t keep this up,” Wolf Larsen said.  “He’ll have to go back for
+the rest of his boats.  Send a man to the wheel, Mr. Van Weyden, keep
+this course for the present, and you might as well set the watches, for
+we won’t do any lingering to-night.”
+
+“I’d give five hundred dollars, though,” he added, “just to be aboard the
+_Macedonia_ for five minutes, listening to my brother curse.”
+
+“And now, Mr. Van Weyden,” he said to me when he had been relieved from
+the wheel, “we must make these new-comers welcome.  Serve out plenty of
+whisky to the hunters and see that a few bottles slip for’ard.  I’ll
+wager every man Jack of them is over the side to-morrow, hunting for Wolf
+Larsen as contentedly as ever they hunted for Death Larsen.”
+
+“But won’t they escape as Wainwright did?” I asked.
+
+He laughed shrewdly.  “Not as long as our old hunters have anything to
+say about it.  I’m dividing amongst them a dollar a skin for all the
+skins shot by our new hunters.  At least half of their enthusiasm to-day
+was due to that.  Oh, no, there won’t be any escaping if they have
+anything to say about it.  And now you’d better get for’ard to your
+hospital duties.  There must be a full ward waiting for you.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Wolf Larsen took the distribution of the whisky off my hands, and the
+bottles began to make their appearance while I worked over the fresh
+batch of wounded men in the forecastle.  I had seen whisky drunk, such as
+whisky-and-soda by the men of the clubs, but never as these men drank it,
+from pannikins and mugs, and from the bottles—great brimming drinks, each
+one of which was in itself a debauch.  But they did not stop at one or
+two.  They drank and drank, and ever the bottles slipped forward and they
+drank more.
+
+Everybody drank; the wounded drank; Oofty-Oofty, who helped me, drank.
+Only Louis refrained, no more than cautiously wetting his lips with the
+liquor, though he joined in the revels with an abandon equal to that of
+most of them.  It was a saturnalia.  In loud voices they shouted over the
+day’s fighting, wrangled about details, or waxed affectionate and made
+friends with the men whom they had fought.  Prisoners and captors
+hiccoughed on one another’s shoulders, and swore mighty oaths of respect
+and esteem.  They wept over the miseries of the past and over the
+miseries yet to come under the iron rule of Wolf Larsen.  And all cursed
+him and told terrible tales of his brutality.
+
+It was a strange and frightful spectacle—the small, bunk-lined space, the
+floor and walls leaping and lurching, the dim light, the swaying shadows
+lengthening and fore-shortening monstrously, the thick air heavy with
+smoke and the smell of bodies and iodoform, and the inflamed faces of the
+men—half-men, I should call them.  I noted Oofty-Oofty, holding the end
+of a bandage and looking upon the scene, his velvety and luminous eyes
+glistening in the light like a deer’s eyes, and yet I knew the barbaric
+devil that lurked in his breast and belied all the softness and
+tenderness, almost womanly, of his face and form.  And I noticed the
+boyish face of Harrison,—a good face once, but now a demon’s,—convulsed
+with passion as he told the new-comers of the hell-ship they were in and
+shrieked curses upon the head of Wolf Larsen.
+
+Wolf Larsen it was, always Wolf Larsen, enslaver and tormentor of men, a
+male Circe and these his swine, suffering brutes that grovelled before
+him and revolted only in drunkenness and in secrecy.  And was I, too, one
+of his swine? I thought.  And Maud Brewster?  No!  I ground my teeth in
+my anger and determination till the man I was attending winced under my
+hand and Oofty-Oofty looked at me with curiosity.  I felt endowed with a
+sudden strength.  What of my new-found love, I was a giant.  I feared
+nothing.  I would work my will through it all, in spite of Wolf Larsen
+and of my own thirty-five bookish years.  All would be well.  I would
+make it well.  And so, exalted, upborne by a sense of power, I turned my
+back on the howling inferno and climbed to the deck, where the fog
+drifted ghostly through the night and the air was sweet and pure and
+quiet.
+
+The steerage, where were two wounded hunters, was a repetition of the
+forecastle, except that Wolf Larsen was not being cursed; and it was with
+a great relief that I again emerged on deck and went aft to the cabin.
+Supper was ready, and Wolf Larsen and Maud were waiting for me.
+
+While all his ship was getting drunk as fast as it could, he remained
+sober.  Not a drop of liquor passed his lips.  He did not dare it under
+the circumstances, for he had only Louis and me to depend upon, and Louis
+was even now at the wheel.  We were sailing on through the fog without a
+look-out and without lights.  That Wolf Larsen had turned the liquor
+loose among his men surprised me, but he evidently knew their psychology
+and the best method of cementing in cordiality, what had begun in
+bloodshed.
+
+His victory over Death Larsen seemed to have had a remarkable effect upon
+him.  The previous evening he had reasoned himself into the blues, and I
+had been waiting momentarily for one of his characteristic outbursts.
+Yet nothing had occurred, and he was now in splendid trim.  Possibly his
+success in capturing so many hunters and boats had counteracted the
+customary reaction.  At any rate, the blues were gone, and the blue
+devils had not put in an appearance.  So I thought at the time; but, ah
+me, little I knew him or knew that even then, perhaps, he was meditating
+an outbreak more terrible than any I had seen.
+
+As I say, he discovered himself in splendid trim when I entered the
+cabin.  He had had no headaches for weeks, his eyes were clear blue as
+the sky, his bronze was beautiful with perfect health; life swelled
+through his veins in full and magnificent flood.  While waiting for me he
+had engaged Maud in animated discussion.  Temptation was the topic they
+had hit upon, and from the few words I heard I made out that he was
+contending that temptation was temptation only when a man was seduced by
+it and fell.
+
+“For look you,” he was saying, “as I see it, a man does things because of
+desire.  He has many desires.  He may desire to escape pain, or to enjoy
+pleasure.  But whatever he does, he does because he desires to do it.”
+
+“But suppose he desires to do two opposite things, neither of which will
+permit him to do the other?” Maud interrupted.
+
+“The very thing I was coming to,” he said.
+
+“And between these two desires is just where the soul of the man is
+manifest,” she went on.  “If it is a good soul, it will desire and do the
+good action, and the contrary if it is a bad soul.  It is the soul that
+decides.”
+
+“Bosh and nonsense!” he exclaimed impatiently.  “It is the desire that
+decides.  Here is a man who wants to, say, get drunk.  Also, he doesn’t
+want to get drunk.  What does he do?  How does he do it?  He is a puppet.
+He is the creature of his desires, and of the two desires he obeys the
+strongest one, that is all.  His soul hasn’t anything to do with it.  How
+can he be tempted to get drunk and refuse to get drunk?  If the desire to
+remain sober prevails, it is because it is the strongest desire.
+Temptation plays no part, unless—” he paused while grasping the new
+thought which had come into his mind—“unless he is tempted to remain
+sober.
+
+“Ha! ha!” he laughed.  “What do you think of that, Mr. Van Weyden?”
+
+“That both of you are hair-splitting,” I said.  “The man’s soul is his
+desires.  Or, if you will, the sum of his desires is his soul.  Therein
+you are both wrong.  You lay the stress upon the desire apart from the
+soul, Miss Brewster lays the stress on the soul apart from the desire,
+and in point of fact soul and desire are the same thing.
+
+“However,” I continued, “Miss Brewster is right in contending that
+temptation is temptation whether the man yield or overcome.  Fire is
+fanned by the wind until it leaps up fiercely.  So is desire like fire.
+It is fanned, as by a wind, by sight of the thing desired, or by a new
+and luring description or comprehension of the thing desired.  There lies
+the temptation.  It is the wind that fans the desire until it leaps up to
+mastery.  That’s temptation.  It may not fan sufficiently to make the
+desire overmastering, but in so far as it fans at all, that far is it
+temptation.  And, as you say, it may tempt for good as well as for evil.”
+
+I felt proud of myself as we sat down to the table.  My words had been
+decisive.  At least they had put an end to the discussion.
+
+But Wolf Larsen seemed voluble, prone to speech as I had never seen him
+before.  It was as though he were bursting with pent energy which must
+find an outlet somehow.  Almost immediately he launched into a discussion
+on love.  As usual, his was the sheer materialistic side, and Maud’s was
+the idealistic.  For myself, beyond a word or so of suggestion or
+correction now and again, I took no part.
+
+He was brilliant, but so was Maud, and for some time I lost the thread of
+the conversation through studying her face as she talked.  It was a face
+that rarely displayed colour, but to-night it was flushed and vivacious.
+Her wit was playing keenly, and she was enjoying the tilt as much as Wolf
+Larsen, and he was enjoying it hugely.  For some reason, though I know
+not why in the argument, so utterly had I lost it in the contemplation of
+one stray brown lock of Maud’s hair, he quoted from Iseult at Tintagel,
+where she says:
+
+   “Blessed am I beyond women even herein,
+   That beyond all born women is my sin,
+   And perfect my transgression.”
+
+As he had read pessimism into Omar, so now he read triumph, stinging
+triumph and exultation, into Swinburne’s lines.  And he read rightly, and
+he read well.  He had hardly ceased reading when Louis put his head into
+the companion-way and whispered down:
+
+“Be easy, will ye?  The fog’s lifted, an’ ’tis the port light iv a
+steamer that’s crossin’ our bow this blessed minute.”
+
+Wolf Larsen sprang on deck, and so swiftly that by the time we followed
+him he had pulled the steerage-slide over the drunken clamour and was on
+his way forward to close the forecastle-scuttle.  The fog, though it
+remained, had lifted high, where it obscured the stars and made the night
+quite black.  Directly ahead of us I could see a bright red light and a
+white light, and I could hear the pulsing of a steamer’s engines.  Beyond
+a doubt it was the _Macedonia_.
+
+Wolf Larsen had returned to the poop, and we stood in a silent group,
+watching the lights rapidly cross our bow.
+
+“Lucky for me he doesn’t carry a searchlight,” Wolf Larsen said.
+
+“What if I should cry out loudly?” I queried in a whisper.
+
+“It would be all up,” he answered.  “But have you thought upon what would
+immediately happen?”
+
+Before I had time to express any desire to know, he had me by the throat
+with his gorilla grip, and by a faint quiver of the muscles—a hint, as it
+were—he suggested to me the twist that would surely have broken my neck.
+The next moment he had released me and we were gazing at the
+_Macedonia’s_ lights.
+
+“What if I should cry out?” Maud asked.
+
+“I like you too well to hurt you,” he said softly—nay, there was a
+tenderness and a caress in his voice that made me wince.
+
+“But don’t do it, just the same, for I’d promptly break Mr. Van Weyden’s
+neck.”
+
+“Then she has my permission to cry out,” I said defiantly.
+
+“I hardly think you’ll care to sacrifice the Dean of American Letters the
+Second,” he sneered.
+
+We spoke no more, though we had become too used to one another for the
+silence to be awkward; and when the red light and the white had
+disappeared we returned to the cabin to finish the interrupted supper.
+
+Again they fell to quoting, and Maud gave Dowson’s “Impenitentia Ultima.”
+She rendered it beautifully, but I watched not her, but Wolf Larsen.  I
+was fascinated by the fascinated look he bent upon Maud.  He was quite
+out of himself, and I noticed the unconscious movement of his lips as he
+shaped word for word as fast as she uttered them.  He interrupted her
+when she gave the lines:
+
+   “And her eyes should be my light while the sun went out behind me,
+   And the viols in her voice be the last sound in my ear.”
+
+“There are viols in your voice,” he said bluntly, and his eyes flashed
+their golden light.
+
+I could have shouted with joy at her control.  She finished the
+concluding stanza without faltering and then slowly guided the
+conversation into less perilous channels.  And all the while I sat in a
+half-daze, the drunken riot of the steerage breaking through the
+bulkhead, the man I feared and the woman I loved talking on and on.  The
+table was not cleared.  The man who had taken Mugridge’s place had
+evidently joined his comrades in the forecastle.
+
+If ever Wolf Larsen attained the summit of living, he attained it then.
+From time to time I forsook my own thoughts to follow him, and I followed
+in amaze, mastered for the moment by his remarkable intellect, under the
+spell of his passion, for he was preaching the passion of revolt.  It was
+inevitable that Milton’s Lucifer should be instanced, and the keenness
+with which Wolf Larsen analysed and depicted the character was a
+revelation of his stifled genius.  It reminded me of Taine, yet I knew
+the man had never heard of that brilliant though dangerous thinker.
+
+“He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God’s thunderbolts,” Wolf
+Larsen was saying.  “Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten.  A third of God’s
+angels he had led with him, and straightway he incited man to rebel
+against God, and gained for himself and hell the major portion of all the
+generations of man.  Why was he beaten out of heaven?  Because he was
+less brave than God? less proud? less aspiring?  No!  A thousand times
+no!  God was more powerful, as he said, Whom thunder hath made greater.
+But Lucifer was a free spirit.  To serve was to suffocate.  He preferred
+suffering in freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable servility.  He
+did not care to serve God.  He cared to serve nothing.  He was no
+figure-head.  He stood on his own legs.  He was an individual.”
+
+“The first Anarchist,” Maud laughed, rising and preparing to withdraw to
+her state-room.
+
+“Then it is good to be an anarchist!” he cried.  He, too, had risen, and
+he stood facing her, where she had paused at the door of her room, as he
+went on:
+
+               “‘Here at least
+   We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
+   Here for his envy; will not drive us hence;
+   Here we may reign secure; and in my choice
+   To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
+   Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
+
+It was the defiant cry of a mighty spirit.  The cabin still rang with his
+voice, as he stood there, swaying, his bronzed face shining, his head up
+and dominant, and his eyes, golden and masculine, intensely masculine and
+insistently soft, flashing upon Maud at the door.
+
+Again that unnamable and unmistakable terror was in her eyes, and she
+said, almost in a whisper, “You are Lucifer.”
+
+The door closed and she was gone.  He stood staring after her for a
+minute, then returned to himself and to me.
+
+“I’ll relieve Louis at the wheel,” he said shortly, “and call upon you to
+relieve at midnight.  Better turn in now and get some sleep.”
+
+He pulled on a pair of mittens, put on his cap, and ascended the
+companion-stairs, while I followed his suggestion by going to bed.  For
+some unknown reason, prompted mysteriously, I did not undress, but lay
+down fully clothed.  For a time I listened to the clamour in the steerage
+and marvelled upon the love which had come to me; but my sleep on the
+_Ghost_ had become most healthful and natural, and soon the songs and
+cries died away, my eyes closed, and my consciousness sank down into the
+half-death of slumber.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I knew not what had aroused me, but I found myself out of my bunk, on my
+feet, wide awake, my soul vibrating to the warning of danger as it might
+have thrilled to a trumpet call.  I threw open the door.  The cabin light
+was burning low.  I saw Maud, my Maud, straining and struggling and
+crushed in the embrace of Wolf Larsen’s arms.  I could see the vain beat
+and flutter of her as she strove, pressing her face against his breast,
+to escape from him.  All this I saw on the very instant of seeing and as
+I sprang forward.
+
+I struck him with my fist, on the face, as he raised his head, but it was
+a puny blow.  He roared in a ferocious, animal-like way, and gave me a
+shove with his hand.  It was only a shove, a flirt of the wrist, yet so
+tremendous was his strength that I was hurled backward as from a
+catapult.  I struck the door of the state-room which had formerly been
+Mugridge’s, splintering and smashing the panels with the impact of my
+body.  I struggled to my feet, with difficulty dragging myself clear of
+the wrecked door, unaware of any hurt whatever.  I was conscious only of
+an overmastering rage.  I think I, too, cried aloud, as I drew the knife
+at my hip and sprang forward a second time.
+
+But something had happened.  They were reeling apart.  I was close upon
+him, my knife uplifted, but I withheld the blow.  I was puzzled by the
+strangeness of it.  Maud was leaning against the wall, one hand out for
+support; but he was staggering, his left hand pressed against his
+forehead and covering his eyes, and with the right he was groping about
+him in a dazed sort of way.  It struck against the wall, and his body
+seemed to express a muscular and physical relief at the contact, as
+though he had found his bearings, his location in space as well as
+something against which to lean.
+
+Then I saw red again.  All my wrongs and humiliations flashed upon me
+with a dazzling brightness, all that I had suffered and others had
+suffered at his hands, all the enormity of the man’s very existence.  I
+sprang upon him, blindly, insanely, and drove the knife into his
+shoulder.  I knew, then, that it was no more than a flesh wound,—I had
+felt the steel grate on his shoulder-blade,—and I raised the knife to
+strike at a more vital part.
+
+But Maud had seen my first blow, and she cried, “Don’t!  Please don’t!”
+
+I dropped my arm for a moment, and a moment only.  Again the knife was
+raised, and Wolf Larsen would have surely died had she not stepped
+between.  Her arms were around me, her hair was brushing my face.  My
+pulse rushed up in an unwonted manner, yet my rage mounted with it.  She
+looked me bravely in the eyes.
+
+“For my sake,” she begged.
+
+“I would kill him for your sake!” I cried, trying to free my arm without
+hurting her.
+
+“Hush!” she said, and laid her fingers lightly on my lips.  I could have
+kissed them, had I dared, even then, in my rage, the touch of them was so
+sweet, so very sweet.  “Please, please,” she pleaded, and she disarmed me
+by the words, as I was to discover they would ever disarm me.
+
+I stepped back, separating from her, and replaced the knife in its
+sheath.  I looked at Wolf Larsen.  He still pressed his left hand against
+his forehead.  It covered his eyes.  His head was bowed.  He seemed to
+have grown limp.  His body was sagging at the hips, his great shoulders
+were drooping and shrinking forward.
+
+“Van Weyden!” he called hoarsely, and with a note of fright in his
+voice.  “Oh, Van Weyden! where are you?”
+
+I looked at Maud.  She did not speak, but nodded her head.
+
+“Here I am,” I answered, stepping to his side.  “What is the matter?”
+
+“Help me to a seat,” he said, in the same hoarse, frightened voice.
+
+“I am a sick man; a very sick man, Hump,” he said, as he left my
+sustaining grip and sank into a chair.
+
+His head dropped forward on the table and was buried in his hands.  From
+time to time it rocked back and forward as with pain.  Once, when he half
+raised it, I saw the sweat standing in heavy drops on his forehead about
+the roots of his hair.
+
+“I am a sick man, a very sick man,” he repeated again, and yet once
+again.
+
+“What is the matter?” I asked, resting my hand on his shoulder.  “What
+can I do for you?”
+
+But he shook my hand off with an irritated movement, and for a long time
+I stood by his side in silence.  Maud was looking on, her face awed and
+frightened.  What had happened to him we could not imagine.
+
+“Hump,” he said at last, “I must get into my bunk.  Lend me a hand.  I’ll
+be all right in a little while.  It’s those damn headaches, I believe.  I
+was afraid of them.  I had a feeling—no, I don’t know what I’m talking
+about.  Help me into my bunk.”
+
+But when I got him into his bunk he again buried his face in his hands,
+covering his eyes, and as I turned to go I could hear him murmuring, “I
+am a sick man, a very sick man.”
+
+Maud looked at me inquiringly as I emerged.  I shook my head, saying:
+
+“Something has happened to him.  What, I don’t know.  He is helpless, and
+frightened, I imagine, for the first time in his life.  It must have
+occurred before he received the knife-thrust, which made only a
+superficial wound.  You must have seen what happened.”
+
+She shook her head.  “I saw nothing.  It is just as mysterious to me.  He
+suddenly released me and staggered away.  But what shall we do?  What
+shall I do?”
+
+“If you will wait, please, until I come back,” I answered.
+
+I went on deck.  Louis was at the wheel.
+
+“You may go for’ard and turn in,” I said, taking it from him.
+
+He was quick to obey, and I found myself alone on the deck of the
+_Ghost_.  As quietly as was possible, I clewed up the topsails, lowered
+the flying jib and staysail, backed the jib over, and flattened the
+mainsail.  Then I went below to Maud.  I placed my finger on my lips for
+silence, and entered Wolf Larsen’s room.  He was in the same position in
+which I had left him, and his head was rocking—almost writhing—from side
+to side.
+
+“Anything I can do for you?” I asked.
+
+He made no reply at first, but on my repeating the question he answered,
+“No, no; I’m all right.  Leave me alone till morning.”
+
+But as I turned to go I noted that his head had resumed its rocking
+motion.  Maud was waiting patiently for me, and I took notice, with a
+thrill of joy, of the queenly poise of her head and her glorious, calm
+eyes.  Calm and sure they were as her spirit itself.
+
+“Will you trust yourself to me for a journey of six hundred miles or so?”
+I asked.
+
+“You mean—?” she asked, and I knew she had guessed aright.
+
+“Yes, I mean just that,” I replied.  “There is nothing left for us but
+the open boat.”
+
+“For me, you mean,” she said.  “You are certainly as safe here as you
+have been.”
+
+“No, there is nothing left for us but the open boat,” I iterated stoutly.
+“Will you please dress as warmly as you can, at once, and make into a
+bundle whatever you wish to bring with you.”
+
+“And make all haste,” I added, as she turned toward her state-room.
+
+The lazarette was directly beneath the cabin, and, opening the trap-door
+in the floor and carrying a candle with me, I dropped down and began
+overhauling the ship’s stores.  I selected mainly from the canned goods,
+and by the time I was ready, willing hands were extended from above to
+receive what I passed up.
+
+We worked in silence.  I helped myself also to blankets, mittens,
+oilskins, caps, and such things, from the slop-chest.  It was no light
+adventure, this trusting ourselves in a small boat to so raw and stormy a
+sea, and it was imperative that we should guard ourselves against the
+cold and wet.
+
+We worked feverishly at carrying our plunder on deck and depositing it
+amidships, so feverishly that Maud, whose strength was hardly a positive
+quantity, had to give over, exhausted, and sit on the steps at the break
+of the poop.  This did not serve to recover her, and she lay on her back,
+on the hard deck, arms stretched out, and whole body relaxed.  It was a
+trick I remembered of my sister, and I knew she would soon be herself
+again.  I knew, also, that weapons would not come in amiss, and I
+re-entered Wolf Larsen’s state-room to get his rifle and shot-gun.  I
+spoke to him, but he made no answer, though his head was still rocking
+from side to side and he was not asleep.
+
+“Good-bye, Lucifer,” I whispered to myself as I softly closed the door.
+
+Next to obtain was a stock of ammunition,—an easy matter, though I had to
+enter the steerage companion-way to do it.  Here the hunters stored the
+ammunition-boxes they carried in the boats, and here, but a few feet from
+their noisy revels, I took possession of two boxes.
+
+Next, to lower a boat.  Not so simple a task for one man.  Having cast
+off the lashings, I hoisted first on the forward tackle, then on the aft,
+till the boat cleared the rail, when I lowered away, one tackle and then
+the other, for a couple of feet, till it hung snugly, above the water,
+against the schooner’s side.  I made certain that it contained the proper
+equipment of oars, rowlocks, and sail.  Water was a consideration, and I
+robbed every boat aboard of its breaker.  As there were nine boats all
+told, it meant that we should have plenty of water, and ballast as well,
+though there was the chance that the boat would be overloaded, what of
+the generous supply of other things I was taking.
+
+While Maud was passing me the provisions and I was storing them in the
+boat, a sailor came on deck from the forecastle.  He stood by the weather
+rail for a time (we were lowering over the lee rail), and then sauntered
+slowly amidships, where he again paused and stood facing the wind, with
+his back toward us.  I could hear my heart beating as I crouched low in
+the boat.  Maud had sunk down upon the deck and was, I knew, lying
+motionless, her body in the shadow of the bulwark.  But the man never
+turned, and, after stretching his arms above his head and yawning
+audibly, he retraced his steps to the forecastle scuttle and disappeared.
+
+A few minutes sufficed to finish the loading, and I lowered the boat into
+the water.  As I helped Maud over the rail and felt her form close to
+mine, it was all I could do to keep from crying out, “I love you!  I love
+you!”  Truly Humphrey Van Weyden was at last in love, I thought, as her
+fingers clung to mine while I lowered her down to the boat.  I held on to
+the rail with one hand and supported her weight with the other, and I was
+proud at the moment of the feat.  It was a strength I had not possessed a
+few months before, on the day I said good-bye to Charley Furuseth and
+started for San Francisco on the ill-fated _Martinez_.
+
+As the boat ascended on a sea, her feet touched and I released her hands.
+I cast off the tackles and leaped after her.  I had never rowed in my
+life, but I put out the oars and at the expense of much effort got the
+boat clear of the _Ghost_.  Then I experimented with the sail.  I had
+seen the boat-steerers and hunters set their spritsails many times, yet
+this was my first attempt.  What took them possibly two minutes took me
+twenty, but in the end I succeeded in setting and trimming it, and with
+the steering-oar in my hands hauled on the wind.
+
+“There lies Japan,” I remarked, “straight before us.”
+
+“Humphrey Van Weyden,” she said, “you are a brave man.”
+
+“Nay,” I answered, “it is you who are a brave woman.”
+
+We turned our heads, swayed by a common impulse to see the last of the
+_Ghost_.  Her low hull lifted and rolled to windward on a sea; her canvas
+loomed darkly in the night; her lashed wheel creaked as the rudder
+kicked; then sight and sound of her faded away, and we were alone on the
+dark sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Day broke, grey and chill.  The boat was close-hauled on a fresh breeze
+and the compass indicated that we were just making the course which would
+bring us to Japan.  Though stoutly mittened, my fingers were cold, and
+they pained from the grip on the steering-oar.  My feet were stinging
+from the bite of the frost, and I hoped fervently that the sun would
+shine.
+
+Before me, in the bottom of the boat, lay Maud.  She, at least, was warm,
+for under her and over her were thick blankets.  The top one I had drawn
+over her face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing but
+the vague shape of her, and her light-brown hair, escaped from the
+covering and jewelled with moisture from the air.
+
+Long I looked at her, dwelling upon that one visible bit of her as only a
+man would who deemed it the most precious thing in the world.  So
+insistent was my gaze that at last she stirred under the blankets, the
+top fold was thrown back and she smiled out on me, her eyes yet heavy
+with sleep.
+
+“Good-morning, Mr. Van Weyden,” she said.  “Have you sighted land yet?”
+
+“No,” I answered, “but we are approaching it at a rate of six miles an
+hour.”
+
+She made a _moue_ of disappointment.
+
+“But that is equivalent to one hundred and forty-four miles in
+twenty-four hours,” I added reassuringly.
+
+Her face brightened.  “And how far have we to go?”
+
+“Siberia lies off there,” I said, pointing to the west.  “But to the
+south-west, some six hundred miles, is Japan.  If this wind should hold,
+we’ll make it in five days.”
+
+“And if it storms?  The boat could not live?”
+
+She had a way of looking one in the eyes and demanding the truth, and
+thus she looked at me as she asked the question.
+
+“It would have to storm very hard,” I temporized.
+
+“And if it storms very hard?”
+
+I nodded my head.  “But we may be picked up any moment by a
+sealing-schooner.  They are plentifully distributed over this part of the
+ocean.”
+
+“Why, you are chilled through!” she cried.  “Look!  You are shivering.
+Don’t deny it; you are.  And here I have been lying warm as toast.”
+
+“I don’t see that it would help matters if you, too, sat up and were
+chilled,” I laughed.
+
+“It will, though, when I learn to steer, which I certainly shall.”
+
+She sat up and began making her simple toilet.  She shook down her hair,
+and it fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and shoulders.
+Dear, damp brown hair!  I wanted to kiss it, to ripple it through my
+fingers, to bury my face in it.  I gazed entranced, till the boat ran
+into the wind and the flapping sail warned me I was not attending to my
+duties.  Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spite
+of my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now in grasping much of
+the physical characteristics of love.  The love of man and woman, I had
+always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit, a spiritual
+bond that linked and drew their souls together.  The bonds of the flesh
+had little part in my cosmos of love.  But I was learning the sweet
+lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself,
+through the flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of the loved one’s
+hair was as much breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the light
+that shone from the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips.  After
+all, pure spirit was unknowable, a thing to be sensed and divined only;
+nor could it express itself in terms of itself.  Jehovah was
+anthropomorphic because he could address himself to the Jews only in
+terms of their understanding; so he was conceived as in their own image,
+as a cloud, a pillar of fire, a tangible, physical something which the
+mind of the Israelites could grasp.
+
+And so I gazed upon Maud’s light-brown hair, and loved it, and learned
+more of love than all the poets and singers had taught me with all their
+songs and sonnets.  She flung it back with a sudden adroit movement, and
+her face emerged, smiling.
+
+“Why don’t women wear their hair down always?” I asked.  “It is so much
+more beautiful.”
+
+“If it didn’t tangle so dreadfully,” she laughed.  “There!  I’ve lost one
+of my precious hair-pins!”
+
+I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and again,
+such was my delight in following her every movement as she searched
+through the blankets for the pin.  I was surprised, and joyfully, that
+she was so much the woman, and the display of each trait and mannerism
+that was characteristically feminine gave me keener joy.  For I had been
+elevating her too highly in my concepts of her, removing her too far from
+the plane of the human, and too far from me.  I had been making of her a
+creature goddess-like and unapproachable.  So I hailed with delight the
+little traits that proclaimed her only woman after all, such as the toss
+of the head which flung back the cloud of hair, and the search for the
+pin.  She was woman, my kind, on my plane, and the delightful intimacy of
+kind, of man and woman, was possible, as well as the reverence and awe in
+which I knew I should always hold her.
+
+She found the pin with an adorable little cry, and I turned my attention
+more fully to my steering.  I proceeded to experiment, lashing and
+wedging the steering-oar until the boat held on fairly well by the wind
+without my assistance.  Occasionally it came up too close, or fell off
+too freely; but it always recovered itself and in the main behaved
+satisfactorily.
+
+“And now we shall have breakfast,” I said.  “But first you must be more
+warmly clad.”
+
+I got out a heavy shirt, new from the slop-chest and made from blanket
+goods.  I knew the kind, so thick and so close of texture that it could
+resist the rain and not be soaked through after hours of wetting.  When
+she had slipped this on over her head, I exchanged the boy’s cap she wore
+for a man’s cap, large enough to cover her hair, and, when the flap was
+turned down, to completely cover her neck and ears.  The effect was
+charming.  Her face was of the sort that cannot but look well under all
+circumstances.  Nothing could destroy its exquisite oval, its well-nigh
+classic lines, its delicately stencilled brows, its large brown eyes,
+clear-seeing and calm, gloriously calm.
+
+A puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us just then.  The boat was
+caught as it obliquely crossed the crest of a wave.  It went over
+suddenly, burying its gunwale level with the sea and shipping a bucketful
+or so of water.  I was opening a can of tongue at the moment, and I
+sprang to the sheet and cast it off just in time.  The sail flapped and
+fluttered, and the boat paid off.  A few minutes of regulating sufficed
+to put it on its course again, when I returned to the preparation of
+breakfast.
+
+“It does very well, it seems, though I am not versed in things nautical,”
+she said, nodding her head with grave approval at my steering
+contrivance.
+
+“But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind,” I explained.
+“When running more freely, with the wind astern abeam, or on the quarter,
+it will be necessary for me to steer.”
+
+“I must say I don’t understand your technicalities,” she said, “but I do
+your conclusion, and I don’t like it.  You cannot steer night and day and
+for ever.  So I shall expect, after breakfast, to receive my first
+lesson.  And then you shall lie down and sleep.  We’ll stand watches just
+as they do on ships.”
+
+“I don’t see how I am to teach you,” I made protest.  “I am just learning
+for myself.  You little thought when you trusted yourself to me that I
+had had no experience whatever with small boats.  This is the first time
+I have ever been in one.”
+
+“Then we’ll learn together, sir.  And since you’ve had a night’s start
+you shall teach me what you have learned.  And now, breakfast.  My! this
+air does give one an appetite!”
+
+“No coffee,” I said regretfully, passing her buttered sea-biscuits and a
+slice of canned tongue.  “And there will be no tea, no soups, nothing
+hot, till we have made land somewhere, somehow.”
+
+After the simple breakfast, capped with a cup of cold water, Maud took
+her lesson in steering.  In teaching her I learned quite a deal myself,
+though I was applying the knowledge already acquired by sailing the
+_Ghost_ and by watching the boat-steerers sail the small boats.  She was
+an apt pupil, and soon learned to keep the course, to luff in the puffs
+and to cast off the sheet in an emergency.
+
+Having grown tired, apparently, of the task, she relinquished the oar to
+me.  I had folded up the blankets, but she now proceeded to spread them
+out on the bottom.  When all was arranged snugly, she said:
+
+“Now, sir, to bed.  And you shall sleep until luncheon.  Till
+dinner-time,” she corrected, remembering the arrangement on the _Ghost_.
+
+What could I do?  She insisted, and said, “Please, please,” whereupon I
+turned the oar over to her and obeyed.  I experienced a positive sensuous
+delight as I crawled into the bed she had made with her hands.  The calm
+and control which were so much a part of her seemed to have been
+communicated to the blankets, so that I was aware of a soft dreaminess
+and content, and of an oval face and brown eyes framed in a fisherman’s
+cap and tossing against a background now of grey cloud, now of grey sea,
+and then I was aware that I had been asleep.
+
+I looked at my watch.  It was one o’clock.  I had slept seven hours!  And
+she had been steering seven hours!  When I took the steering-oar I had
+first to unbend her cramped fingers.  Her modicum of strength had been
+exhausted, and she was unable even to move from her position.  I was
+compelled to let go the sheet while I helped her to the nest of blankets
+and chafed her hands and arms.
+
+“I am so tired,” she said, with a quick intake of the breath and a sigh,
+drooping her head wearily.
+
+But she straightened it the next moment.  “Now don’t scold, don’t you
+dare scold,” she cried with mock defiance.
+
+“I hope my face does not appear angry,” I answered seriously; “for I
+assure you I am not in the least angry.”
+
+“N-no,” she considered.  “It looks only reproachful.”
+
+“Then it is an honest face, for it looks what I feel.  You were not fair
+to yourself, nor to me.  How can I ever trust you again?”
+
+She looked penitent.  “I’ll be good,” she said, as a naughty child might
+say it.  “I promise—”
+
+“To obey as a sailor would obey his captain?”
+
+“Yes,” she answered.  “It was stupid of me, I know.”
+
+“Then you must promise something else,” I ventured.
+
+“Readily.”
+
+“That you will not say, ‘Please, please,’ too often; for when you do you
+are sure to override my authority.”
+
+She laughed with amused appreciation.  She, too, had noticed the power of
+the repeated “please.”
+
+“It is a good word—” I began.
+
+“But I must not overwork it,” she broke in.
+
+But she laughed weakly, and her head drooped again.  I left the oar long
+enough to tuck the blankets about her feet and to pull a single fold
+across her face.  Alas! she was not strong.  I looked with misgiving
+toward the south-west and thought of the six hundred miles of hardship
+before us—ay, if it were no worse than hardship.  On this sea a storm
+might blow up at any moment and destroy us.  And yet I was unafraid.  I
+was without confidence in the future, extremely doubtful, and yet I felt
+no underlying fear.  It must come right, it must come right, I repeated
+to myself, over and over again.
+
+The wind freshened in the afternoon, raising a stiffer sea and trying the
+boat and me severely.  But the supply of food and the nine breakers of
+water enabled the boat to stand up to the sea and wind, and I held on as
+long as I dared.  Then I removed the sprit, tightly hauling down the peak
+of the sail, and we raced along under what sailors call a leg-of-mutton.
+
+Late in the afternoon I sighted a steamer’s smoke on the horizon to
+leeward, and I knew it either for a Russian cruiser, or, more likely, the
+_Macedonia_ still seeking the _Ghost_.  The sun had not shone all day,
+and it had been bitter cold.  As night drew on, the clouds darkened and
+the wind freshened, so that when Maud and I ate supper it was with our
+mittens on and with me still steering and eating morsels between puffs.
+
+By the time it was dark, wind and sea had become too strong for the boat,
+and I reluctantly took in the sail and set about making a drag or
+sea-anchor.  I had learned of the device from the talk of the hunters,
+and it was a simple thing to manufacture.  Furling the sail and lashing
+it securely about the mast, boom, sprit, and two pairs of spare oars, I
+threw it overboard.  A line connected it with the bow, and as it floated
+low in the water, practically unexposed to the wind, it drifted less
+rapidly than the boat.  In consequence it held the boat bow on to the sea
+and wind—the safest position in which to escape being swamped when the
+sea is breaking into whitecaps.
+
+“And now?” Maud asked cheerfully, when the task was accomplished and I
+pulled on my mittens.
+
+“And now we are no longer travelling toward Japan,” I answered.  “Our
+drift is to the south-east, or south-south-east, at the rate of at least
+two miles an hour.”
+
+“That will be only twenty-four miles,” she urged, “if the wind remains
+high all night.”
+
+“Yes, and only one hundred and forty miles if it continues for three days
+and nights.”
+
+“But it won’t continue,” she said with easy confidence.  “It will turn
+around and blow fair.”
+
+“The sea is the great faithless one.”
+
+“But the wind!” she retorted.  “I have heard you grow eloquent over the
+brave trade-wind.”
+
+“I wish I had thought to bring Wolf Larsen’s chronometer and sextant,” I
+said, still gloomily.  “Sailing one direction, drifting another
+direction, to say nothing of the set of the current in some third
+direction, makes a resultant which dead reckoning can never calculate.
+Before long we won’t know where we are by five hundred miles.”
+
+Then I begged her pardon and promised I should not be disheartened any
+more.  At her solicitation I let her take the watch till midnight,—it was
+then nine o’clock, but I wrapped her in blankets and put an oilskin about
+her before I lay down.  I slept only cat-naps.  The boat was leaping and
+pounding as it fell over the crests, I could hear the seas rushing past,
+and spray was continually being thrown aboard.  And still, it was not a
+bad night, I mused—nothing to the nights I had been through on the
+_Ghost_; nothing, perhaps, to the nights we should go through in this
+cockle-shell.  Its planking was three-quarters of an inch thick.  Between
+us and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood.
+
+And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid.  The death which
+Wolf Larsen and even Thomas Mugridge had made me fear, I no longer
+feared.  The coming of Maud Brewster into my life seemed to have
+transformed me.  After all, I thought, it is better and finer to love
+than to be loved, if it makes something in life so worth while that one
+is not loath to die for it.  I forget my own life in the love of another
+life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted so much to live as
+right now when I place the least value upon my own life.  I never had so
+much reason for living, was my concluding thought; and after that, until
+I dozed, I contented myself with trying to pierce the darkness to where I
+knew Maud crouched low in the stern-sheets, watchful of the foaming sea
+and ready to call me on an instant’s notice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+There is no need of going into an extended recital of our suffering in
+the small boat during the many days we were driven and drifted, here and
+there, willy-nilly, across the ocean.  The high wind blew from the
+north-west for twenty-four hours, when it fell calm, and in the night
+sprang up from the south-west.  This was dead in our teeth, but I took in
+the sea-anchor and set sail, hauling a course on the wind which took us
+in a south-south-easterly direction.  It was an even choice between this
+and the west-north-westerly course which the wind permitted; but the warm
+airs of the south fanned my desire for a warmer sea and swayed my
+decision.
+
+In three hours—it was midnight, I well remember, and as dark as I had
+ever seen it on the sea—the wind, still blowing out of the south-west,
+rose furiously, and once again I was compelled to set the sea-anchor.
+
+Day broke and found me wan-eyed and the ocean lashed white, the boat
+pitching, almost on end, to its drag.  We were in imminent danger of
+being swamped by the whitecaps.  As it was, spray and spume came aboard
+in such quantities that I bailed without cessation.  The blankets were
+soaking.  Everything was wet except Maud, and she, in oilskins, rubber
+boots, and sou’wester, was dry, all but her face and hands and a stray
+wisp of hair.  She relieved me at the bailing-hole from time to time, and
+bravely she threw out the water and faced the storm.  All things are
+relative.  It was no more than a stiff blow, but to us, fighting for life
+in our frail craft, it was indeed a storm.
+
+Cold and cheerless, the wind beating on our faces, the white seas roaring
+by, we struggled through the day.  Night came, but neither of us slept.
+Day came, and still the wind beat on our faces and the white seas roared
+past.  By the second night Maud was falling asleep from exhaustion.  I
+covered her with oilskins and a tarpaulin.  She was comparatively dry,
+but she was numb with the cold.  I feared greatly that she might die in
+the night; but day broke, cold and cheerless, with the same clouded sky
+and beating wind and roaring seas.
+
+I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours.  I was wet and chilled to the
+marrow, till I felt more dead than alive.  My body was stiff from
+exertion as well as from cold, and my aching muscles gave me the severest
+torture whenever I used them, and I used them continually.  And all the
+time we were being driven off into the north-east, directly away from
+Japan and toward bleak Bering Sea.
+
+And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated.  In
+fact, toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle and
+something more.  The boat’s bow plunged under a crest, and we came
+through quarter-full of water.  I bailed like a madman.  The liability of
+shipping another such sea was enormously increased by the water that
+weighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy.  And another such
+sea meant the end.  When I had the boat empty again I was forced to take
+away the tarpaulin which covered Maud, in order that I might lash it down
+across the bow.  It was well I did, for it covered the boat fully a third
+of the way aft, and three times, in the next several hours, it flung off
+the bulk of the down-rushing water when the bow shoved under the seas.
+
+Maud’s condition was pitiable.  She sat crouched in the bottom of the
+boat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing the pain she
+suffered.  But ever her eyes looked bravely at me, and ever her lips
+uttered brave words.
+
+The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little I
+noticed it.  I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-sheets.
+The morning of the fourth day found the wind diminished to a gentle
+whisper, the sea dying down and the sun shining upon us.  Oh, the blessed
+sun!  How we bathed our poor bodies in its delicious warmth, reviving
+like bugs and crawling things after a storm.  We smiled again, said
+amusing things, and waxed optimistic over our situation.  Yet it was, if
+anything, worse than ever.  We were farther from Japan than the night we
+left the _Ghost_.  Nor could I more than roughly guess our latitude and
+longitude.  At a calculation of a two-mile drift per hour, during the
+seventy and odd hours of the storm, we had been driven at least one
+hundred and fifty miles to the north-east.  But was such calculated drift
+correct?  For all I knew, it might have been four miles per hour instead
+of two.  In which case we were another hundred and fifty miles to the
+bad.
+
+Where we were I did not know, though there was quite a likelihood that we
+were in the vicinity of the _Ghost_.  There were seals about us, and I
+was prepared to sight a sealing-schooner at any time.  We did sight one,
+in the afternoon, when the north-west breeze had sprung up freshly once
+more.  But the strange schooner lost itself on the sky-line and we alone
+occupied the circle of the sea.
+
+Came days of fog, when even Maud’s spirit drooped and there were no merry
+words upon her lips; days of calm, when we floated on the lonely
+immensity of sea, oppressed by its greatness and yet marvelling at the
+miracle of tiny life, for we still lived and struggled to live; days of
+sleet and wind and snow-squalls, when nothing could keep us warm; or days
+of drizzling rain, when we filled our water-breakers from the drip of the
+wet sail.
+
+And ever I loved Maud with an increasing love.  She was so many-sided, so
+many-mooded—“protean-mooded” I called her.  But I called her this, and
+other and dearer things, in my thoughts only.  Though the declaration of
+my love urged and trembled on my tongue a thousand times, I knew that it
+was no time for such a declaration.  If for no other reason, it was no
+time, when one was protecting and trying to save a woman, to ask that
+woman for her love.  Delicate as was the situation, not alone in this but
+in other ways, I flattered myself that I was able to deal delicately with
+it; and also I flattered myself that by look or sign I gave no
+advertisement of the love I felt for her.  We were like good comrades,
+and we grew better comrades as the days went by.
+
+One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and fear.
+The terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering, the
+strangeness and isolation of the situation,—all that should have
+frightened a robust woman,—seemed to make no impression upon her who had
+known life only in its most sheltered and consummately artificial
+aspects, and who was herself all fire and dew and mist, sublimated
+spirit, all that was soft and tender and clinging in woman.  And yet I am
+wrong.  She _was_ timid and afraid, but she possessed courage.  The flesh
+and the qualms of the flesh she was heir to, but the flesh bore heavily
+only on the flesh.  And she was spirit, first and always spirit,
+etherealized essence of life, calm as her calm eyes, and sure of
+permanence in the changing order of the universe.
+
+Came days of storm, days and nights of storm, when the ocean menaced us
+with its roaring whiteness, and the wind smote our struggling boat with a
+Titan’s buffets.  And ever we were flung off, farther and farther, to the
+north-east.  It was in such a storm, and the worst that we had
+experienced, that I cast a weary glance to leeward, not in quest of
+anything, but more from the weariness of facing the elemental strife, and
+in mute appeal, almost, to the wrathful powers to cease and let us be.
+What I saw I could not at first believe.  Days and nights of
+sleeplessness and anxiety had doubtless turned my head.  I looked back at
+Maud, to identify myself, as it were, in time and space.  The sight of
+her dear wet cheeks, her flying hair, and her brave brown eyes convinced
+me that my vision was still healthy.  Again I turned my face to leeward,
+and again I saw the jutting promontory, black and high and naked, the
+raging surf that broke about its base and beat its front high up with
+spouting fountains, the black and forbidding coast-line running toward the
+south-east and fringed with a tremendous scarf of white.
+
+“Maud,” I said.  “Maud.”
+
+She turned her head and beheld the sight.
+
+“It cannot be Alaska!” she cried.
+
+“Alas, no,” I answered, and asked, “Can you swim?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“Neither can I,” I said.  “So we must get ashore without swimming, in
+some opening between the rocks through which we can drive the boat and
+clamber out.  But we must be quick, most quick—and sure.”
+
+I spoke with a confidence she knew I did not feel, for she looked at me
+with that unfaltering gaze of hers and said:
+
+“I have not thanked you yet for all you have done for me but—”
+
+She hesitated, as if in doubt how best to word her gratitude.
+
+“Well?” I said, brutally, for I was not quite pleased with her thanking
+me.
+
+“You might help me,” she smiled.
+
+“To acknowledge your obligations before you die?  Not at all.  We are not
+going to die.  We shall land on that island, and we shall be snug and
+sheltered before the day is done.”
+
+I spoke stoutly, but I did not believe a word.  Nor was I prompted to lie
+through fear.  I felt no fear, though I was sure of death in that boiling
+surge amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing nearer.  It was
+impossible to hoist sail and claw off that shore.  The wind would
+instantly capsize the boat; the seas would swamp it the moment it fell
+into the trough; and, besides, the sail, lashed to the spare oars,
+dragged in the sea ahead of us.
+
+As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few hundred
+yards to leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that Maud must die.
+My cursed imagination saw her beaten and mangled against the rocks, and
+it was too terrible.  I strove to compel myself to think we would make
+the landing safely, and so I spoke, not what I believed, but what I
+preferred to believe.
+
+I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a moment
+I entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and leaping
+overboard.  Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment, when we
+entered on the final stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim my
+love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the desperate struggle and
+die.
+
+Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat.  I felt
+her mittened hand come out to mine.  And thus, without speech, we waited
+the end.  We were not far off the line the wind made with the western
+edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that some set of the
+current or send of the sea would drift us past before we reached the
+surf.
+
+“We shall go clear,” I said, with a confidence which I knew deceived
+neither of us.
+
+“By God, we _will_ go clear!” I cried, five minutes later.
+
+The oath left my lips in my excitement—the first, I do believe, in my
+life, unless “trouble it,” an expletive of my youth, be accounted an
+oath.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” I said.
+
+“You have convinced me of your sincerity,” she said, with a faint smile.
+“I do know, now, that we shall go clear.”
+
+I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory,
+and as we looked we could see grow the intervening coastline of what was
+evidently a deep cove.  At the same time there broke upon our ears a
+continuous and mighty bellowing.  It partook of the magnitude and volume
+of distant thunder, and it came to us directly from leeward, rising above
+the crash of the surf and travelling directly in the teeth of the storm.
+As we passed the point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of
+white sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf, and which was covered
+with myriads of seals.  It was from them that the great bellowing went
+up.
+
+“A rookery!” I cried.  “Now are we indeed saved.  There must be men and
+cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters.  Possibly there is a
+station ashore.”
+
+But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, “Still bad,
+but not so bad.  And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall drift by
+that next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered beach, where we
+may land without wetting our feet.”
+
+And the gods were kind.  The first and second headlands were directly in
+line with the south-west wind; but once around the second,—and we went
+perilously near,—we picked up the third headland, still in line with the
+wind and with the other two.  But the cove that intervened!  It
+penetrated deep into the land, and the tide, setting in, drifted us under
+the shelter of the point.  Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy but
+smooth ground-swell, and I took in the sea-anchor and began to row.  From
+the point the shore curved away, more and more to the south and west,
+until at last it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-locked
+harbour, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples where
+vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over the
+frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet inshore.
+
+Here were no seals whatever.  The boat’s stern touched the hard shingle.
+I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud.  The next moment she was beside
+me.  As my fingers released hers, she clutched for my arm hastily.  At
+the same moment I swayed, as about to fall to the sand.  This was the
+startling effect of the cessation of motion.  We had been so long upon
+the moving, rocking sea that the stable land was a shock to us.  We
+expected the beach to lift up this way and that, and the rocky walls to
+swing back and forth like the sides of a ship; and when we braced
+ourselves, automatically, for these various expected movements, their
+non-occurrence quite overcame our equilibrium.
+
+“I really must sit down,” Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a dizzy
+gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.
+
+I attended to making the boat secure and joined her.  Thus we landed on
+Endeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long custom of the
+sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+“Fool!” I cried aloud in my vexation.
+
+I had unloaded the boat and carried its contents high up on the beach,
+where I had set about making a camp.  There was driftwood, though not
+much, on the beach, and the sight of a coffee tin I had taken from the
+_Ghost’s_ larder had given me the idea of a fire.
+
+“Blithering idiot!” I was continuing.
+
+But Maud said, “Tut, tut,” in gentle reproval, and then asked why I was a
+blithering idiot.
+
+“No matches,” I groaned.  “Not a match did I bring.  And now we shall
+have no hot coffee, soup, tea, or anything!”
+
+“Wasn’t it—er—Crusoe who rubbed sticks together?” she drawled.
+
+“But I have read the personal narratives of a score of shipwrecked men
+who tried, and tried in vain,” I answered.  “I remember Winters, a
+newspaper fellow with an Alaskan and Siberian reputation.  Met him at the
+Bibelot once, and he was telling us how he attempted to make a fire with
+a couple of sticks.  It was most amusing.  He told it inimitably, but it
+was the story of a failure.  I remember his conclusion, his black eyes
+flashing as he said, ‘Gentlemen, the South Sea Islander may do it, the
+Malay may do it, but take my word it’s beyond the white man.’”
+
+“Oh, well, we’ve managed so far without it,” she said cheerfully.  “And
+there’s no reason why we cannot still manage without it.”
+
+“But think of the coffee!” I cried.  “It’s good coffee, too, I know.  I
+took it from Larsen’s private stores.  And look at that good wood.”
+
+I confess, I wanted the coffee badly; and I learned, not long afterward,
+that the berry was likewise a little weakness of Maud’s.  Besides, we had
+been so long on a cold diet that we were numb inside as well as out.
+Anything warm would have been most gratifying.  But I complained no more
+and set about making a tent of the sail for Maud.
+
+I had looked upon it as a simple task, what of the oars, mast, boom, and
+sprit, to say nothing of plenty of lines.  But as I was without
+experience, and as every detail was an experiment and every successful
+detail an invention, the day was well gone before her shelter was an
+accomplished fact.  And then, that night, it rained, and she was flooded
+out and driven back into the boat.
+
+The next morning I dug a shallow ditch around the tent, and, an hour
+later, a sudden gust of wind, whipping over the rocky wall behind us,
+picked up the tent and smashed it down on the sand thirty yards away.
+
+Maud laughed at my crestfallen expression, and I said, “As soon as the
+wind abates I intend going in the boat to explore the island.  There must
+be a station somewhere, and men.  And ships must visit the station.  Some
+Government must protect all these seals.  But I wish to have you
+comfortable before I start.”
+
+“I should like to go with you,” was all she said.
+
+“It would be better if you remained.  You have had enough of hardship.
+It is a miracle that you have survived.  And it won’t be comfortable in
+the boat rowing and sailing in this rainy weather.  What you need is
+rest, and I should like you to remain and get it.”
+
+Something suspiciously akin to moistness dimmed her beautiful eyes before
+she dropped them and partly turned away her head.
+
+“I should prefer going with you,” she said in a low voice, in which there
+was just a hint of appeal.
+
+“I might be able to help you a—” her voice broke,—“a little.  And if
+anything should happen to you, think of me left here alone.”
+
+“Oh, I intend being very careful,” I answered.  “And I shall not go so
+far but what I can get back before night.  Yes, all said and done, I
+think it vastly better for you to remain, and sleep, and rest and do
+nothing.”
+
+She turned and looked me in the eyes.  Her gaze was unfaltering, but
+soft.
+
+“Please, please,” she said, oh, so softly.
+
+I stiffened myself to refuse, and shook my head.  Still she waited and
+looked at me.  I tried to word my refusal, but wavered.  I saw the glad
+light spring into her eyes and knew that I had lost.  It was impossible
+to say no after that.
+
+The wind died down in the afternoon, and we were prepared to start the
+following morning.  There was no way of penetrating the island from our
+cove, for the walls rose perpendicularly from the beach, and, on either
+side of the cove, rose from the deep water.
+
+Morning broke dull and grey, but calm, and I was awake early and had the
+boat in readiness.
+
+“Fool!  Imbecile!  Yahoo!” I shouted, when I thought it was meet to
+arouse Maud; but this time I shouted in merriment as I danced about the
+beach, bareheaded, in mock despair.
+
+Her head appeared under the flap of the sail.
+
+“What now?” she asked sleepily, and, withal, curiously.
+
+“Coffee!” I cried.  “What do you say to a cup of coffee? hot coffee?
+piping hot?”
+
+“My!” she murmured, “you startled me, and you are cruel.  Here I have
+been composing my soul to do without it, and here you are vexing me with
+your vain suggestions.”
+
+“Watch me,” I said.
+
+From under clefts among the rocks I gathered a few dry sticks and chips.
+These I whittled into shavings or split into kindling.  From my note-book
+I tore out a page, and from the ammunition box took a shot-gun shell.
+Removing the wads from the latter with my knife, I emptied the powder on
+a flat rock.  Next I pried the primer, or cap, from the shell, and laid
+it on the rock, in the midst of the scattered powder.  All was ready.
+Maud still watched from the tent.  Holding the paper in my left hand, I
+smashed down upon the cap with a rock held in my right.  There was a puff
+of white smoke, a burst of flame, and the rough edge of the paper was
+alight.
+
+Maud clapped her hands gleefully.  “Prometheus!” she cried.
+
+But I was too occupied to acknowledge her delight.  The feeble flame must
+be cherished tenderly if it were to gather strength and live.  I fed it,
+shaving by shaving, and sliver by sliver, till at last it was snapping
+and crackling as it laid hold of the smaller chips and sticks.  To be
+cast away on an island had not entered into my calculations, so we were
+without a kettle or cooking utensils of any sort; but I made shift with
+the tin used for bailing the boat, and later, as we consumed our supply
+of canned goods, we accumulated quite an imposing array of cooking
+vessels.
+
+I boiled the water, but it was Maud who made the coffee.  And how good it
+was!  My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled sea-biscuit and
+water.  The breakfast was a success, and we sat about the fire much
+longer than enterprising explorers should have done, sipping the hot
+black coffee and talking over our situation.
+
+I was confident that we should find a station in some one of the coves,
+for I knew that the rookeries of Bering Sea were thus guarded; but Maud
+advanced the theory—to prepare me for disappointment, I do believe, if
+disappointment were to come—that we had discovered an unknown rookery.
+She was in very good spirits, however, and made quite merry in accepting
+our plight as a grave one.
+
+“If you are right,” I said, “then we must prepare to winter here.  Our
+food will not last, but there are the seals.  They go away in the fall,
+so I must soon begin to lay in a supply of meat.  Then there will be huts
+to build and driftwood to gather.  Also we shall try out seal fat for
+lighting purposes.  Altogether, we’ll have our hands full if we find the
+island uninhabited.  Which we shall not, I know.”
+
+But she was right.  We sailed with a beam wind along the shore, searching
+the coves with our glasses and landing occasionally, without finding a
+sign of human life.  Yet we learned that we were not the first who had
+landed on Endeavour Island.  High up on the beach of the second cove from
+ours, we discovered the splintered wreck of a boat—a sealer’s boat, for
+the rowlocks were bound in sennit, a gun-rack was on the starboard side
+of the bow, and in white letters was faintly visible _Gazelle_ No. 2.
+The boat had lain there for a long time, for it was half filled with
+sand, and the splintered wood had that weather-worn appearance due to
+long exposure to the elements.  In the stern-sheets I found a rusty
+ten-gauge shot-gun and a sailor’s sheath-knife broken short across and so
+rusted as to be almost unrecognizable.
+
+“They got away,” I said cheerfully; but I felt a sinking at the heart and
+seemed to divine the presence of bleached bones somewhere on that beach.
+
+I did not wish Maud’s spirits to be dampened by such a find, so I turned
+seaward again with our boat and skirted the north-eastern point of the
+island.  There were no beaches on the southern shore, and by early
+afternoon we rounded the black promontory and completed the
+circumnavigation of the island.  I estimated its circumference at
+twenty-five miles, its width as varying from two to five miles; while my
+most conservative calculation placed on its beaches two hundred thousand
+seals.  The island was highest at its extreme south-western point, the
+headlands and backbone diminishing regularly until the north-eastern
+portion was only a few feet above the sea.  With the exception of our
+little cove, the other beaches sloped gently back for a distance of
+half-a-mile or so, into what I might call rocky meadows, with here and
+there patches of moss and tundra grass.  Here the seals hauled out, and
+the old bulls guarded their harems, while the young bulls hauled out by
+themselves.
+
+This brief description is all that Endeavour Island merits.  Damp and
+soggy where it was not sharp and rocky, buffeted by storm winds and
+lashed by the sea, with the air continually a-tremble with the bellowing
+of two hundred thousand amphibians, it was a melancholy and miserable
+sojourning-place.  Maud, who had prepared me for disappointment, and who
+had been sprightly and vivacious all day, broke down as we landed in our
+own little cove.  She strove bravely to hide it from me, but while I was
+kindling another fire I knew she was stifling her sobs in the blankets
+under the sail-tent.
+
+It was my turn to be cheerful, and I played the part to the best of my
+ability, and with such success that I brought the laughter back into her
+dear eyes and song on her lips; for she sang to me before she went to an
+early bed.  It was the first time I had heard her sing, and I lay by the
+fire, listening and transported, for she was nothing if not an artist in
+everything she did, and her voice, though not strong, was wonderfully
+sweet and expressive.
+
+I still slept in the boat, and I lay awake long that night, gazing up at
+the first stars I had seen in many nights and pondering the situation.
+Responsibility of this sort was a new thing to me.  Wolf Larsen had been
+quite right.  I had stood on my father’s legs.  My lawyers and agents had
+taken care of my money for me.  I had had no responsibilities at all.
+Then, on the _Ghost_ I had learned to be responsible for myself.  And
+now, for the first time in my life, I found myself responsible for some
+one else.  And it was required of me that this should be the gravest of
+responsibilities, for she was the one woman in the world—the one small
+woman, as I loved to think of her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+No wonder we called it Endeavour Island.  For two weeks we toiled at
+building a hut.  Maud insisted on helping, and I could have wept over her
+bruised and bleeding hands.  And still, I was proud of her because of it.
+There was something heroic about this gently-bred woman enduring our
+terrible hardship and with her pittance of strength bending to the tasks
+of a peasant woman.  She gathered many of the stones which I built into
+the walls of the hut; also, she turned a deaf ear to my entreaties when I
+begged her to desist.  She compromised, however, by taking upon herself
+the lighter labours of cooking and gathering driftwood and moss for our
+winter’s supply.
+
+The hut’s walls rose without difficulty, and everything went smoothly
+until the problem of the roof confronted me.  Of what use the four walls
+without a roof?  And of what could a roof be made?  There were the spare
+oars, very true.  They would serve as roof-beams; but with what was I to
+cover them?  Moss would never do.  Tundra grass was impracticable.  We
+needed the sail for the boat, and the tarpaulin had begun to leak.
+
+“Winters used walrus skins on his hut,” I said.
+
+“There are the seals,” she suggested.
+
+So next day the hunting began.  I did not know how to shoot, but I
+proceeded to learn.  And when I had expended some thirty shells for three
+seals, I decided that the ammunition would be exhausted before I acquired
+the necessary knowledge.  I had used eight shells for lighting fires
+before I hit upon the device of banking the embers with wet moss, and
+there remained not over a hundred shells in the box.
+
+“We must club the seals,” I announced, when convinced of my poor
+marksmanship.  “I have heard the sealers talk about clubbing them.”
+
+“They are so pretty,” she objected.  “I cannot bear to think of it being
+done.  It is so directly brutal, you know; so different from shooting
+them.”
+
+“That roof must go on,” I answered grimly.  “Winter is almost here.  It
+is our lives against theirs.  It is unfortunate we haven’t plenty of
+ammunition, but I think, anyway, that they suffer less from being clubbed
+than from being all shot up.  Besides, I shall do the clubbing.”
+
+“That’s just it,” she began eagerly, and broke off in sudden confusion.
+
+“Of course,” I began, “if you prefer—”
+
+“But what shall I be doing?” she interrupted, with that softness I knew
+full well to be insistence.
+
+“Gathering firewood and cooking dinner,” I answered lightly.
+
+She shook her head.  “It is too dangerous for you to attempt alone.”
+
+“I know, I know,” she waived my protest.  “I am only a weak woman, but
+just my small assistance may enable you to escape disaster.”
+
+“But the clubbing?” I suggested.
+
+“Of course, you will do that.  I shall probably scream.  I’ll look away
+when—”
+
+“The danger is most serious,” I laughed.
+
+“I shall use my judgment when to look and when not to look,” she replied
+with a grand air.
+
+The upshot of the affair was that she accompanied me next morning.  I
+rowed into the adjoining cove and up to the edge of the beach.  There
+were seals all about us in the water, and the bellowing thousands on the
+beach compelled us to shout at each other to make ourselves heard.
+
+“I know men club them,” I said, trying to reassure myself, and gazing
+doubtfully at a large bull, not thirty feet away, upreared on his
+fore-flippers and regarding me intently.  “But the question is, How do
+they club them?”
+
+“Let us gather tundra grass and thatch the roof,” Maud said.
+
+She was as frightened as I at the prospect, and we had reason to be
+gazing at close range at the gleaming teeth and dog-like mouths.
+
+“I always thought they were afraid of men,” I said.
+
+“How do I know they are not afraid?” I queried a moment later, after
+having rowed a few more strokes along the beach.  “Perhaps, if I were to
+step boldly ashore, they would cut for it, and I could not catch up with
+one.”  And still I hesitated.
+
+“I heard of a man, once, who invaded the nesting grounds of wild geese,”
+Maud said.  “They killed him.”
+
+“The geese?”
+
+“Yes, the geese.  My brother told me about it when I was a little girl.”
+
+“But I know men club them,” I persisted.
+
+“I think the tundra grass will make just as good a roof,” she said.
+
+Far from her intention, her words were maddening me, driving me on.  I
+could not play the coward before her eyes.  “Here goes,” I said, backing
+water with one oar and running the bow ashore.
+
+I stepped out and advanced valiantly upon a long-maned bull in the midst
+of his wives.  I was armed with the regular club with which the
+boat-pullers killed the wounded seals gaffed aboard by the hunters.  It
+was only a foot and a half long, and in my superb ignorance I never
+dreamed that the club used ashore when raiding the rookeries measured
+four to five feet.  The cows lumbered out of my way, and the distance
+between me and the bull decreased.  He raised himself on his flippers
+with an angry movement.  We were a dozen feet apart.  Still I advanced
+steadily, looking for him to turn tail at any moment and run.
+
+At six feet the panicky thought rushed into my mind, What if he will not
+run?  Why, then I shall club him, came the answer.  In my fear I had
+forgotten that I was there to get the bull instead of to make him run.
+And just then he gave a snort and a snarl and rushed at me.  His eyes
+were blazing, his mouth was wide open; the teeth gleamed cruelly white.
+Without shame, I confess that it was I who turned and footed it.  He ran
+awkwardly, but he ran well.  He was but two paces behind when I tumbled
+into the boat, and as I shoved off with an oar his teeth crunched down
+upon the blade.  The stout wood was crushed like an egg-shell.  Maud and
+I were astounded.  A moment later he had dived under the boat, seized the
+keel in his mouth, and was shaking the boat violently.
+
+“My!” said Maud.  “Let’s go back.”
+
+I shook my head.  “I can do what other men have done, and I know that
+other men have clubbed seals.  But I think I’ll leave the bulls alone
+next time.”
+
+“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.
+
+“Now don’t say, ‘Please, please,’” I cried, half angrily, I do believe.
+
+She made no reply, and I knew my tone must have hurt her.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” I said, or shouted, rather, in order to make myself
+heard above the roar of the rookery.  “If you say so, I’ll turn and go
+back; but honestly, I’d rather stay.”
+
+“Now don’t say that this is what you get for bringing a woman along,” she
+said.  She smiled at me whimsically, gloriously, and I knew there was no
+need for forgiveness.
+
+I rowed a couple of hundred feet along the beach so as to recover my
+nerves, and then stepped ashore again.
+
+“Do be cautious,” she called after me.
+
+I nodded my head and proceeded to make a flank attack on the nearest
+harem.  All went well until I aimed a blow at an outlying cow's head and
+fell short.  She snorted and tried to scramble away.  I ran in close and
+struck another blow, hitting the shoulder instead of the head.
+
+“Watch out!” I heard Maud scream.
+
+In my excitement I had not been taking notice of other things, and I
+looked up to see the lord of the harem charging down upon me.  Again I
+fled to the boat, hotly pursued; but this time Maud made no suggestion of
+turning back.
+
+“It would be better, I imagine, if you let harems alone and devoted your
+attention to lonely and inoffensive-looking seals,” was what she said.
+“I think I have read something about them.  Dr. Jordan’s book, I believe.
+They are the young bulls, not old enough to have harems of their own.  He
+called them the holluschickie, or something like that.  It seems to me if
+we find where they haul out—”
+
+“It seems to me that your fighting instinct is aroused,” I laughed.
+
+She flushed quickly and prettily.  “I’ll admit I don’t like defeat any
+more than you do, or any more than I like the idea of killing such
+pretty, inoffensive creatures.”
+
+“Pretty!” I sniffed.  “I failed to mark anything pre-eminently pretty
+about those foamy-mouthed beasts that raced me.”
+
+“Your point of view,” she laughed.  “You lacked perspective.  Now if you
+did not have to get so close to the subject—”
+
+“The very thing!” I cried.  “What I need is a longer club.  And there’s
+that broken oar ready to hand.”
+
+“It just comes to me,” she said, “that Captain Larsen was telling me how
+the men raided the rookeries.  They drive the seals, in small herds, a
+short distance inland before they kill them.”
+
+“I don’t care to undertake the herding of one of those harems,” I
+objected.
+
+“But there are the holluschickie,” she said.  “The holluschickie haul out
+by themselves, and Dr. Jordan says that paths are left between the
+harems, and that as long as the holluschickie keep strictly to the path
+they are unmolested by the masters of the harem.”
+
+“There’s one now,” I said, pointing to a young bull in the water.  “Let’s
+watch him, and follow him if he hauls out.”
+
+He swam directly to the beach and clambered out into a small opening
+between two harems, the masters of which made warning noises but did not
+attack him.  We watched him travel slowly inward, threading about among
+the harems along what must have been the path.
+
+“Here goes,” I said, stepping out; but I confess my heart was in my mouth
+as I thought of going through the heart of that monstrous herd.
+
+“It would be wise to make the boat fast,” Maud said.
+
+She had stepped out beside me, and I regarded her with wonderment.
+
+She nodded her head determinedly.  “Yes, I’m going with you, so you may
+as well secure the boat and arm me with a club.”
+
+“Let’s go back,” I said dejectedly.  “I think tundra grass, will do,
+after all.”
+
+“You know it won’t,” was her reply.  “Shall I lead?”
+
+With a shrug of the shoulders, but with the warmest admiration and pride
+at heart for this woman, I equipped her with the broken oar and took
+another for myself.  It was with nervous trepidation that we made the
+first few rods of the journey.  Once Maud screamed in terror as a cow
+thrust an inquisitive nose toward her foot, and several times I quickened
+my pace for the same reason.  But, beyond warning coughs from either
+side, there were no signs of hostility.  It was a rookery which had never
+been raided by the hunters, and in consequence the seals were
+mild-tempered and at the same time unafraid.
+
+In the very heart of the herd the din was terrific.  It was almost
+dizzying in its effect.  I paused and smiled reassuringly at Maud, for I
+had recovered my equanimity sooner than she.  I could see that she was
+still badly frightened.  She came close to me and shouted:
+
+“I’m dreadfully afraid!”
+
+And I was not.  Though the novelty had not yet worn off, the peaceful
+comportment of the seals had quieted my alarm.  Maud was trembling.
+
+“I’m afraid, and I’m not afraid,” she chattered with shaking jaws.  “It’s
+my miserable body, not I.”
+
+“It’s all right, it’s all right,” I reassured her, my arm passing
+instinctively and protectingly around her.
+
+I shall never forget, in that moment, how instantly conscious I became of
+my manhood.  The primitive deeps of my nature stirred.  I felt myself
+masculine, the protector of the weak, the fighting male.  And, best of
+all, I felt myself the protector of my loved one.  She leaned against me,
+so light and lily-frail, and as her trembling eased away it seemed as
+though I became aware of prodigious strength.  I felt myself a match for
+the most ferocious bull in the herd, and I know, had such a bull charged
+upon me, that I should have met it unflinchingly and quite coolly, and I
+know that I should have killed it.
+
+“I am all right now,” she said, looking up at me gratefully.  “Let us go
+on.”
+
+And that the strength in me had quieted her and given her confidence,
+filled me with an exultant joy.  The youth of the race seemed burgeoning
+in me, over-civilized man that I was, and I lived for myself the old
+hunting days and forest nights of my remote and forgotten ancestry.  I
+had much for which to thank Wolf Larsen, was my thought as we went along
+the path between the jostling harems.
+
+A quarter of a mile inland we came upon the holluschickie—sleek young
+bulls, living out the loneliness of their bachelorhood and gathering
+strength against the day when they would fight their way into the ranks
+of the Benedicts.
+
+Everything now went smoothly.  I seemed to know just what to do and how
+to do it.  Shouting, making threatening gestures with my club, and even
+prodding the lazy ones, I quickly cut out a score of the young bachelors
+from their companions.  Whenever one made an attempt to break back toward
+the water, I headed it off.  Maud took an active part in the drive, and
+with her cries and flourishings of the broken oar was of considerable
+assistance.  I noticed, though, that whenever one looked tired and
+lagged, she let it slip past.  But I noticed, also, whenever one, with a
+show of fight, tried to break past, that her eyes glinted and showed
+bright, and she rapped it smartly with her club.
+
+“My, it’s exciting!” she cried, pausing from sheer weakness.  “I think
+I’ll sit down.”
+
+I drove the little herd (a dozen strong, now, what of the escapes she had
+permitted) a hundred yards farther on; and by the time she joined me I
+had finished the slaughter and was beginning to skin.  An hour later we
+went proudly back along the path between the harems.  And twice again we
+came down the path burdened with skins, till I thought we had enough to
+roof the hut.  I set the sail, laid one tack out of the cove, and on the
+other tack made our own little inner cove.
+
+“It’s just like home-coming,” Maud said, as I ran the boat ashore.
+
+I heard her words with a responsive thrill, it was all so dearly intimate
+and natural, and I said:
+
+“It seems as though I have lived this life always.  The world of books
+and bookish folk is very vague, more like a dream memory than an
+actuality.  I surely have hunted and forayed and fought all the days of
+my life.  And you, too, seem a part of it.  You are—”  I was on the verge
+of saying, “my woman, my mate,” but glibly changed it to—“standing the
+hardship well.”
+
+But her ear had caught the flaw.  She recognized a flight that midmost
+broke.  She gave me a quick look.
+
+“Not that.  You were saying—?”
+
+“That the American Mrs. Meynell was living the life of a savage and
+living it quite successfully,” I said easily.
+
+“Oh,” was all she replied; but I could have sworn there was a note of
+disappointment in her voice.
+
+But “my woman, my mate” kept ringing in my head for the rest of the day
+and for many days.  Yet never did it ring more loudly than that night, as
+I watched her draw back the blanket of moss from the coals, blow up the
+fire, and cook the evening meal.  It must have been latent savagery
+stirring in me, for the old words, so bound up with the roots of the
+race, to grip me and thrill me.  And grip and thrill they did, till I
+fell asleep, murmuring them to myself over and over again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+“It will smell,” I said, “but it will keep in the heat and keep out the
+rain and snow.”
+
+We were surveying the completed seal-skin roof.
+
+“It is clumsy, but it will serve the purpose, and that is the main
+thing,” I went on, yearning for her praise.
+
+And she clapped her hands and declared that she was hugely pleased.
+
+“But it is dark in here,” she said the next moment, her shoulders
+shrinking with a little involuntary shiver.
+
+“You might have suggested a window when the walls were going up,” I said.
+“It was for you, and you should have seen the need of a window.”
+
+“But I never do see the obvious, you know,” she laughed back.  “And
+besides, you can knock a hole in the wall at any time.”
+
+“Quite true; I had not thought of it,” I replied, wagging my head sagely.
+“But have you thought of ordering the window-glass?  Just call up the
+firm,—Red, 4451, I think it is,—and tell them what size and kind of glass
+you wish.”
+
+“That means—” she began.
+
+“No window.”
+
+It was a dark and evil-appearing thing, that hut, not fit for aught
+better than swine in a civilized land; but for us, who had known the
+misery of the open boat, it was a snug little habitation.  Following the
+housewarming, which was accomplished by means of seal-oil and a wick made
+from cotton calking, came the hunting for our winter’s meat and the
+building of the second hut.  It was a simple affair, now, to go forth in
+the morning and return by noon with a boatload of seals.  And then, while
+I worked at building the hut, Maud tried out the oil from the blubber and
+kept a slow fire under the frames of meat.  I had heard of jerking beef
+on the plains, and our seal-meat, cut in thin strips and hung in the
+smoke, cured excellently.
+
+The second hut was easier to erect, for I built it against the first, and
+only three walls were required.  But it was work, hard work, all of it.
+Maud and I worked from dawn till dark, to the limit of our strength, so
+that when night came we crawled stiffly to bed and slept the animal-like
+sleep of exhaustion.  And yet Maud declared that she had never felt better
+or stronger in her life.  I knew this was true of myself, but hers was
+such a lily strength that I feared she would break down.  Often and
+often, her last-reserve force gone, I have seen her stretched flat on her
+back on the sand in the way she had of resting and recuperating.  And
+then she would be up on her feet and toiling hard as ever.  Where she
+obtained this strength was the marvel to me.
+
+“Think of the long rest this winter,” was her reply to my remonstrances.
+“Why, we’ll be clamorous for something to do.”
+
+We held a housewarming in my hut the night it was roofed.  It was the end
+of the third day of a fierce storm which had swung around the compass
+from the south-east to the north-west, and which was then blowing
+directly in upon us.  The beaches of the outer cove were thundering with
+the surf, and even in our land-locked inner cove a respectable sea was
+breaking.  No high backbone of island sheltered us from the wind, and it
+whistled and bellowed about the hut till at times I feared for the
+strength of the walls.  The skin roof, stretched tightly as a drumhead, I
+had thought, sagged and bellied with every gust; and innumerable
+interstices in the walls, not so tightly stuffed with moss as Maud had
+supposed, disclosed themselves.  Yet the seal-oil burned brightly and we
+were warm and comfortable.
+
+It was a pleasant evening indeed, and we voted that as a social function
+on Endeavour Island it had not yet been eclipsed.  Our minds were at
+ease.  Not only had we resigned ourselves to the bitter winter, but we
+were prepared for it.  The seals could depart on their mysterious journey
+into the south at any time, now, for all we cared; and the storms held no
+terror for us.  Not only were we sure of being dry and warm and sheltered
+from the wind, but we had the softest and most luxurious mattresses that
+could be made from moss.  This had been Maud’s idea, and she had herself
+jealously gathered all the moss.  This was to be my first night on the
+mattress, and I knew I should sleep the sweeter because she had made it.
+
+As she rose to go she turned to me with the whimsical way she had, and
+said:
+
+“Something is going to happen—is happening, for that matter.  I feel it.
+Something is coming here, to us.  It is coming now.  I don’t know what,
+but it is coming.”
+
+“Good or bad?” I asked.
+
+She shook her head.  “I don’t know, but it is there, somewhere.”
+
+She pointed in the direction of the sea and wind.
+
+“It’s a lee shore,” I laughed, “and I am sure I’d rather be here than
+arriving, a night like this.”
+
+“You are not frightened?” I asked, as I stepped to open the door for her.
+
+Her eyes looked bravely into mine.
+
+“And you feel well? perfectly well?”
+
+“Never better,” was her answer.
+
+We talked a little longer before she went.
+
+“Good-night, Maud,” I said.
+
+“Good-night, Humphrey,” she said.
+
+This use of our given names had come about quite as a matter of course,
+and was as unpremeditated as it was natural.  In that moment I could have
+put my arms around her and drawn her to me.  I should certainly have done
+so out in that world to which we belonged.  As it was, the situation
+stopped there in the only way it could; but I was left alone in my little
+hut, glowing warmly through and through with a pleasant satisfaction; and
+I knew that a tie, or a tacit something, existed between us which had not
+existed before.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+I awoke, oppressed by a mysterious sensation.  There seemed something
+missing in my environment.  But the mystery and oppressiveness vanished
+after the first few seconds of waking, when I identified the missing
+something as the wind.  I had fallen asleep in that state of nerve
+tension with which one meets the continuous shock of sound or movement,
+and I had awakened, still tense, bracing myself to meet the pressure of
+something which no longer bore upon me.
+
+It was the first night I had spent under cover in several months, and I
+lay luxuriously for some minutes under my blankets (for once not wet with
+fog or spray), analysing, first, the effect produced upon me by the
+cessation of the wind, and next, the joy which was mine from resting on
+the mattress made by Maud’s hands.  When I had dressed and opened the
+door, I heard the waves still lapping on the beach, garrulously attesting
+the fury of the night.  It was a clear day, and the sun was shining.  I
+had slept late, and I stepped outside with sudden energy, bent upon
+making up lost time as befitted a dweller on Endeavour Island.
+
+And when outside, I stopped short.  I believed my eyes without question,
+and yet I was for the moment stunned by what they disclosed to me.
+There, on the beach, not fifty feet away, bow on, dismasted, was a
+black-hulled vessel.  Masts and booms, tangled with shrouds, sheets, and
+rent canvas, were rubbing gently alongside.  I could have rubbed my eyes
+as I looked.  There was the home-made galley we had built, the familiar
+break of the poop, the low yacht-cabin scarcely rising above the rail.
+It was the _Ghost_.
+
+What freak of fortune had brought it here—here of all spots? what chance
+of chances?  I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall at my back and knew
+the profundity of despair.  Escape was hopeless, out of the question.  I
+thought of Maud, asleep there in the hut we had reared; I remembered her
+“Good-night, Humphrey”; “my woman, my mate,” went ringing through my
+brain, but now, alas, it was a knell that sounded.  Then everything went
+black before my eyes.
+
+Possibly it was the fraction of a second, but I had no knowledge of how
+long an interval had lapsed before I was myself again.  There lay the
+_Ghost_, bow on to the beach, her splintered bowsprit projecting over the
+sand, her tangled spars rubbing against her side to the lift of the
+crooning waves.  Something must be done, must be done.
+
+It came upon me suddenly, as strange, that nothing moved aboard.  Wearied
+from the night of struggle and wreck, all hands were yet asleep, I
+thought.  My next thought was that Maud and I might yet escape.  If we
+could take to the boat and make round the point before any one awoke?  I
+would call her and start.  My hand was lifted at her door to knock, when
+I recollected the smallness of the island.  We could never hide ourselves
+upon it.  There was nothing for us but the wide raw ocean.  I thought of
+our snug little huts, our supplies of meat and oil and moss and firewood,
+and I knew that we could never survive the wintry sea and the great
+storms which were to come.
+
+So I stood, with hesitant knuckle, without her door.  It was impossible,
+impossible.  A wild thought of rushing in and killing her as she slept
+rose in my mind.  And then, in a flash, the better solution came to me.
+All hands were asleep.  Why not creep aboard the _Ghost_,—well I knew the
+way to Wolf Larsen’s bunk,—and kill him in his sleep?  After that—well,
+we would see.  But with him dead there was time and space in which to
+prepare to do other things; and besides, whatever new situation arose, it
+could not possibly be worse than the present one.
+
+My knife was at my hip.  I returned to my hut for the shot-gun, made sure
+it was loaded, and went down to the _Ghost_.  With some difficulty, and
+at the expense of a wetting to the waist, I climbed aboard.  The
+forecastle scuttle was open.  I paused to listen for the breathing of the
+men, but there was no breathing.  I almost gasped as the thought came to
+me: What if the _Ghost_ is deserted?  I listened more closely.  There was
+no sound.  I cautiously descended the ladder.  The place had the empty
+and musty feel and smell usual to a dwelling no longer inhabited.
+Everywhere was a thick litter of discarded and ragged garments, old
+sea-boots, leaky oilskins—all the worthless forecastle dunnage of a long
+voyage.
+
+Abandoned hastily, was my conclusion, as I ascended to the deck.  Hope
+was alive again in my breast, and I looked about me with greater
+coolness.  I noted that the boats were missing.  The steerage told the
+same tale as the forecastle.  The hunters had packed their belongings
+with similar haste.  The _Ghost_ was deserted.  It was Maud’s and mine.
+I thought of the ship’s stores and the lazarette beneath the cabin, and
+the idea came to me of surprising Maud with something nice for breakfast.
+
+The reaction from my fear, and the knowledge that the terrible deed I had
+come to do was no longer necessary, made me boyish and eager.  I went up
+the steerage companion-way two steps at a time, with nothing distinct in
+my mind except joy and the hope that Maud would sleep on until the
+surprise breakfast was quite ready for her.  As I rounded the galley, a
+new satisfaction was mine at thought of all the splendid cooking utensils
+inside.  I sprang up the break of the poop, and saw—Wolf Larsen.  What of
+my impetus and the stunning surprise, I clattered three or four steps
+along the deck before I could stop myself.  He was standing in the
+companion-way, only his head and shoulders visible, staring straight at
+me.  His arms were resting on the half-open slide.  He made no movement
+whatever—simply stood there, staring at me.
+
+I began to tremble.  The old stomach sickness clutched me.  I put one
+hand on the edge of the house to steady myself.  My lips seemed suddenly
+dry and I moistened them against the need of speech.  Nor did I for an
+instant take my eyes off him.  Neither of us spoke.  There was something
+ominous in his silence, his immobility.  All my old fear of him returned
+and by my new fear was increased an hundred-fold.  And still we stood, the
+pair of us, staring at each other.
+
+I was aware of the demand for action, and, my old helplessness strong
+upon me, I was waiting for him to take the initiative.  Then, as the
+moments went by, it came to me that the situation was analogous to the
+one in which I had approached the long-maned bull, my intention of
+clubbing obscured by fear until it became a desire to make him run.  So
+it was at last impressed upon me that I was there, not to have Wolf
+Larsen take the initiative, but to take it myself.
+
+I cocked both barrels and levelled the shot-gun at him.  Had he moved,
+attempted to drop down the companion-way, I know I would have shot him.
+But he stood motionless and staring as before.  And as I faced him, with
+levelled gun shaking in my hands, I had time to note the worn and haggard
+appearance of his face.  It was as if some strong anxiety had wasted it.
+The cheeks were sunken, and there was a wearied, puckered expression on
+the brow.  And it seemed to me that his eyes were strange, not only the
+expression, but the physical seeming, as though the optic nerves and
+supporting muscles had suffered strain and slightly twisted the eyeballs.
+
+All this I saw, and my brain now working rapidly, I thought a thousand
+thoughts; and yet I could not pull the triggers.  I lowered the gun and
+stepped to the corner of the cabin, primarily to relieve the tension on
+my nerves and to make a new start, and incidentally to be closer.  Again
+I raised the gun.  He was almost at arm’s length.  There was no hope for
+him.  I was resolved.  There was no possible chance of missing him, no
+matter how poor my marksmanship.  And yet I wrestled with myself and
+could not pull the triggers.
+
+“Well?” he demanded impatiently.
+
+I strove vainly to force my fingers down on the triggers, and vainly I
+strove to say something.
+
+“Why don’t you shoot?” he asked.
+
+I cleared my throat of a huskiness which prevented speech.  “Hump,” he
+said slowly, “you can’t do it.  You are not exactly afraid.  You are
+impotent.  Your conventional morality is stronger than you.  You are the
+slave to the opinions which have credence among the people you have known
+and have read about.  Their code has been drummed into your head from the
+time you lisped, and in spite of your philosophy, and of what I have
+taught you, it won’t let you kill an unarmed, unresisting man.”
+
+“I know it,” I said hoarsely.
+
+“And you know that I would kill an unarmed man as readily as I would
+smoke a cigar,” he went on.  “You know me for what I am,—my worth in the
+world by your standard.  You have called me snake, tiger, shark, monster,
+and Caliban.  And yet, you little rag puppet, you little echoing
+mechanism, you are unable to kill me as you would a snake or a shark,
+because I have hands, feet, and a body shaped somewhat like yours.  Bah!
+I had hoped better things of you, Hump.”
+
+He stepped out of the companion-way and came up to me.
+
+“Put down that gun.  I want to ask you some questions.  I haven’t had a
+chance to look around yet.  What place is this?  How is the _Ghost_
+lying?  How did you get wet?  Where’s Maud?—I beg your pardon, Miss
+Brewster—or should I say, ‘Mrs. Van Weyden’?”
+
+I had backed away from him, almost weeping at my inability to shoot him,
+but not fool enough to put down the gun.  I hoped, desperately, that he
+might commit some hostile act, attempt to strike me or choke me; for in
+such way only I knew I could be stirred to shoot.
+
+“This is Endeavour Island,” I said.
+
+“Never heard of it,” he broke in.
+
+“At least, that’s our name for it,” I amended.
+
+“Our?” he queried.  “Who’s our?”
+
+“Miss Brewster and myself.  And the _Ghost_ is lying, as you can see for
+yourself, bow on to the beach.”
+
+“There are seals here,” he said.  “They woke me up with their barking, or
+I’d be sleeping yet.  I heard them when I drove in last night.  They were
+the first warning that I was on a lee shore.  It’s a rookery, the kind of
+a thing I’ve hunted for years.  Thanks to my brother Death, I’ve lighted
+on a fortune.  It’s a mint.  What’s its bearings?”
+
+“Haven’t the least idea,” I said.  “But you ought to know quite closely.
+What were your last observations?”
+
+He smiled inscrutably, but did not answer.
+
+“Well, where’s all hands?” I asked.  “How does it come that you are
+alone?”
+
+I was prepared for him again to set aside my question, and was surprised
+at the readiness of his reply.
+
+“My brother got me inside forty-eight hours, and through no fault of
+mine.  Boarded me in the night with only the watch on deck.  Hunters went
+back on me.  He gave them a bigger lay.  Heard him offering it.  Did it
+right before me.  Of course the crew gave me the go-by.  That was to be
+expected.  All hands went over the side, and there I was, marooned on my
+own vessel.  It was Death’s turn, and it’s all in the family anyway.”
+
+“But how did you lose the masts?” I asked.
+
+“Walk over and examine those lanyards,” he said, pointing to where the
+mizzen-rigging should have been.
+
+“They have been cut with a knife!” I exclaimed.
+
+“Not quite,” he laughed.  “It was a neater job.  Look again.”
+
+I looked.  The lanyards had been almost severed, with just enough left to
+hold the shrouds till some severe strain should be put upon them.
+
+“Cooky did that,” he laughed again.  “I know, though I didn’t spot him at
+it.  Kind of evened up the score a bit.”
+
+“Good for Mugridge!” I cried.
+
+“Yes, that’s what I thought when everything went over the side.  Only I
+said it on the other side of my mouth.”
+
+“But what were you doing while all this was going on?” I asked.
+
+“My best, you may be sure, which wasn’t much under the circumstances.”
+
+I turned to re-examine Thomas Mugridge’s work.
+
+“I guess I’ll sit down and take the sunshine,” I heard Wolf Larsen
+saying.
+
+There was a hint, just a slight hint, of physical feebleness in his
+voice, and it was so strange that I looked quickly at him.  His hand was
+sweeping nervously across his face, as though he were brushing away
+cobwebs.  I was puzzled.  The whole thing was so unlike the Wolf Larsen I
+had known.
+
+“How are your headaches?” I asked.
+
+“They still trouble me,” was his answer.  “I think I have one coming on
+now.”
+
+He slipped down from his sitting posture till he lay on the deck.  Then
+he rolled over on his side, his head resting on the biceps of the under
+arm, the forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.  I stood regarding him
+wonderingly.
+
+“Now’s your chance, Hump,” he said.
+
+“I don’t understand,” I lied, for I thoroughly understood.
+
+“Oh, nothing,” he added softly, as if he were drowsing; “only you’ve got
+me where you want me.”
+
+“No, I haven’t,” I retorted; “for I want you a few thousand miles away
+from here.”
+
+He chuckled, and thereafter spoke no more.  He did not stir as I passed
+by him and went down into the cabin.  I lifted the trap in the floor, but
+for some moments gazed dubiously into the darkness of the lazarette
+beneath.  I hesitated to descend.  What if his lying down were a ruse?
+Pretty, indeed, to be caught there like a rat.  I crept softly up the
+companion-way and peeped at him.  He was lying as I had left him.  Again
+I went below; but before I dropped into the lazarette I took the
+precaution of casting down the door in advance.  At least there would be
+no lid to the trap.  But it was all needless.  I regained the cabin with
+a store of jams, sea-biscuits, canned meats, and such things,—all I could
+carry,—and replaced the trap-door.
+
+A peep at Wolf Larsen showed me that he had not moved.  A bright thought
+struck me.  I stole into his state-room and possessed myself of his
+revolvers.  There were no other weapons, though I thoroughly ransacked
+the three remaining state-rooms.  To make sure, I returned and went
+through the steerage and forecastle, and in the galley gathered up all
+the sharp meat and vegetable knives.  Then I bethought me of the great
+yachtsman’s knife he always carried, and I came to him and spoke to him,
+first softly, then loudly.  He did not move.  I bent over and took it
+from his pocket.  I breathed more freely.  He had no arms with which to
+attack me from a distance; while I, armed, could always forestall him
+should he attempt to grapple me with his terrible gorilla arms.
+
+Filling a coffee-pot and frying-pan with part of my plunder, and taking
+some chinaware from the cabin pantry, I left Wolf Larsen lying in the sun
+and went ashore.
+
+Maud was still asleep.  I blew up the embers (we had not yet arranged a
+winter kitchen), and quite feverishly cooked the breakfast.  Toward the
+end, I heard her moving about within the hut, making her toilet.  Just as
+all was ready and the coffee poured, the door opened and she came forth.
+
+“It’s not fair of you,” was her greeting.  “You are usurping one of my
+prerogatives.  You know you agreed that the cooking should be mine,
+and—”
+
+“But just this once,” I pleaded.
+
+“If you promise not to do it again,” she smiled.  “Unless, of course, you
+have grown tired of my poor efforts.”
+
+To my delight she never once looked toward the beach, and I maintained
+the banter with such success all unconsciously she sipped coffee from the
+china cup, ate fried evaporated potatoes, and spread marmalade on her
+biscuit.  But it could not last.  I saw the surprise that came over her.
+She had discovered the china plate from which she was eating.  She looked
+over the breakfast, noting detail after detail.  Then she looked at me,
+and her face turned slowly toward the beach.
+
+“Humphrey!” she said.
+
+The old unnamable terror mounted into her eyes.
+
+“Is—he?” she quavered.
+
+I nodded my head.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+We waited all day for Wolf Larsen to come ashore.  It was an intolerable
+period of anxiety.  Each moment one or the other of us cast expectant
+glances toward the _Ghost_.  But he did not come.  He did not even appear
+on deck.
+
+“Perhaps it is his headache,” I said.  “I left him lying on the poop.  He
+may lie there all night.  I think I’ll go and see.”
+
+Maud looked entreaty at me.
+
+“It is all right,” I assured her.  “I shall take the revolvers.  You know
+I collected every weapon on board.”
+
+“But there are his arms, his hands, his terrible, terrible hands!” she
+objected.  And then she cried, “Oh, Humphrey, I am afraid of him!  Don’t
+go—please don’t go!”
+
+She rested her hand appealingly on mine, and sent my pulse fluttering.
+My heart was surely in my eyes for a moment.  The dear and lovely woman!
+And she was so much the woman, clinging and appealing, sunshine and dew
+to my manhood, rooting it deeper and sending through it the sap of a new
+strength.  I was for putting my arm around her, as when in the midst of
+the seal herd; but I considered, and refrained.
+
+“I shall not take any risks,” I said.  “I’ll merely peep over the bow and
+see.”
+
+She pressed my hand earnestly and let me go.  But the space on deck where
+I had left him lying was vacant.  He had evidently gone below.  That
+night we stood alternate watches, one of us sleeping at a time; for there
+was no telling what Wolf Larsen might do.  He was certainly capable of
+anything.
+
+The next day we waited, and the next, and still he made no sign.
+
+“These headaches of his, these attacks,” Maud said, on the afternoon of
+the fourth day; “Perhaps he is ill, very ill.  He may be dead.”
+
+“Or dying,” was her afterthought when she had waited some time for me to
+speak.
+
+“Better so,” I answered.
+
+“But think, Humphrey, a fellow-creature in his last lonely hour.”
+
+“Perhaps,” I suggested.
+
+“Yes, even perhaps,” she acknowledged.  “But we do not know.  It would be
+terrible if he were.  I could never forgive myself.  We must do
+something.”
+
+“Perhaps,” I suggested again.
+
+I waited, smiling inwardly at the woman of her which compelled a
+solicitude for Wolf Larsen, of all creatures.  Where was her solicitude
+for me, I thought,—for me whom she had been afraid to have merely peep
+aboard?
+
+She was too subtle not to follow the trend of my silence.  And she was as
+direct as she was subtle.
+
+“You must go aboard, Humphrey, and find out,” she said.  “And if you want
+to laugh at me, you have my consent and forgiveness.”
+
+I arose obediently and went down the beach.
+
+“Do be careful,” she called after me.
+
+I waved my arm from the forecastle head and dropped down to the deck.
+Aft I walked to the cabin companion, where I contented myself with
+hailing below.  Wolf Larsen answered, and as he started to ascend the
+stairs I cocked my revolver.  I displayed it openly during our
+conversation, but he took no notice of it.  He appeared the same,
+physically, as when last I saw him, but he was gloomy and silent.  In
+fact, the few words we spoke could hardly be called a conversation.  I
+did not inquire why he had not been ashore, nor did he ask why I had not
+come aboard.  His head was all right again, he said, and so, without
+further parley, I left him.
+
+Maud received my report with obvious relief, and the sight of smoke which
+later rose in the galley put her in a more cheerful mood.  The next day,
+and the next, we saw the galley smoke rising, and sometimes we caught
+glimpses of him on the poop.  But that was all.  He made no attempt to
+come ashore.  This we knew, for we still maintained our night-watches.
+We were waiting for him to do something, to show his hand, so to say, and
+his inaction puzzled and worried us.
+
+A week of this passed by.  We had no other interest than Wolf Larsen, and
+his presence weighed us down with an apprehension which prevented us from
+doing any of the little things we had planned.
+
+But at the end of the week the smoke ceased rising from the galley, and
+he no longer showed himself on the poop.  I could see Maud’s solicitude
+again growing, though she timidly—and even proudly, I think—forbore a
+repetition of her request.  After all, what censure could be put upon
+her?  She was divinely altruistic, and she was a woman.  Besides, I was
+myself aware of hurt at thought of this man whom I had tried to kill,
+dying alone with his fellow-creatures so near.  He was right.  The code
+of my group was stronger than I.  The fact that he had hands, feet, and a
+body shaped somewhat like mine, constituted a claim which I could not
+ignore.
+
+So I did not wait a second time for Maud to send me.  I discovered that
+we stood in need of condensed milk and marmalade, and announced that I
+was going aboard.  I could see that she wavered.  She even went so far as
+to murmur that they were non-essentials and that my trip after them might
+be inexpedient.  And as she had followed the trend of my silence, she now
+followed the trend of my speech, and she knew that I was going aboard,
+not because of condensed milk and marmalade, but because of her and of
+her anxiety, which she knew she had failed to hide.
+
+I took off my shoes when I gained the forecastle head, and went
+noiselessly aft in my stocking feet.  Nor did I call this time from the
+top of the companion-way.  Cautiously descending, I found the cabin
+deserted.  The door to his state-room was closed.  At first I thought of
+knocking, then I remembered my ostensible errand and resolved to carry it
+out.  Carefully avoiding noise, I lifted the trap-door in the floor and
+set it to one side.  The slop-chest, as well as the provisions, was
+stored in the lazarette, and I took advantage of the opportunity to lay
+in a stock of underclothing.
+
+As I emerged from the lazarette I heard sounds in Wolf Larsen’s
+state-room.  I crouched and listened.  The door-knob rattled.  Furtively,
+instinctively, I slunk back behind the table and drew and cocked my
+revolver.  The door swung open and he came forth.  Never had I seen so
+profound a despair as that which I saw on his face,—the face of Wolf
+Larsen the fighter, the strong man, the indomitable one.  For all the
+world like a woman wringing her hands, he raised his clenched fists and
+groaned.  One fist unclosed, and the open palm swept across his eyes as
+though brushing away cobwebs.
+
+“God!  God!” he groaned, and the clenched fists were raised again to the
+infinite despair with which his throat vibrated.
+
+It was horrible.  I was trembling all over, and I could feel the shivers
+running up and down my spine and the sweat standing out on my forehead.
+Surely there can be little in this world more awful than the spectacle of
+a strong man in the moment when he is utterly weak and broken.
+
+But Wolf Larsen regained control of himself by an exertion of his
+remarkable will.  And it was exertion.  His whole frame shook with the
+struggle.  He resembled a man on the verge of a fit.  His face strove to
+compose itself, writhing and twisting in the effort till he broke down
+again.  Once more the clenched fists went upward and he groaned.  He
+caught his breath once or twice and sobbed.  Then he was successful.  I
+could have thought him the old Wolf Larsen, and yet there was in his
+movements a vague suggestion of weakness and indecision.  He started for
+the companion-way, and stepped forward quite as I had been accustomed to
+see him do; and yet again, in his very walk, there seemed that suggestion
+of weakness and indecision.
+
+I was now concerned with fear for myself.  The open trap lay directly in
+his path, and his discovery of it would lead instantly to his discovery
+of me.  I was angry with myself for being caught in so cowardly a
+position, crouching on the floor.  There was yet time.  I rose swiftly to
+my feet, and, I know, quite unconsciously assumed a defiant attitude.  He
+took no notice of me.  Nor did he notice the open trap.  Before I could
+grasp the situation, or act, he had walked right into the trap.  One foot
+was descending into the opening, while the other foot was just on the
+verge of beginning the uplift.  But when the descending foot missed the
+solid flooring and felt vacancy beneath, it was the old Wolf Larsen and
+the tiger muscles that made the falling body spring across the opening,
+even as it fell, so that he struck on his chest and stomach, with arms
+outstretched, on the floor of the opposite side.  The next instant he had
+drawn up his legs and rolled clear.  But he rolled into my marmalade and
+underclothes and against the trap-door.
+
+The expression on his face was one of complete comprehension.  But before
+I could guess what he had comprehended, he had dropped the trap-door into
+place, closing the lazarette.  Then I understood.  He thought he had me
+inside.  Also, he was blind, blind as a bat.  I watched him, breathing
+carefully so that he should not hear me.  He stepped quickly to his
+state-room.  I saw his hand miss the door-knob by an inch, quickly fumble
+for it, and find it.  This was my chance.  I tiptoed across the cabin and
+to the top of the stairs.  He came back, dragging a heavy sea-chest,
+which he deposited on top of the trap.  Not content with this he fetched
+a second chest and placed it on top of the first.  Then he gathered up
+the marmalade and underclothes and put them on the table.  When he
+started up the companion-way, I retreated, silently rolling over on top
+of the cabin.
+
+He shoved the slide part way back and rested his arms on it, his body
+still in the companion-way.  His attitude was of one looking forward the
+length of the schooner, or staring, rather, for his eyes were fixed and
+unblinking.  I was only five feet away and directly in what should have
+been his line of vision.  It was uncanny.  I felt myself a ghost, what of
+my invisibility.  I waved my hand back and forth, of course without
+effect; but when the moving shadow fell across his face I saw at once
+that he was susceptible to the impression.  His face became more
+expectant and tense as he tried to analyze and identify the impression.
+He knew that he had responded to something from without, that his
+sensibility had been touched by a changing something in his environment;
+but what it was he could not discover.  I ceased waving my hand, so that
+the shadow remained stationary.  He slowly moved his head back and forth
+under it and turned from side to side, now in the sunshine, now in the
+shade, feeling the shadow, as it were, testing it by sensation.
+
+I, too, was busy, trying to reason out how he was aware of the existence
+of so intangible a thing as a shadow.  If it were his eyeballs only that
+were affected, or if his optic nerve were not wholly destroyed, the
+explanation was simple.  If otherwise, then the only conclusion I could
+reach was that the sensitive skin recognized the difference of
+temperature between shade and sunshine.  Or, perhaps,—who can tell?—it
+was that fabled sixth sense which conveyed to him the loom and feel of an
+object close at hand.
+
+Giving over his attempt to determine the shadow, he stepped on deck and
+started forward, walking with a swiftness and confidence which surprised
+me.  And still there was that hint of the feebleness of the blind in his
+walk.  I knew it now for what it was.
+
+To my amused chagrin, he discovered my shoes on the forecastle head and
+brought them back with him into the galley.  I watched him build the fire
+and set about cooking food for himself; then I stole into the cabin for
+my marmalade and underclothes, slipped back past the galley, and climbed
+down to the beach to deliver my barefoot report.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+“It’s too bad the _Ghost_ has lost her masts.  Why we could sail away in
+her.  Don’t you think we could, Humphrey?”
+
+I sprang excitedly to my feet.
+
+“I wonder, I wonder,” I repeated, pacing up and down.
+
+Maud’s eyes were shining with anticipation as they followed me.  She had
+such faith in me!  And the thought of it was so much added power.  I
+remembered Michelet’s “To man, woman is as the earth was to her legendary
+son; he has but to fall down and kiss her breast and he is strong again.”
+For the first time I knew the wonderful truth of his words.  Why, I was
+living them.  Maud was all this to me, an unfailing source of strength
+and courage.  I had but to look at her, or think of her, and be strong
+again.
+
+“It can be done, it can be done,” I was thinking and asserting aloud.
+“What men have done, I can do; and if they have never done this before,
+still I can do it.”
+
+“What? for goodness’ sake,” Maud demanded.  “Do be merciful.  What is it
+you can do?”
+
+“We can do it,” I amended.  “Why, nothing else than put the masts back
+into the _Ghost_ and sail away.”
+
+“Humphrey!” she exclaimed.
+
+And I felt as proud of my conception as if it were already a fact
+accomplished.
+
+“But how is it possible to be done?” she asked.
+
+“I don’t know,” was my answer.  “I know only that I am capable of doing
+anything these days.”
+
+I smiled proudly at her—too proudly, for she dropped her eyes and was for
+the moment silent.
+
+“But there is Captain Larsen,” she objected.
+
+“Blind and helpless,” I answered promptly, waving him aside as a straw.
+
+“But those terrible hands of his!  You know how he leaped across the
+opening of the lazarette.”
+
+“And you know also how I crept about and avoided him,” I contended gaily.
+
+“And lost your shoes.”
+
+“You’d hardly expect them to avoid Wolf Larsen without my feet inside of
+them.”
+
+We both laughed, and then went seriously to work constructing the plan
+whereby we were to step the masts of the _Ghost_ and return to the world.
+I remembered hazily the physics of my school days, while the last few
+months had given me practical experience with mechanical purchases.  I
+must say, though, when we walked down to the _Ghost_ to inspect more
+closely the task before us, that the sight of the great masts lying in
+the water almost disheartened me.  Where were we to begin?  If there had
+been one mast standing, something high up to which to fasten blocks and
+tackles!  But there was nothing.  It reminded me of the problem of
+lifting oneself by one’s boot-straps.  I understood the mechanics of
+levers; but where was I to get a fulcrum?
+
+There was the mainmast, fifteen inches in diameter at what was now the
+butt, still sixty-five feet in length, and weighing, I roughly
+calculated, at least three thousand pounds.  And then came the foremast,
+larger in diameter, and weighing surely thirty-five hundred pounds.
+Where was I to begin?  Maud stood silently by my side, while I evolved in
+my mind the contrivance known among sailors as “shears.”  But, though
+known to sailors, I invented it there on Endeavour Island.  By crossing
+and lashing the ends of two spars, and then elevating them in the air
+like an inverted “V,” I could get a point above the deck to which to make
+fast my hoisting tackle.  To this hoisting tackle I could, if necessary,
+attach a second hoisting tackle.  And then there was the windlass!
+
+Maud saw that I had achieved a solution, and her eyes warmed
+sympathetically.
+
+“What are you going to do?” she asked.
+
+“Clear that raffle,” I answered, pointing to the tangled wreckage
+overside.
+
+Ah, the decisiveness, the very sound of the words, was good in my ears.
+“Clear that raffle!”  Imagine so salty a phrase on the lips of the
+Humphrey Van Weyden of a few months gone!
+
+There must have been a touch of the melodramatic in my pose and voice,
+for Maud smiled.  Her appreciation of the ridiculous was keen, and in all
+things she unerringly saw and felt, where it existed, the touch of sham,
+the overshading, the overtone.  It was this which had given poise and
+penetration to her own work and made her of worth to the world.  The
+serious critic, with the sense of humour and the power of expression,
+must inevitably command the world’s ear.  And so it was that she had
+commanded.  Her sense of humour was really the artist’s instinct for
+proportion.
+
+“I’m sure I’ve heard it before, somewhere, in books,” she murmured
+gleefully.
+
+I had an instinct for proportion myself, and I collapsed forthwith,
+descending from the dominant pose of a master of matter to a state of
+humble confusion which was, to say the least, very miserable.
+
+Her hand leapt out at once to mine.
+
+“I’m so sorry,” she said.
+
+“No need to be,” I gulped.  “It does me good.  There’s too much of the
+schoolboy in me.  All of which is neither here nor there.  What we’ve got
+to do is actually and literally to clear that raffle.  If you’ll come
+with me in the boat, we’ll get to work and straighten things out.”
+
+“‘When the topmen clear the raffle with their clasp-knives in their
+teeth,’” she quoted at me; and for the rest of the afternoon we made
+merry over our labour.
+
+Her task was to hold the boat in position while I worked at the tangle.
+And such a tangle—halyards, sheets, guys, down-hauls, shrouds, stays, all
+washed about and back and forth and through, and twined and knotted by
+the sea.  I cut no more than was necessary, and what with passing the
+long ropes under and around the booms and masts, of unreeving the
+halyards and sheets, of coiling down in the boat and uncoiling in order
+to pass through another knot in the bight, I was soon wet to the skin.
+
+The sails did require some cutting, and the canvas, heavy with water,
+tried my strength severely; but I succeeded before nightfall in getting
+it all spread out on the beach to dry.  We were both very tired when we
+knocked off for supper, and we had done good work, too, though to the eye
+it appeared insignificant.
+
+Next morning, with Maud as able assistant, I went into the hold of the
+_Ghost_ to clear the steps of the mast-butts.  We had no more than begun
+work when the sound of my knocking and hammering brought Wolf Larsen.
+
+“Hello below!” he cried down the open hatch.
+
+The sound of his voice made Maud quickly draw close to me, as for
+protection, and she rested one hand on my arm while we parleyed.
+
+“Hello on deck,” I replied.  “Good-morning to you.”
+
+“What are you doing down there?” he demanded.  “Trying to scuttle my ship
+for me?”
+
+“Quite the opposite; I’m repairing her,” was my answer.
+
+“But what in thunder are you repairing?”  There was puzzlement in his
+voice.
+
+“Why, I’m getting everything ready for re-stepping the masts,” I replied
+easily, as though it were the simplest project imaginable.
+
+“It seems as though you’re standing on your own legs at last, Hump,” we
+heard him say; and then for some time he was silent.
+
+“But I say, Hump,” he called down.  “You can’t do it.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I can,” I retorted.  “I’m doing it now.”
+
+“But this is my vessel, my particular property.  What if I forbid you?”
+
+“You forget,” I replied.  “You are no longer the biggest bit of the
+ferment.  You were, once, and able to eat me, as you were pleased to
+phrase it; but there has been a diminishing, and I am now able to eat
+you.  The yeast has grown stale.”
+
+He gave a short, disagreeable laugh.  “I see you’re working my philosophy
+back on me for all it is worth.  But don’t make the mistake of
+under-estimating me.  For your own good I warn you.”
+
+“Since when have you become a philanthropist?” I queried.  “Confess, now,
+in warning me for my own good, that you are very consistent.”
+
+He ignored my sarcasm, saying, “Suppose I clap the hatch on, now?  You
+won’t fool me as you did in the lazarette.”
+
+“Wolf Larsen,” I said sternly, for the first time addressing him by this
+his most familiar name, “I am unable to shoot a helpless, unresisting
+man.  You have proved that to my satisfaction as well as yours.  But I
+warn you now, and not so much for your own good as for mine, that I shall
+shoot you the moment you attempt a hostile act.  I can shoot you now, as
+I stand here; and if you are so minded, just go ahead and try to clap on
+the hatch.”
+
+“Nevertheless, I forbid you, I distinctly forbid your tampering with my
+ship.”
+
+“But, man!” I expostulated, “you advance the fact that it is your ship as
+though it were a moral right.  You have never considered moral rights in
+your dealings with others.  You surely do not dream that I’ll consider
+them in dealing with you?”
+
+I had stepped underneath the open hatchway so that I could see him.  The
+lack of expression on his face, so different from when I had watched him
+unseen, was enhanced by the unblinking, staring eyes.  It was not a
+pleasant face to look upon.
+
+“And none so poor, not even Hump, to do him reverence,” he sneered.
+
+The sneer was wholly in his voice.  His face remained expressionless as
+ever.
+
+“How do you do, Miss Brewster,” he said suddenly, after a pause.
+
+I started.  She had made no noise whatever, had not even moved.  Could it
+be that some glimmer of vision remained to him? or that his vision was
+coming back?
+
+“How do you do, Captain Larsen,” she answered.  “Pray, how did you know I
+was here?”
+
+“Heard you breathing, of course.  I say, Hump’s improving, don’t you
+think so?”
+
+“I don’t know,” she answered, smiling at me.  “I have never seen him
+otherwise.”
+
+“You should have seen him before, then.”
+
+“Wolf Larsen, in large doses,” I murmured, “before and after taking.”
+
+“I want to tell you again, Hump,” he said threateningly, “that you’d
+better leave things alone.”
+
+“But don’t you care to escape as well as we?” I asked incredulously.
+
+“No,” was his answer.  “I intend dying here.”
+
+“Well, we don’t,” I concluded defiantly, beginning again my knocking and
+hammering.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+Next day, the mast-steps clear and everything in readiness, we started to
+get the two topmasts aboard.  The maintopmast was over thirty feet in
+length, the foretopmast nearly thirty, and it was of these that I
+intended making the shears.  It was puzzling work.  Fastening one end of
+a heavy tackle to the windlass, and with the other end fast to the butt
+of the foretopmast, I began to heave.  Maud held the turn on the windlass
+and coiled down the slack.
+
+We were astonished at the ease with which the spar was lifted.  It was an
+improved crank windlass, and the purchase it gave was enormous.  Of
+course, what it gave us in power we paid for in distance; as many times
+as it doubled my strength, that many times was doubled the length of rope
+I heaved in.  The tackle dragged heavily across the rail, increasing its
+drag as the spar arose more and more out of the water, and the exertion
+on the windlass grew severe.
+
+But when the butt of the topmast was level with the rail, everything came
+to a standstill.
+
+“I might have known it,” I said impatiently.  “Now we have to do it all
+over again.”
+
+“Why not fasten the tackle part way down the mast?” Maud suggested.
+
+“It’s what I should have done at first,” I answered, hugely disgusted
+with myself.
+
+Slipping off a turn, I lowered the mast back into the water and fastened
+the tackle a third of the way down from the butt.  In an hour, what of
+this and of rests between the heaving, I had hoisted it to the point
+where I could hoist no more.  Eight feet of the butt was above the rail,
+and I was as far away as ever from getting the spar on board.  I sat down
+and pondered the problem.  It did not take long.  I sprang jubilantly to
+my feet.
+
+“Now I have it!” I cried.  “I ought to make the tackle fast at the point
+of balance.  And what we learn of this will serve us with everything else
+we have to hoist aboard.”
+
+Once again I undid all my work by lowering the mast into the water.  But
+I miscalculated the point of balance, so that when I heaved the top of
+the mast came up instead of the butt.  Maud looked despair, but I laughed
+and said it would do just as well.
+
+Instructing her how to hold the turn and be ready to slack away at
+command, I laid hold of the mast with my hands and tried to balance it
+inboard across the rail.  When I thought I had it I cried to her to slack
+away; but the spar righted, despite my efforts, and dropped back toward
+the water.  Again I heaved it up to its old position, for I had now
+another idea.  I remembered the watch-tackle—a small double and single
+block affair—and fetched it.
+
+While I was rigging it between the top of the spar and the opposite rail,
+Wolf Larsen came on the scene.  We exchanged nothing more than
+good-mornings, and, though he could not see, he sat on the rail out of
+the way and followed by the sound all that I did.
+
+Again instructing Maud to slack away at the windlass when I gave the
+word, I proceeded to heave on the watch-tackle.  Slowly the mast swung in
+until it balanced at right angles across the rail; and then I discovered
+to my amazement that there was no need for Maud to slack away.  In fact,
+the very opposite was necessary.  Making the watch-tackle fast, I hove on
+the windlass and brought in the mast, inch by inch, till its top tilted
+down to the deck and finally its whole length lay on the deck.
+
+I looked at my watch.  It was twelve o’clock.  My back was aching sorely,
+and I felt extremely tired and hungry.  And there on the deck was a
+single stick of timber to show for a whole morning’s work.  For the first
+time I thoroughly realized the extent of the task before us.  But I was
+learning, I was learning.  The afternoon would show far more
+accomplished.  And it did; for we returned at one o’clock, rested and
+strengthened by a hearty dinner.
+
+In less than an hour I had the maintopmast on deck and was constructing
+the shears.  Lashing the two topmasts together, and making allowance for
+their unequal length, at the point of intersection I attached the double
+block of the main throat-halyards.  This, with the single block and the
+throat-halyards themselves, gave me a hoisting tackle.  To prevent the
+butts of the masts from slipping on the deck, I nailed down thick cleats.
+Everything in readiness, I made a line fast to the apex of the shears and
+carried it directly to the windlass.  I was growing to have faith in that
+windlass, for it gave me power beyond all expectation.  As usual, Maud
+held the turn while I heaved.  The shears rose in the air.
+
+Then I discovered I had forgotten guy-ropes.  This necessitated my
+climbing the shears, which I did twice, before I finished guying it fore
+and aft and to either side.  Twilight had set in by the time this was
+accomplished.  Wolf Larsen, who had sat about and listened all afternoon
+and never opened his mouth, had taken himself off to the galley and
+started his supper.  I felt quite stiff across the small of the back, so
+much so that I straightened up with an effort and with pain.  I looked
+proudly at my work.  It was beginning to show.  I was wild with desire,
+like a child with a new toy, to hoist something with my shears.
+
+“I wish it weren’t so late,” I said.  “I’d like to see how it works.”
+
+“Don’t be a glutton, Humphrey,” Maud chided me.  “Remember, to-morrow is
+coming, and you’re so tired now that you can hardly stand.”
+
+“And you?” I said, with sudden solicitude.  “You must be very tired.  You
+have worked hard and nobly.  I am proud of you, Maud.”
+
+“Not half so proud as I am of you, nor with half the reason,” she
+answered, looking me straight in the eyes for a moment with an expression
+in her own and a dancing, tremulous light which I had not seen before and
+which gave me a pang of quick delight, I know not why, for I did not
+understand it.  Then she dropped her eyes, to lift them again, laughing.
+
+“If our friends could see us now,” she said.  “Look at us.  Have you ever
+paused for a moment to consider our appearance?”
+
+“Yes, I have considered yours, frequently,” I answered, puzzling over
+what I had seen in her eyes and puzzled by her sudden change of subject.
+
+“Mercy!” she cried.  “And what do I look like, pray?”
+
+“A scarecrow, I’m afraid,” I replied.  “Just glance at your draggled
+skirts, for instance.  Look at those three-cornered tears.  And such a
+waist!  It would not require a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that you have
+been cooking over a camp-fire, to say nothing of trying out seal-blubber.
+And to cap it all, that cap!  And all that is the woman who wrote ‘A Kiss
+Endured.’”
+
+She made me an elaborate and stately courtesy, and said, “As for you,
+sir—”
+
+And yet, through the five minutes of banter which followed, there was a
+serious something underneath the fun which I could not but relate to the
+strange and fleeting expression I had caught in her eyes.  What was it?
+Could it be that our eyes were speaking beyond the will of our speech?
+My eyes had spoken, I knew, until I had found the culprits out and
+silenced them.  This had occurred several times.  But had she seen the
+clamour in them and understood?  And had her eyes so spoken to me?  What
+else could that expression have meant—that dancing, tremulous light, and
+a something more which words could not describe.  And yet it could not
+be.  It was impossible.  Besides, I was not skilled in the speech of
+eyes.  I was only Humphrey Van Weyden, a bookish fellow who loved.  And
+to love, and to wait and win love, that surely was glorious enough for
+me.  And thus I thought, even as we chaffed each other’s appearance,
+until we arrived ashore and there were other things to think about.
+
+“It’s a shame, after working hard all day, that we cannot have an
+uninterrupted night’s sleep,” I complained, after supper.
+
+“But there can be no danger now? from a blind man?” she queried.
+
+“I shall never be able to trust him,” I averred, “and far less now that
+he is blind.  The liability is that his part helplessness will make him
+more malignant than ever.  I know what I shall do to-morrow, the first
+thing—run out a light anchor and kedge the schooner off the beach.  And
+each night when we come ashore in the boat, Mr. Wolf Larsen will be left
+a prisoner on board.  So this will be the last night we have to stand
+watch, and because of that it will go the easier.”
+
+We were awake early and just finishing breakfast as daylight came.
+
+“Oh, Humphrey!” I heard Maud cry in dismay and suddenly stop.
+
+I looked at her.  She was gazing at the _Ghost_.  I followed her gaze,
+but could see nothing unusual.  She looked at me, and I looked inquiry
+back.
+
+“The shears,” she said, and her voice trembled.
+
+I had forgotten their existence.  I looked again, but could not see them.
+
+“If he has—” I muttered savagely.
+
+She put her hand sympathetically on mine, and said, “You will have to
+begin over again.”
+
+“Oh, believe me, my anger means nothing; I could not hurt a fly,” I
+smiled back bitterly.  “And the worst of it is, he knows it.  You are
+right.  If he has destroyed the shears, I shall do nothing except begin
+over again.”
+
+“But I’ll stand my watch on board hereafter,” I blurted out a moment
+later.  “And if he interferes—”
+
+“But I dare not stay ashore all night alone,” Maud was saying when I came
+back to myself.  “It would be so much nicer if he would be friendly with
+us and help us.  We could all live comfortably aboard.”
+
+“We will,” I asserted, still savagely, for the destruction of my beloved
+shears had hit me hard.  “That is, you and I will live aboard, friendly
+or not with Wolf Larsen.”
+
+“It’s childish,” I laughed later, “for him to do such things, and for me
+to grow angry over them, for that matter.”
+
+But my heart smote me when we climbed aboard and looked at the havoc he
+had done.  The shears were gone altogether.  The guys had been slashed
+right and left.  The throat-halyards which I had rigged were cut across
+through every part.  And he knew I could not splice.  A thought struck
+me.  I ran to the windlass.  It would not work.  He had broken it.  We
+looked at each other in consternation.  Then I ran to the side.  The
+masts, booms, and gaffs I had cleared were gone.  He had found the lines
+which held them, and cast them adrift.
+
+Tears were in Maud’s eyes, and I do believe they were for me.  I could
+have wept myself.  Where now was our project of remasting the _Ghost_?
+He had done his work well.  I sat down on the hatch-combing and rested my
+chin on my hands in black despair.
+
+“He deserves to die,” I cried out; “and God forgive me, I am not man
+enough to be his executioner.”
+
+But Maud was by my side, passing her hand soothingly through my hair as
+though I were a child, and saying, “There, there; it will all come right.
+We are in the right, and it must come right.”
+
+I remembered Michelet and leaned my head against her; and truly I became
+strong again.  The blessed woman was an unfailing fount of power to me.
+What did it matter?  Only a set-back, a delay.  The tide could not have
+carried the masts far to seaward, and there had been no wind.  It meant
+merely more work to find them and tow them back.  And besides, it was a
+lesson.  I knew what to expect.  He might have waited and destroyed our
+work more effectually when we had more accomplished.
+
+“Here he comes now,” she whispered.
+
+I glanced up.  He was strolling leisurely along the poop on the port
+side.
+
+“Take no notice of him,” I whispered.  “He’s coming to see how we take
+it.  Don’t let him know that we know.  We can deny him that satisfaction.
+Take off your shoes—that’s right—and carry them in your hand.”
+
+And then we played hide-and-seek with the blind man.  As he came up the
+port side we slipped past on the starboard; and from the poop we watched
+him turn and start aft on our track.
+
+He must have known, somehow, that we were on board, for he said
+“Good-morning” very confidently, and waited for the greeting to be
+returned.  Then he strolled aft, and we slipped forward.
+
+“Oh, I know you’re aboard,” he called out, and I could see him listen
+intently after he had spoken.
+
+It reminded me of the great hoot-owl, listening, after its booming cry,
+for the stir of its frightened prey.  But we did not stir, and we moved
+only when he moved.  And so we dodged about the deck, hand in hand, like
+a couple of children chased by a wicked ogre, till Wolf Larsen, evidently
+in disgust, left the deck for the cabin.  There was glee in our eyes, and
+suppressed titters in our mouths, as we put on our shoes and clambered
+over the side into the boat.  And as I looked into Maud’s clear brown
+eyes I forgot the evil he had done, and I knew only that I loved her, and
+that because of her the strength was mine to win our way back to the
+world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+For two days Maud and I ranged the sea and explored the beaches in search
+of the missing masts.  But it was not till the third day that we found
+them, all of them, the shears included, and, of all perilous places, in
+the pounding surf of the grim south-western promontory.  And how we
+worked!  At the dark end of the first day we returned, exhausted, to our
+little cove, towing the mainmast behind us.  And we had been compelled to
+row, in a dead calm, practically every inch of the way.
+
+Another day of heart-breaking and dangerous toil saw us in camp with the
+two topmasts to the good.  The day following I was desperate, and I
+rafted together the foremast, the fore and main booms, and the fore and
+main gaffs.  The wind was favourable, and I had thought to tow them back
+under sail, but the wind baffled, then died away, and our progress with
+the oars was a snail’s pace.  And it was such dispiriting effort.  To
+throw one’s whole strength and weight on the oars and to feel the boat
+checked in its forward lunge by the heavy drag behind, was not exactly
+exhilarating.
+
+Night began to fall, and to make matters worse, the wind sprang up ahead.
+Not only did all forward motion cease, but we began to drift back and out
+to sea.  I struggled at the oars till I was played out.  Poor Maud, whom
+I could never prevent from working to the limit of her strength, lay
+weakly back in the stern-sheets.  I could row no more.  My bruised and
+swollen hands could no longer close on the oar handles.  My wrists and
+arms ached intolerably, and though I had eaten heartily of a
+twelve-o’clock lunch, I had worked so hard that I was faint from hunger.
+
+I pulled in the oars and bent forward to the line which held the tow.
+But Maud’s hand leaped out restrainingly to mine.
+
+“What are you going to do?” she asked in a strained, tense voice.
+
+“Cast it off,” I answered, slipping a turn of the rope.
+
+But her fingers closed on mine.
+
+“Please don’t,” she begged.
+
+“It is useless,” I answered.  “Here is night and the wind blowing us off
+the land.”
+
+“But think, Humphrey.  If we cannot sail away on the _Ghost_, we may
+remain for years on the island—for life even.  If it has never been
+discovered all these years, it may never be discovered.”
+
+“You forget the boat we found on the beach,” I reminded her.
+
+“It was a seal-hunting boat,” she replied, “and you know perfectly well
+that if the men had escaped they would have been back to make their
+fortunes from the rookery.  You know they never escaped.”
+
+I remained silent, undecided.
+
+“Besides,” she added haltingly, “it’s your idea, and I want to see you
+succeed.”
+
+Now I could harden my heart.  As soon as she put it on a flattering
+personal basis, generosity compelled me to deny her.
+
+“Better years on the island than to die to-night, or to-morrow, or the
+next day, in the open boat.  We are not prepared to brave the sea.  We
+have no food, no water, no blankets, nothing.  Why, you’d not survive the
+night without blankets: I know how strong you are.  You are shivering
+now.”
+
+“It is only nervousness,” she answered.  “I am afraid you will cast off
+the masts in spite of me.”
+
+“Oh, please, please, Humphrey, don’t!” she burst out, a moment later.
+
+And so it ended, with the phrase she knew had all power over me.  We
+shivered miserably throughout the night.  Now and again I fitfully slept,
+but the pain of the cold always aroused me.  How Maud could stand it was
+beyond me.  I was too tired to thrash my arms about and warm myself, but
+I found strength time and again to chafe her hands and feet to restore
+the circulation.  And still she pleaded with me not to cast off the
+masts.  About three in the morning she was caught by a cold cramp, and
+after I had rubbed her out of that she became quite numb.  I was
+frightened.  I got out the oars and made her row, though she was so weak
+I thought she would faint at every stroke.
+
+Morning broke, and we looked long in the growing light for our island.
+At last it showed, small and black, on the horizon, fully fifteen miles
+away.  I scanned the sea with my glasses.  Far away in the south-west I
+could see a dark line on the water, which grew even as I looked at it.
+
+“Fair wind!” I cried in a husky voice I did not recognize as my own.
+
+Maud tried to reply, but could not speak.  Her lips were blue with cold,
+and she was hollow-eyed—but oh, how bravely her brown eyes looked at me!
+How piteously brave!
+
+Again I fell to chafing her hands and to moving her arms up and down and
+about until she could thrash them herself.  Then I compelled her to stand
+up, and though she would have fallen had I not supported her, I forced
+her to walk back and forth the several steps between the thwart and the
+stern-sheets, and finally to spring up and down.
+
+“Oh, you brave, brave woman,” I said, when I saw the life coming back
+into her face.  “Did you know that you were brave?”
+
+“I never used to be,” she answered.  “I was never brave till I knew you.
+It is you who have made me brave.”
+
+“Nor I, until I knew you,” I answered.
+
+She gave me a quick look, and again I caught that dancing, tremulous
+light and something more in her eyes.  But it was only for the moment.
+Then she smiled.
+
+“It must have been the conditions,” she said; but I knew she was wrong,
+and I wondered if she likewise knew.  Then the wind came, fair and fresh,
+and the boat was soon labouring through a heavy sea toward the island.
+At half-past three in the afternoon we passed the south-western
+promontory.  Not only were we hungry, but we were now suffering from
+thirst.  Our lips were dry and cracked, nor could we longer moisten them
+with our tongues.  Then the wind slowly died down.  By night it was dead
+calm and I was toiling once more at the oars—but weakly, most weakly.  At
+two in the morning the boat’s bow touched the beach of our own inner cove
+and I staggered out to make the painter fast.  Maud could not stand, nor
+had I strength to carry her.  I fell in the sand with her, and, when I
+had recovered, contented myself with putting my hands under her shoulders
+and dragging her up the beach to the hut.
+
+The next day we did no work.  In fact, we slept till three in the
+afternoon, or at least I did, for I awoke to find Maud cooking dinner.
+Her power of recuperation was wonderful.  There was something tenacious
+about that lily-frail body of hers, a clutch on existence which one could
+not reconcile with its patent weakness.
+
+“You know I was travelling to Japan for my health,” she said, as we
+lingered at the fire after dinner and delighted in the movelessness of
+loafing.  “I was not very strong.  I never was.  The doctors recommended
+a sea voyage, and I chose the longest.”
+
+“You little knew what you were choosing,” I laughed.
+
+“But I shall be a different women for the experience, as well as a
+stronger woman,” she answered; “and, I hope a better woman.  At least I
+shall understand a great deal more of life.”
+
+Then, as the short day waned, we fell to discussing Wolf Larsen’s
+blindness.  It was inexplicable.  And that it was grave, I instanced his
+statement that he intended to stay and die on Endeavour Island.  When he,
+strong man that he was, loving life as he did, accepted his death, it was
+plain that he was troubled by something more than mere blindness.  There
+had been his terrific headaches, and we were agreed that it was some sort
+of brain break-down, and that in his attacks he endured pain beyond our
+comprehension.
+
+I noticed as we talked over his condition, that Maud’s sympathy went out
+to him more and more; yet I could not but love her for it, so sweetly
+womanly was it.  Besides, there was no false sentiment about her feeling.
+She was agreed that the most rigorous treatment was necessary if we were
+to escape, though she recoiled at the suggestion that I might some time
+be compelled to take his life to save my own—“our own,” she put it.
+
+In the morning we had breakfast and were at work by daylight.  I found a
+light kedge anchor in the fore-hold, where such things were kept; and
+with a deal of exertion got it on deck and into the boat.  With a long
+running-line coiled down in the stem, I rowed well out into our little
+cove and dropped the anchor into the water.  There was no wind, the tide
+was high, and the schooner floated.  Casting off the shore-lines, I
+kedged her out by main strength (the windlass being broken), till she
+rode nearly up and down to the small anchor—too small to hold her in any
+breeze.  So I lowered the big starboard anchor, giving plenty of slack;
+and by afternoon I was at work on the windlass.
+
+Three days I worked on that windlass.  Least of all things was I a
+mechanic, and in that time I accomplished what an ordinary machinist
+would have done in as many hours.  I had to learn my tools to begin with,
+and every simple mechanical principle which such a man would have at his
+finger ends I had likewise to learn.  And at the end of three days I had
+a windlass which worked clumsily.  It never gave the satisfaction the old
+windlass had given, but it worked and made my work possible.
+
+In half a day I got the two topmasts aboard and the shears rigged and
+guyed as before.  And that night I slept on board and on deck beside my
+work.  Maud, who refused to stay alone ashore, slept in the forecastle.
+Wolf Larsen had sat about, listening to my repairing the windlass and
+talking with Maud and me upon indifferent subjects.  No reference was
+made on either side to the destruction of the shears; nor did he say
+anything further about my leaving his ship alone.  But still I had feared
+him, blind and helpless and listening, always listening, and I never let
+his strong arms get within reach of me while I worked.
+
+On this night, sleeping under my beloved shears, I was aroused by his
+footsteps on the deck.  It was a starlight night, and I could see the
+bulk of him dimly as he moved about.  I rolled out of my blankets and
+crept noiselessly after him in my stocking feet.  He had armed himself
+with a draw-knife from the tool-locker, and with this he prepared to cut
+across the throat-halyards I had again rigged to the shears.  He felt the
+halyards with his hands and discovered that I had not made them fast.
+This would not do for a draw-knife, so he laid hold of the running part,
+hove taut, and made fast.  Then he prepared to saw across with the
+draw-knife.
+
+“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” I said quietly.
+
+He heard the click of my pistol and laughed.
+
+“Hello, Hump,” he said.  “I knew you were here all the time.  You can’t
+fool my ears.”
+
+“That’s a lie, Wolf Larsen,” I said, just as quietly as before.
+“However, I am aching for a chance to kill you, so go ahead and cut.”
+
+“You have the chance always,” he sneered.
+
+“Go ahead and cut,” I threatened ominously.
+
+“I’d rather disappoint you,” he laughed, and turned on his heel and went
+aft.
+
+“Something must be done, Humphrey,” Maud said, next morning, when I had
+told her of the night’s occurrence.  “If he has liberty, he may do
+anything.  He may sink the vessel, or set fire to it.  There is no
+telling what he may do.  We must make him a prisoner.”
+
+“But how?” I asked, with a helpless shrug.  “I dare not come within reach
+of his arms, and he knows that so long as his resistance is passive I
+cannot shoot him.”
+
+“There must be some way,” she contended.  “Let me think.”
+
+“There is one way,” I said grimly.
+
+She waited.
+
+I picked up a seal-club.
+
+“It won’t kill him,” I said.  “And before he could recover I’d have him
+bound hard and fast.”
+
+She shook her head with a shudder.  “No, not that.  There must be some
+less brutal way.  Let us wait.”
+
+But we did not have to wait long, and the problem solved itself.  In the
+morning, after several trials, I found the point of balance in the
+foremast and attached my hoisting tackle a few feet above it.  Maud held
+the turn on the windlass and coiled down while I heaved.  Had the
+windlass been in order it would not have been so difficult; as it was, I
+was compelled to apply all my weight and strength to every inch of the
+heaving.  I had to rest frequently.  In truth, my spells of resting were
+longer than those of working.  Maud even contrived, at times when all my
+efforts could not budge the windlass, to hold the turn with one hand and
+with the other to throw the weight of her slim body to my assistance.
+
+At the end of an hour the single and double blocks came together at the
+top of the shears.  I could hoist no more.  And yet the mast was not
+swung entirely inboard.  The butt rested against the outside of the port
+rail, while the top of the mast overhung the water far beyond the
+starboard rail.  My shears were too short.  All my work had been for
+nothing.  But I no longer despaired in the old way.  I was acquiring more
+confidence in myself and more confidence in the possibilities of
+windlasses, shears, and hoisting tackles.  There was a way in which it
+could be done, and it remained for me to find that way.
+
+While I was considering the problem, Wolf Larsen came on deck.  We
+noticed something strange about him at once.  The indecisiveness, or
+feebleness, of his movements was more pronounced.  His walk was actually
+tottery as he came down the port side of the cabin.  At the break of the
+poop he reeled, raised one hand to his eyes with the familiar brushing
+gesture, and fell down the steps—still on his feet—to the main deck,
+across which he staggered, falling and flinging out his arms for support.
+He regained his balance by the steerage companion-way and stood there
+dizzily for a space, when he suddenly crumpled up and collapsed, his legs
+bending under him as he sank to the deck.
+
+“One of his attacks,” I whispered to Maud.
+
+She nodded her head; and I could see sympathy warm in her eyes.
+
+We went up to him, but he seemed unconscious, breathing spasmodically.
+She took charge of him, lifting his head to keep the blood out of it and
+despatching me to the cabin for a pillow.  I also brought blankets, and
+we made him comfortable.  I took his pulse.  It beat steadily and strong,
+and was quite normal.  This puzzled me.  I became suspicious.
+
+“What if he should be feigning this?” I asked, still holding his wrist.
+
+Maud shook her head, and there was reproof in her eyes.  But just then
+the wrist I held leaped from my hand, and the hand clasped like a steel
+trap about my wrist.  I cried aloud in awful fear, a wild inarticulate
+cry; and I caught one glimpse of his face, malignant and triumphant, as
+his other hand compassed my body and I was drawn down to him in a
+terrible grip.
+
+My wrist was released, but his other arm, passed around my back, held
+both my arms so that I could not move.  His free hand went to my throat,
+and in that moment I knew the bitterest foretaste of death earned by
+one’s own idiocy.  Why had I trusted myself within reach of those
+terrible arms?  I could feel other hands at my throat.  They were Maud’s
+hands, striving vainly to tear loose the hand that was throttling me.
+She gave it up, and I heard her scream in a way that cut me to the soul,
+for it was a woman’s scream of fear and heart-breaking despair.  I had
+heard it before, during the sinking of the _Martinez_.
+
+My face was against his chest and I could not see, but I heard Maud turn
+and run swiftly away along the deck.  Everything was happening quickly.
+I had not yet had a glimmering of unconsciousness, and it seemed that an
+interminable period of time was lapsing before I heard her feet flying
+back.  And just then I felt the whole man sink under me.  The breath was
+leaving his lungs and his chest was collapsing under my weight.  Whether
+it was merely the expelled breath, or his consciousness of his growing
+impotence, I know not, but his throat vibrated with a deep groan.  The
+hand at my throat relaxed.  I breathed.  It fluttered and tightened
+again.  But even his tremendous will could not overcome the dissolution
+that assailed it.  That will of his was breaking down.  He was fainting.
+
+Maud’s footsteps were very near as his hand fluttered for the last time
+and my throat was released.  I rolled off and over to the deck on my
+back, gasping and blinking in the sunshine.  Maud was pale but
+composed,—my eyes had gone instantly to her face,—and she was looking at
+me with mingled alarm and relief.  A heavy seal-club in her hand caught
+my eyes, and at that moment she followed my gaze down to it.  The club
+dropped from her hand as though it had suddenly stung her, and at the
+same moment my heart surged with a great joy.  Truly she was my woman, my
+mate-woman, fighting with me and for me as the mate of a caveman would
+have fought, all the primitive in her aroused, forgetful of her culture,
+hard under the softening civilization of the only life she had ever
+known.
+
+“Dear woman!” I cried, scrambling to my feet.
+
+The next moment she was in my arms, weeping convulsively on my shoulder
+while I clasped her close.  I looked down at the brown glory of her hair,
+glinting gems in the sunshine far more precious to me than those in the
+treasure-chests of kings.  And I bent my head and kissed her hair softly,
+so softly that she did not know.
+
+Then sober thought came to me.  After all, she was only a woman, crying
+her relief, now that the danger was past, in the arms of her protector or
+of the one who had been endangered.  Had I been father or brother, the
+situation would have been in nowise different.  Besides, time and place
+were not meet, and I wished to earn a better right to declare my love.
+So once again I softly kissed her hair as I felt her receding from my
+clasp.
+
+“It was a real attack this time,” I said: “another shock like the one
+that made him blind.  He feigned at first, and in doing so brought it
+on.”
+
+Maud was already rearranging his pillow.
+
+“No,” I said, “not yet.  Now that I have him helpless, helpless he shall
+remain.  From this day we live in the cabin.  Wolf Larsen shall live in
+the steerage.”
+
+I caught him under the shoulders and dragged him to the companion-way.
+At my direction Maud fetched a rope.  Placing this under his shoulders, I
+balanced him across the threshold and lowered him down the steps to the
+floor.  I could not lift him directly into a bunk, but with Maud’s help I
+lifted first his shoulders and head, then his body, balanced him across
+the edge, and rolled him into a lower bunk.
+
+But this was not to be all.  I recollected the handcuffs in his
+state-room, which he preferred to use on sailors instead of the ancient
+and clumsy ship irons.  So, when we left him, he lay handcuffed hand and
+foot.  For the first time in many days I breathed freely.  I felt
+strangely light as I came on deck, as though a weight had been lifted off
+my shoulders.  I felt, also, that Maud and I had drawn more closely
+together.  And I wondered if she, too, felt it, as we walked along the
+deck side by side to where the stalled foremast hung in the shears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+At once we moved aboard the _Ghost_, occupying our old state-rooms and
+cooking in the galley.  The imprisonment of Wolf Larsen had happened most
+opportunely, for what must have been the Indian summer of this high
+latitude was gone and drizzling stormy weather had set in.  We were very
+comfortable, and the inadequate shears, with the foremast suspended from
+them, gave a business-like air to the schooner and a promise of
+departure.
+
+And now that we had Wolf Larsen in irons, how little did we need it!
+Like his first attack, his second had been accompanied by serious
+disablement.  Maud made the discovery in the afternoon while trying to
+give him nourishment.  He had shown signs of consciousness, and she had
+spoken to him, eliciting no response.  He was lying on his left side at
+the time, and in evident pain.  With a restless movement he rolled his
+head around, clearing his left ear from the pillow against which it had
+been pressed.  At once he heard and answered her, and at once she came to
+me.
+
+Pressing the pillow against his left ear, I asked him if he heard me, but
+he gave no sign.  Removing the pillow and, repeating the question he
+answered promptly that he did.
+
+“Do you know you are deaf in the right ear?” I asked.
+
+“Yes,” he answered in a low, strong voice, “and worse than that.  My
+whole right side is affected.  It seems asleep.  I cannot move arm or
+leg.”
+
+“Feigning again?” I demanded angrily.
+
+He shook his head, his stern mouth shaping the strangest, twisted smile.
+It was indeed a twisted smile, for it was on the left side only, the
+facial muscles of the right side moving not at all.
+
+“That was the last play of the Wolf,” he said.  “I am paralysed.  I shall
+never walk again.  Oh, only on the other side,” he added, as though
+divining the suspicious glance I flung at his left leg, the knee of which
+had just then drawn up, and elevated the blankets.
+
+“It’s unfortunate,” he continued.  “I’d liked to have done for you first,
+Hump.  And I thought I had that much left in me.”
+
+“But why?” I asked; partly in horror, partly out of curiosity.
+
+Again his stern mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:
+
+“Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest bit of
+the ferment to the end, to eat you.  But to die this way.”
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, or attempted to shrug them, rather, for the
+left shoulder alone moved.  Like the smile, the shrug was twisted.
+
+“But how can you account for it?” I asked.  “Where is the seat of your
+trouble?”
+
+“The brain,” he said at once.  “It was those cursed headaches brought it
+on.”
+
+“Symptoms,” I said.
+
+He nodded his head.  “There is no accounting for it.  I was never sick in
+my life.  Something’s gone wrong with my brain.  A cancer, a tumour, or
+something of that nature,—a thing that devours and destroys.  It’s
+attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by cell—from
+the pain.”
+
+“The motor-centres, too,” I suggested.
+
+“So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here,
+conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going down,
+breaking bit by bit communication with the world.  I cannot see, hearing
+and feeling are leaving me, at this rate I shall soon cease to speak; yet
+all the time I shall be here, alive, active, and powerless.”
+
+“When you say _you_ are here, I’d suggest the likelihood of the soul,” I
+said.
+
+“Bosh!” was his retort.  “It simply means that in the attack on my brain
+the higher psychical centres are untouched.  I can remember, I can think
+and reason.  When that goes, I go.  I am not.  The soul?”
+
+He broke out in mocking laughter, then turned his left ear to the pillow
+as a sign that he wished no further conversation.
+
+Maud and I went about our work oppressed by the fearful fate which had
+overtaken him,—how fearful we were yet fully to realize.  There was the
+awfulness of retribution about it.  Our thoughts were deep and solemn,
+and we spoke to each other scarcely above whispers.
+
+“You might remove the handcuffs,” he said that night, as we stood in
+consultation over him.  “It’s dead safe.  I’m a paralytic now.  The next
+thing to watch out for is bed sores.”
+
+He smiled his twisted smile, and Maud, her eyes wide with horror, was
+compelled to turn away her head.
+
+“Do you know that your smile is crooked?” I asked him; for I knew that
+she must attend him, and I wished to save her as much as possible.
+
+“Then I shall smile no more,” he said calmly.  “I thought something was
+wrong.  My right cheek has been numb all day.  Yes, and I’ve had warnings
+of this for the last three days; by spells, my right side seemed going to
+sleep, sometimes arm or hand, sometimes leg or foot.”
+
+“So my smile is crooked?” he queried a short while after.  “Well,
+consider henceforth that I smile internally, with my soul, if you please,
+my soul.  Consider that I am smiling now.”
+
+And for the space of several minutes he lay there, quiet, indulging his
+grotesque fancy.
+
+The man of him was not changed.  It was the old, indomitable, terrible
+Wolf Larsen, imprisoned somewhere within that flesh which had once been
+so invincible and splendid.  Now it bound him with insentient fetters,
+walling his soul in darkness and silence, blocking it from the world
+which to him had been a riot of action.  No more would he conjugate the
+verb “to do in every mood and tense.”  “To be” was all that remained to
+him—to be, as he had defined death, without movement; to will, but not to
+execute; to think and reason and in the spirit of him to be as alive as
+ever, but in the flesh to be dead, quite dead.
+
+And yet, though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust
+ourselves to his condition.  Our minds revolted.  To us he was full of
+potentiality.  We knew not what to expect of him next, what fearful
+thing, rising above the flesh, he might break out and do.  Our experience
+warranted this state of mind, and we went about our work with anxiety
+always upon us.
+
+I had solved the problem which had arisen through the shortness of the
+shears.  By means of the watch-tackle (I had made a new one), I heaved
+the butt of the foremast across the rail and then lowered it to the deck.
+Next, by means of the shears, I hoisted the main boom on board.  Its
+forty feet of length would supply the height necessary properly to swing
+the mast.  By means of a secondary tackle I had attached to the shears, I
+swung the boom to a nearly perpendicular position, then lowered the butt
+to the deck, where, to prevent slipping, I spiked great cleats around it.
+The single block of my original shears-tackle I had attached to the end
+of the boom.  Thus, by carrying this tackle to the windlass, I could
+raise and lower the end of the boom at will, the butt always remaining
+stationary, and, by means of guys, I could swing the boom from side to
+side.  To the end of the boom I had likewise rigged a hoisting tackle;
+and when the whole arrangement was completed I could not but be startled
+by the power and latitude it gave me.
+
+Of course, two days’ work was required for the accomplishment of this
+part of my task, and it was not till the morning of the third day that I
+swung the foremast from the deck and proceeded to square its butt to fit
+the step.  Here I was especially awkward.  I sawed and chopped and
+chiselled the weathered wood till it had the appearance of having been
+gnawed by some gigantic mouse.  But it fitted.
+
+“It will work, I know it will work,” I cried.
+
+“Do you know Dr. Jordan’s final test of truth?” Maud asked.
+
+I shook my head and paused in the act of dislodging the shavings which
+had drifted down my neck.
+
+“Can we make it work?  Can we trust our lives to it? is the test.”
+
+“He is a favourite of yours,” I said.
+
+“When I dismantled my old Pantheon and cast out Napoleon and Cæsar and
+their fellows, I straightway erected a new Pantheon,” she answered
+gravely, “and the first I installed was Dr. Jordan.”
+
+“A modern hero.”
+
+“And a greater because modern,” she added.  “How can the Old World heroes
+compare with ours?”
+
+I shook my head.  We were too much alike in many things for argument.
+Our points of view and outlook on life at least were very alike.
+
+“For a pair of critics we agree famously,” I laughed.
+
+“And as shipwright and able assistant,” she laughed back.
+
+But there was little time for laughter in those days, what of our heavy
+work and of the awfulness of Wolf Larsen’s living death.
+
+He had received another stroke.  He had lost his voice, or he was losing
+it.  He had only intermittent use of it.  As he phrased it, the wires
+were like the stock market, now up, now down.  Occasionally the wires
+were up and he spoke as well as ever, though slowly and heavily.  Then
+speech would suddenly desert him, in the middle of a sentence perhaps,
+and for hours, sometimes, we would wait for the connection to be
+re-established.  He complained of great pain in his head, and it was
+during this period that he arranged a system of communication against the
+time when speech should leave him altogether—one pressure of the hand for
+“yes,” two for “no.”  It was well that it was arranged, for by evening
+his voice had gone from him.  By hand pressures, after that, he answered
+our questions, and when he wished to speak he scrawled his thoughts with
+his left hand, quite legibly, on a sheet of paper.
+
+The fierce winter had now descended upon us.  Gale followed gale, with
+snow and sleet and rain.  The seals had started on their great southern
+migration, and the rookery was practically deserted.  I worked
+feverishly.  In spite of the bad weather, and of the wind which
+especially hindered me, I was on deck from daylight till dark and making
+substantial progress.
+
+I profited by my lesson learned through raising the shears and then
+climbing them to attach the guys.  To the top of the foremast, which was
+just lifted conveniently from the deck, I attached the rigging, stays and
+throat and peak halyards.  As usual, I had underrated the amount of work
+involved in this portion of the task, and two long days were necessary to
+complete it.  And there was so much yet to be done—the sails, for
+instance, which practically had to be made over.
+
+While I toiled at rigging the foremast, Maud sewed on canvas, ready
+always to drop everything and come to my assistance when more hands than
+two were required.  The canvas was heavy and hard, and she sewed with the
+regular sailor’s palm and three-cornered sail-needle.  Her hands were
+soon sadly blistered, but she struggled bravely on, and in addition doing
+the cooking and taking care of the sick man.
+
+“A fig for superstition,” I said on Friday morning.  “That mast goes in
+to-day.”
+
+Everything was ready for the attempt.  Carrying the boom-tackle to the
+windlass, I hoisted the mast nearly clear of the deck.  Making this
+tackle fast, I took to the windlass the shears-tackle (which was
+connected with the end of the boom), and with a few turns had the mast
+perpendicular and clear.
+
+Maud clapped her hands the instant she was relieved from holding the
+turn, crying:
+
+“It works!  It works!  We’ll trust our lives to it!”
+
+Then she assumed a rueful expression.
+
+“It’s not over the hole,” she add.  “Will you have to begin all over?”
+
+I smiled in superior fashion, and, slacking off on one of the boom-guys
+and taking in on the other, swung the mast perfectly in the centre of the
+deck.  Still it was not over the hole.  Again the rueful expression came
+on her face, and again I smiled in a superior way.  Slacking away on the
+boom-tackle and hoisting an equivalent amount on the shears-tackle, I
+brought the butt of the mast into position directly over the hole in the
+deck.  Then I gave Maud careful instructions for lowering away and went
+into the hold to the step on the schooner’s bottom.
+
+I called to her, and the mast moved easily and accurately.  Straight
+toward the square hole of the step the square butt descended; but as it
+descended it slowly twisted so that square would not fit into square.
+But I had not even a moment’s indecision.  Calling to Maud to cease
+lowering, I went on deck and made the watch-tackle fast to the mast with
+a rolling hitch.  I left Maud to pull on it while I went below.  By the
+light of the lantern I saw the butt twist slowly around till its sides
+coincided with the sides of the step.  Maud made fast and returned to the
+windlass.  Slowly the butt descended the several intervening inches, at
+the same time slightly twisting again.  Again Maud rectified the twist
+with the watch-tackle, and again she lowered away from the windlass.
+Square fitted into square.  The mast was stepped.
+
+I raised a shout, and she ran down to see.  In the yellow lantern light
+we peered at what we had accomplished.  We looked at each other, and our
+hands felt their way and clasped.  The eyes of both of us, I think, were
+moist with the joy of success.
+
+“It was done so easily after all,” I remarked.  “All the work was in the
+preparation.”
+
+“And all the wonder in the completion,” Maud added.  “I can scarcely
+bring myself to realize that that great mast is really up and in; that
+you have lifted it from the water, swung it through the air, and
+deposited it here where it belongs.  It is a Titan’s task.”
+
+“And they made themselves many inventions,” I began merrily, then paused
+to sniff the air.
+
+I looked hastily at the lantern.  It was not smoking.  Again I sniffed.
+
+“Something is burning,” Maud said, with sudden conviction.
+
+We sprang together for the ladder, but I raced past her to the deck.  A
+dense volume of smoke was pouring out of the steerage companion-way.
+
+“The Wolf is not yet dead,” I muttered to myself as I sprang down through
+the smoke.
+
+It was so thick in the confined space that I was compelled to feel my
+way; and so potent was the spell of Wolf Larsen on my imagination, I was
+quite prepared for the helpless giant to grip my neck in a strangle hold.
+I hesitated, the desire to race back and up the steps to the deck almost
+overpowering me.  Then I recollected Maud.  The vision of her, as I had
+last seen her, in the lantern light of the schooner’s hold, her brown
+eyes warm and moist with joy, flashed before me, and I knew that I could
+not go back.
+
+I was choking and suffocating by the time I reached Wolf Larsen’s bunk.
+I reached my hand and felt for his.  He was lying motionless, but moved
+slightly at the touch of my hand.  I felt over and under his blankets.
+There was no warmth, no sign of fire.  Yet that smoke which blinded me
+and made me cough and gasp must have a source.  I lost my head
+temporarily and dashed frantically about the steerage.  A collision with
+the table partially knocked the wind from my body and brought me to
+myself.  I reasoned that a helpless man could start a fire only near to
+where he lay.
+
+I returned to Wolf Larsen’s bunk.  There I encountered Maud.  How long
+she had been there in that suffocating atmosphere I could not guess.
+
+“Go up on deck!” I commanded peremptorily.
+
+“But, Humphrey—” she began to protest in a queer, husky voice.
+
+“Please! please!” I shouted at her harshly.
+
+She drew away obediently, and then I thought, What if she cannot find the
+steps?  I started after her, to stop at the foot of the companion-way.
+Perhaps she had gone up.  As I stood there, hesitant, I heard her cry
+softly:
+
+“Oh, Humphrey, I am lost.”
+
+I found her fumbling at the wall of the after bulkhead, and, half leading
+her, half carrying her, I took her up the companion-way.  The pure air
+was like nectar.  Maud was only faint and dizzy, and I left her lying on
+the deck when I took my second plunge below.
+
+The source of the smoke must be very close to Wolf Larsen—my mind was
+made up to this, and I went straight to his bunk.  As I felt about among
+his blankets, something hot fell on the back of my hand.  It burned me,
+and I jerked my hand away.  Then I understood.  Through the cracks in the
+bottom of the upper bunk he had set fire to the mattress.  He still
+retained sufficient use of his left arm to do this.  The damp straw of
+the mattress, fired from beneath and denied air, had been smouldering all
+the while.
+
+As I dragged the mattress out of the bunk it seemed to disintegrate in
+mid-air, at the same time bursting into flames.  I beat out the burning
+remnants of straw in the bunk, then made a dash for the deck for fresh
+air.
+
+Several buckets of water sufficed to put out the burning mattress in the
+middle of the steerage floor; and ten minutes later, when the smoke had
+fairly cleared, I allowed Maud to come below.  Wolf Larsen was
+unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the fresh air to restore
+him.  We were working over him, however, when he signed for paper and
+pencil.
+
+“Pray do not interrupt me,” he wrote.  “I am smiling.”
+
+“I am still a bit of the ferment, you see,” he wrote a little later.
+
+“I am glad you are as small a bit as you are,” I said.
+
+“Thank you,” he wrote.  “But just think of how much smaller I shall be
+before I die.”
+
+“And yet I am all here, Hump,” he wrote with a final flourish.  “I can
+think more clearly than ever in my life before.  Nothing to disturb me.
+Concentration is perfect.  I am all here and more than here.”
+
+It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man’s body
+had become his mausoleum.  And there, in so strange sepulchre, his spirit
+fluttered and lived.  It would flutter and live till the last line of
+communication was broken, and after that who was to say how much longer
+it might continue to flutter and live?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+“I think my left side is going,” Wolf Larsen wrote, the morning after his
+attempt to fire the ship.  “The numbness is growing.  I can hardly move
+my hand.  You will have to speak louder.  The last lines are going down.”
+
+“Are you in pain?” I asked.
+
+I was compelled to repeat my question loudly before he answered:
+
+“Not all the time.”
+
+The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and it was
+with extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl.  It was like a
+“spirit message,” such as are delivered at séances of spiritualists for a
+dollar admission.
+
+“But I am still here, all here,” the hand scrawled more slowly and
+painfully than ever.
+
+The pencil dropped, and we had to replace it in the hand.
+
+“When there is no pain I have perfect peace and quiet.  I have never
+thought so clearly.  I can ponder life and death like a Hindoo sage.”
+
+“And immortality?” Maud queried loudly in the ear.
+
+Three times the hand essayed to write but fumbled hopelessly.  The pencil
+fell.  In vain we tried to replace it.  The fingers could not close on
+it.  Then Maud pressed and held the fingers about the pencil with her own
+hand and the hand wrote, in large letters, and so slowly that the minutes
+ticked off to each letter:
+
+“B-O-S-H.”
+
+It was Wolf Larsen’s last word, “bosh,” sceptical and invincible to the
+end.  The arm and hand relaxed.  The trunk of the body moved slightly.
+Then there was no movement.  Maud released the hand.  The fingers spread
+slightly, falling apart of their own weight, and the pencil rolled away.
+
+“Do you still hear?” I shouted, holding the fingers and waiting for the
+single pressure which would signify “Yes.”  There was no response.  The
+hand was dead.
+
+“I noticed the lips slightly move,” Maud said.
+
+I repeated the question.  The lips moved.  She placed the tips of her
+fingers on them.  Again I repeated the question.  “Yes,” Maud announced.
+We looked at each other expectantly.
+
+“What good is it?” I asked.  “What can we say now?”
+
+“Oh, ask him—”
+
+She hesitated.
+
+“Ask him something that requires no for an answer,” I suggested.  “Then
+we will know for certainty.”
+
+“Are you hungry?” she cried.
+
+The lips moved under her fingers, and she answered, “Yes.”
+
+“Will you have some beef?” was her next query.
+
+“No,” she announced.
+
+“Beef-tea?”
+
+“Yes, he will have some beef-tea,” she said, quietly, looking up at me.
+“Until his hearing goes we shall be able to communicate with him.  And
+after that—”
+
+She looked at me queerly.  I saw her lips trembling and the tears
+swimming up in her eyes.  She swayed toward me and I caught her in my
+arms.
+
+“Oh, Humphrey,” she sobbed, “when will it all end?  I am so tired, so
+tired.”
+
+She buried her head on my shoulder, her frail form shaken with a storm of
+weeping.  She was like a feather in my arms, so slender, so ethereal.
+“She has broken down at last,” I thought.  “What can I do without her
+help?”
+
+But I soothed and comforted her, till she pulled herself bravely together
+and recuperated mentally as quickly as she was wont to do physically.
+
+“I ought to be ashamed of myself,” she said.  Then added, with the
+whimsical smile I adored, “but I am only one, small woman.”
+
+That phrase, the “one small woman,” startled me like an electric shock.
+It was my own phrase, my pet, secret phrase, my love phrase for her.
+
+“Where did you get that phrase?” I demanded, with an abruptness that in
+turn startled her.
+
+“What phrase?” she asked.
+
+“One small woman.”
+
+“Is it yours?” she asked.
+
+“Yes,” I answered.  “Mine.  I made it.”
+
+“Then you must have talked in your sleep,” she smiled.
+
+The dancing, tremulous light was in her eyes.  Mine, I knew, were
+speaking beyond the will of my speech.  I leaned toward her.  Without
+volition I leaned toward her, as a tree is swayed by the wind.  Ah, we
+were very close together in that moment.  But she shook her head, as one
+might shake off sleep or a dream, saying:
+
+“I have known it all my life.  It was my father’s name for my mother.”
+
+“It is my phrase too,” I said stubbornly.
+
+“For your mother?”
+
+“No,” I answered, and she questioned no further, though I could have
+sworn her eyes retained for some time a mocking, teasing expression.
+
+With the foremast in, the work now went on apace.  Almost before I knew
+it, and without one serious hitch, I had the mainmast stepped.  A
+derrick-boom, rigged to the foremast, had accomplished this; and several
+days more found all stays and shrouds in place, and everything set up
+taut.  Topsails would be a nuisance and a danger for a crew of two, so I
+heaved the topmasts on deck and lashed them fast.
+
+Several more days were consumed in finishing the sails and putting them
+on.  There were only three—the jib, foresail, and mainsail; and, patched,
+shortened, and distorted, they were a ridiculously ill-fitting suit for
+so trim a craft as the _Ghost_.
+
+“But they’ll work!” Maud cried jubilantly.  “We’ll make them work, and
+trust our lives to them!”
+
+Certainly, among my many new trades, I shone least as a sail-maker.  I
+could sail them better than make them, and I had no doubt of my power to
+bring the schooner to some northern port of Japan.  In fact, I had
+crammed navigation from text-books aboard; and besides, there was Wolf
+Larsen’s star-scale, so simple a device that a child could work it.
+
+As for its inventor, beyond an increasing deafness and the movement of
+the lips growing fainter and fainter, there had been little change in his
+condition for a week.  But on the day we finished bending the schooner’s
+sails, he heard his last, and the last movement of his lips died away—but
+not before I had asked him, “Are you all there?” and the lips had
+answered, “Yes.”
+
+The last line was down.  Somewhere within that tomb of the flesh still
+dwelt the soul of the man.  Walled by the living clay, that fierce
+intelligence we had known burned on; but it burned on in silence and
+darkness.  And it was disembodied.  To that intelligence there could be
+no objective knowledge of a body.  It knew no body.  The very world was
+not.  It knew only itself and the vastness and profundity of the quiet
+and the dark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+The day came for our departure.  There was no longer anything to detain
+us on Endeavour Island.  The _Ghost’s_ stumpy masts were in place, her
+crazy sails bent.  All my handiwork was strong, none of it beautiful; but
+I knew that it would work, and I felt myself a man of power as I looked
+at it.
+
+“I did it!  I did it!  With my own hands I did it!” I wanted to cry
+aloud.
+
+But Maud and I had a way of voicing each other’s thoughts, and she said,
+as we prepared to hoist the mainsail:
+
+“To think, Humphrey, you did it all with your own hands?”
+
+“But there were two other hands,” I answered.  “Two small hands, and
+don’t say that was a phrase, also, of your father.”
+
+She laughed and shook her head, and held her hands up for inspection.
+
+“I can never get them clean again,” she wailed, “nor soften the
+weather-beat.”
+
+“Then dirt and weather-beat shall be your guerdon of honour,” I said,
+holding them in mine; and, spite of my resolutions, I would have kissed
+the two dear hands had she not swiftly withdrawn them.
+
+Our comradeship was becoming tremulous, I had mastered my love long and
+well, but now it was mastering me.  Wilfully had it disobeyed and won my
+eyes to speech, and now it was winning my tongue—ay, and my lips, for
+they were mad this moment to kiss the two small hands which had toiled so
+faithfully and hard.  And I, too, was mad.  There was a cry in my being
+like bugles calling me to her.  And there was a wind blowing upon me
+which I could not resist, swaying the very body of me till I leaned
+toward her, all unconscious that I leaned.  And she knew it.  She could
+not but know it as she swiftly drew away her hands, and yet, could not
+forbear one quick searching look before she turned away her eyes.
+
+By means of deck-tackles I had arranged to carry the halyards forward to
+the windlass; and now I hoisted the mainsail, peak and throat, at the
+same time.  It was a clumsy way, but it did not take long, and soon the
+foresail as well was up and fluttering.
+
+“We can never get that anchor up in this narrow place, once it has left
+the bottom,” I said.  “We should be on the rocks first.”
+
+“What can you do?” she asked.
+
+“Slip it,” was my answer.  “And when I do, you must do your first work on
+the windlass.  I shall have to run at once to the wheel, and at the same
+time you must be hoisting the jib.”
+
+This manœuvre of getting under way I had studied and worked out a score
+of times; and, with the jib-halyard to the windlass, I knew Maud was
+capable of hoisting that most necessary sail.  A brisk wind was blowing
+into the cove, and though the water was calm, rapid work was required to
+get us safely out.
+
+When I knocked the shackle-bolt loose, the chain roared out through the
+hawse-hole and into the sea.  I raced aft, putting the wheel up.  The
+_Ghost_ seemed to start into life as she heeled to the first fill of her
+sails.  The jib was rising.  As it filled, the _Ghost’s_ bow swung off
+and I had to put the wheel down a few spokes and steady her.
+
+I had devised an automatic jib-sheet which passed the jib across of
+itself, so there was no need for Maud to attend to that; but she was
+still hoisting the jib when I put the wheel hard down.  It was a moment
+of anxiety, for the _Ghost_ was rushing directly upon the beach, a
+stone’s throw distant.  But she swung obediently on her heel into the
+wind.  There was a great fluttering and flapping of canvas and
+reef-points, most welcome to my ears, then she filled away on the other
+tack.
+
+Maud had finished her task and come aft, where she stood beside me, a
+small cap perched on her wind-blown hair, her cheeks flushed from
+exertion, her eyes wide and bright with the excitement, her nostrils
+quivering to the rush and bite of the fresh salt air.  Her brown eyes
+were like a startled deer’s.  There was a wild, keen look in them I had
+never seen before, and her lips parted and her breath suspended as the
+_Ghost_, charging upon the wall of rock at the entrance to the inner
+cove, swept into the wind and filled away into safe water.
+
+My first mate’s berth on the sealing grounds stood me in good stead, and
+I cleared the inner cove and laid a long tack along the shore of the
+outer cove.  Once again about, and the _Ghost_ headed out to open sea.
+She had now caught the bosom-breathing of the ocean, and was herself
+a-breath with the rhythm of it as she smoothly mounted and slipped down
+each broad-backed wave.  The day had been dull and overcast, but the sun
+now burst through the clouds, a welcome omen, and shone upon the curving
+beach where together we had dared the lords of the harem and slain the
+holluschickie.  All Endeavour Island brightened under the sun.  Even the
+grim south-western promontory showed less grim, and here and there, where
+the sea-spray wet its surface, high lights flashed and dazzled in the
+sun.
+
+“I shall always think of it with pride,” I said to Maud.
+
+She threw her head back in a queenly way but said, “Dear, dear Endeavour
+Island!  I shall always love it.”
+
+“And I,” I said quickly.
+
+It seemed our eyes must meet in a great understanding, and yet, loath,
+they struggled away and did not meet.
+
+There was a silence I might almost call awkward, till I broke it, saying:
+
+“See those black clouds to windward.  You remember, I told you last night
+the barometer was falling.”
+
+“And the sun is gone,” she said, her eyes still fixed upon our island,
+where we had proved our mastery over matter and attained to the truest
+comradeship that may fall to man and woman.
+
+“And it’s slack off the sheets for Japan!” I cried gaily.  “A fair wind
+and a flowing sheet, you know, or however it goes.”
+
+Lashing the wheel I ran forward, eased the fore and mainsheets, took in
+on the boom-tackles and trimmed everything for the quartering breeze
+which was ours.  It was a fresh breeze, very fresh, but I resolved to run
+as long as I dared.  Unfortunately, when running free, it is impossible
+to lash the wheel, so I faced an all-night watch.  Maud insisted on
+relieving me, but proved that she had not the strength to steer in a
+heavy sea, even if she could have gained the wisdom on such short notice.
+She appeared quite heart-broken over the discovery, but recovered her
+spirits by coiling down tackles and halyards and all stray ropes.  Then
+there were meals to be cooked in the galley, beds to make, Wolf Larsen to
+be attended upon, and she finished the day with a grand house-cleaning
+attack upon the cabin and steerage.
+
+All night I steered, without relief, the wind slowly and steadily
+increasing and the sea rising.  At five in the morning Maud brought me
+hot coffee and biscuits she had baked, and at seven a substantial and
+piping hot breakfast put new life into me.
+
+Throughout the day, and as slowly and steadily as ever, the wind
+increased.  It impressed one with its sullen determination to blow, and
+blow harder, and keep on blowing.  And still the _Ghost_ foamed along,
+racing off the miles till I was certain she was making at least eleven
+knots.  It was too good to lose, but by nightfall I was exhausted.
+Though in splendid physical trim, a thirty-six-hour trick at the wheel
+was the limit of my endurance.  Besides, Maud begged me to heave to, and
+I knew, if the wind and sea increased at the same rate during the night,
+that it would soon be impossible to heave to.  So, as twilight deepened,
+gladly and at the same time reluctantly, I brought the _Ghost_ up on the
+wind.
+
+But I had not reckoned upon the colossal task the reefing of three sails
+meant for one man.  While running away from the wind I had not
+appreciated its force, but when we ceased to run I learned to my sorrow,
+and well-nigh to my despair, how fiercely it was really blowing.  The
+wind balked my every effort, ripping the canvas out of my hands and in an
+instant undoing what I had gained by ten minutes of severest struggle.
+At eight o’clock I had succeeded only in putting the second reef into the
+foresail.  At eleven o’clock I was no farther along.  Blood dripped from
+every finger-end, while the nails were broken to the quick.  From pain
+and sheer exhaustion I wept in the darkness, secretly, so that Maud
+should not know.
+
+Then, in desperation, I abandoned the attempt to reef the mainsail and
+resolved to try the experiment of heaving to under the close-reefed
+foresail.  Three hours more were required to gasket the mainsail and jib,
+and at two in the morning, nearly dead, the life almost buffeted and
+worked out of me, I had barely sufficient consciousness to know the
+experiment was a success.  The close-reefed foresail worked.  The _Ghost_
+clung on close to the wind and betrayed no inclination to fall off
+broadside to the trough.
+
+I was famished, but Maud tried vainly to get me to eat.  I dozed with my
+mouth full of food.  I would fall asleep in the act of carrying food to
+my mouth and waken in torment to find the act yet uncompleted.  So
+sleepily helpless was I that she was compelled to hold me in my chair to
+prevent my being flung to the floor by the violent pitching of the
+schooner.
+
+Of the passage from the galley to the cabin I knew nothing.  It was a
+sleep-walker Maud guided and supported.  In fact, I was aware of nothing
+till I awoke, how long after I could not imagine, in my bunk with my
+boots off.  It was dark.  I was stiff and lame, and cried out with pain
+when the bed-clothes touched my poor finger-ends.
+
+Morning had evidently not come, so I closed my eyes and went to sleep
+again.  I did not know it, but I had slept the clock around and it was
+night again.
+
+Once more I woke, troubled because I could sleep no better.  I struck a
+match and looked at my watch.  It marked midnight.  And I had not left
+the deck until three!  I should have been puzzled had I not guessed the
+solution.  No wonder I was sleeping brokenly.  I had slept twenty-one
+hours.  I listened for a while to the behaviour of the _Ghost_, to the
+pounding of the seas and the muffled roar of the wind on deck, and then
+turned over on my side and slept peacefully until morning.
+
+When I arose at seven I saw no sign of Maud and concluded she was in the
+galley preparing breakfast.  On deck I found the _Ghost_ doing splendidly
+under her patch of canvas.  But in the galley, though a fire was burning
+and water boiling, I found no Maud.
+
+I discovered her in the steerage, by Wolf Larsen’s bunk.  I looked at
+him, the man who had been hurled down from the topmost pitch of life to
+be buried alive and be worse than dead.  There seemed a relaxation of his
+expressionless face which was new.  Maud looked at me and I understood.
+
+“His life flickered out in the storm,” I said.
+
+“But he still lives,” she answered, infinite faith in her voice.
+
+“He had too great strength.”
+
+“Yes,” she said, “but now it no longer shackles him.  He is a free
+spirit.”
+
+“He is a free spirit surely,” I answered; and, taking her hand, I led her
+on deck.
+
+The storm broke that night, which is to say that it diminished as slowly
+as it had arisen.  After breakfast next morning, when I had hoisted Wolf
+Larsen’s body on deck ready for burial, it was still blowing heavily and
+a large sea was running.  The deck was continually awash with the sea
+which came inboard over the rail and through the scuppers.  The wind
+smote the schooner with a sudden gust, and she heeled over till her lee
+rail was buried, the roar in her rigging rising in pitch to a shriek.  We
+stood in the water to our knees as I bared my head.
+
+“I remember only one part of the service,” I said, “and that is, ‘And the
+body shall be cast into the sea.’”
+
+Maud looked at me, surprised and shocked; but the spirit of something I
+had seen before was strong upon me, impelling me to give service to Wolf
+Larsen as Wolf Larsen had once given service to another man.  I lifted
+the end of the hatch cover and the canvas-shrouded body slipped feet
+first into the sea.  The weight of iron dragged it down.  It was gone.
+
+“Good-bye, Lucifer, proud spirit,” Maud whispered, so low that it was
+drowned by the shouting of the wind; but I saw the movement of her lips
+and knew.
+
+As we clung to the lee rail and worked our way aft, I happened to glance
+to leeward.  The _Ghost_, at the moment, was uptossed on a sea, and I
+caught a clear view of a small steamship two or three miles away, rolling
+and pitching, head on to the sea, as it steamed toward us.  It was
+painted black, and from the talk of the hunters of their poaching
+exploits I recognized it as a United States revenue cutter.  I pointed it
+out to Maud and hurriedly led her aft to the safety of the poop.
+
+I started to rush below to the flag-locker, then remembered that in
+rigging the _Ghost_ I had forgotten to make provision for a
+flag-halyard.
+
+“We need no distress signal,” Maud said.  “They have only to see us.”
+
+“We are saved,” I said, soberly and solemnly.  And then, in an exuberance
+of joy, “I hardly know whether to be glad or not.”
+
+I looked at her.  Our eyes were not loath to meet.  We leaned toward each
+other, and before I knew it my arms were about her.
+
+“Need I?” I asked.
+
+And she answered, “There is no need, though the telling of it would be
+sweet, so sweet.”
+
+Her lips met the press of mine, and, by what strange trick of the
+imagination I know not, the scene in the cabin of the _Ghost_ flashed
+upon me, when she had pressed her fingers lightly on my lips and said,
+“Hush, hush.”
+
+“My woman, my one small woman,” I said, my free hand petting her shoulder
+in the way all lovers know though never learn in school.
+
+“My man,” she said, looking at me for an instant with tremulous lids
+which fluttered down and veiled her eyes as she snuggled her head against
+my breast with a happy little sigh.
+
+I looked toward the cutter.  It was very close.  A boat was being
+lowered.
+
+“One kiss, dear love,” I whispered.  “One kiss more before they come.”
+
+“And rescue us from ourselves,” she completed, with a most adorable
+smile, whimsical as I had never seen it, for it was whimsical with love.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                 THE END
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London</title>
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Sea-Wolf</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: October 15, 1997 [eBook #1074]<br />
+[Most recently updated: November 24, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Price</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-WOLF ***</div>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:55%;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="[Illustration]" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>The Sea-Wolf</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Jack London</h2>
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">author of</span><br/>
+&ldquo;<span class="smcap">the call of the wild</span>,&rdquo; &ldquo;<span
+class="smcap">the faith of men</span>,&rdquo;<br/>
+<span class="smcap">etc.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>POPULAR EDITION</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+LONDON<br/>
+WILLIAM HEINEMANN<br/>
+1917
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>First published</i>, <i>November</i> 1904.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>New Impression</i>, <i>December</i> 1904, <i>April</i> 1908.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Popular Edition</i>, <i>July</i> 1910; <i>New Impressions</i>, <i>March</i>
+1912, <i>September</i> 1912, <i>November</i> 1913, <i>May</i> 1915, <i>May</i>
+1916, <i>July</i> 1917.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Copyright</i>, <i>London</i>, <i>William Heinemann</i>, 1904
+</p>
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER I.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER II.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER III.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER IV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER V.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">CHAPTER VI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">CHAPTER VII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">CHAPTER VIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">CHAPTER IX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">CHAPTER X.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">CHAPTER XI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">CHAPTER XII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">CHAPTER XIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">CHAPTER XIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">CHAPTER XV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">CHAPTER XVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">CHAPTER XVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">CHAPTER XVIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap19">CHAPTER XIX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap20">CHAPTER XX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap21">CHAPTER XXI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap22">CHAPTER XXII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap23">CHAPTER XXIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap24">CHAPTER XXIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap25">CHAPTER XXV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap26">CHAPTER XXVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap27">CHAPTER XXVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap28">CHAPTER XXVIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap29">CHAPTER XXIX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap30">CHAPTER XXX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap31">CHAPTER XXXI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap32">CHAPTER XXXII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap33">CHAPTER XXXIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap34">CHAPTER XXXIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap35">CHAPTER XXXV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap36">CHAPTER XXXVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap37">CHAPTER XXXVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap38">CHAPTER XXXVIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap39">CHAPTER XXXIX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause
+of it all to Charley Furuseth&rsquo;s credit. He kept a summer cottage in Mill
+Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied it except when
+he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest
+his brain. When summer came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and dusty
+existence in the city and to toil incessantly. Had it not been my custom to run
+up to see him every Saturday afternoon and to stop over till Monday morning,
+this particular January Monday morning would not have found me afloat on San
+Francisco Bay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not but that I was afloat in a safe craft, for the <i>Martinez</i> was a new
+ferry-steamer, making her fourth or fifth trip on the run between Sausalito and
+San Francisco. The danger lay in the heavy fog which blanketed the bay, and of
+which, as a landsman, I had little apprehension. In fact, I remember the placid
+exaltation with which I took up my position on the forward upper deck, directly
+beneath the pilot-house, and allowed the mystery of the fog to lay hold of my
+imagination. A fresh breeze was blowing, and for a time I was alone in the
+moist obscurity&mdash;yet not alone, for I was dimly conscious of the presence
+of the pilot, and of what I took to be the captain, in the glass house above my
+head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labour which made
+it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation, in order to
+visit my friend who lived across an arm of the sea. It was good that men should
+be specialists, I mused. The peculiar knowledge of the pilot and captain
+sufficed for many thousands of people who knew no more of the sea and
+navigation than I knew. On the other hand, instead of having to devote my
+energy to the learning of a multitude of things, I concentrated it upon a few
+particular things, such as, for instance, the analysis of Poe&rsquo;s place in
+American literature&mdash;an essay of mine, by the way, in the current
+<i>Atlantic</i>. Coming aboard, as I passed through the cabin, I had noticed
+with greedy eyes a stout gentleman reading the <i>Atlantic</i>, which was open
+at my very essay. And there it was again, the division of labour, the special
+knowledge of the pilot and captain which permitted the stout gentleman to read
+my special knowledge on Poe while they carried him safely from Sausalito to San
+Francisco.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A red-faced man, slamming the cabin door behind him and stumping out on the
+deck, interrupted my reflections, though I made a mental note of the topic for
+use in a projected essay which I had thought of calling &ldquo;The Necessity
+for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.&rdquo; The red-faced man shot a glance up
+at the pilot-house, gazed around at the fog, stumped across the deck and back
+(he evidently had artificial legs), and stood still by my side, legs wide
+apart, and with an expression of keen enjoyment on his face. I was not wrong
+when I decided that his days had been spent on the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s nasty weather like this here that turns heads grey before
+their time,&rdquo; he said, with a nod toward the pilot-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had not thought there was any particular strain,&rdquo; I answered.
+&ldquo;It seems as simple as A, B, C. They know the direction by compass, the
+distance, and the speed. I should not call it anything more than mathematical
+certainty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Strain!&rdquo; he snorted. &ldquo;Simple as A, B, C! Mathematical
+certainty!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He seemed to brace himself up and lean backward against the air as he stared at
+me. &ldquo;How about this here tide that&rsquo;s rushin&rsquo; out through the
+Golden Gate?&rdquo; he demanded, or bellowed, rather. &ldquo;How fast is she
+ebbin&rsquo;? What&rsquo;s the drift, eh? Listen to that, will you? A
+bell-buoy, and we&rsquo;re a-top of it! See &rsquo;em alterin&rsquo; the
+course!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From out of the fog came the mournful tolling of a bell, and I could see the
+pilot turning the wheel with great rapidity. The bell, which had seemed
+straight ahead, was now sounding from the side. Our own whistle was blowing
+hoarsely, and from time to time the sound of other whistles came to us from out
+of the fog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a ferry-boat of some sort,&rdquo; the new-comer said,
+indicating a whistle off to the right. &ldquo;And there! D&rsquo;ye hear that?
+Blown by mouth. Some scow schooner, most likely. Better watch out, Mr.
+Schooner-man. Ah, I thought so. Now hell&rsquo;s a poppin&rsquo; for
+somebody!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unseen ferry-boat was blowing blast after blast, and the mouth-blown horn
+was tooting in terror-stricken fashion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now they&rsquo;re payin&rsquo; their respects to each other and
+tryin&rsquo; to get clear,&rdquo; the red-faced man went on, as the hurried
+whistling ceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His face was shining, his eyes flashing with excitement as he translated into
+articulate language the speech of the horns and sirens. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a
+steam-siren a-goin&rsquo; it over there to the left. And you hear that fellow
+with a frog in his throat&mdash;a steam schooner as near as I can judge,
+crawlin&rsquo; in from the Heads against the tide.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shrill little whistle, piping as if gone mad, came from directly ahead and
+from very near at hand. Gongs sounded on the <i>Martinez</i>. Our paddle-wheels
+stopped, their pulsing beat died away, and then they started again. The shrill
+little whistle, like the chirping of a cricket amid the cries of great beasts,
+shot through the fog from more to the side and swiftly grew faint and fainter.
+I looked to my companion for enlightenment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of them dare-devil launches,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I almost wish
+we&rsquo;d sunk him, the little rip! They&rsquo;re the cause of more trouble.
+And what good are they? Any jackass gets aboard one and runs it from hell to
+breakfast, blowin&rsquo; his whistle to beat the band and tellin&rsquo; the
+rest of the world to look out for him, because he&rsquo;s comin&rsquo; and
+can&rsquo;t look out for himself! Because he&rsquo;s comin&rsquo;! And
+you&rsquo;ve got to look out, too! Right of way! Common decency! They
+don&rsquo;t know the meanin&rsquo; of it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I felt quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he stumped indignantly
+up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog. And romantic it
+certainly was&mdash;the fog, like the grey shadow of infinite mystery, brooding
+over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes of light and sparkle,
+cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their steeds of wood and steel
+through the heart of the mystery, groping their way blindly through the Unseen,
+and clamouring and clanging in confident speech the while their hearts are
+heavy with incertitude and fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The voice of my companion brought me back to myself with a laugh. I too had
+been groping and floundering, the while I thought I rode clear-eyed through the
+mystery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello! somebody comin&rsquo; our way,&rdquo; he was saying. &ldquo;And
+d&rsquo;ye hear that? He&rsquo;s comin&rsquo; fast. Walking right along. Guess
+he don&rsquo;t hear us yet. Wind&rsquo;s in wrong direction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fresh breeze was blowing right down upon us, and I could hear the whistle
+plainly, off to one side and a little ahead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ferry-boat?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded, then added, &ldquo;Or he wouldn&rsquo;t be keepin&rsquo; up such a
+clip.&rdquo; He gave a short chuckle. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re gettin&rsquo;
+anxious up there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I glanced up. The captain had thrust his head and shoulders out of the
+pilot-house, and was staring intently into the fog as though by sheer force of
+will he could penetrate it. His face was anxious, as was the face of my
+companion, who had stumped over to the rail and was gazing with a like
+intentness in the direction of the invisible danger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then everything happened, and with inconceivable rapidity. The fog seemed to
+break away as though split by a wedge, and the bow of a steamboat emerged,
+trailing fog-wreaths on either side like seaweed on the snout of Leviathan. I
+could see the pilot-house and a white-bearded man leaning partly out of it, on
+his elbows. He was clad in a blue uniform, and I remember noting how trim and
+quiet he was. His quietness, under the circumstances, was terrible. He accepted
+Destiny, marched hand in hand with it, and coolly measured the stroke. As he
+leaned there, he ran a calm and speculative eye over us, as though to determine
+the precise point of the collision, and took no notice whatever when our pilot,
+white with rage, shouted, &ldquo;Now you&rsquo;ve done it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On looking back, I realize that the remark was too obvious to make rejoinder
+necessary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Grab hold of something and hang on,&rdquo; the red-faced man said to me.
+All his bluster had gone, and he seemed to have caught the contagion of
+preternatural calm. &ldquo;And listen to the women scream,&rdquo; he said
+grimly&mdash;almost bitterly, I thought, as though he had been through the
+experience before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vessels came together before I could follow his advice. We must have been
+struck squarely amidships, for I saw nothing, the strange steamboat having
+passed beyond my line of vision. The <i>Martinez</i> heeled over, sharply, and
+there was a crashing and rending of timber. I was thrown flat on the wet deck,
+and before I could scramble to my feet I heard the scream of the women. This it
+was, I am certain,&mdash;the most indescribable of blood-curdling
+sounds,&mdash;that threw me into a panic. I remembered the life-preservers
+stored in the cabin, but was met at the door and swept backward by a wild rush
+of men and women. What happened in the next few minutes I do not recollect,
+though I have a clear remembrance of pulling down life-preservers from the
+overhead racks, while the red-faced man fastened them about the bodies of an
+hysterical group of women. This memory is as distinct and sharp as that of any
+picture I have seen. It is a picture, and I can see it now,&mdash;the jagged
+edges of the hole in the side of the cabin, through which the grey fog swirled
+and eddied; the empty upholstered seats, littered with all the evidences of
+sudden flight, such as packages, hand satchels, umbrellas, and wraps; the stout
+gentleman who had been reading my essay, encased in cork and canvas, the
+magazine still in his hand, and asking me with monotonous insistence if I
+thought there was any danger; the red-faced man, stumping gallantly around on
+his artificial legs and buckling life-preservers on all comers; and finally,
+the screaming bedlam of women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This it was, the screaming of the women, that most tried my nerves. It must
+have tried, too, the nerves of the red-faced man, for I have another picture
+which will never fade from my mind. The stout gentleman is stuffing the
+magazine into his overcoat pocket and looking on curiously. A tangled mass of
+women, with drawn, white faces and open mouths, is shrieking like a chorus of
+lost souls; and the red-faced man, his face now purplish with wrath, and with
+arms extended overhead as in the act of hurling thunderbolts, is shouting,
+&ldquo;Shut up! Oh, shut up!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remember the scene impelled me to sudden laughter, and in the next instant I
+realized I was becoming hysterical myself; for these were women of my own kind,
+like my mother and sisters, with the fear of death upon them and unwilling to
+die. And I remember that the sounds they made reminded me of the squealing of
+pigs under the knife of the butcher, and I was struck with horror at the
+vividness of the analogy. These women, capable of the most sublime emotions, of
+the tenderest sympathies, were open-mouthed and screaming. They wanted to live,
+they were helpless, like rats in a trap, and they screamed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The horror of it drove me out on deck. I was feeling sick and squeamish, and
+sat down on a bench. In a hazy way I saw and heard men rushing and shouting as
+they strove to lower the boats. It was just as I had read descriptions of such
+scenes in books. The tackles jammed. Nothing worked. One boat lowered away with
+the plugs out, filled with women and children and then with water, and
+capsized. Another boat had been lowered by one end, and still hung in the
+tackle by the other end, where it had been abandoned. Nothing was to be seen of
+the strange steamboat which had caused the disaster, though I heard men saying
+that she would undoubtedly send boats to our assistance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I descended to the lower deck. The <i>Martinez</i> was sinking fast, for the
+water was very near. Numbers of the passengers were leaping overboard. Others,
+in the water, were clamouring to be taken aboard again. No one heeded them. A
+cry arose that we were sinking. I was seized by the consequent panic, and went
+over the side in a surge of bodies. How I went over I do not know, though I did
+know, and instantly, why those in the water were so desirous of getting back on
+the steamer. The water was cold&mdash;so cold that it was painful. The pang, as
+I plunged into it, was as quick and sharp as that of fire. It bit to the
+marrow. It was like the grip of death. I gasped with the anguish and shock of
+it, filling my lungs before the life-preserver popped me to the surface. The
+taste of the salt was strong in my mouth, and I was strangling with the acrid
+stuff in my throat and lungs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was the cold that was most distressing. I felt that I could survive but
+a few minutes. People were struggling and floundering in the water about me. I
+could hear them crying out to one another. And I heard, also, the sound of
+oars. Evidently the strange steamboat had lowered its boats. As the time went
+by I marvelled that I was still alive. I had no sensation whatever in my lower
+limbs, while a chilling numbness was wrapping about my heart and creeping into
+it. Small waves, with spiteful foaming crests, continually broke over me and
+into my mouth, sending me off into more strangling paroxysms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing chorus of
+screams in the distance, and knew that the <i>Martinez</i> had gone down.
+Later,&mdash;how much later I have no knowledge,&mdash;I came to myself with a
+start of fear. I was alone. I could hear no calls or cries&mdash;only the sound
+of the waves, made weirdly hollow and reverberant by the fog. A panic in a
+crowd, which partakes of a sort of community of interest, is not so terrible as
+a panic when one is by oneself; and such a panic I now suffered. Whither was I
+drifting? The red-faced man had said that the tide was ebbing through the
+Golden Gate. Was I, then, being carried out to sea? And the life-preserver in
+which I floated? Was it not liable to go to pieces at any moment? I had heard
+of such things being made of paper and hollow rushes which quickly became
+saturated and lost all buoyancy. And I could not swim a stroke. And I was
+alone, floating, apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness. I
+confess that a madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the women had
+shrieked, and beat the water with my numb hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness intervened, of which
+I remember no more than one remembers of troubled and painful sleep. When I
+aroused, it was as after centuries of time; and I saw, almost above me and
+emerging from the fog, the bow of a vessel, and three triangular sails, each
+shrewdly lapping the other and filled with wind. Where the bow cut the water
+there was a great foaming and gurgling, and I seemed directly in its path. I
+tried to cry out, but was too exhausted. The bow plunged down, just missing me
+and sending a swash of water clear over my head. Then the long, black side of
+the vessel began slipping past, so near that I could have touched it with my
+hands. I tried to reach it, in a mad resolve to claw into the wood with my
+nails, but my arms were heavy and lifeless. Again I strove to call out, but
+made no sound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a hollow between
+the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing at the wheel, and of
+another man who seemed to be doing little else than smoke a cigar. I saw the
+smoke issuing from his lips as he slowly turned his head and glanced out over
+the water in my direction. It was a careless, unpremeditated glance, one of
+those haphazard things men do when they have no immediate call to do anything
+in particular, but act because they are alive and must do something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But life and death were in that glance. I could see the vessel being swallowed
+up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the wheel, and the head of the
+other man turning, slowly turning, as his gaze struck the water and casually
+lifted along it toward me. His face wore an absent expression, as of deep
+thought, and I became afraid that if his eyes did light upon me he would
+nevertheless not see me. But his eyes did light upon me, and looked squarely
+into mine; and he did see me, for he sprang to the wheel, thrusting the other
+man aside, and whirled it round and round, hand over hand, at the same time
+shouting orders of some sort. The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its
+former course and leapt almost instantly from view into the fog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the power of my
+will to fight above the suffocating blankness and darkness that was rising
+around me. A little later I heard the stroke of oars, growing nearer and
+nearer, and the calls of a man. When he was very near I heard him crying, in
+vexed fashion, &ldquo;Why in hell don&rsquo;t you sing out?&rdquo; This meant
+me, I thought, and then the blankness and darkness rose over me.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness. Sparkling points
+of light spluttered and shot past me. They were stars, I knew, and flaring
+comets, that peopled my flight among the suns. As I reached the limit of my
+swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, a great gong struck and
+thundered. For an immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid
+centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myself it must
+be. My rhythm grew shorter and shorter. I was jerked from swing to counter
+swing with irritating haste. I could scarcely catch my breath, so fiercely was
+I impelled through the heavens. The gong thundered more frequently and more
+furiously. I grew to await it with a nameless dread. Then it seemed as though I
+were being dragged over rasping sands, white and hot in the sun. This gave
+place to a sense of intolerable anguish. My skin was scorching in the torment
+of fire. The gong clanged and knelled. The sparkling points of light flashed
+past me in an interminable stream, as though the whole sidereal system were
+dropping into the void. I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened my
+eyes. Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me. My mighty rhythm was
+the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea. The terrific gong was a
+frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and clattered with each leap of
+the ship. The rasping, scorching sands were a man&rsquo;s hard hands chafing my
+naked chest. I squirmed under the pain of it, and half lifted my head. My chest
+was raw and red, and I could see tiny blood globules starting through the torn
+and inflamed cuticle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll do, Yonson,&rdquo; one of the men said.
+&ldquo;Carn&rsquo;t yer see you&rsquo;ve bloomin&rsquo; well rubbed all the
+gent&rsquo;s skin orf?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceased
+chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet. The man who had spoken to him was
+clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost effeminate,
+face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with his mother&rsquo;s
+milk. A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirty gunny-sack about his slim
+hips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty ship&rsquo;s galley in which I
+found myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; &rsquo;ow yer feelin&rsquo; now, sir?&rdquo; he asked, with
+the subservient smirk which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped by Yonson to
+my feet. The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was grating horribly on my
+nerves. I could not collect my thoughts. Clutching the woodwork of the galley
+for support,&mdash;and I confess the grease with which it was scummed put my
+teeth on edge,&mdash;I reached across a hot cooking-range to the offending
+utensil, unhooked it, and wedged it securely into the coal-box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my hand a steaming
+mug with an &ldquo;&rsquo;Ere, this&rsquo;ll do yer good.&rdquo; It was a
+nauseous mess,&mdash;ship&rsquo;s coffee,&mdash;but the heat of it was
+revivifying. Between gulps of the molten stuff I glanced down at my raw and
+bleeding chest and turned to the Scandinavian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you, Mr. Yonson,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;but don&rsquo;t you think
+your measures were rather heroic?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than of my words,
+that he held up his palm for inspection. It was remarkably calloused. I passed
+my hand over the horny projections, and my teeth went on edge once more from
+the horrible rasping sensation produced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My name is Johnson, not Yonson,&rdquo; he said, in very good, though
+slow, English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was mild protest in his pale blue eyes, and withal a timid frankness and
+manliness that quite won me to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you, Mr. Johnson,&rdquo; I corrected, and reached out my hand for
+his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He hesitated, awkward and bashful, shifted his weight from one leg to the
+other, then blunderingly gripped my hand in a hearty shake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you any dry clothes I may put on?&rdquo; I asked the cook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; he answered, with cheerful alacrity. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll
+run down an&rsquo; tyke a look over my kit, if you&rsquo;ve no objections, sir,
+to wearin&rsquo; my things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He dived out of the galley door, or glided rather, with a swiftness and
+smoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like as oily. In
+fact, this oiliness, or greasiness, as I was later to learn, was probably the
+most salient expression of his personality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And where am I?&rdquo; I asked Johnson, whom I took, and rightly, to be
+one of the sailors. &ldquo;What vessel is this, and where is she bound?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Off the Farallones, heading about sou-west,&rdquo; he answered, slowly
+and methodically, as though groping for his best English, and rigidly observing
+the order of my queries. &ldquo;The schooner <i>Ghost</i>, bound seal-hunting
+to Japan.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And who is the captain? I must see him as soon as I am dressed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson looked puzzled and embarrassed. He hesitated while he groped in his
+vocabulary and framed a complete answer. &ldquo;The cap&rsquo;n is Wolf Larsen,
+or so men call him. I never heard his other name. But you better speak soft
+with him. He is mad this morning. The mate&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he did not finish. The cook had glided in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better sling yer &rsquo;ook out of &rsquo;ere, Yonson,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;The old man&rsquo;ll be wantin&rsquo; yer on deck, an&rsquo; this
+ayn&rsquo;t no d&rsquo;y to fall foul of &rsquo;im.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson turned obediently to the door, at the same time, over the cook&rsquo;s
+shoulder, favouring me with an amazingly solemn and portentous wink as though
+to emphasize his interrupted remark and the need for me to be soft-spoken with
+the captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hanging over the cook&rsquo;s arm was a loose and crumpled array of
+evil-looking and sour-smelling garments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They was put aw&rsquo;y wet, sir,&rdquo; he vouchsafed explanation.
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ll &rsquo;ave to make them do till I dry yours out by the
+fire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clinging to the woodwork, staggering with the roll of the ship, and aided by
+the cook, I managed to slip into a rough woollen undershirt. On the instant my
+flesh was creeping and crawling from the harsh contact. He noticed my
+involuntary twitching and grimacing, and smirked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I only &rsquo;ope yer don&rsquo;t ever &rsquo;ave to get used to such as
+that in this life, &rsquo;cos you&rsquo;ve got a bloomin&rsquo; soft skin, that
+you &rsquo;ave, more like a lydy&rsquo;s than any I know of. I was
+bloomin&rsquo; well sure you was a gentleman as soon as I set eyes on
+yer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had taken a dislike to him at first, and as he helped to dress me this
+dislike increased. There was something repulsive about his touch. I shrank from
+his hand; my flesh revolted. And between this and the smells arising from
+various pots boiling and bubbling on the galley fire, I was in haste to get out
+into the fresh air. Further, there was the need of seeing the captain about
+what arrangements could be made for getting me ashore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A cheap cotton shirt, with frayed collar and a bosom discoloured with what I
+took to be ancient blood-stains, was put on me amid a running and apologetic
+fire of comment. A pair of workman&rsquo;s brogans encased my feet, and for
+trousers I was furnished with a pair of pale blue, washed-out overalls, one leg
+of which was fully ten inches shorter than the other. The abbreviated leg
+looked as though the devil had there clutched for the Cockney&rsquo;s soul and
+missed the shadow for the substance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And whom have I to thank for this kindness?&rdquo; I asked, when I stood
+completely arrayed, a tiny boy&rsquo;s cap on my head, and for coat a dirty,
+striped cotton jacket which ended at the small of my back and the sleeves of
+which reached just below my elbows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cook drew himself up in a smugly humble fashion, a deprecating smirk on his
+face. Out of my experience with stewards on the Atlantic liners at the end of
+the voyage, I could have sworn he was waiting for his tip. From my fuller
+knowledge of the creature I now know that the posture was unconscious. An
+hereditary servility, no doubt, was responsible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mugridge, sir,&rdquo; he fawned, his effeminate features running into a
+greasy smile. &ldquo;Thomas Mugridge, sir, an&rsquo; at yer service.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, Thomas,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I shall not forget
+you&mdash;when my clothes are dry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A soft light suffused his face and his eyes glistened, as though somewhere in
+the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and stirred with dim
+memories of tips received in former lives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you, sir,&rdquo; he said, very gratefully and very humbly indeed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and I stepped out
+on deck. I was still weak from my prolonged immersion. A puff of wind caught
+me,&mdash;and I staggered across the moving deck to a corner of the cabin, to
+which I clung for support. The schooner, heeled over far out from the
+perpendicular, was bowing and plunging into the long Pacific roll. If she were
+heading south-west as Johnson had said, the wind, then, I calculated, was
+blowing nearly from the south. The fog was gone, and in its place the sun
+sparkled crisply on the surface of the water. I turned to the east, where I
+knew California must lie, but could see nothing save low-lying
+fog-banks&mdash;the same fog, doubtless, that had brought about the disaster to
+the <i>Martinez</i> and placed me in my present situation. To the north, and
+not far away, a group of naked rocks thrust above the sea, on one of which I
+could distinguish a lighthouse. In the south-west, and almost in our course, I
+saw the pyramidal loom of some vessel&rsquo;s sails.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more immediate
+surroundings. My first thought was that a man who had come through a collision
+and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than I received. Beyond
+a sailor at the wheel who stared curiously across the top of the cabin, I
+attracted no notice whatever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships. There, on a hatch,
+a large man was lying on his back. He was fully clothed, though his shirt was
+ripped open in front. Nothing was to be seen of his chest, however, for it was
+covered with a mass of black hair, in appearance like the furry coat of a dog.
+His face and neck were hidden beneath a black beard, intershot with grey, which
+would have been stiff and bushy had it not been limp and draggled and dripping
+with water. His eyes were closed, and he was apparently unconscious; but his
+mouth was wide open, his breast, heaving as though from suffocation as he
+laboured noisily for breath. A sailor, from time to time and quite
+methodically, as a matter of routine, dropped a canvas bucket into the ocean at
+the end of a rope, hauled it in hand under hand, and sluiced its contents over
+the prostrate man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely chewing the end
+of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had rescued me from the sea. His
+height was probably five feet ten inches, or ten and a half; but my first
+impression, or feel of the man, was not of this, but of his strength. And yet,
+while he was of massive build, with broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not
+characterize his strength as massive. It was what might be termed a sinewy,
+knotty strength, of the kind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but which, in
+him, because of his heavy build, partook more of the enlarged gorilla order.
+Not that in appearance he seemed in the least gorilla-like. What I am striving
+to express is this strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physical
+semblance. It was a strength we are wont to associate with things primitive,
+with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine our tree-dwelling prototypes to
+have been&mdash;a strength savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essence of
+life in that it is the potency of motion, the elemental stuff itself out of
+which the many forms of life have been moulded; in short, that which writhes in
+the body of a snake when the head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is
+dead, or which lingers in the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and
+quivers from the prod of a finger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who paced up and
+down. He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet struck the deck squarely and
+with surety; every movement of a muscle, from the heave of the shoulders to the
+tightening of the lips about the cigar, was decisive, and seemed to come out of
+a strength that was excessive and overwhelming. In fact, though this strength
+pervaded every action of his, it seemed but the advertisement of a greater
+strength that lurked within, that lay dormant and no more than stirred from
+time to time, but which might arouse, at any moment, terrible and compelling,
+like the rage of a lion or the wrath of a storm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned encouragingly at me,
+at the same time jerking his thumb in the direction of the man who paced up and
+down by the hatchway. Thus I was given to understand that he was the captain,
+the &ldquo;Old Man,&rdquo; in the cook&rsquo;s vernacular, the individual whom
+I must interview and put to the trouble of somehow getting me ashore. I had
+half started forward, to get over with what I was certain would be a stormy
+five minutes, when a more violent suffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate
+person who was lying on his back. He wrenched and writhed about convulsively.
+The chin, with the damp black beard, pointed higher in the air as the back
+muscles stiffened and the chest swelled in an unconscious and instinctive
+effort to get more air. Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I knew that the
+skin was taking on a purplish hue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and gazed down at
+the dying man. So fierce had this final struggle become that the sailor paused
+in the act of flinging more water over him and stared curiously, the canvas
+bucket partly tilted and dripping its contents to the deck. The dying man beat
+a tattoo on the hatch with his heels, straightened out his legs, and stiffened
+in one great tense effort, and rolled his head from side to side. Then the
+muscles relaxed, the head stopped rolling, and a sigh, as of profound relief,
+floated upward from his lips. The jaw dropped, the upper lip lifted, and two
+rows of tobacco-discoloured teeth appeared. It seemed as though his features
+had frozen into a diabolical grin at the world he had left and outwitted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then a most surprising thing occurred. The captain broke loose upon the dead
+man like a thunderclap. Oaths rolled from his lips in a continuous stream. And
+they were not namby-pamby oaths, or mere expressions of indecency. Each word
+was a blasphemy, and there were many words. They crisped and crackled like
+electric sparks. I had never heard anything like it in my life, nor could I
+have conceived it possible. With a turn for literary expression myself, and a
+penchant for forcible figures and phrases, I appreciated, as no other listener,
+I dare say, the peculiar vividness and strength and absolute blasphemy of his
+metaphors. The cause of it all, as near as I could make out, was that the man,
+who was mate, had gone on a debauch before leaving San Francisco, and then had
+the poor taste to die at the beginning of the voyage and leave Wolf Larsen
+short-handed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It should be unnecessary to state, at least to my friends, that I was shocked.
+Oaths and vile language of any sort had always been repellent to me. I felt a
+wilting sensation, a sinking at the heart, and, I might just as well say, a
+giddiness. To me, death had always been invested with solemnity and dignity. It
+had been peaceful in its occurrence, sacred in its ceremonial. But death in its
+more sordid and terrible aspects was a thing with which I had been unacquainted
+till now. As I say, while I appreciated the power of the terrific denunciation
+that swept out of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked. The
+scorching torrent was enough to wither the face of the corpse. I should not
+have been surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled and flared
+up in smoke and flame. But the dead man was unconcerned. He continued to grin
+with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery and defiance. He was master of
+the situation.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen ceased swearing as suddenly as he had begun. He relighted his cigar
+and glanced around. His eyes chanced upon the cook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Cooky?&rdquo; he began, with a suaveness that was cold and of the
+temper of steel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; the cook eagerly interpolated, with appeasing and
+apologetic servility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think you&rsquo;ve stretched that neck of yours just
+about enough? It&rsquo;s unhealthy, you know. The mate&rsquo;s gone, so I
+can&rsquo;t afford to lose you too. You must be very, very careful of your
+health, Cooky. Understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His last word, in striking contrast with the smoothness of his previous
+utterance, snapped like the lash of a whip. The cook quailed under it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; was the meek reply, as the offending head disappeared
+into the galley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this sweeping rebuke, which the cook had only pointed, the rest of the crew
+became uninterested and fell to work at one task or another. A number of men,
+however, who were lounging about a companion-way between the galley and hatch,
+and who did not seem to be sailors, continued talking in low tones with one
+another. These, I afterward learned, were the hunters, the men who shot the
+seals, and a very superior breed to common sailor-folk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Johansen!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called out. A sailor stepped forward
+obediently. &ldquo;Get your palm and needle and sew the beggar up. You&rsquo;ll
+find some old canvas in the sail-locker. Make it do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;ll I put on his feet, sir?&rdquo; the man asked, after the
+customary &ldquo;Ay, ay, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll see to that,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen answered, and elevated his
+voice in a call of &ldquo;Cooky!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thomas Mugridge popped out of his galley like a jack-in-the-box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go below and fill a sack with coal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any of you fellows got a Bible or Prayer-book?&rdquo; was the
+captain&rsquo;s next demand, this time of the hunters lounging about the
+companion-way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They shook their heads, and some one made a jocular remark which I did not
+catch, but which raised a general laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen made the same demand of the sailors. Bibles and Prayer-books seemed
+scarce articles, but one of the men volunteered to pursue the quest amongst the
+watch below, returning in a minute with the information that there was none.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The captain shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;Then we&rsquo;ll drop him over
+without any palavering, unless our clerical-looking castaway has the burial
+service at sea by heart.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time he had swung fully around and was facing me. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a
+preacher, aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hunters,&mdash;there were six of them,&mdash;to a man, turned and regarded
+me. I was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow. A laugh went up at my
+appearance,&mdash;a laugh that was not lessened or softened by the dead man
+stretched and grinning on the deck before us; a laugh that was as rough and
+harsh and frank as the sea itself; that arose out of coarse feelings and
+blunted sensibilities, from natures that knew neither courtesy nor gentleness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his grey eyes lighted with a slight glint of
+amusement; and in that moment, having stepped forward quite close to him, I
+received my first impression of the man himself, of the man as apart from his
+body, and from the torrent of blasphemy I had heard him spew forth. The face,
+with large features and strong lines, of the square order, yet well filled out,
+was apparently massive at first sight; but again, as with the body, the
+massiveness seemed to vanish, and a conviction to grow of a tremendous and
+excessive mental or spiritual strength that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps
+of his being. The jaw, the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and
+swelling heavily above the eyes,&mdash;these, while strong in themselves,
+unusually strong, seemed to speak an immense vigour or virility of spirit that
+lay behind and beyond and out of sight. There was no sounding such a spirit, no
+measuring, no determining of metes and bounds, nor neatly classifying in some
+pigeon-hole with others of similar type.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The eyes&mdash;and it was my destiny to know them well&mdash;were large and
+handsome, wide apart as the true artist&rsquo;s are wide, sheltering under a
+heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows. The eyes themselves were of
+that baffling protean grey which is never twice the same; which runs through
+many shades and colourings like intershot silk in sunshine; which is grey, dark
+and light, and greenish-grey, and sometimes of the clear azure of the deep sea.
+They were eyes that masked the soul with a thousand guises, and that sometimes
+opened, at rare moments, and allowed it to rush up as though it were about to
+fare forth nakedly into the world on some wonderful adventure,&mdash;eyes that
+could brood with the hopeless sombreness of leaden skies; that could snap and
+crackle points of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that
+could grow chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm and
+soften and be all a-dance with love-lights, intense and masculine, luring and
+compelling, which at the same time fascinate and dominate women till they
+surrender in a gladness of joy and of relief and sacrifice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to return. I told him that, unhappily for the burial service, I was not a
+preacher, when he sharply demanded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you do for a living?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had I ever
+canvassed it. I was quite taken aback, and before I could find myself had
+sillily stammered, &ldquo;I&mdash;I am a gentleman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His lip curled in a swift sneer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have worked, I do work,&rdquo; I cried impetuously, as though he were
+my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of my
+arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For your living?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I was quite
+beside myself&mdash;&ldquo;rattled,&rdquo; as Furuseth would have termed it,
+like a quaking child before a stern school-master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who feeds you?&rdquo; was his next question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have an income,&rdquo; I answered stoutly, and could have bitten my
+tongue the next instant. &ldquo;All of which, you will pardon my observing, has
+nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to see you about.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he disregarded my protest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who earned it? Eh? I thought so. Your father. You stand on dead
+men&rsquo;s legs. You&rsquo;ve never had any of your own. You couldn&rsquo;t
+walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly for three
+meals. Let me see your hand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His tremendous, dormant strength must have stirred, swiftly and accurately, or
+I must have slept a moment, for before I knew it he had stepped two paces
+forward, gripped my right hand in his, and held it up for inspection. I tried
+to withdraw it, but his fingers tightened, without visible effort, till I
+thought mine would be crushed. It is hard to maintain one&rsquo;s dignity under
+such circumstances. I could not squirm or struggle like a schoolboy. Nor could
+I attack such a creature who had but to twist my arm to break it. Nothing
+remained but to stand still and accept the indignity. I had time to notice that
+the pockets of the dead man had been emptied on the deck, and that his body and
+his grin had been wrapped from view in canvas, the folds of which the sailor,
+Johansen, was sewing together with coarse white twine, shoving the needle
+through with a leather contrivance fitted on the palm of his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen dropped my hand with a flirt of disdain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dead men&rsquo;s hands have kept it soft. Good for little else than
+dish-washing and scullion work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish to be put ashore,&rdquo; I said firmly, for I now had myself in
+control. &ldquo;I shall pay you whatever you judge your delay and trouble to be
+worth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at me curiously. Mockery shone in his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have a counter proposition to make, and for the good of your soul. My
+mate&rsquo;s gone, and there&rsquo;ll be a lot of promotion. A sailor comes aft
+to take mate&rsquo;s place, cabin-boy goes for&rsquo;ard to take sailor&rsquo;s
+place, and you take the cabin-boy&rsquo;s place, sign the articles for the
+cruise, twenty dollars per month and found. Now what do you say? And mind you,
+it&rsquo;s for your own soul&rsquo;s sake. It will be the making of you. You
+might learn in time to stand on your own legs, and perhaps to toddle along a
+bit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I took no notice. The sails of the vessel I had seen off to the south-west
+had grown larger and plainer. They were of the same schooner-rig as the
+<i>Ghost</i>, though the hull itself, I could see, was smaller. She was a
+pretty sight, leaping and flying toward us, and evidently bound to pass at
+close range. The wind had been momentarily increasing, and the sun, after a few
+angry gleams, had disappeared. The sea had turned a dull leaden grey and grown
+rougher, and was now tossing foaming whitecaps to the sky. We were travelling
+faster, and heeled farther over. Once, in a gust, the rail dipped under the
+sea, and the decks on that side were for the moment awash with water that made
+a couple of the hunters hastily lift their feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That vessel will soon be passing us,&rdquo; I said, after a
+moment&rsquo;s pause. &ldquo;As she is going in the opposite direction, she is
+very probably bound for San Francisco.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very probably,&rdquo; was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s answer, as he turned
+partly away from me and cried out, &ldquo;Cooky! Oh, Cooky!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Cockney popped out of the galley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s that boy? Tell him I want him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir;&rdquo; and Thomas Mugridge fled swiftly aft and disappeared
+down another companion-way near the wheel. A moment later he emerged, a
+heavy-set young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, with a glowering, villainous
+countenance, trailing at his heels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Ere &rsquo;e is, sir,&rdquo; the cook said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Wolf Larsen ignored that worthy, turning at once to the cabin-boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s your name, boy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;George Leach, sir,&rdquo; came the sullen answer, and the boy&rsquo;s
+bearing showed clearly that he divined the reason for which he had been
+summoned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not an Irish name,&rdquo; the captain snapped sharply.
+&ldquo;O&rsquo;Toole or McCarthy would suit your mug a damn sight better.
+Unless, very likely, there&rsquo;s an Irishman in your mother&rsquo;s
+woodpile.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw the young fellow&rsquo;s hands clench at the insult, and the blood crawl
+scarlet up his neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But let that go,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen continued. &ldquo;You may have very
+good reasons for forgetting your name, and I&rsquo;ll like you none the worse
+for it as long as you toe the mark. Telegraph Hill, of course, is your port of
+entry. It sticks out all over your mug. Tough as they make them and twice as
+nasty. I know the kind. Well, you can make up your mind to have it taken out of
+you on this craft. Understand? Who shipped you, anyway?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;McCready and Swanson.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen thundered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;McCready and Swanson, sir,&rdquo; the boy corrected, his eyes burning
+with a bitter light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who got the advance money?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They did, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought as much. And damned glad you were to let them have it.
+Couldn&rsquo;t make yourself scarce too quick, with several gentlemen you may
+have heard of looking for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy metamorphosed into a savage on the instant. His body bunched together
+as though for a spring, and his face became as an infuriated beast&rsquo;s as
+he snarled, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A what?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen asked, a peculiar softness in his voice, as
+though he were overwhelmingly curious to hear the unspoken word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy hesitated, then mastered his temper. &ldquo;Nothin&rsquo;, sir. I take
+it back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you have shown me I was right.&rdquo; This with a gratified smile.
+&ldquo;How old are you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just turned sixteen, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A lie. You&rsquo;ll never see eighteen again. Big for your age at that,
+with muscles like a horse. Pack up your kit and go for&rsquo;ard into the
+fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle. You&rsquo;re a boat-puller now. You&rsquo;re promoted;
+see?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without waiting for the boy&rsquo;s acceptance, the captain turned to the
+sailor who had just finished the gruesome task of sewing up the corpse.
+&ldquo;Johansen, do you know anything about navigation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, never mind; you&rsquo;re mate just the same. Get your traps aft
+into the mate&rsquo;s berth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ay, ay, sir,&rdquo; was the cheery response, as Johansen started
+forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the erstwhile cabin-boy had not moved. &ldquo;What are you
+waiting for?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t sign for boat-puller, sir,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;I
+signed for cabin-boy. An&rsquo; I don&rsquo;t want no boat-pullin&rsquo; in
+mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pack up and go for&rsquo;ard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This time Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s command was thrillingly imperative. The boy
+glowered sullenly, but refused to move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came another stirring of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s tremendous strength. It was
+utterly unexpected, and it was over and done with between the ticks of two
+seconds. He had sprung fully six feet across the deck and driven his fist into
+the other&rsquo;s stomach. At the same moment, as though I had been struck
+myself, I felt a sickening shock in the pit of my stomach. I instance this to
+show the sensitiveness of my nervous organization at the time, and how unused I
+was to spectacles of brutality. The cabin-boy&mdash;and he weighed one hundred
+and sixty-five at the very least&mdash;crumpled up. His body wrapped limply
+about the fist like a wet rag about a stick. He lifted into the air, described
+a short curve, and struck the deck alongside the corpse on his head and
+shoulders, where he lay and writhed about in agony.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; Larsen asked of me. &ldquo;Have you made up your
+mind?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had glanced occasionally at the approaching schooner, and it was now almost
+abreast of us and not more than a couple of hundred yards away. It was a very
+trim and neat little craft. I could see a large, black number on one of its
+sails, and I had seen pictures of pilot-boats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What vessel is that?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The pilot-boat <i>Lady Mine</i>,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen answered grimly.
+&ldquo;Got rid of her pilots and running into San Francisco. She&rsquo;ll be
+there in five or six hours with this wind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you please signal it, then, so that I may be put ashore.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sorry, but I&rsquo;ve lost the signal book overboard,&rdquo; he
+remarked, and the group of hunters grinned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I debated a moment, looking him squarely in the eyes. I had seen the frightful
+treatment of the cabin-boy, and knew that I should very probably receive the
+same, if not worse. As I say, I debated with myself, and then I did what I
+consider the bravest act of my life. I ran to the side, waving my arms and
+shouting:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Lady Mine</i> ahoy! Take me ashore! A thousand dollars if you take me
+ashore!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I waited, watching two men who stood by the wheel, one of them steering. The
+other was lifting a megaphone to his lips. I did not turn my head, though I
+expected every moment a killing blow from the human brute behind me. At last,
+after what seemed centuries, unable longer to stand the strain, I looked
+around. He had not moved. He was standing in the same position, swaying easily
+to the roll of the ship and lighting a fresh cigar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the matter? Anything wrong?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the cry from the <i>Lady Mine</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes!&rdquo; I shouted, at the top of my lungs. &ldquo;Life or death! One
+thousand dollars if you take me ashore!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too much &rsquo;Frisco tanglefoot for the health of my crew!&rdquo; Wolf
+Larsen shouted after. &ldquo;This one&rdquo;&mdash;indicating me with his
+thumb&mdash;&ldquo;fancies sea-serpents and monkeys just now!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man on the <i>Lady Mine</i> laughed back through the megaphone. The
+pilot-boat plunged past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give him hell for me!&rdquo; came a final cry, and the two men waved
+their arms in farewell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I leaned despairingly over the rail, watching the trim little schooner swiftly
+increasing the bleak sweep of ocean between us. And she would probably be in
+San Francisco in five or six hours! My head seemed bursting. There was an ache
+in my throat as though my heart were up in it. A curling wave struck the side
+and splashed salt spray on my lips. The wind puffed strongly, and the
+<i>Ghost</i> heeled far over, burying her lee rail. I could hear the water
+rushing down upon the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I turned around, a moment later, I saw the cabin-boy staggering to his
+feet. His face was ghastly white, twitching with suppressed pain. He looked
+very sick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Leach, are you going for&rsquo;ard?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; came the answer of a spirit cowed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you?&rdquo; I was asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give you a thousand&mdash;&rdquo; I began, but was
+interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stow that! Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy? Or do I
+have to take you in hand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was I to do? To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps, would not help
+my case. I looked steadily into the cruel grey eyes. They might have been
+granite for all the light and warmth of a human soul they contained. One may
+see the soul stir in some men&rsquo;s eyes, but his were bleak, and cold, and
+grey as the sea itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say &lsquo;yes, sir.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; I corrected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Van Weyden, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First name?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Humphrey, sir; Humphrey Van Weyden.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Age?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thirty-five, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll do. Go to the cook and learn your duties.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary servitude to Wolf
+Larsen. He was stronger than I, that was all. But it was very unreal at the
+time. It is no less unreal now that I look back upon it. It will always be to
+me a monstrous, inconceivable thing, a horrible nightmare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hold on, don&rsquo;t go yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Johansen, call all hands. Now that we&rsquo;ve everything cleaned up,
+we&rsquo;ll have the funeral and get the decks cleared of useless
+lumber.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors, under the
+captain&rsquo;s direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse upon a hatch-cover.
+On either side the deck, against the rail and bottoms up, were lashed a number
+of small boats. Several men picked up the hatch-cover with its ghastly freight,
+carried it to the lee side, and rested it on the boats, the feet pointing
+overboard. To the feet was attached the sack of coal which the cook had
+fetched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and awe-inspiring
+event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial at any rate. One of the
+hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his mates called &ldquo;Smoke,&rdquo; was
+telling stories, liberally intersprinkled with oaths and obscenities; and every
+minute or so the group of hunters gave mouth to a laughter that sounded to me
+like a wolf-chorus or the barking of hell-hounds. The sailors trooped noisily
+aft, some of the watch below rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and talked in
+low tones together. There was an ominous and worried expression on their faces.
+It was evident that they did not like the outlook of a voyage under such a
+captain and begun so inauspiciously. From time to time they stole glances at
+Wolf Larsen, and I could see that they were apprehensive of the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stepped up to the hatch-cover, and all caps came off. I ran my eyes over
+them&mdash;twenty men all told; twenty-two including the man at the wheel and
+myself. I was pardonably curious in my survey, for it appeared my fate to be
+pent up with them on this miniature floating world for I knew not how many
+weeks or months. The sailors, in the main, were English and Scandinavian, and
+their faces seemed of the heavy, stolid order. The hunters, on the other hand,
+had stronger and more diversified faces, with hard lines and the marks of the
+free play of passions. Strange to say, and I noted it at once, Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s features showed no such evil stamp. There seemed nothing vicious
+in them. True, there were lines, but they were the lines of decision and
+firmness. It seemed, rather, a frank and open countenance, which frankness or
+openness was enhanced by the fact that he was smooth-shaven. I could hardly
+believe&mdash;until the next incident occurred&mdash;that it was the face of a
+man who could behave as he had behaved to the cabin-boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment, as he opened his mouth to speak, puff after puff struck the
+schooner and pressed her side under. The wind shrieked a wild song through the
+rigging. Some of the hunters glanced anxiously aloft. The lee rail, where the
+dead man lay, was buried in the sea, and as the schooner lifted and righted the
+water swept across the deck wetting us above our shoe-tops. A shower of rain
+drove down upon us, each drop stinging like a hailstone. As it passed, Wolf
+Larsen began to speak, the bare-headed men swaying in unison, to the heave and
+lunge of the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I only remember one part of the service,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and that
+is, &lsquo;And the body shall be cast into the sea.&rsquo; So cast it
+in.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ceased speaking. The men holding the hatch-cover seemed perplexed, puzzled
+no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony. He burst upon them in a fury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lift up that end there, damn you! What the hell&rsquo;s the matter with
+you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and, like a dog
+flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the sea. The coal at his feet
+dragged him down. He was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Johansen,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate, &ldquo;keep
+all hands on deck now they&rsquo;re here. Get in the topsails and jibs and make
+a good job of it. We&rsquo;re in for a sou&rsquo;-easter. Better reef the jib
+and mainsail too, while you&rsquo;re about it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders and the men
+pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts&mdash;all naturally confusing to a
+landsman such as myself. But it was the heartlessness of it that especially
+struck me. The dead man was an episode that was past, an incident that was
+dropped, in a canvas covering with a sack of coal, while the ship sped along
+and her work went on. Nobody had been affected. The hunters were laughing at a
+fresh story of Smoke&rsquo;s; the men pulling and hauling, and two of them
+climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was studying the clouding sky to windward; and the
+dead man, dying obscenely, buried sordidly, and sinking down, down&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness,
+rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate
+thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime. I held on to the weather
+rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across the desolate foaming waves to
+the low-lying fog-banks that hid San Francisco and the California coast.
+Rain-squalls were driving in between, and I could scarcely see the fog. And
+this strange vessel, with its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and
+ever leaping up and out, was heading away into the south-west, into the great
+and lonely Pacific expanse.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner <i>Ghost</i>, as I strove to
+fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and pain. The cook, who
+was called &ldquo;the doctor&rdquo; by the crew, &ldquo;Tommy&rdquo; by the
+hunters, and &ldquo;Cooky&rdquo; by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person. The
+difference worked in my status brought about a corresponding difference in
+treatment from him. Servile and fawning as he had been before, he was now as
+domineering and bellicose. In truth, I was no longer the fine gentleman with a
+skin soft as a &ldquo;lydy&rsquo;s,&rdquo; but only an ordinary and very
+worthless cabin-boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his behaviour
+and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties. Besides my work in
+the cabin, with its four small state-rooms, I was supposed to be his assistant
+in the galley, and my colossal ignorance concerning such things as peeling
+potatoes or washing greasy pots was a source of unending and sarcastic wonder
+to him. He refused to take into consideration what I was, or, rather, what my
+life and the things I was accustomed to had been. This was part of the attitude
+he chose to adopt toward me; and I confess, ere the day was done, that I hated
+him with more lively feelings than I had ever hated any one in my life before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that the
+<i>Ghost</i>, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn till
+later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an
+&ldquo;&rsquo;owlin&rsquo; sou&rsquo;-easter.&rdquo; At half-past five, under
+his directions, I set the table in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in
+place, and then carried the tea and cooked food down from the galley. In this
+connection I cannot forbear relating my first experience with a boarding sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look sharp or you&rsquo;ll get doused,&rdquo; was Mr. Mugridge&rsquo;s
+parting injunction, as I left the galley with a big tea-pot in one hand, and in
+the hollow of the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked bread. One of the
+hunters, a tall, loose-jointed chap named Henderson, was going aft at the time
+from the steerage (the name the hunters facetiously gave their midships
+sleeping quarters) to the cabin. Wolf Larsen was on the poop, smoking his
+everlasting cigar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Ere she comes. Sling yer &rsquo;ook!&rdquo; the cook cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley door slide
+shut with a bang. Then I saw Henderson leaping like a madman for the main
+rigging, up which he shot, on the inside, till he was many feet higher than my
+head. Also I saw a great wave, curling and foaming, poised far above the rail.
+I was directly under it. My mind did not work quickly, everything was so new
+and strange. I grasped that I was in danger, but that was all. I stood still,
+in trepidation. Then Wolf Larsen shouted from the poop:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Grab hold something, you&mdash;you Hump!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was too late. I sprang toward the rigging, to which I might have clung,
+and was met by the descending wall of water. What happened after that was very
+confusing. I was beneath the water, suffocating and drowning. My feet were out
+from under me, and I was turning over and over and being swept along I knew not
+where. Several times I collided against hard objects, once striking my right
+knee a terrible blow. Then the flood seemed suddenly to subside and I was
+breathing the good air again. I had been swept against the galley and around
+the steerage companion-way from the weather side into the lee scuppers. The
+pain from my hurt knee was agonizing. I could not put my weight on it, or, at
+least, I thought I could not put my weight on it; and I felt sure the leg was
+broken. But the cook was after me, shouting through the lee galley door:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Ere, you! Don&rsquo;t tyke all night about it! Where&rsquo;s the
+pot? Lost overboard? Serve you bloody well right if yer neck was broke!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I managed to struggle to my feet. The great tea-pot was still in my hand. I
+limped to the galley and handed it to him. But he was consumed with
+indignation, real or feigned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gawd blime me if you ayn&rsquo;t a slob. Wot &rsquo;re you good for
+anyw&rsquo;y, I&rsquo;d like to know? Eh? Wot &rsquo;re you good for
+any&rsquo;wy? Cawn&rsquo;t even carry a bit of tea aft without losin&rsquo; it.
+Now I&rsquo;ll &rsquo;ave to boil some more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; wot &rsquo;re you snifflin&rsquo; about?&rdquo; he burst out
+at me, with renewed rage. &ldquo;&rsquo;Cos you&rsquo;ve &rsquo;urt yer pore
+little leg, pore little mamma&rsquo;s darlin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was not sniffling, though my face might well have been drawn and twitching
+from the pain. But I called up all my resolution, set my teeth, and hobbled
+back and forth from galley to cabin and cabin to galley without further mishap.
+Two things I had acquired by my accident: an injured knee-cap that went
+undressed and from which I suffered for weary months, and the name of
+&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; which Wolf Larsen had called me from the poop. Thereafter,
+fore and aft, I was known by no other name, until the term became a part of my
+thought-processes and I identified it with myself, thought of myself as Hump,
+as though Hump were I and had always been I.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was no easy task, waiting on the cabin table, where sat Wolf Larsen,
+Johansen, and the six hunters. The cabin was small, to begin with, and to move
+around, as I was compelled to, was not made easier by the schooner&rsquo;s
+violent pitching and wallowing. But what struck me most forcibly was the total
+lack of sympathy on the part of the men whom I served. I could feel my knee
+through my clothes, swelling, and swelling, and I was sick and faint from the
+pain of it. I could catch glimpses of my face, white and ghastly, distorted
+with pain, in the cabin mirror. All the men must have seen my condition, but
+not one spoke or took notice of me, till I was almost grateful to Wolf Larsen,
+later on (I was washing the dishes), when he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let a little thing like that bother you. You&rsquo;ll get
+used to such things in time. It may cripple you some, but all the same
+you&rsquo;ll be learning to walk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what you call a paradox, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; he added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He seemed pleased when I nodded my head with the customary &ldquo;Yes,
+sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you know a bit about literary things? Eh? Good. I&rsquo;ll
+have some talks with you some time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, taking no further account of me, he turned his back and went up on
+deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was sent to sleep
+in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk. I was glad to get out of the
+detestable presence of the cook and to be off my feet. To my surprise, my
+clothes had dried on me and there seemed no indications of catching cold,
+either from the last soaking or from the prolonged soaking from the foundering
+of the <i>Martinez</i>. Under ordinary circumstances, after all that I had
+undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a trained nurse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But my knee was bothering me terribly. As well as I could make out, the kneecap
+seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the swelling. As I sat in my bunk
+examining it (the six hunters were all in the steerage, smoking and talking in
+loud voices), Henderson took a passing glance at it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Looks nasty,&rdquo; he commented. &ldquo;Tie a rag around it, and
+it&rsquo;ll be all right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad of my back,
+with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict injunctions to do nothing but
+rest. But I must do these men justice. Callous as they were to my suffering,
+they were equally callous to their own when anything befell them. And this was
+due, I believe, first, to habit; and second, to the fact that they were less
+sensitively organized. I really believe that a finely-organized, high-strung
+man would suffer twice and thrice as much as they from a like injury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tired as I was,&mdash;exhausted, in fact,&mdash;I was prevented from sleeping
+by the pain in my knee. It was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud. At
+home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new and
+elemental environment seemed to call for a savage repression. Like the savage,
+the attitude of these men was stoical in great things, childish in little
+things. I remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the
+hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did not even
+murmur or change the expression on his face. Yet I have seen the same man, time
+and again, fly into the most outrageous passion over a trifle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and cursing like
+a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another hunter as to whether a
+seal pup knew instinctively how to swim. He held that it did, that it could
+swim the moment it was born. The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking
+fellow with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup
+was born on the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its
+mother was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their
+nestlings how to fly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay in
+their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists. But they were
+supremely interested, for every little while they ardently took sides, and
+sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices surged back and forth in
+waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined space. Childish and
+immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more
+childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at
+all. Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation. They
+proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the
+proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the
+opposing man&rsquo;s judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history.
+Rebuttal was precisely similar. I have related this in order to show the mental
+calibre of the men with whom I was thrown in contact. Intellectually they were
+children, inhabiting the physical forms of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and
+offensive-smelling tobacco. The air was thick and murky with the smoke of it;
+and this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she struggled
+through the storm, would surely have made me sea-sick had I been a victim to
+that malady. As it was, it made me quite squeamish, though this nausea might
+have been due to the pain of my leg and exhaustion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation. It was
+unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a
+dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying
+here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner. Cabin-boy! I had never done any
+hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life. I had lived a placid,
+uneventful, sedentary existence all my days&mdash;the life of a scholar and a
+recluse on an assured and comfortable income. Violent life and athletic sports
+had never appealed to me. I had always been a book-worm; so my sisters and
+father had called me during my childhood. I had gone camping but once in my
+life, and then I left the party almost at its start and returned to the
+comforts and conveniences of a roof. And here I was, with dreary and endless
+vistas before me of table-setting, potato-peeling, and dish-washing. And I was
+not strong. The doctors had always said that I had a remarkable constitution,
+but I had never developed it or my body through exercise. My muscles were small
+and soft, like a woman&rsquo;s, or so the doctors had said time and again in
+the course of their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads.
+But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I was, in no
+fit condition for the rough life in prospect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and are related
+for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak and helpless
+<i>rôle</i> I was destined to play. But I thought, also, of my mother and
+sisters, and pictured their grief. I was among the missing dead of the
+<i>Martinez</i> disaster, an unrecovered body. I could see the head-lines in
+the papers; the fellows at the University Club and the Bibelot shaking their
+heads and saying, &ldquo;Poor chap!&rdquo; And I could see Charley Furuseth, as
+I had said good-bye to him that morning, lounging in a dressing-gown on the
+be-pillowed window couch and delivering himself of oracular and pessimistic
+epigrams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains and falling
+and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner <i>Ghost</i> was fighting
+her way farther and farther into the heart of the Pacific&mdash;and I was on
+her. I could hear the wind above. It came to my ears as a muffled roar. Now and
+again feet stamped overhead. An endless creaking was going on all about me, the
+woodwork and the fittings groaning and squeaking and complaining in a thousand
+keys. The hunters were still arguing and roaring like some semi-human
+amphibious breed. The air was filled with oaths and indecent expressions. I
+could see their faces, flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and
+emphasized by the sickly yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth
+with the ship. Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping
+dens of animals in a menagerie. Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging from the
+walls, and here and there rifles and shotguns rested securely in the racks. It
+was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and pirates of by-gone years. My
+imagination ran riot, and still I could not sleep. And it was a long, long
+night, weary and dreary and long.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<p>
+But my first night in the hunters&rsquo; steerage was also my last. Next day
+Johansen, the new mate, was routed from the cabin by Wolf Larsen, and sent into
+the steerage to sleep thereafter, while I took possession of the tiny cabin
+state-room, which, on the first day of the voyage, had already had two
+occupants. The reason for this change was quickly learned by the hunters, and
+became the cause of a deal of grumbling on their part. It seemed that Johansen,
+in his sleep, lived over each night the events of the day. His incessant
+talking and shouting and bellowing of orders had been too much for Wolf Larsen,
+who had accordingly foisted the nuisance upon his hunters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a sleepless night, I arose weak and in agony, to hobble through my second
+day on the <i>Ghost</i>. Thomas Mugridge routed me out at half-past five, much
+in the fashion that Bill Sykes must have routed out his dog; but Mr.
+Mugridge&rsquo;s brutality to me was paid back in kind and with interest. The
+unnecessary noise he made (I had lain wide-eyed the whole night) must have
+awakened one of the hunters; for a heavy shoe whizzed through the
+semi-darkness, and Mr. Mugridge, with a sharp howl of pain, humbly begged
+everybody&rsquo;s pardon. Later on, in the galley, I noticed that his ear was
+bruised and swollen. It never went entirely back to its normal shape, and was
+called a &ldquo;cauliflower ear&rdquo; by the sailors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day was filled with miserable variety. I had taken my dried clothes down
+from the galley the night before, and the first thing I did was to exchange the
+cook&rsquo;s garments for them. I looked for my purse. In addition to some
+small change (and I have a good memory for such things), it had contained one
+hundred and eighty-five dollars in gold and paper. The purse I found, but its
+contents, with the exception of the small silver, had been abstracted. I spoke
+to the cook about it, when I went on deck to take up my duties in the galley,
+and though I had looked forward to a surly answer, I had not expected the
+belligerent harangue that I received.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look &rsquo;ere, &rsquo;Ump,&rdquo; he began, a malicious light in his
+eyes and a snarl in his throat; &ldquo;d&rsquo;ye want yer nose punched? If you
+think I&rsquo;m a thief, just keep it to yerself, or you&rsquo;ll find
+&rsquo;ow bloody well mistyken you are. Strike me blind if this ayn&rsquo;t
+gratitude for yer! &rsquo;Ere you come, a pore mis&rsquo;rable specimen of
+&rsquo;uman scum, an&rsquo; I tykes yer into my galley an&rsquo; treats yer
+&rsquo;ansom, an&rsquo; this is wot I get for it. Nex&rsquo; time you can go to
+&rsquo;ell, say I, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;ve a good mind to give you what-for
+anyw&rsquo;y.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So saying, he put up his fists and started for me. To my shame be it, I cowered
+away from the blow and ran out the galley door. What else was I to do? Force,
+nothing but force, obtained on this brute-ship. Moral suasion was a thing
+unknown. Picture it to yourself: a man of ordinary stature, slender of build,
+and with weak, undeveloped muscles, who has lived a peaceful, placid life, and
+is unused to violence of any sort&mdash;what could such a man possibly do?
+There was no more reason that I should stand and face these human beasts than
+that I should stand and face an infuriated bull.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So I thought it out at the time, feeling the need for vindication and desiring
+to be at peace with my conscience. But this vindication did not satisfy. Nor,
+to this day can I permit my manhood to look back upon those events and feel
+entirely exonerated. The situation was something that really exceeded rational
+formulas for conduct and demanded more than the cold conclusions of reason.
+When viewed in the light of formal logic, there is not one thing of which to be
+ashamed; but nevertheless a shame rises within me at the recollection, and in
+the pride of my manhood I feel that my manhood has in unaccountable ways been
+smirched and sullied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which is neither here nor there. The speed with which I ran from the
+galley caused excruciating pain in my knee, and I sank down helplessly at the
+break of the poop. But the Cockney had not pursued me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at &rsquo;im run! Look at &rsquo;im run!&rdquo; I could hear him
+crying. &ldquo;An&rsquo; with a gyme leg at that! Come on back, you pore little
+mamma&rsquo;s darling. I won&rsquo;t &rsquo;it yer; no, I won&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I came back and went on with my work; and here the episode ended for the time,
+though further developments were yet to take place. I set the breakfast-table
+in the cabin, and at seven o&rsquo;clock waited on the hunters and officers.
+The storm had evidently broken during the night, though a huge sea was still
+running and a stiff wind blowing. Sail had been made in the early watches, so
+that the <i>Ghost</i> was racing along under everything except the two topsails
+and the flying jib. These three sails, I gathered from the conversation, were
+to be set immediately after breakfast. I learned, also, that Wolf Larsen was
+anxious to make the most of the storm, which was driving him to the south-west
+into that portion of the sea where he expected to pick up with the north-east
+trades. It was before this steady wind that he hoped to make the major portion
+of the run to Japan, curving south into the tropics and north again as he
+approached the coast of Asia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After breakfast I had another unenviable experience. When I had finished
+washing the dishes, I cleaned the cabin stove and carried the ashes up on deck
+to empty them. Wolf Larsen and Henderson were standing near the wheel, deep in
+conversation. The sailor, Johnson, was steering. As I started toward the
+weather side I saw him make a sudden motion with his head, which I mistook for
+a token of recognition and good-morning. In reality, he was attempting to warn
+me to throw my ashes over the lee side. Unconscious of my blunder, I passed by
+Wolf Larsen and the hunter and flung the ashes over the side to windward. The
+wind drove them back, and not only over me, but over Henderson and Wolf Larsen.
+The next instant the latter kicked me, violently, as a cur is kicked. I had not
+realized there could be so much pain in a kick. I reeled away from him and
+leaned against the cabin in a half-fainting condition. Everything was swimming
+before my eyes, and I turned sick. The nausea overpowered me, and I managed to
+crawl to the side of the vessel. But Wolf Larsen did not follow me up. Brushing
+the ashes from his clothes, he had resumed his conversation with Henderson.
+Johansen, who had seen the affair from the break of the poop, sent a couple of
+sailors aft to clean up the mess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later in the morning I received a surprise of a totally different sort.
+Following the cook&rsquo;s instructions, I had gone into Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+state-room to put it to rights and make the bed. Against the wall, near the
+head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books. I glanced over them, noting
+with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey.
+There were scientific works, too, among which were represented men such as
+Tyndall, Proctor, and Darwin. Astronomy and physics were represented, and I
+remarked Bulfinch&rsquo;s <i>Age of Fable</i>, Shaw&rsquo;s <i>History of
+English and American Literature</i>, and Johnson&rsquo;s <i>Natural History</i>
+in two large volumes. Then there were a number of grammars, such as
+Metcalf&rsquo;s, and Reed and Kellogg&rsquo;s; and I smiled as I saw a copy of
+<i>The Dean&rsquo;s English</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could not reconcile these books with the man from what I had seen of him, and
+I wondered if he could possibly read them. But when I came to make the bed I
+found, between the blankets, dropped apparently as he had sunk off to sleep, a
+complete Browning, the Cambridge Edition. It was open at &ldquo;In a
+Balcony,&rdquo; and I noticed, here and there, passages underlined in pencil.
+Further, letting drop the volume during a lurch of the ship, a sheet of paper
+fell out. It was scrawled over with geometrical diagrams and calculations of
+some sort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would
+inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he
+became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly
+comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering. I had already
+remarked that his language was excellent, marred with an occasional slight
+inaccuracy. Of course, in common speech with the sailors and hunters, it
+sometimes fairly bristled with errors, which was due to the vernacular itself;
+but in the few words he had held with me it had been clear and correct.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This glimpse I had caught of his other side must have emboldened me, for I
+resolved to speak to him about the money I had lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have been robbed,&rdquo; I said to him, a little later, when I found
+him pacing up and down the poop alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; he corrected, not harshly, but sternly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have been robbed, sir,&rdquo; I amended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How did it happen?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I told him the whole circumstance, how my clothes had been left to dry in
+the galley, and how, later, I was nearly beaten by the cook when I mentioned
+the matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He smiled at my recital. &ldquo;Pickings,&rdquo; he concluded;
+&ldquo;Cooky&rsquo;s pickings. And don&rsquo;t you think your miserable life
+worth the price? Besides, consider it a lesson. You&rsquo;ll learn in time how
+to take care of your money for yourself. I suppose, up to now, your lawyer has
+done it for you, or your business agent.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could feel the quiet sneer through his words, but demanded, &ldquo;How can I
+get it back again?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s your look-out. You haven&rsquo;t any lawyer or business
+agent now, so you&rsquo;ll have to depend on yourself. When you get a dollar,
+hang on to it. A man who leaves his money lying around, the way you did,
+deserves to lose it. Besides, you have sinned. You have no right to put
+temptation in the way of your fellow-creatures. You tempted Cooky, and he fell.
+You have placed his immortal soul in jeopardy. By the way, do you believe in
+the immortal soul?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that the deeps
+were opening to me and that I was gazing into his soul. But it was an illusion.
+Far as it might have seemed, no man has ever seen very far into Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s soul, or seen it at all,&mdash;of this I am convinced. It was a
+very lonely soul, I was to learn, that never unmasked, though at rare moments
+it played at doing so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I read immortality in your eyes,&rdquo; I answered, dropping the
+&ldquo;sir,&rdquo;&mdash;an experiment, for I thought the intimacy of the
+conversation warranted it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took no notice. &ldquo;By that, I take it, you see something that is alive,
+but that necessarily does not have to live for ever.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I read more than that,&rdquo; I continued boldly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you read consciousness. You read the consciousness of life that it
+is alive; but still no further away, no endlessness of life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How clearly he thought, and how well he expressed what he thought! From
+regarding me curiously, he turned his head and glanced out over the leaden sea
+to windward. A bleakness came into his eyes, and the lines of his mouth grew
+severe and harsh. He was evidently in a pessimistic mood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then to what end?&rdquo; he demanded abruptly, turning back to me.
+&ldquo;If I am immortal&mdash;why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I halted. How could I explain my idealism to this man? How could I put into
+speech a something felt, a something like the strains of music heard in sleep,
+a something that convinced yet transcended utterance?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you believe, then?&rdquo; I countered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I believe that life is a mess,&rdquo; he answered promptly. &ldquo;It is
+like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a
+year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat
+the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they
+may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is
+all. What do you make of those things?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He swept his arm in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors who
+were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They move, so does the jelly-fish move. They move in order to eat in
+order that they may keep moving. There you have it. They live for their
+belly&rsquo;s sake, and the belly is for their sake. It&rsquo;s a circle; you
+get nowhere. Neither do they. In the end they come to a standstill. They move
+no more. They are dead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They have dreams,&rdquo; I interrupted, &ldquo;radiant, flashing
+dreams&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of grub,&rdquo; he concluded sententiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And of more&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Grub. Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying it.&rdquo; His
+voice sounded harsh. There was no levity in it. &ldquo;For, look you, they
+dream of making lucky voyages which will bring them more money, of becoming the
+mates of ships, of finding fortunes&mdash;in short, of being in a better
+position for preying on their fellows, of having all night in, good grub and
+somebody else to do the dirty work. You and I are just like them. There is no
+difference, except that we have eaten more and better. I am eating them now,
+and you too. But in the past you have eaten more than I have. You have slept in
+soft beds, and worn fine clothes, and eaten good meals. Who made those beds?
+and those clothes? and those meals? Not you. You never made anything in your
+own sweat. You live on an income which your father earned. You are like a
+frigate bird swooping down upon the boobies and robbing them of the fish they
+have caught. You are one with a crowd of men who have made what they call a
+government, who are masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the
+other men get and would like to eat themselves. You wear the warm clothes. They
+made the clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business
+agent who handles your money, for a job.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that is beside the matter,&rdquo; I cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all.&rdquo; He was speaking rapidly now, and his eyes were
+flashing. &ldquo;It is piggishness, and it is life. Of what use or sense is an
+immortality of piggishness? What is the end? What is it all about? You have
+made no food. Yet the food you have eaten or wasted might have saved the lives
+of a score of wretches who made the food but did not eat it. What immortal end
+did you serve? or did they? Consider yourself and me. What does your boasted
+immortality amount to when your life runs foul of mine? You would like to go
+back to the land, which is a favourable place for your kind of piggishness. It
+is a whim of mine to keep you aboard this ship, where my piggishness
+flourishes. And keep you I will. I may make or break you. You may die to-day,
+this week, or next month. I could kill you now, with a blow of my fist, for you
+are a miserable weakling. But if we are immortal, what is the reason for this?
+To be piggish as you and I have been all our lives does not seem to be just the
+thing for immortals to be doing. Again, what&rsquo;s it all about? Why have I
+kept you here?&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because you are stronger,&rdquo; I managed to blurt out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why stronger?&rdquo; he went on at once with his perpetual queries.
+&ldquo;Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you? Don&rsquo;t you see?
+Don&rsquo;t you see?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the hopelessness of it,&rdquo; I protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I agree with you,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;Then why move at all, since
+moving is living? Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be no
+hopelessness. But,&mdash;and there it is,&mdash;we want to live and move,
+though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life
+to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would
+be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your
+immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive
+for ever. Bah! An eternity of piggishness!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He abruptly turned on his heel and started forward. He stopped at the break of
+the poop and called me to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By the way, how much was it that Cooky got away with?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One hundred and eighty-five dollars, sir,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head. A moment later, as I started down the companion stairs to
+lay the table for dinner, I heard him loudly cursing some men amidships.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+By the following morning the storm had blown itself quite out and the
+<i>Ghost</i> was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath of wind.
+Occasional light airs were felt, however, and Wolf Larsen patrolled the poop
+constantly, his eyes ever searching the sea to the north-eastward, from which
+direction the great trade-wind must blow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men were all on deck and busy preparing their various boats for the
+season&rsquo;s hunting. There are seven boats aboard, the captain&rsquo;s
+dingey, and the six which the hunters will use. Three, a hunter, a boat-puller,
+and a boat-steerer, compose a boat&rsquo;s crew. On board the schooner the
+boat-pullers and steerers are the crew. The hunters, too, are supposed to be in
+command of the watches, subject, always, to the orders of Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this, and more, I have learned. The <i>Ghost</i> is considered the fastest
+schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets. In fact, she was once a
+private yacht, and was built for speed. Her lines and fittings&mdash;though I
+know nothing about such things&mdash;speak for themselves. Johnson was telling
+me about her in a short chat I had with him during yesterday&rsquo;s second
+dog-watch. He spoke enthusiastically, with the love for a fine craft such as
+some men feel for horses. He is greatly disgusted with the outlook, and I am
+given to understand that Wolf Larsen bears a very unsavoury reputation among
+the sealing captains. It was the <i>Ghost</i> herself that lured Johnson into
+signing for the voyage, but he is already beginning to repent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he told me, the <i>Ghost</i> is an eighty-ton schooner of a remarkably fine
+model. Her beam, or width, is twenty-three feet, and her length a little over
+ninety feet. A lead keel of fabulous but unknown weight makes her very stable,
+while she carries an immense spread of canvas. From the deck to the truck of
+the maintopmast is something over a hundred feet, while the foremast with its
+topmast is eight or ten feet shorter. I am giving these details so that the
+size of this little floating world which holds twenty-two men may be
+appreciated. It is a very little world, a mote, a speck, and I marvel that men
+should dare to venture the sea on a contrivance so small and fragile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen has, also, a reputation for reckless carrying on of sail. I
+overheard Henderson and another of the hunters, Standish, a Californian,
+talking about it. Two years ago he dismasted the <i>Ghost</i> in a gale on
+Bering Sea, whereupon the present masts were put in, which are stronger and
+heavier in every way. He is said to have remarked, when he put them in, that he
+preferred turning her over to losing the sticks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every man aboard, with the exception of Johansen, who is rather overcome by his
+promotion, seems to have an excuse for having sailed on the <i>Ghost</i>. Half
+the men forward are deep-water sailors, and their excuse is that they did not
+know anything about her or her captain. And those who do know, whisper that the
+hunters, while excellent shots, were so notorious for their quarrelsome and
+rascally proclivities that they could not sign on any decent schooner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew,&mdash;Louis he is
+called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a very sociable
+fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a listener. In the afternoon,
+while the cook was below asleep and I was peeling the everlasting potatoes,
+Louis dropped into the galley for a &ldquo;yarn.&rdquo; His excuse for being
+aboard was that he was drunk when he signed. He assured me again and again that
+it was the last thing in the world he would dream of doing in a sober moment.
+It seems that he has been seal-hunting regularly each season for a dozen years,
+and is accounted one of the two or three very best boat-steerers in both
+fleets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, my boy,&rdquo; he shook his head ominously at me, &ldquo;&rsquo;tis
+the worst schooner ye could iv selected, nor were ye drunk at the time as was
+I. &rsquo;Tis sealin&rsquo; is the sailor&rsquo;s paradise&mdash;on other ships
+than this. The mate was the first, but mark me words, there&rsquo;ll be more
+dead men before the trip is done with. Hist, now, between you an&rsquo; meself
+and the stanchion there, this Wolf Larsen is a regular devil, an&rsquo; the
+<i>Ghost&rsquo;ll</i> be a hell-ship like she&rsquo;s always ben since he had
+hold iv her. Don&rsquo;t I know? Don&rsquo;t I know? Don&rsquo;t I remember him
+in Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row an&rsquo; shot four iv his men?
+Wasn&rsquo;t I a-layin&rsquo; on the <i>Emma L.</i>, not three hundred yards
+away? An&rsquo; there was a man the same year he killed with a blow iv his
+fist. Yes, sir, killed &rsquo;im dead-oh. His head must iv smashed like an
+eggshell. An&rsquo; wasn&rsquo;t there the Governor of Kura Island, an&rsquo;
+the Chief iv Police, Japanese gentlemen, sir, an&rsquo; didn&rsquo;t they come
+aboard the <i>Ghost</i> as his guests, a-bringin&rsquo; their wives
+along&mdash;wee an&rsquo; pretty little bits of things like you see &rsquo;em
+painted on fans. An&rsquo; as he was a-gettin&rsquo; under way, didn&rsquo;t
+the fond husbands get left astern-like in their sampan, as it might be by
+accident? An&rsquo; wasn&rsquo;t it a week later that the poor little ladies
+was put ashore on the other side of the island, with nothin&rsquo; before
+&rsquo;em but to walk home acrost the mountains on their weeny-teeny little
+straw sandals which wouldn&rsquo;t hang together a mile? Don&rsquo;t I know?
+&rsquo;Tis the beast he is, this Wolf Larsen&mdash;the great big beast
+mentioned iv in Revelation; an&rsquo; no good end will he ever come to. But
+I&rsquo;ve said nothin&rsquo; to ye, mind ye. I&rsquo;ve whispered never a
+word; for old fat Louis&rsquo;ll live the voyage out if the last mother&rsquo;s
+son of yez go to the fishes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wolf Larsen!&rdquo; he snorted a moment later. &ldquo;Listen to the
+word, will ye! Wolf&mdash;&rsquo;tis what he is. He&rsquo;s not black-hearted
+like some men. &rsquo;Tis no heart he has at all. Wolf, just wolf, &rsquo;tis
+what he is. D&rsquo;ye wonder he&rsquo;s well named?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if he is so well-known for what he is,&rdquo; I queried, &ldquo;how
+is it that he can get men to ship with him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; how is it ye can get men to do anything on God&rsquo;s earth
+an&rsquo; sea?&rdquo; Louis demanded with Celtic fire. &ldquo;How d&rsquo;ye
+find me aboard if &rsquo;twasn&rsquo;t that I was drunk as a pig when I put me
+name down? There&rsquo;s them that can&rsquo;t sail with better men, like the
+hunters, and them that don&rsquo;t know, like the poor devils of wind-jammers
+for&rsquo;ard there. But they&rsquo;ll come to it, they&rsquo;ll come to it,
+an&rsquo; be sorry the day they was born. I could weep for the poor creatures,
+did I but forget poor old fat Louis and the troubles before him. But &rsquo;tis
+not a whisper I&rsquo;ve dropped, mind ye, not a whisper.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Them hunters is the wicked boys,&rdquo; he broke forth again, for he
+suffered from a constitutional plethora of speech. &ldquo;But wait till they
+get to cutting up iv jinks and rowin&rsquo; &rsquo;round. He&rsquo;s the
+boy&rsquo;ll fix &rsquo;em. &rsquo;Tis him that&rsquo;ll put the fear of God in
+their rotten black hearts. Look at that hunter iv mine, Horner.
+&lsquo;Jock&rsquo; Horner they call him, so quiet-like an&rsquo;
+easy-goin&rsquo;, soft-spoken as a girl, till ye&rsquo;d think butter
+wouldn&rsquo;t melt in the mouth iv him. Didn&rsquo;t he kill his boat-steerer
+last year? &rsquo;Twas called a sad accident, but I met the boat-puller in
+Yokohama an&rsquo; the straight iv it was given me. An&rsquo; there&rsquo;s
+Smoke, the black little devil&mdash;didn&rsquo;t the Roosians have him for
+three years in the salt mines of Siberia, for poachin&rsquo; on Copper Island,
+which is a Roosian preserve? Shackled he was, hand an&rsquo; foot, with his
+mate. An&rsquo; didn&rsquo;t they have words or a ruction of some
+kind?&mdash;for &rsquo;twas the other fellow Smoke sent up in the buckets to
+the top of the mine; an&rsquo; a piece at a time he went up, a leg to-day,
+an&rsquo; to-morrow an arm, the next day the head, an&rsquo; so on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you can&rsquo;t mean it!&rdquo; I cried out, overcome with the
+horror of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mean what!&rdquo; he demanded, quick as a flash. &ldquo;&rsquo;Tis
+nothin&rsquo; I&rsquo;ve said. Deef I am, and dumb, as ye should be for the
+sake iv your mother; an&rsquo; never once have I opened me lips but to say fine
+things iv them an&rsquo; him, God curse his soul, an&rsquo; may he rot in
+purgatory ten thousand years, and then go down to the last an&rsquo; deepest
+hell iv all!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson, the man who had chafed me raw when I first came aboard, seemed the
+least equivocal of the men forward or aft. In fact, there was nothing equivocal
+about him. One was struck at once by his straightforwardness and manliness,
+which, in turn, were tempered by a modesty which might be mistaken for
+timidity. But timid he was not. He seemed, rather, to have the courage of his
+convictions, the certainty of his manhood. It was this that made him protest,
+at the commencement of our acquaintance, against being called Yonson. And upon
+this, and him, Louis passed judgment and prophecy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we&rsquo;ve
+for&rsquo;ard with us,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The best sailorman in the
+fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle. He&rsquo;s my boat-puller. But it&rsquo;s to trouble
+he&rsquo;ll come with Wolf Larsen, as the sparks fly upward. It&rsquo;s meself
+that knows. I can see it brewin&rsquo; an&rsquo; comin&rsquo; up like a storm
+in the sky. I&rsquo;ve talked to him like a brother, but it&rsquo;s little he
+sees in takin&rsquo; in his lights or flyin&rsquo; false signals. He grumbles
+out when things don&rsquo;t go to suit him, and there&rsquo;ll be always some
+tell-tale carryin&rsquo; word iv it aft to the Wolf. The Wolf is strong, and
+it&rsquo;s the way of a wolf to hate strength, an&rsquo; strength it is
+he&rsquo;ll see in Johnson&mdash;no knucklin&rsquo; under, and a &lsquo;Yes,
+sir, thank ye kindly, sir,&rsquo; for a curse or a blow. Oh, she&rsquo;s
+a-comin&rsquo;! She&rsquo;s a-comin&rsquo;! An&rsquo; God knows where
+I&rsquo;ll get another boat-puller! What does the fool up an&rsquo; say, when
+the old man calls him Yonson, but &lsquo;Me name is Johnson, sir,&rsquo;
+an&rsquo; then spells it out, letter for letter. Ye should iv seen the old
+man&rsquo;s face! I thought he&rsquo;d let drive at him on the spot. He
+didn&rsquo;t, but he will, an&rsquo; he&rsquo;ll break that squarehead&rsquo;s
+heart, or it&rsquo;s little I know iv the ways iv men on the ships iv the
+sea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable. I am compelled to Mister him and to
+Sir him with every speech. One reason for this is that Wolf Larsen seems to
+have taken a fancy to him. It is an unprecedented thing, I take it, for a
+captain to be chummy with the cook; but this is certainly what Wolf Larsen is
+doing. Two or three times he put his head into the galley and chaffed Mugridge
+good-naturedly, and once, this afternoon, he stood by the break of the poop and
+chatted with him for fully fifteen minutes. When it was over, and Mugridge was
+back in the galley, he became greasily radiant, and went about his work,
+humming coster songs in a nerve-racking and discordant falsetto.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I always get along with the officers,&rdquo; he remarked to me in a
+confidential tone. &ldquo;I know the w&rsquo;y, I do, to myke myself
+uppreci-yted. There was my last skipper&mdash;w&rsquo;y I thought nothin&rsquo;
+of droppin&rsquo; down in the cabin for a little chat and a friendly glass.
+&lsquo;Mugridge,&rsquo; sez &rsquo;e to me, &lsquo;Mugridge,&rsquo; sez
+&rsquo;e, &lsquo;you&rsquo;ve missed yer vokytion.&rsquo; &lsquo;An&rsquo;
+&rsquo;ow&rsquo;s that?&rsquo; sez I. &lsquo;Yer should &rsquo;a been born a
+gentleman, an&rsquo; never &rsquo;ad to work for yer livin&rsquo;.&rsquo; God
+strike me dead, &rsquo;Ump, if that ayn&rsquo;t wot &rsquo;e sez, an&rsquo; me
+a-sittin&rsquo; there in &rsquo;is own cabin, jolly-like an&rsquo; comfortable,
+a-smokin&rsquo; &rsquo;is cigars an&rsquo; drinkin&rsquo; &rsquo;is rum.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction. I never heard a voice I hated so.
+His oily, insinuating tones, his greasy smile and his monstrous self-conceit
+grated on my nerves till sometimes I was all in a tremble. Positively, he was
+the most disgusting and loathsome person I have ever met. The filth of his
+cooking was indescribable; and, as he cooked everything that was eaten aboard,
+I was compelled to select what I ate with great circumspection, choosing from
+the least dirty of his concoctions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work. The nails were
+discoloured and black, while the skin was already grained with dirt which even
+a scrubbing-brush could not remove. Then blisters came, in a painful and
+never-ending procession, and I had a great burn on my forearm, acquired by
+losing my balance in a roll of the ship and pitching against the galley stove.
+Nor was my knee any better. The swelling had not gone down, and the cap was
+still up on edge. Hobbling about on it from morning till night was not helping
+it any. What I needed was rest, if it were ever to get well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rest! I never before knew the meaning of the word. I had been resting all my
+life and did not know it. But now, could I sit still for one half-hour and do
+nothing, not even think, it would be the most pleasurable thing in the world.
+But it is a revelation, on the other hand. I shall be able to appreciate the
+lives of the working people hereafter. I did not dream that work was so
+terrible a thing. From half-past five in the morning till ten o&rsquo;clock at
+night I am everybody&rsquo;s slave, with not one moment to myself, except such
+as I can steal near the end of the second dog-watch. Let me pause for a minute
+to look out over the sea sparkling in the sun, or to gaze at a sailor going
+aloft to the gaff-topsails, or running out the bowsprit, and I am sure to hear
+the hateful voice, &ldquo;&rsquo;Ere, you, &rsquo;Ump, no sodgerin&rsquo;.
+I&rsquo;ve got my peepers on yer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the gossip is going
+around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight. Henderson seems the best of
+the hunters, a slow-going fellow, and hard to rouse; but roused he must have
+been, for Smoke had a bruised and discoloured eye, and looked particularly
+vicious when he came into the cabin for supper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the callousness and
+brutishness of these men. There is one green hand in the crew, Harrison by
+name, a clumsy-looking country boy, mastered, I imagine, by the spirit of
+adventure, and making his first voyage. In the light baffling airs the schooner
+had been tacking about a great deal, at which times the sails pass from one
+side to the other and a man is sent aloft to shift over the fore-gaff-topsail.
+In some way, when Harrison was aloft, the sheet jammed in the block through
+which it runs at the end of the gaff. As I understood it, there were two ways
+of getting it cleared,&mdash;first, by lowering the foresail, which was
+comparatively easy and without danger; and second, by climbing out the
+peak-halyards to the end of the gaff itself, an exceedingly hazardous
+performance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johansen called out to Harrison to go out the halyards. It was patent to
+everybody that the boy was afraid. And well he might be, eighty feet above the
+deck, to trust himself on those thin and jerking ropes. Had there been a steady
+breeze it would not have been so bad, but the <i>Ghost</i> was rolling emptily
+in a long sea, and with each roll the canvas flapped and boomed and the
+halyards slacked and jerked taut. They were capable of snapping a man off like
+a fly from a whip-lash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of him, but
+hesitated. It was probably the first time he had been aloft in his life.
+Johansen, who had caught the contagion of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s masterfulness,
+burst out with a volley of abuse and curses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll do, Johansen,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said brusquely.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have you know that I do the swearing on this ship. If I need
+your assistance, I&rsquo;ll call you in.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; the mate acknowledged submissively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime Harrison had started out on the halyards. I was looking up from
+the galley door, and I could see him trembling, as if with ague, in every limb.
+He proceeded very slowly and cautiously, an inch at a time. Outlined against
+the clear blue of the sky, he had the appearance of an enormous spider crawling
+along the tracery of its web.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a slight uphill climb, for the foresail peaked high; and the halyards,
+running through various blocks on the gaff and mast, gave him separate holds
+for hands and feet. But the trouble lay in that the wind was not strong enough
+nor steady enough to keep the sail full. When he was half-way out, the
+<i>Ghost</i> took a long roll to windward and back again into the hollow
+between two seas. Harrison ceased his progress and held on tightly. Eighty feet
+beneath, I could see the agonized strain of his muscles as he gripped for very
+life. The sail emptied and the gaff swung amid-ships. The halyards slackened,
+and, though it all happened very quickly, I could see them sag beneath the
+weight of his body. Then the gaff swung to the side with an abrupt swiftness,
+the great sail boomed like a cannon, and the three rows of reef-points slatted
+against the canvas like a volley of rifles. Harrison, clinging on, made the
+giddy rush through the air. This rush ceased abruptly. The halyards became
+instantly taut. It was the snap of the whip. His clutch was broken. One hand
+was torn loose from its hold. The other lingered desperately for a moment, and
+followed. His body pitched out and down, but in some way he managed to save
+himself with his legs. He was hanging by them, head downward. A quick effort
+brought his hands up to the halyards again; but he was a long time regaining
+his former position, where he hung, a pitiable object.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet he has no appetite for supper,&rdquo; I heard Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s voice, which came to me from around the corner of the galley.
+&ldquo;Stand from under, you, Johansen! Watch out! Here she comes!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In truth, Harrison was very sick, as a person is sea-sick; and for a long time
+he clung to his precarious perch without attempting to move. Johansen, however,
+continued violently to urge him on to the completion of his task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a shame,&rdquo; I heard Johnson growling in painfully slow and
+correct English. He was standing by the main rigging, a few feet away from me.
+&ldquo;The boy is willing enough. He will learn if he has a chance. But this
+is&mdash;&rdquo; He paused awhile, for the word &ldquo;murder&rdquo; was his
+final judgment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hist, will ye!&rdquo; Louis whispered to him, &ldquo;For the love iv
+your mother hold your mouth!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Johnson, looking on, still continued his grumbling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; the hunter Standish spoke to Wolf Larsen,
+&ldquo;that&rsquo;s my boat-puller, and I don&rsquo;t want to lose him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, Standish,&rdquo; was the reply.
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s your boat-puller when you&rsquo;ve got him in the boat; but
+he&rsquo;s my sailor when I have him aboard, and I&rsquo;ll do what I damn well
+please with him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that&rsquo;s no reason&mdash;&rdquo; Standish began in a torrent of
+speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll do, easy as she goes,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen counselled back.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve told you what&rsquo;s what, and let it stop at that. The
+man&rsquo;s mine, and I&rsquo;ll make soup of him and eat it if I want
+to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was an angry gleam in the hunter&rsquo;s eye, but he turned on his heel
+and entered the steerage companion-way, where he remained, looking upward. All
+hands were on deck now, and all eyes were aloft, where a human life was at
+grapples with death. The callousness of these men, to whom industrial
+organization gave control of the lives of other men, was appalling. I, who had
+lived out of the whirl of the world, had never dreamed that its work was
+carried on in such fashion. Life had always seemed a peculiarly sacred thing,
+but here it counted for nothing, was a cipher in the arithmetic of commerce. I
+must say, however, that the sailors themselves were sympathetic, as instance
+the case of Johnson; but the masters (the hunters and the captain) were
+heartlessly indifferent. Even the protest of Standish arose out of the fact
+that he did not wish to lose his boat-puller. Had it been some other
+hunter&rsquo;s boat-puller, he, like them, would have been no more than amused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to return to Harrison. It took Johansen, insulting and reviling the poor
+wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started again. A little later he made the
+end of the gaff, where, astride the spar itself, he had a better chance for
+holding on. He cleared the sheet, and was free to return, slightly downhill
+now, along the halyards to the mast. But he had lost his nerve. Unsafe as was
+his present position, he was loath to forsake it for the more unsafe position
+on the halyards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down to the deck. His
+eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling violently. I had never seen
+fear so strongly stamped upon a human face. Johansen called vainly for him to
+come down. At any moment he was liable to be snapped off the gaff, but he was
+helpless with fright. Wolf Larsen, walking up and down with Smoke and in
+conversation, took no more notice of him, though he cried sharply, once, to the
+man at the wheel:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re off your course, my man! Be careful, unless you&rsquo;re
+looking for trouble!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ay, ay, sir,&rdquo; the helmsman responded, putting a couple of spokes
+down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been guilty of running the <i>Ghost</i> several points off her course in
+order that what little wind there was should fill the foresail and hold it
+steady. He had striven to help the unfortunate Harrison at the risk of
+incurring Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s anger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible. Thomas Mugridge, on
+the other hand, considered it a laughable affair, and was continually bobbing
+his head out the galley door to make jocose remarks. How I hated him! And how
+my hatred for him grew and grew, during that fearful time, to cyclopean
+dimensions. For the first time in my life I experienced the desire to
+murder&mdash;&ldquo;saw red,&rdquo; as some of our picturesque writers phrase
+it. Life in general might still be sacred, but life in the particular case of
+Thomas Mugridge had become very profane indeed. I was frightened when I became
+conscious that I was seeing red, and the thought flashed through my mind: was
+I, too, becoming tainted by the brutality of my environment?&mdash;I, who even
+in the most flagrant crimes had denied the justice and righteousness of capital
+punishment?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fully half-an-hour went by, and then I saw Johnson and Louis in some sort of
+altercation. It ended with Johnson flinging off Louis&rsquo;s detaining arm and
+starting forward. He crossed the deck, sprang into the fore rigging, and began
+to climb. But the quick eye of Wolf Larsen caught him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, you, what are you up to?&rdquo; he cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson&rsquo;s ascent was arrested. He looked his captain in the eyes and
+replied slowly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am going to get that boy down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll get down out of that rigging, and damn lively about it!
+D&rsquo;ye hear? Get down!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson hesitated, but the long years of obedience to the masters of ships
+overpowered him, and he dropped sullenly to the deck and went on forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At half after five I went below to set the cabin table, but I hardly knew what
+I did, for my eyes and my brain were filled with the vision of a man,
+white-faced and trembling, comically like a bug, clinging to the thrashing
+gaff. At six o&rsquo;clock, when I served supper, going on deck to get the food
+from the galley, I saw Harrison, still in the same position. The conversation
+at the table was of other things. Nobody seemed interested in the wantonly
+imperilled life. But making an extra trip to the galley a little later, I was
+gladdened by the sight of Harrison staggering weakly from the rigging to the
+forecastle scuttle. He had finally summoned the courage to descend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before closing this incident, I must give a scrap of conversation I had with
+Wolf Larsen in the cabin, while I was washing the dishes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were looking squeamish this afternoon,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;What
+was the matter?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could see that he knew what had made me possibly as sick as Harrison, that he
+was trying to draw me, and I answered, &ldquo;It was because of the brutal
+treatment of that boy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave a short laugh. &ldquo;Like sea-sickness, I suppose. Some men are
+subject to it, and others are not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not so,&rdquo; I objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just so,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;The earth is as full of brutality as
+the sea is full of motion. And some men are made sick by the one, and some by
+the other. That&rsquo;s the only reason.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you, who make a mock of human life, don&rsquo;t you place any value
+upon it whatever?&rdquo; I demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Value? What value?&rdquo; He looked at me, and though his eyes were
+steady and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile in them. &ldquo;What kind
+of value? How do you measure it? Who values it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do,&rdquo; I made answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then what is it worth to you? Another man&rsquo;s life, I mean. Come
+now, what is it worth?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The value of life? How could I put a tangible value upon it? Somehow, I, who
+have always had expression, lacked expression when with Wolf Larsen. I have
+since determined that a part of it was due to the man&rsquo;s personality, but
+that the greater part was due to his totally different outlook. Unlike other
+materialists I had met and with whom I had something in common to start on, I
+had nothing in common with him. Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity
+of his mind that baffled me. He drove so directly to the core of the matter,
+divesting a question always of all superfluous details, and with such an air of
+finality, that I seemed to find myself struggling in deep water, with no
+footing under me. Value of life? How could I answer the question on the spur of
+the moment? The sacredness of life I had accepted as axiomatic. That it was
+intrinsically valuable was a truism I had never questioned. But when he
+challenged the truism I was speechless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We were talking about this yesterday,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I held that
+life was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might live,
+and that living was merely successful piggishness. Why, if there is anything in
+supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so
+much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be
+born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions
+of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the
+possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and
+utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could
+become the fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah! It has no
+value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature
+spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a
+thousand lives, and it&rsquo;s life eats life till the strongest and most
+piggish life is left.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have read Darwin,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But you read him
+misunderstandingly when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions
+your wanton destruction of life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;You know you only mean that in relation to
+human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish you destroy as much as I
+or any other man. And human life is in no wise different, though you feel it is
+and think that you reason why it is. Why should I be parsimonious with this
+life which is cheap and without value? There are more sailors than there are
+ships on the sea for them, more workers than there are factories or machines
+for them. Why, you who live on the land know that you house your poor people in
+the slums of cities and loose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there
+still remain more poor people, dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit of
+meat (which is life destroyed), than you know what to do with. Have you ever
+seen the London dockers fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He started for the companion stairs, but turned his head for a final word.
+&ldquo;Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And
+it is of course over-estimated since it is of necessity prejudiced in its own
+favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a
+treasure beyond diamonds or rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself?
+Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is
+plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains
+upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the
+world. He was worth nothing to the world. The supply is too large. To himself
+only was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was, being
+dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself. He alone rated himself beyond
+diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be
+washed away by a bucket of sea-water, and he does not even know that the
+diamonds and rubies are gone. He does not lose anything, for with the loss of
+himself he loses the knowledge of loss. Don&rsquo;t you see? And what have you
+to say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That you are at least consistent,&rdquo; was all I could say, and I went
+on washing the dishes.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the north-east
+trades. I came on deck, after a good night&rsquo;s rest in spite of my poor
+knee, to find the <i>Ghost</i> foaming along, wing-and-wing, and every sail
+drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze astern. Oh, the wonder of the
+great trade-wind! All day we sailed, and all night, and the next day, and the
+next, day after day, the wind always astern and blowing steadily and strong.
+The schooner sailed herself. There was no pulling and hauling on sheets and
+tackles, no shifting of topsails, no work at all for the sailors to do except
+to steer. At night when the sun went down, the sheets were slackened; in the
+morning, when they yielded up the damp of the dew and relaxed, they were pulled
+tight again&mdash;and that was all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ten knots, twelve knots, eleven knots, varying from time to time, is the speed
+we are making. And ever out of the north-east the brave wind blows, driving us
+on our course two hundred and fifty miles between the dawns. It saddens me and
+gladdens me, the gait with which we are leaving San Francisco behind and with
+which we are foaming down upon the tropics. Each day grows perceptibly warmer.
+In the second dog-watch the sailors come on deck, stripped, and heave buckets
+of water upon one another from overside. Flying-fish are beginning to be seen,
+and during the night the watch above scrambles over the deck in pursuit of
+those that fall aboard. In the morning, Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the
+galley is pleasantly areek with the odour of their frying; while dolphin meat
+is served fore and aft on such occasions as Johnson catches the blazing
+beauties from the bowsprit end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson seems to spend all his spare time there or aloft at the crosstrees,
+watching the <i>Ghost</i> cleaving the water under press of sail. There is
+passion, adoration, in his eyes, and he goes about in a sort of trance, gazing
+in ecstasy at the swelling sails, the foaming wake, and the heave and the run
+of her over the liquid mountains that are moving with us in stately procession.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days and nights are &ldquo;all a wonder and a wild delight,&rdquo; and
+though I have little time from my dreary work, I steal odd moments to gaze and
+gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the world possessed. Above,
+the sky is stainless blue&mdash;blue as the sea itself, which under the
+forefoot is of the colour and sheen of azure satin. All around the horizon are
+pale, fleecy clouds, never changing, never moving, like a silver setting for
+the flawless turquoise sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not forget one night, when I should have been asleep, of lying on the
+forecastle-head and gazing down at the spectral ripple of foam thrust aside by
+the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> forefoot. It sounded like the gurgling of a brook over
+mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the crooning song of it lured me away and
+out of myself till I was no longer Hump the cabin-boy, nor Van Weyden, the man
+who had dreamed away thirty-five years among books. But a voice behind me, the
+unmistakable voice of Wolf Larsen, strong with the invincible certitude of the
+man and mellow with appreciation of the words he was quoting, aroused me.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;O the blazing tropic night, when the wake&rsquo;s a welt of
+light<br/>
+That holds the hot sky tame,<br/>
+And the steady forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors<br/>
+Where the scared whale flukes in flame.<br/>
+Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass,<br/>
+And her ropes are taut with the dew,<br/>
+For we&rsquo;re booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out
+trail,<br/>
+We&rsquo;re sagging south on the Long Trail&mdash;the trail that is always
+new.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eh, Hump? How&rsquo;s it strike you?&rdquo; he asked, after the due
+pause which words and setting demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked into his face. It was aglow with light, as the sea itself, and the
+eyes were flashing in the starshine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It strikes me as remarkable, to say the least, that you should show
+enthusiasm,&rdquo; I answered coldly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, man, it&rsquo;s living! it&rsquo;s life!&rdquo; he cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which is a cheap thing and without value.&rdquo; I flung his words at
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He laughed, and it was the first time I had heard honest mirth in his voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, I cannot get you to understand, cannot drive it into your head, what
+a thing this life is. Of course life is valueless, except to itself. And I can
+tell you that my life is pretty valuable just now&mdash;to myself. It is beyond
+price, which you will acknowledge is a terrific overrating, but which I cannot
+help, for it is the life that is in me that makes the rating.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He appeared waiting for the words with which to express the thought that was in
+him, and finally went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all time
+were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine. I know truth, divine
+good from evil, right from wrong. My vision is clear and far. I could almost
+believe in God. But,&rdquo; and his voice changed and the light went out of his
+face,&mdash;&ldquo;what is this condition in which I find myself? this joy of
+living? this exultation of life? this inspiration, I may well call it? It is
+what comes when there is nothing wrong with one&rsquo;s digestion, when his
+stomach is in trim and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well. It is the
+bribe for living, the champagne of the blood, the effervescence of the
+ferment&mdash;that makes some men think holy thoughts, and other men to see God
+or to create him when they cannot see him. That is all, the drunkenness of
+life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast, the babbling of the life that is
+insane with consciousness that it is alive. And&mdash;bah! To-morrow I shall
+pay for it as the drunkard pays. And I shall know that I must die, at sea most
+likely, cease crawling of myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the
+sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement
+of my muscles that it may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the
+guts of fishes. Bah! And bah! again. The champagne is already flat. The sparkle
+and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He left me as suddenly as he had come, springing to the deck with the weight
+and softness of a tiger. The <i>Ghost</i> ploughed on her way. I noted the
+gurgling forefoot was very like a snore, and as I listened to it the effect of
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s swift rush from sublime exultation to despair slowly left
+me. Then some deep-water sailor, from the waist of the ship, lifted a rich
+tenor voice in the &ldquo;Song of the Trade Wind&rdquo;:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Oh, I am the wind the seamen love&mdash;<br/>
+I am steady, and strong, and true;<br/>
+They follow my track by the clouds above,<br/>
+O&rsquo;er the fathomless tropic blue.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Through daylight and dark I follow the bark<br/>
+I keep like a hound on her trail;<br/>
+I&rsquo;m strongest at noon, yet under the moon,<br/>
+I stiffen the bunt of her sail.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of his strange
+moods and vagaries. At other times I take him for a great man, a genius who has
+never arrived. And, finally, I am convinced that he is the perfect type of the
+primitive man, born a thousand years or generations too late and an anachronism
+in this culminating century of civilization. He is certainly an individualist
+of the most pronounced type. Not only that, but he is very lonely. There is no
+congeniality between him and the rest of the men aboard ship. His tremendous
+virility and mental strength wall him apart. They are more like children to
+him, even the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to
+their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies. Or else he
+probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in their
+mental processes and examining their souls as though to see of what soul-stuff
+is made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter or that, with
+cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of interest, pondering their
+actions or replies or petty rages with a curiosity almost laughable to me who
+stood onlooker and who understood. Concerning his own rages, I am convinced
+that they are not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the
+main they are the habits of a pose or attitude he has seen fit to take toward
+his fellow-men. I know, with the possible exception of the incident of the dead
+mate, that I have not seen him really angry; nor do I wish ever to see him in a
+genuine rage, when all the force of him is called into play.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas Mugridge in
+the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident upon which I have already
+touched once or twice. The twelve o&rsquo;clock dinner was over, one day, and I
+had just finished putting the cabin in order, when Wolf Larsen and Thomas
+Mugridge descended the companion stairs. Though the cook had a cubby-hole of a
+state-room opening off from the cabin, in the cabin itself he had never dared
+to linger or to be seen, and he flitted to and fro, once or twice a day, a
+timid spectre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you know how to play &lsquo;Nap,&rsquo;&rdquo; Wolf Larsen was saying
+in a pleased sort of voice. &ldquo;I might have guessed an Englishman would
+know. I learned it myself in English ships.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile, so pleased was he at
+chumming thus with the captain. The little airs he put on and the painful
+striving to assume the easy carriage of a man born to a dignified place in life
+would have been sickening had they not been ludicrous. He quite ignored my
+presence, though I credited him with being simply unable to see me. His pale,
+wishy-washy eyes were swimming like lazy summer seas, though what blissful
+visions they beheld were beyond my imagination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get the cards, Hump,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen ordered, as they took seats at
+the table. &ldquo;And bring out the cigars and the whisky you&rsquo;ll find in
+my berth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I returned with the articles in time to hear the Cockney hinting broadly that
+there was a mystery about him, that he might be a gentleman&rsquo;s son gone
+wrong or something or other; also, that he was a remittance man and was paid to
+keep away from England&mdash;&ldquo;p&rsquo;yed &rsquo;ansomely, sir,&rdquo;
+was the way he put it; &ldquo;p&rsquo;yed &rsquo;ansomely to sling my
+&rsquo;ook an&rsquo; keep slingin&rsquo; it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had brought the customary liquor glasses, but Wolf Larsen frowned, shook his
+head, and signalled with his hands for me to bring the tumblers. These he
+filled two-thirds full with undiluted whisky&mdash;&ldquo;a gentleman&rsquo;s
+drink?&rdquo; quoth Thomas Mugridge,&mdash;and they clinked their glasses to
+the glorious game of &ldquo;Nap,&rdquo; lighted cigars, and fell to shuffling
+and dealing the cards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They played for money. They increased the amounts of the bets. They drank
+whisky, they drank it neat, and I fetched more. I do not know whether Wolf
+Larsen cheated or not,&mdash;a thing he was thoroughly capable of
+doing,&mdash;but he won steadily. The cook made repeated journeys to his bunk
+for money. Each time he performed the journey with greater swagger, but he
+never brought more than a few dollars at a time. He grew maudlin, familiar,
+could hardly see the cards or sit upright. As a preliminary to another journey
+to his bunk, he hooked Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s buttonhole with a greasy forefinger
+and vacuously proclaimed and reiterated, &ldquo;I got money, I got money, I
+tell yer, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;m a gentleman&rsquo;s son.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen was unaffected by the drink, yet he drank glass for glass, and if
+anything his glasses were fuller. There was no change in him. He did not appear
+even amused at the other&rsquo;s antics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the end, with loud protestations that he could lose like a gentleman, the
+cook&rsquo;s last money was staked on the game&mdash;and lost. Whereupon he
+leaned his head on his hands and wept. Wolf Larsen looked curiously at him, as
+though about to probe and vivisect him, then changed his mind, as from the
+foregone conclusion that there was nothing there to probe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said to me, elaborately polite, &ldquo;kindly take Mr.
+Mugridge&rsquo;s arm and help him up on deck. He is not feeling very
+well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And tell Johnson to douse him with a few buckets of salt water,&rdquo;
+he added, in a lower tone for my ear alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I left Mr. Mugridge on deck, in the hands of a couple of grinning sailors who
+had been told off for the purpose. Mr. Mugridge was sleepily spluttering that
+he was a gentleman&rsquo;s son. But as I descended the companion stairs to
+clear the table I heard him shriek as the first bucket of water struck him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen was counting his winnings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One hundred and eighty-five dollars even,&rdquo; he said aloud.
+&ldquo;Just as I thought. The beggar came aboard without a cent.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what you have won is mine, sir,&rdquo; I said boldly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He favoured me with a quizzical smile. &ldquo;Hump, I have studied some grammar
+in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled. &lsquo;Was mine,&rsquo; you
+should have said, not &rsquo;is mine.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a question, not of grammar, but of ethics,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was possibly a minute before he spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;ye know, Hump,&rdquo; he said, with a slow seriousness which had
+in it an indefinable strain of sadness, &ldquo;that this is the first time I
+have heard the word &lsquo;ethics&rsquo; in the mouth of a man. You and I are
+the only men on this ship who know its meaning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At one time in my life,&rdquo; he continued, after another pause,
+&ldquo;I dreamed that I might some day talk with men who used such language,
+that I might lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born, and
+hold conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as
+ethics. And this is the first time I have ever heard the word pronounced. Which
+is all by the way, for you are wrong. It is a question neither of grammar nor
+ethics, but of fact.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;The fact is that you have the
+money.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His face brightened. He seemed pleased at my perspicacity. &ldquo;But it is
+avoiding the real question,&rdquo; I continued, &ldquo;which is one of
+right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; he remarked, with a wry pucker of his mouth, &ldquo;I see you
+still believe in such things as right and wrong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you?&mdash;at all?&rdquo; I demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not the least bit. Might is right, and that is all there is to it.
+Weakness is wrong. Which is a very poor way of saying that it is good for
+oneself to be strong, and evil for oneself to be weak&mdash;or better yet, it
+is pleasurable to be strong, because of the profits; painful to be weak,
+because of the penalties. Just now the possession of this money is a
+pleasurable thing. It is good for one to possess it. Being able to possess it,
+I wrong myself and the life that is in me if I give it to you and forego the
+pleasure of possessing it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you wrong me by withholding it,&rdquo; I objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all. One man cannot wrong another man. He can only wrong himself.
+As I see it, I do wrong always when I consider the interests of others.
+Don&rsquo;t you see? How can two particles of the yeast wrong each other by
+striving to devour each other? It is their inborn heritage to strive to devour,
+and to strive not to be devoured. When they depart from this they sin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you don&rsquo;t believe in altruism?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He received the word as if it had a familiar ring, though he pondered it
+thoughtfully. &ldquo;Let me see, it means something about coöperation,
+doesn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, in a way there has come to be a sort of connection,&rdquo; I
+answered unsurprised by this time at such gaps in his vocabulary, which, like
+his knowledge, was the acquirement of a self-read, self-educated man, whom no
+one had directed in his studies, and who had thought much and talked little or
+not at all. &ldquo;An altruistic act is an act performed for the welfare of
+others. It is unselfish, as opposed to an act performed for self, which is
+selfish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head. &ldquo;Oh, yes, I remember it now. I ran across it in
+Spencer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Spencer!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;Have you read him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not very much,&rdquo; was his confession. &ldquo;I understood quite a
+good deal of <i>First Principles</i>, but his <i>Biology</i> took the wind out
+of my sails, and his <i>Psychology</i> left me butting around in the doldrums
+for many a day. I honestly could not understand what he was driving at. I put
+it down to mental deficiency on my part, but since then I have decided that it
+was for want of preparation. I had no proper basis. Only Spencer and myself
+know how hard I hammered. But I did get something out of his <i>Data of
+Ethics</i>. There&rsquo;s where I ran across &lsquo;altruism,&rsquo; and I
+remember now how it was used.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wondered what this man could have got from such a work. Spencer I remembered
+enough to know that altruism was imperative to his ideal of highest conduct.
+Wolf Larsen, evidently, had sifted the great philosopher&rsquo;s teachings,
+rejecting and selecting according to his needs and desires.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What else did you run across?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His brows drew in slightly with the mental effort of suitably phrasing thoughts
+which he had never before put into speech. I felt an elation of spirit. I was
+groping into his soul-stuff as he made a practice of groping in the soul-stuff
+of others. I was exploring virgin territory. A strange, a terribly strange,
+region was unrolling itself before my eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In as few words as possible,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;Spencer puts it
+something like this: First, a man must act for his own benefit&mdash;to do this
+is to be moral and good. Next, he must act for the benefit of his children. And
+third, he must act for the benefit of his race.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the highest, finest, right conduct,&rdquo; I interjected, &ldquo;is
+that act which benefits at the same time the man, his children, and his
+race.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t stand for that,&rdquo; he replied.
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t see the necessity for it, nor the common sense. I cut out
+the race and the children. I would sacrifice nothing for them. It&rsquo;s just
+so much slush and sentiment, and you must see it yourself, at least for one who
+does not believe in eternal life. With immortality before me, altruism would be
+a paying business proposition. I might elevate my soul to all kinds of
+altitudes. But with nothing eternal before me but death, given for a brief
+spell this yeasty crawling and squirming which is called life, why, it would be
+immoral for me to perform any act that was a sacrifice. Any sacrifice that
+makes me lose one crawl or squirm is foolish,&mdash;and not only foolish, for
+it is a wrong against myself and a wicked thing. I must not lose one crawl or
+squirm if I am to get the most out of the ferment. Nor will the eternal
+movelessness that is coming to me be made easier or harder by the sacrifices or
+selfishnesses of the time when I was yeasty and acrawl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you are an individualist, a materialist, and, logically, a
+hedonist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Big words,&rdquo; he smiled. &ldquo;But what is a hedonist?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded agreement when I had given the definition. &ldquo;And you are
+also,&rdquo; I continued, &ldquo;a man one could not trust in the least thing
+where it was possible for a selfish interest to intervene?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you&rsquo;re beginning to understand,&rdquo; he said, brightening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are a man utterly without what the world calls morals?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A man of whom to be always afraid&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way to put it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As one is afraid of a snake, or a tiger, or a shark?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you know me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And you know me as I am
+generally known. Other men call me &lsquo;Wolf.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are a sort of monster,&rdquo; I added audaciously, &ldquo;a Caliban
+who has pondered Setebos, and who acts as you act, in idle moments, by whim and
+fancy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His brow clouded at the allusion. He did not understand, and I quickly learned
+that he did not know the poem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m just reading Browning,&rdquo; he confessed, &ldquo;and
+it&rsquo;s pretty tough. I haven&rsquo;t got very far along, and as it is
+I&rsquo;ve about lost my bearings.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not to be tiresome, I shall say that I fetched the book from his state-room and
+read &ldquo;Caliban&rdquo; aloud. He was delighted. It was a primitive mode of
+reasoning and of looking at things that he understood thoroughly. He
+interrupted again and again with comment and criticism. When I finished, he had
+me read it over a second time, and a third. We fell into
+discussion&mdash;philosophy, science, evolution, religion. He betrayed the
+inaccuracies of the self-read man, and, it must be granted, the sureness and
+directness of the primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was its
+strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex
+materialism of Charley Furuseth. Not that I&mdash;a confirmed and, as Furuseth
+phrased it, a temperamental idealist&mdash;was to be compelled; but that Wolf
+Larsen stormed the last strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received
+respect, while not accorded conviction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Time passed. Supper was at hand and the table not laid. I became restless and
+anxious, and when Thomas Mugridge glared down the companion-way, sick and angry
+of countenance, I prepared to go about my duties. But Wolf Larsen cried out to
+him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cooky, you&rsquo;ve got to hustle to-night. I&rsquo;m busy with Hump,
+and you&rsquo;ll do the best you can without him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And again the unprecedented was established. That night I sat at table with the
+captain and the hunters, while Thomas Mugridge waited on us and washed the
+dishes afterward&mdash;a whim, a Caliban-mood of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s, and one I
+foresaw would bring me trouble. In the meantime we talked and talked, much to
+the disgust of the hunters, who could not understand a word.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Three days of rest, three blessed days of rest, are what I had with Wolf
+Larsen, eating at the cabin table and doing nothing but discuss life,
+literature, and the universe, the while Thomas Mugridge fumed and raged and did
+my work as well as his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Watch out for squalls, is all I can say to you,&rdquo; was Louis&rsquo;s
+warning, given during a spare half-hour on deck while Wolf Larsen was engaged
+in straightening out a row among the hunters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ye can&rsquo;t tell what&rsquo;ll be happenin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Louis went
+on, in response to my query for more definite information. &ldquo;The
+man&rsquo;s as contrary as air currents or water currents. You can never guess
+the ways iv him. &rsquo;Tis just as you&rsquo;re thinkin&rsquo; you know him
+and are makin&rsquo; a favourable slant along him, that he whirls around, dead
+ahead and comes howlin&rsquo; down upon you and a-rippin&rsquo; all iv your
+fine-weather sails to rags.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So I was not altogether surprised when the squall foretold by Louis smote me.
+We had been having a heated discussion,&mdash;upon life, of course,&mdash;and,
+grown over-bold, I was passing stiff strictures upon Wolf Larsen and the life
+of Wolf Larsen. In fact, I was vivisecting him and turning over his soul-stuff
+as keenly and thoroughly as it was his custom to do it to others. It may be a
+weakness of mine that I have an incisive way of speech; but I threw all
+restraint to the winds and cut and slashed until the whole man of him was
+snarling. The dark sun-bronze of his face went black with wrath, his eyes were
+ablaze. There was no clearness or sanity in them&mdash;nothing but the terrific
+rage of a madman. It was the wolf in him that I saw, and a mad wolf at that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm. I had steeled myself to
+brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly; but the enormous strength of
+the man was too much for my fortitude. He had gripped me by the biceps with his
+single hand, and when that grip tightened I wilted and shrieked aloud. My feet
+went out from under me. I simply could not stand upright and endure the agony.
+The muscles refused their duty. The pain was too great. My biceps was being
+crushed to a pulp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He seemed to recover himself, for a lucid gleam came into his eyes, and he
+relaxed his hold with a short laugh that was more like a growl. I fell to the
+floor, feeling very faint, while he sat down, lighted a cigar, and watched me
+as a cat watches a mouse. As I writhed about I could see in his eyes that
+curiosity I had so often noted, that wonder and perplexity, that questing, that
+everlasting query of his as to what it was all about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I finally crawled to my feet and ascended the companion stairs. Fair weather
+was over, and there was nothing left but to return to the galley. My left arm
+was numb, as though paralysed, and days passed before I could use it, while
+weeks went by before the last stiffness and pain went out of it. And he had
+done nothing but put his hand upon my arm and squeeze. There had been no
+wrenching or jerking. He had just closed his hand with a steady pressure. What
+he might have done I did not fully realize till next day, when he put his head
+into the galley, and, as a sign of renewed friendliness, asked me how my arm
+was getting on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It might have been worse,&rdquo; he smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was peeling potatoes. He picked one up from the pan. It was fair-sized, firm,
+and unpeeled. He closed his hand upon it, squeezed, and the potato squirted out
+between his fingers in mushy streams. The pulpy remnant he dropped back into
+the pan and turned away, and I had a sharp vision of how it might have fared
+with me had the monster put his real strength upon me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the three days&rsquo; rest was good in spite of it all, for it had given my
+knee the very chance it needed. It felt much better, the swelling had
+materially decreased, and the cap seemed descending into its proper place.
+Also, the three days&rsquo; rest brought the trouble I had foreseen. It was
+plainly Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s intention to make me pay for those three days.
+He treated me vilely, cursed me continually, and heaped his own work upon me.
+He even ventured to raise his fist to me, but I was becoming animal-like
+myself, and I snarled in his face so terribly that it must have frightened him
+back. It is no pleasant picture I can conjure up of myself, Humphrey Van
+Weyden, in that noisome ship&rsquo;s galley, crouched in a corner over my task,
+my face raised to the face of the creature about to strike me, my lips lifted
+and snarling like a dog&rsquo;s, my eyes gleaming with fear and helplessness
+and the courage that comes of fear and helplessness. I do not like the picture.
+It reminds me too strongly of a rat in a trap. I do not care to think of it;
+but it was effective, for the threatened blow did not descend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as I glared. A
+pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and showing our teeth. He was a
+coward, afraid to strike me because I had not quailed sufficiently in advance;
+so he chose a new way to intimidate me. There was only one galley knife that,
+as a knife, amounted to anything. This, through many years of service and wear,
+had acquired a long, lean blade. It was unusually cruel-looking, and at first I
+had shuddered every time I used it. The cook borrowed a stone from Johansen and
+proceeded to sharpen the knife. He did it with great ostentation, glancing
+significantly at me the while. He whetted it up and down all day long. Every
+odd moment he could find he had the knife and stone out and was whetting away.
+The steel acquired a razor edge. He tried it with the ball of his thumb or
+across the nail. He shaved hairs from the back of his hand, glanced along the
+edge with microscopic acuteness, and found, or feigned that he found, always, a
+slight inequality in its edge somewhere. Then he would put it on the stone
+again and whet, whet, whet, till I could have laughed aloud, it was so very
+ludicrous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using it, that under
+all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice, like mine, that would impel
+him to do the very thing his whole nature protested against doing and was
+afraid of doing. &ldquo;Cooky&rsquo;s sharpening his knife for Hump,&rdquo; was
+being whispered about among the sailors, and some of them twitted him about it.
+This he took in good part, and was really pleased, nodding his head with
+direful foreknowledge and mystery, until George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy,
+ventured some rough pleasantry on the subject.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now it happened that Leach was one of the sailors told off to douse Mugridge
+after his game of cards with the captain. Leach had evidently done his task
+with a thoroughness that Mugridge had not forgiven, for words followed and evil
+names involving smirched ancestries. Mugridge menaced with the knife he was
+sharpening for me. Leach laughed and hurled more of his Telegraph Hill
+Billingsgate, and before either he or I knew what had happened, his right arm
+had been ripped open from elbow to wrist by a quick slash of the knife. The
+cook backed away, a fiendish expression on his face, the knife held before him
+in a position of defence. But Leach took it quite calmly, though blood was
+spouting upon the deck as generously as water from a fountain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to get you, Cooky,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and
+I&rsquo;ll get you hard. And I won&rsquo;t be in no hurry about it.
+You&rsquo;ll be without that knife when I come for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So saying, he turned and walked quietly forward. Mugridge&rsquo;s face was
+livid with fear at what he had done and at what he might expect sooner or later
+from the man he had stabbed. But his demeanour toward me was more ferocious
+than ever. In spite of his fear at the reckoning he must expect to pay for what
+he had done, he could see that it had been an object-lesson to me, and he
+became more domineering and exultant. Also there was a lust in him, akin to
+madness, which had come with sight of the blood he had drawn. He was beginning
+to see red in whatever direction he looked. The psychology of it is sadly
+tangled, and yet I could read the workings of his mind as clearly as though it
+were a printed book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several days went by, the <i>Ghost</i> still foaming down the trades, and I
+could swear I saw madness growing in Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s eyes. And I
+confess that I became afraid, very much afraid. Whet, whet, whet, it went all
+day long. The look in his eyes as he felt the keen edge and glared at me was
+positively carnivorous. I was afraid to turn my shoulder to him, and when I
+left the galley I went out backwards&mdash;to the amusement of the sailors and
+hunters, who made a point of gathering in groups to witness my exit. The strain
+was too great. I sometimes thought my mind would give way under it&mdash;a meet
+thing on this ship of madmen and brutes. Every hour, every minute of my
+existence was in jeopardy. I was a human soul in distress, and yet no soul,
+fore or aft, betrayed sufficient sympathy to come to my aid. At times I thought
+of throwing myself on the mercy of Wolf Larsen, but the vision of the mocking
+devil in his eyes that questioned life and sneered at it would come strong upon
+me and compel me to refrain. At other times I seriously contemplated suicide,
+and the whole force of my hopeful philosophy was required to keep me from going
+over the side in the darkness of night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several times Wolf Larsen tried to inveigle me into discussion, but I gave him
+short answers and eluded him. Finally, he commanded me to resume my seat at the
+cabin table for a time and let the cook do my work. Then I spoke frankly,
+telling him what I was enduring from Thomas Mugridge because of the three days
+of favouritism which had been shown me. Wolf Larsen regarded me with smiling
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you&rsquo;re afraid, eh?&rdquo; he sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said defiantly and honestly, &ldquo;I am afraid.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way with you fellows,&rdquo; he cried, half angrily,
+&ldquo;sentimentalizing about your immortal souls and afraid to die. At sight
+of a sharp knife and a cowardly Cockney the clinging of life to life overcomes
+all your fond foolishness. Why, my dear fellow, you will live for ever. You are
+a god, and God cannot be killed. Cooky cannot hurt you. You are sure of your
+resurrection. What&rsquo;s there to be afraid of?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have eternal life before you. You are a millionaire in immortality,
+and a millionaire whose fortune cannot be lost, whose fortune is less
+perishable than the stars and as lasting as space or time. It is impossible for
+you to diminish your principal. Immortality is a thing without beginning or
+end. Eternity is eternity, and though you die here and now you will go on
+living somewhere else and hereafter. And it is all very beautiful, this shaking
+off of the flesh and soaring of the imprisoned spirit. Cooky cannot hurt you.
+He can only give you a boost on the path you eternally must tread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or, if you do not wish to be boosted just yet, why not boost Cooky?
+According to your ideas, he, too, must be an immortal millionaire. You cannot
+bankrupt him. His paper will always circulate at par. You cannot diminish the
+length of his living by killing him, for he is without beginning or end.
+He&rsquo;s bound to go on living, somewhere, somehow. Then boost him. Stick a
+knife in him and let his spirit free. As it is, it&rsquo;s in a nasty prison,
+and you&rsquo;ll do him only a kindness by breaking down the door. And who
+knows?&mdash;it may be a very beautiful spirit that will go soaring up into the
+blue from that ugly carcass. Boost him along, and I&rsquo;ll promote you to his
+place, and he&rsquo;s getting forty-five dollars a month.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was plain that I could look for no help or mercy from Wolf Larsen. Whatever
+was to be done I must do for myself; and out of the courage of fear I evolved
+the plan of fighting Thomas Mugridge with his own weapons. I borrowed a
+whetstone from Johansen. Louis, the boat-steerer, had already begged me for
+condensed milk and sugar. The lazarette, where such delicacies were stored, was
+situated beneath the cabin floor. Watching my chance, I stole five cans of the
+milk, and that night, when it was Louis&rsquo;s watch on deck, I traded them
+with him for a dirk as lean and cruel-looking as Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s
+vegetable knife. It was rusty and dull, but I turned the grindstone while Louis
+gave it an edge. I slept more soundly than usual that night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next morning, after breakfast, Thomas Mugridge began his whet, whet, whet. I
+glanced warily at him, for I was on my knees taking the ashes from the stove.
+When I returned from throwing them overside, he was talking to Harrison, whose
+honest yokel&rsquo;s face was filled with fascination and wonder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Mugridge was saying, &ldquo;an&rsquo; wot does &rsquo;is
+worship do but give me two years in Reading. But blimey if I cared. The other
+mug was fixed plenty. Should &rsquo;a seen &rsquo;im. Knife just like this. I
+stuck it in, like into soft butter, an&rsquo; the w&rsquo;y &rsquo;e squealed
+was better&rsquo;n a tu-penny gaff.&rdquo; He shot a glance in my direction to
+see if I was taking it in, and went on. &ldquo;&lsquo;I didn&rsquo;t mean it
+Tommy,&rsquo; &rsquo;e was snifflin&rsquo;; &lsquo;so &rsquo;elp me Gawd, I
+didn&rsquo;t mean it!&rsquo; &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll fix yer bloody well
+right,&rsquo; I sez, an&rsquo; kept right after &rsquo;im. I cut &rsquo;im in
+ribbons, that&rsquo;s wot I did, an&rsquo; &rsquo;e a-squealin&rsquo; all the
+time. Once &rsquo;e got &rsquo;is &rsquo;and on the knife an&rsquo; tried to
+&rsquo;old it. &lsquo;Ad &rsquo;is fingers around it, but I pulled it through,
+cuttin&rsquo; to the bone. O, &rsquo;e was a sight, I can tell yer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A call from the mate interrupted the gory narrative, and Harrison went aft.
+Mugridge sat down on the raised threshold to the galley and went on with his
+knife-sharpening. I put the shovel away and calmly sat down on the coal-box
+facing him. He favoured me with a vicious stare. Still calmly, though my heart
+was going pitapat, I pulled out Louis&rsquo;s dirk and began to whet it on the
+stone. I had looked for almost any sort of explosion on the Cockney&rsquo;s
+part, but to my surprise he did not appear aware of what I was doing. He went
+on whetting his knife. So did I. And for two hours we sat there, face to face,
+whet, whet, whet, till the news of it spread abroad and half the ship&rsquo;s
+company was crowding the galley doors to see the sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Encouragement and advice were freely tendered, and Jock Horner, the quiet,
+self-spoken hunter who looked as though he would not harm a mouse, advised me
+to leave the ribs alone and to thrust upward for the abdomen, at the same time
+giving what he called the &ldquo;Spanish twist&rdquo; to the blade. Leach, his
+bandaged arm prominently to the fore, begged me to leave a few remnants of the
+cook for him; and Wolf Larsen paused once or twice at the break of the poop to
+glance curiously at what must have been to him a stirring and crawling of the
+yeasty thing he knew as life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I make free to say that for the time being life assumed the same sordid
+values to me. There was nothing pretty about it, nothing divine&mdash;only two
+cowardly moving things that sat whetting steel upon stone, and a group of other
+moving things, cowardly and otherwise, that looked on. Half of them, I am sure,
+were anxious to see us shedding each other&rsquo;s blood. It would have been
+entertainment. And I do not think there was one who would have interfered had
+we closed in a death-struggle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the other hand, the whole thing was laughable and childish. Whet, whet,
+whet,&mdash;Humphrey Van Weyden sharpening his knife in a ship&rsquo;s galley
+and trying its edge with his thumb! Of all situations this was the most
+inconceivable. I know that my own kind could not have believed it possible. I
+had not been called &ldquo;Sissy&rdquo; Van Weyden all my days without reason,
+and that &ldquo;Sissy&rdquo; Van Weyden should be capable of doing this thing
+was a revelation to Humphrey Van Weyden, who knew not whether to be exultant or
+ashamed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But nothing happened. At the end of two hours Thomas Mugridge put away knife
+and stone and held out his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wot&rsquo;s the good of mykin&rsquo; a &rsquo;oly show of ourselves for
+them mugs?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;They don&rsquo;t love us, an&rsquo;
+bloody well glad they&rsquo;d be a-seein&rsquo; us cuttin&rsquo; our throats.
+Yer not &rsquo;arf bad, &rsquo;Ump! You&rsquo;ve got spunk, as you Yanks
+s&rsquo;y, an&rsquo; I like yer in a w&rsquo;y. So come on an&rsquo;
+shyke.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Coward that I might be, I was less a coward than he. It was a distinct victory
+I had gained, and I refused to forego any of it by shaking his detestable hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said pridelessly, &ldquo;tyke it or leave it,
+I&rsquo;ll like yer none the less for it.&rdquo; And to save his face he turned
+fiercely upon the onlookers. &ldquo;Get outa my galley-doors, you
+bloomin&rsquo; swabs!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This command was reinforced by a steaming kettle of water, and at sight of it
+the sailors scrambled out of the way. This was a sort of victory for Thomas
+Mugridge, and enabled him to accept more gracefully the defeat I had given him,
+though, of course, he was too discreet to attempt to drive the hunters away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I see Cooky&rsquo;s finish,&rdquo; I heard Smoke say to Horner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You bet,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;Hump runs the galley from now on,
+and Cooky pulls in his horns.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mugridge heard and shot a swift glance at me, but I gave no sign that the
+conversation had reached me. I had not thought my victory was so far-reaching
+and complete, but I resolved to let go nothing I had gained. As the days went
+by, Smoke&rsquo;s prophecy was verified. The Cockney became more humble and
+slavish to me than even to Wolf Larsen. I mistered him and sirred him no
+longer, washed no more greasy pots, and peeled no more potatoes. I did my own
+work, and my own work only, and when and in what fashion I saw fit. Also I
+carried the dirk in a sheath at my hip, sailor-fashion, and maintained toward
+Thomas Mugridge a constant attitude which was composed of equal parts of
+domineering, insult, and contempt.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+<p>
+My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases&mdash;if by intimacy may be denoted
+those relations which exist between master and man, or, better yet, between
+king and jester. I am to him no more than a toy, and he values me no more than
+a child values a toy. My function is to amuse, and so long as I amuse all goes
+well; but let him become bored, or let him have one of his black moods come
+upon him, and at once I am relegated from cabin table to galley, while, at the
+same time, I am fortunate to escape with my life and a whole body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man
+aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise. He
+seems consuming with the tremendous power that is in him and that seems never
+to have found adequate expression in works. He is as Lucifer would be, were
+that proud spirit banished to a society of soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he is oppressed
+by the primal melancholy of the race. Knowing him, I review the old
+Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding. The white-skinned, fair-haired
+savages who created that terrible pantheon were of the same fibre as he. The
+frivolity of the laughter-loving Latins is no part of him. When he laughs it is
+from a humour that is nothing else than ferocious. But he laughs rarely; he is
+too often sad. And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of the race.
+It is the race heritage, the sadness which has made the race sober-minded,
+clean-lived and fanatically moral, and which, in this latter connection, has
+culminated among the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been religion in
+its more agonizing forms. But the compensations of such religion are denied
+Wolf Larsen. His brutal materialism will not permit it. So, when his blue moods
+come on, nothing remains for him, but to be devilish. Were he not so terrible a
+man, I could sometimes feel sorry for him, as instance three mornings ago, when
+I went into his stateroom to fill his water-bottle and came unexpectedly upon
+him. He did not see me. His head was buried in his hands, and his shoulders
+were heaving convulsively as with sobs. He seemed torn by some mighty grief. As
+I softly withdrew I could hear him groaning, &ldquo;God! God! God!&rdquo; Not
+that he was calling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from his
+soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by evening,
+strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling about the cabin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never been sick in my life, Hump,&rdquo; he said, as I guided
+him to his room. &ldquo;Nor did I ever have a headache except the time my head
+was healing after having been laid open for six inches by a capstan-bar.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as wild animals
+suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer, without plaint, without
+sympathy, utterly alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed and put
+things in order, I found him well and hard at work. Table and bunk were
+littered with designs and calculations. On a large transparent sheet, compass
+and square in hand, he was copying what appeared to be a scale of some sort or
+other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello, Hump,&rdquo; he greeted me genially. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m just
+finishing the finishing touches. Want to see it work?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what is it?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to kindergarten
+simplicity,&rdquo; he answered gaily. &ldquo;From to-day a child will be able
+to navigate a ship. No more long-winded calculations. All you need is one star
+in the sky on a dirty night to know instantly where you are. Look. I place the
+transparent scale on this star-map, revolving the scale on the North Pole. On
+the scale I&rsquo;ve worked out the circles of altitude and the lines of
+bearing. All I do is to put it on a star, revolve the scale till it is opposite
+those figures on the map underneath, and presto! there you are, the
+ship&rsquo;s precise location!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear blue this morning
+as the sea, were sparkling with light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must be well up in mathematics,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Where did you
+go to school?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never saw the inside of one, worse luck,&rdquo; was the answer. &ldquo;I
+had to dig it out for myself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And why do you think I have made this thing?&rdquo; he demanded,
+abruptly. &ldquo;Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?&rdquo; He
+laughed one of his horrible mocking laughs. &ldquo;Not at all. To get it
+patented, to make money from it, to revel in piggishness with all night in
+while other men do the work. That&rsquo;s my purpose. Also, I have enjoyed
+working it out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The creative joy,&rdquo; I murmured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess that&rsquo;s what it ought to be called. Which is another way of
+expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of movement over
+matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the yeast because it is yeast
+and crawls.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate materialism and
+went about making the bed. He continued copying lines and figures upon the
+transparent scale. It was a task requiring the utmost nicety and precision, and
+I could not but admire the way he tempered his strength to the fineness and
+delicacy of the need.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a fascinated
+sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man&mdash;beautiful in the masculine
+sense. And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked the total lack of
+viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness in his face. It was the face, I am
+convinced, of a man who did no wrong. And by this I do not wish to be
+misunderstood. What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did
+nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience. I
+am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it. He was a magnificent
+atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the
+world before the development of the moral nature. He was not immoral, but
+merely unmoral.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face. Smooth-shaven,
+every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and sharp as a cameo; while
+sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a dark bronze which bespoke
+struggle and battle and added both to his savagery and his beauty. The lips
+were full, yet possessed of the firmness, almost harshness, which is
+characteristic of thin lips. The set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was
+likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness and indomitableness of the
+male&mdash;the nose also. It was the nose of a being born to conquer and
+command. It just hinted of the eagle beak. It might have been Grecian, it might
+have been Roman, only it was a shade too massive for the one, a shade too
+delicate for the other. And while the whole face was the incarnation of
+fierceness and strength, the primal melancholy from which he suffered seemed to
+greaten the lines of mouth and eye and brow, seemed to give a largeness and
+completeness which otherwise the face would have lacked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him. I cannot say how greatly
+the man had come to interest me. Who was he? What was he? How had he happened
+to be? All powers seemed his, all potentialities&mdash;why, then, was he no
+more than the obscure master of a seal-hunting schooner with a reputation for
+frightful brutality amongst the men who hunted seals?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why is it that you have not done great things in this world? With the
+power that is yours you might have risen to any height. Unpossessed of
+conscience or moral instinct, you might have mastered the world, broken it to
+your hand. And yet here you are, at the top of your life, where diminishing and
+dying begin, living an obscure and sordid existence, hunting sea animals for
+the satisfaction of woman&rsquo;s vanity and love of decoration, revelling in a
+piggishness, to use your own words, which is anything and everything except
+splendid. Why, with all that wonderful strength, have you not done something?
+There was nothing to stop you, nothing that could stop you. What was wrong? Did
+you lack ambition? Did you fall under temptation? What was the matter? What was
+the matter?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had lifted his eyes to me at the commencement of my outburst, and followed
+me complacently until I had done and stood before him breathless and dismayed.
+He waited a moment, as though seeking where to begin, and then said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth to sow? If you
+will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony places, where there was not
+much earth, and forthwith they sprung up because they had no deepness of earth.
+And when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they
+withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up and choked
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he queried, half petulantly. &ldquo;It was not well. I was
+one of those seeds.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying. I finished my work
+and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway you will
+see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord. I was born within a hundred miles of
+that stretch of water. But I was not born Norwegian. I am a Dane. My father and
+mother were Danes, and how they ever came to that bleak bight of land on the
+west coast I do not know. I never heard. Outside of that there is nothing
+mysterious. They were poor people and unlettered. They came of generations of
+poor unlettered people&mdash;peasants of the sea who sowed their sons on the
+waves as has been their custom since time began. There is no more to
+tell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there is,&rdquo; I objected. &ldquo;It is still obscure to
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What can I tell you?&rdquo; he demanded, with a recrudescence of
+fierceness. &ldquo;Of the meagreness of a child&rsquo;s life? of fish diet and
+coarse living? of going out with the boats from the time I could crawl? of my
+brothers, who went away one by one to the deep-sea farming and never came back?
+of myself, unable to read or write, cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the
+coastwise, old-country ships? of the rough fare and rougher usage, where kicks
+and blows were bed and breakfast and took the place of speech, and fear and
+hatred and pain were my only soul-experiences? I do not care to remember. A
+madness comes up in my brain even now as I think of it. But there were
+coastwise skippers I would have returned and killed when a man&rsquo;s strength
+came to me, only the lines of my life were cast at the time in other places. I
+did return, not long ago, but unfortunately the skippers were dead, all but
+one, a mate in the old days, a skipper when I met him, and when I left him a
+cripple who would never walk again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the inside of a
+school, how did you learn to read and write?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the English merchant service. Cabin-boy at twelve, ship&rsquo;s boy
+at fourteen, ordinary seaman at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen, and cock of
+the fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle, infinite ambition and infinite loneliness, receiving
+neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for myself&mdash;navigation,
+mathematics, science, literature, and what not. And of what use has it been?
+Master and owner of a ship at the top of my life, as you say, when I am
+beginning to diminish and die. Paltry, isn&rsquo;t it? And when the sun was up
+I was scorched, and because I had no root I withered away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple,&rdquo; I chided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who rose to
+the purple,&rdquo; he answered grimly. &ldquo;No man makes opportunity. All the
+great men ever did was to know it when it came to them. The Corsican knew. I
+have dreamed as greatly as the Corsican. I should have known the opportunity,
+but it never came. The thorns sprung up and choked me. And, Hump, I can tell
+you that you know more about me than any living man, except my own
+brother.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what is he? And where is he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Master of the steamship <i>Macedonia</i>, seal-hunter,&rdquo; was the
+answer. &ldquo;We will meet him most probably on the Japan coast. Men call him
+&lsquo;Death&rsquo; Larsen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Death Larsen!&rdquo; I involuntarily cried. &ldquo;Is he like
+you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hardly. He is a lump of an animal without any head. He has all
+my&mdash;my&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Brutishness,&rdquo; I suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&mdash;thank you for the word,&mdash;all my brutishness, but he can
+scarcely read or write.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And he has never philosophized on life,&rdquo; I added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness.
+&ldquo;And he is all the happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy living
+it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the books.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Ghost</i> has attained the southernmost point of the arc she is
+describing across the Pacific, and is already beginning to edge away to the
+west and north toward some lone island, it is rumoured, where she will fill her
+water-casks before proceeding to the season&rsquo;s hunt along the coast of
+Japan. The hunters have experimented and practised with their rifles and
+shotguns till they are satisfied, and the boat-pullers and steerers have made
+their spritsails, bound the oars and rowlocks in leather and sennit so that
+they will make no noise when creeping on the seals, and put their boats in
+apple-pie order&mdash;to use Leach&rsquo;s homely phrase.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His arm, by the way, has healed nicely, though the scar will remain all his
+life. Thomas Mugridge lives in mortal fear of him, and is afraid to venture on
+deck after dark. There are two or three standing quarrels in the forecastle.
+Louis tells me that the gossip of the sailors finds its way aft, and that two
+of the telltales have been badly beaten by their mates. He shakes his head
+dubiously over the outlook for the man Johnson, who is boat-puller in the same
+boat with him. Johnson has been guilty of speaking his mind too freely, and has
+collided two or three times with Wolf Larsen over the pronunciation of his
+name. Johansen he thrashed on the amidships deck the other night, since which
+time the mate has called him by his proper name. But of course it is out of the
+question that Johnson should thrash Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis has also given me additional information about Death Larsen, which
+tallies with the captain&rsquo;s brief description. We may expect to meet Death
+Larsen on the Japan coast. &ldquo;And look out for squalls,&rdquo; is
+Louis&rsquo;s prophecy, &ldquo;for they hate one another like the wolf whelps
+they are.&rdquo; Death Larsen is in command of the only sealing steamer in the
+fleet, the <i>Macedonia</i>, which carries fourteen boats, whereas the rest of
+the schooners carry only six. There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of
+strange raids and expeditions she may make, ranging from opium smuggling into
+the States and arms smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open piracy. Yet
+I cannot but believe for I have never yet caught him in a lie, while he has a
+cyclopædic knowledge of sealing and the men of the sealing fleets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and aft, on this
+veritable hell-ship. Men fight and struggle ferociously for one another&rsquo;s
+lives. The hunters are looking for a shooting scrape at any moment between
+Smoke and Henderson, whose old quarrel has not healed, while Wolf Larsen says
+positively that he will kill the survivor of the affair, if such affair comes
+off. He frankly states that the position he takes is based on no moral grounds,
+that all the hunters could kill and eat one another so far as he is concerned,
+were it not that he needs them alive for the hunting. If they will only hold
+their hands until the season is over, he promises them a royal carnival, when
+all grudges can be settled and the survivors may toss the non-survivors
+overboard and arrange a story as to how the missing men were lost at sea. I
+think even the hunters are appalled at his cold-bloodedness. Wicked men though
+they be, they are certainly very much afraid of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thomas Mugridge is cur-like in his subjection to me, while I go about in secret
+dread of him. His is the courage of fear,&mdash;a strange thing I know well of
+myself,&mdash;and at any moment it may master the fear and impel him to the
+taking of my life. My knee is much better, though it often aches for long
+periods, and the stiffness is gradually leaving the arm which Wolf Larsen
+squeezed. Otherwise I am in splendid condition, feel that I am in splendid
+condition. My muscles are growing harder and increasing in size. My hands,
+however, are a spectacle for grief. They have a parboiled appearance, are
+afflicted with hang-nails, while the nails are broken and discoloured, and the
+edges of the quick seem to be assuming a fungoid sort of growth. Also, I am
+suffering from boils, due to the diet, most likely, for I was never afflicted
+in this manner before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was amused, a couple of evenings back, by seeing Wolf Larsen reading the
+Bible, a copy of which, after the futile search for one at the beginning of the
+voyage, had been found in the dead mate&rsquo;s sea-chest. I wondered what Wolf
+Larsen could get from it, and he read aloud to me from Ecclesiastes. I could
+imagine he was speaking the thoughts of his own mind as he read to me, and his
+voice, reverberating deeply and mournfully in the confined cabin, charmed and
+held me. He may be uneducated, but he certainly knows how to express the
+significance of the written word. I can hear him now, as I shall always hear
+him, the primal melancholy vibrant in his voice as he read:
+</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>
+&ldquo;I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings
+and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights
+of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in
+Jerusalem; also my wisdom returned with me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on the
+labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity and vexation of
+spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous and to
+the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that
+sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner;
+and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there
+is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil,
+and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the
+dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a living
+dog is better than a dead lion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything,
+neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;
+neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under
+the sun.&rdquo;
+
+</p> </blockquote>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There you have it, Hump,&rdquo; he said, closing the book upon his
+finger and looking up at me. &ldquo;The Preacher who was king over Israel in
+Jerusalem thought as I think. You call me a pessimist. Is not this pessimism of
+the blackest?&mdash;&lsquo;All is vanity and vexation of spirit,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;There is no profit under the sun,&rsquo; &lsquo;There is one event unto
+all,&rsquo; to the fool and the wise, the clean and the unclean, the sinner and
+the saint, and that event is death, and an evil thing, he says. For the
+Preacher loved life, and did not want to die, saying, &lsquo;For a living dog
+is better than a dead lion.&rsquo; He preferred the vanity and vexation to the
+silence and unmovableness of the grave. And so I. To crawl is piggish; but to
+not crawl, to be as the clod and rock, is loathsome to contemplate. It is
+loathsome to the life that is in me, the very essence of which is movement, the
+power of movement, and the consciousness of the power of movement. Life itself
+is unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is greater unsatisfaction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are worse off than Omar,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;He, at least, after
+the customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his materialism a
+joyous thing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who was Omar?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more work that day,
+nor the next, nor the next.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rubáiyát, and it was to him
+like a great find of treasure. Much I remembered, possibly two-thirds of the
+quatrains, and I managed to piece out the remainder without difficulty. We
+talked for hours over single stanzas, and I found him reading into them a wail
+of regret and a rebellion which, for the life of me, I could not discover
+myself. Possibly I recited with a certain joyous lilt which was my own,
+for&mdash;his memory was good, and at a second rendering, very often the first,
+he made a quatrain his own&mdash;he recited the same lines and invested them
+with an unrest and passionate revolt that was well-nigh convincing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was not surprised
+when he hit upon the one born of an instant&rsquo;s irritability, and quite at
+variance with the Persian&rsquo;s complacent philosophy and genial code of
+life:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;What, without asking, hither hurried <i>Whence</i>?<br/>
+And, without asking, <i>Whither</i> hurried hence!<br/>
+Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine<br/>
+Must drown the memory of that insolence!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Great!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen cried. &ldquo;Great! That&rsquo;s the keynote.
+Insolence! He could not have used a better word.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In vain I objected and denied. He deluged me, overwhelmed me with argument.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not the nature of life to be otherwise. Life, when it knows
+that it must cease living, will always rebel. It cannot help itself. The
+Preacher found life and the works of life all a vanity and vexation, an evil
+thing; but death, the ceasing to be able to be vain and vexed, he found an
+eviler thing. Through chapter after chapter he is worried by the one event that
+cometh to all alike. So Omar, so I, so you, even you, for you rebelled against
+dying when Cooky sharpened a knife for you. You were afraid to die; the life
+that was in you, that composes you, that is greater than you, did not want to
+die. You have talked of the instinct of immortality. I talk of the instinct of
+life, which is to live, and which, when death looms near and large, masters the
+instinct, so called, of immortality. It mastered it in you (you cannot deny
+it), because a crazy Cockney cook sharpened a knife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are afraid of him now. You are afraid of me. You cannot deny it. If
+I should catch you by the throat, thus,&rdquo;&mdash;his hand was about my
+throat and my breath was shut off,&mdash;&ldquo;and began to press the life out
+of you thus, and thus, your instinct of immortality will go glimmering, and
+your instinct of life, which is longing for life, will flutter up, and you will
+struggle to save yourself. Eh? I see the fear of death in your eyes. You beat
+the air with your arms. You exert all your puny strength to struggle to live.
+Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as a butterfly resting there.
+Your chest is heaving, your tongue protruding, your skin turning dark, your
+eyes swimming. &lsquo;To live! To live! To live!&rsquo; you are crying; and you
+are crying to live here and now, not hereafter. You doubt your immortality, eh?
+Ha! ha! You are not sure of it. You won&rsquo;t chance it. This life only you
+are certain is real. Ah, it is growing dark and darker. It is the darkness of
+death, the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is
+gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around you. Your eyes are
+becoming set. They are glazing. My voice sounds faint and far. You cannot see
+my face. And still you struggle in my grip. You kick with your legs. Your body
+draws itself up in knots like a snake&rsquo;s. Your chest heaves and strains.
+To live! To live! To live&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I heard no more. Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he had so
+graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on the floor and
+he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully with that old familiar
+light of curiosity in his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, have I convinced you?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;Here take a drink
+of this. I want to ask you some questions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I rolled my head negatively on the floor. &ldquo;Your arguments are
+too&mdash;er&mdash;forcible,&rdquo; I managed to articulate, at cost of great
+pain to my aching throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be all right in half-an-hour,&rdquo; he assured me.
+&ldquo;And I promise I won&rsquo;t use any more physical demonstrations. Get up
+now. You can sit on a chair.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the Preacher
+was resumed. And half the night we sat up over it.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap12"></a>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The last twenty-four hours have witnessed a carnival of brutality. From cabin
+to forecastle it seems to have broken out like a contagion. I scarcely know
+where to begin. Wolf Larsen was really the cause of it. The relations among the
+men, strained and made tense by feuds, quarrels and grudges, were in a state of
+unstable equilibrium, and evil passions flared up in flame like prairie-grass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thomas Mugridge is a sneak, a spy, an informer. He has been attempting to curry
+favour and reinstate himself in the good graces of the captain by carrying
+tales of the men forward. He it was, I know, that carried some of
+Johnson&rsquo;s hasty talk to Wolf Larsen. Johnson, it seems, bought a suit of
+oilskins from the slop-chest and found them to be of greatly inferior quality.
+Nor was he slow in advertising the fact. The slop-chest is a sort of miniature
+dry-goods store which is carried by all sealing schooners and which is stocked
+with articles peculiar to the needs of the sailors. Whatever a sailor purchases
+is taken from his subsequent earnings on the sealing grounds; for, as it is
+with the hunters so it is with the boat-pullers and steerers&mdash;in the place
+of wages they receive a &ldquo;lay,&rdquo; a rate of so much per skin for every
+skin captured in their particular boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But of Johnson&rsquo;s grumbling at the slop-chest I knew nothing, so that what
+I witnessed came with a shock of sudden surprise. I had just finished sweeping
+the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf Larsen into a discussion of Hamlet,
+his favourite Shakespearian character, when Johansen descended the companion
+stairs followed by Johnson. The latter&rsquo;s cap came off after the custom of
+the sea, and he stood respectfully in the centre of the cabin, swaying heavily
+and uneasily to the roll of the schooner and facing the captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut the doors and draw the slide,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I obeyed I noticed an anxious light come into Johnson&rsquo;s eyes, but I
+did not dream of its cause. I did not dream of what was to occur until it did
+occur, but he knew from the very first what was coming and awaited it bravely.
+And in his action I found complete refutation of all Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+materialism. The sailor Johnson was swayed by idea, by principle, and truth,
+and sincerity. He was right, he knew he was right, and he was unafraid. He
+would die for the right if needs be, he would be true to himself, sincere with
+his soul. And in this was portrayed the victory of the spirit over the flesh,
+the indomitability and moral grandeur of the soul that knows no restriction and
+rises above time and space and matter with a surety and invincibleness born of
+nothing else than eternity and immortality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to return. I noticed the anxious light in Johnson&rsquo;s eyes, but mistook
+it for the native shyness and embarrassment of the man. The mate, Johansen,
+stood away several feet to the side of him, and fully three yards in front of
+him sat Wolf Larsen on one of the pivotal cabin chairs. An appreciable pause
+fell after I had closed the doors and drawn the slide, a pause that must have
+lasted fully a minute. It was broken by Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yonson,&rdquo; he began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My name is Johnson, sir,&rdquo; the sailor boldly corrected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Johnson, then, damn you! Can you guess why I have sent for
+you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, and no, sir,&rdquo; was the slow reply. &ldquo;My work is done
+well. The mate knows that, and you know it, sir. So there cannot be any
+complaint.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And is that all?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen queried, his voice soft, and low,
+and purring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know you have it in for me,&rdquo; Johnson continued with his
+unalterable and ponderous slowness. &ldquo;You do not like me.
+You&mdash;you&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen prompted. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be afraid of my
+feelings.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not afraid,&rdquo; the sailor retorted, a slight angry flush rising
+through his sunburn. &ldquo;If I speak not fast, it is because I have not been
+from the old country as long as you. You do not like me because I am too much
+of a man; that is why, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are too much of a man for ship discipline, if that is what you mean,
+and if you know what I mean,&rdquo; was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s retort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know English, and I know what you mean, sir,&rdquo; Johnson answered,
+his flush deepening at the slur on his knowledge of the English language.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Johnson,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said, with an air of dismissing all that had
+gone before as introductory to the main business in hand, &ldquo;I understand
+you&rsquo;re not quite satisfied with those oilskins?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I am not. They are no good, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve been shooting off your mouth about them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I say what I think, sir,&rdquo; the sailor answered courageously, not
+failing at the same time in ship courtesy, which demanded that
+&ldquo;sir&rdquo; be appended to each speech he made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this moment that I chanced to glance at Johansen. His big fists were
+clenching and unclenching, and his face was positively fiendish, so malignantly
+did he look at Johnson. I noticed a black discoloration, still faintly visible,
+under Johansen&rsquo;s eye, a mark of the thrashing he had received a few
+nights before from the sailor. For the first time I began to divine that
+something terrible was about to be enacted,&mdash;what, I could not imagine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know what happens to men who say what you&rsquo;ve said about my
+slop-chest and me?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen was demanding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know, sir,&rdquo; was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen demanded, sharply and imperatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What you and the mate there are going to do to me, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at him, Hump,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said to me, &ldquo;look at this
+bit of animated dust, this aggregation of matter that moves and breathes and
+defies me and thoroughly believes itself to be compounded of something good;
+that is impressed with certain human fictions such as righteousness and
+honesty, and that will live up to them in spite of all personal discomforts and
+menaces. What do you think of him, Hump? What do you think of him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think that he is a better man than you are,&rdquo; I answered,
+impelled, somehow, with a desire to draw upon myself a portion of the wrath I
+felt was about to break upon his head. &ldquo;His human fictions, as you choose
+to call them, make for nobility and manhood. You have no fictions, no dreams,
+no ideals. You are a pauper.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head with a savage pleasantness. &ldquo;Quite true, Hump, quite
+true. I have no fictions that make for nobility and manhood. A living dog is
+better than a dead lion, say I with the Preacher. My only doctrine is the
+doctrine of expediency, and it makes for surviving. This bit of the ferment we
+call &lsquo;Johnson,&rsquo; when he is no longer a bit of the ferment, only
+dust and ashes, will have no more nobility than any dust and ashes, while I
+shall still be alive and roaring.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know what I am going to do?&rdquo; he questioned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I am going to exercise my prerogative of roaring and show you how
+fares nobility. Watch me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three yards away from Johnson he was, and sitting down. Nine feet! And yet he
+left the chair in full leap, without first gaining a standing position. He left
+the chair, just as he sat in it, squarely, springing from the sitting posture
+like a wild animal, a tiger, and like a tiger covered the intervening space. It
+was an avalanche of fury that Johnson strove vainly to fend off. He threw one
+arm down to protect the stomach, the other arm up to protect the head; but Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s fist drove midway between, on the chest, with a crushing,
+resounding impact. Johnson&rsquo;s breath, suddenly expelled, shot from his
+mouth and as suddenly checked, with the forced, audible expiration of a man
+wielding an axe. He almost fell backward, and swayed from side to side in an
+effort to recover his balance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot give the further particulars of the horrible scene that followed. It
+was too revolting. It turns me sick even now when I think of it. Johnson fought
+bravely enough, but he was no match for Wolf Larsen, much less for Wolf Larsen
+and the mate. It was frightful. I had not imagined a human being could endure
+so much and still live and struggle on. And struggle on Johnson did. Of course
+there was no hope for him, not the slightest, and he knew it as well as I, but
+by the manhood that was in him he could not cease from fighting for that
+manhood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was too much for me to witness. I felt that I should lose my mind, and I ran
+up the companion stairs to open the doors and escape on deck. But Wolf Larsen,
+leaving his victim for the moment, and with one of his tremendous springs,
+gained my side and flung me into the far corner of the cabin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The phenomena of life, Hump,&rdquo; he girded at me. &ldquo;Stay and
+watch it. You may gather data on the immortality of the soul. Besides, you
+know, we can&rsquo;t hurt Johnson&rsquo;s soul. It&rsquo;s only the fleeting
+form we may demolish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed centuries&mdash;possibly it was no more than ten minutes that the
+beating continued. Wolf Larsen and Johansen were all about the poor fellow.
+They struck him with their fists, kicked him with their heavy shoes, knocked
+him down, and dragged him to his feet to knock him down again. His eyes were
+blinded so that he could not see, and the blood running from ears and nose and
+mouth turned the cabin into a shambles. And when he could no longer rise they
+still continued to beat and kick him where he lay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Easy, Johansen; easy as she goes,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen finally said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the beast in the mate was up and rampant, and Wolf Larsen was compelled to
+brush him away with a back-handed sweep of the arm, gentle enough, apparently,
+but which hurled Johansen back like a cork, driving his head against the wall
+with a crash. He fell to the floor, half stunned for the moment, breathing
+heavily and blinking his eyes in a stupid sort of way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jerk open the doors, Hump,&rdquo; I was commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I obeyed, and the two brutes picked up the senseless man like a sack of rubbish
+and hove him clear up the companion stairs, through the narrow doorway, and out
+on deck. The blood from his nose gushed in a scarlet stream over the feet of
+the helmsman, who was none other than Louis, his boat-mate. But Louis took and
+gave a spoke and gazed imperturbably into the binnacle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not so was the conduct of George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy. Fore and aft
+there was nothing that could have surprised us more than his consequent
+behaviour. He it was that came up on the poop without orders and dragged
+Johnson forward, where he set about dressing his wounds as well as he could and
+making him comfortable. Johnson, as Johnson, was unrecognizable; and not only
+that, for his features, as human features at all, were unrecognizable, so
+discoloured and swollen had they become in the few minutes which had elapsed
+between the beginning of the beating and the dragging forward of the body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But of Leach&rsquo;s behaviour&mdash;By the time I had finished cleansing the
+cabin he had taken care of Johnson. I had come up on deck for a breath of fresh
+air and to try to get some repose for my overwrought nerves. Wolf Larsen was
+smoking a cigar and examining the patent log which the <i>Ghost</i> usually
+towed astern, but which had been hauled in for some purpose. Suddenly
+Leach&rsquo;s voice came to my ears. It was tense and hoarse with an
+overmastering rage. I turned and saw him standing just beneath the break of the
+poop on the port side of the galley. His face was convulsed and white, his eyes
+were flashing, his clenched fists raised overhead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;May God damn your soul to hell, Wolf Larsen, only hell&rsquo;s too good
+for you, you coward, you murderer, you pig!&rdquo; was his opening salutation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was thunderstruck. I looked for his instant annihilation. But it was not Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s whim to annihilate him. He sauntered slowly forward to the break
+of the poop, and, leaning his elbow on the corner of the cabin, gazed down
+thoughtfully and curiously at the excited boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the boy indicted Wolf Larsen as he had never been indicted before. The
+sailors assembled in a fearful group just outside the forecastle scuttle and
+watched and listened. The hunters piled pell-mell out of the steerage, but as
+Leach&rsquo;s tirade continued I saw that there was no levity in their faces.
+Even they were frightened, not at the boy&rsquo;s terrible words, but at his
+terrible audacity. It did not seem possible that any living creature could thus
+beard Wolf Larsen in his teeth. I know for myself that I was shocked into
+admiration of the boy, and I saw in him the splendid invincibleness of
+immortality rising above the flesh and the fears of the flesh, as in the
+prophets of old, to condemn unrighteousness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And such condemnation! He haled forth Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s soul naked to the
+scorn of men. He rained upon it curses from God and High Heaven, and withered
+it with a heat of invective that savoured of a mediæval excommunication of the
+Catholic Church. He ran the gamut of denunciation, rising to heights of wrath
+that were sublime and almost Godlike, and from sheer exhaustion sinking to the
+vilest and most indecent abuse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His rage was a madness. His lips were flecked with a soapy froth, and sometimes
+he choked and gurgled and became inarticulate. And through it all, calm and
+impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing down, Wolf Larsen seemed lost in a
+great curiosity. This wild stirring of yeasty life, this terrific revolt and
+defiance of matter that moved, perplexed and interested him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Each moment I looked, and everybody looked, for him to leap upon the boy and
+destroy him. But it was not his whim. His cigar went out, and he continued to
+gaze silently and curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leach had worked himself into an ecstasy of impotent rage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pig! Pig! Pig!&rdquo; he was reiterating at the top of his lungs.
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you come down and kill me, you murderer? You can do it!
+I ain&rsquo;t afraid! There&rsquo;s no one to stop you! Damn sight better dead
+and outa your reach than alive and in your clutches! Come on, you coward! Kill
+me! Kill me! Kill me!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this stage that Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s erratic soul brought him into
+the scene. He had been listening at the galley door, but he now came out,
+ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side, but obviously to see the killing
+he was certain would take place. He smirked greasily up into the face of Wolf
+Larsen, who seemed not to see him. But the Cockney was unabashed, though mad,
+stark mad. He turned to Leach, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Such langwidge! Shockin&rsquo;!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leach&rsquo;s rage was no longer impotent. Here at last was something ready to
+hand. And for the first time since the stabbing the Cockney had appeared
+outside the galley without his knife. The words had barely left his mouth when
+he was knocked down by Leach. Three times he struggled to his feet, striving to
+gain the galley, and each time was knocked down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Lord!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;&rsquo;Elp! &rsquo;Elp! Tyke &rsquo;im
+aw&rsquo;y, carn&rsquo;t yer? Tyke &rsquo;im aw&rsquo;y!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hunters laughed from sheer relief. Tragedy had dwindled, the farce had
+begun. The sailors now crowded boldly aft, grinning and shuffling, to watch the
+pummelling of the hated Cockney. And even I felt a great joy surge up within
+me. I confess that I delighted in this beating Leach was giving to Thomas
+Mugridge, though it was as terrible, almost, as the one Mugridge had caused to
+be given to Johnson. But the expression of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s face never
+changed. He did not change his position either, but continued to gaze down with
+a great curiosity. For all his pragmatic certitude, it seemed as if he watched
+the play and movement of life in the hope of discovering something more about
+it, of discerning in its maddest writhings a something which had hitherto
+escaped him,&mdash;the key to its mystery, as it were, which would make all
+clear and plain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the beating! It was quite similar to the one I had witnessed in the cabin.
+The Cockney strove in vain to protect himself from the infuriated boy. And in
+vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin. He rolled toward it, grovelled
+toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down. But blow followed blow with
+bewildering rapidity. He was knocked about like a shuttlecock, until, finally,
+like Johnson, he was beaten and kicked as he lay helpless on the deck. And no
+one interfered. Leach could have killed him, but, having evidently filled the
+measure of his vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate foe, who was
+whimpering and wailing in a puppyish sort of way, and walked forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But these two affairs were only the opening events of the day&rsquo;s
+programme. In the afternoon Smoke and Henderson fell foul of each other, and a
+fusillade of shots came up from the steerage, followed by a stampede of the
+other four hunters for the deck. A column of thick, acrid smoke&mdash;the kind
+always made by black powder&mdash;was arising through the open companion-way,
+and down through it leaped Wolf Larsen. The sound of blows and scuffling came
+to our ears. Both men were wounded, and he was thrashing them both for having
+disobeyed his orders and crippled themselves in advance of the hunting season.
+In fact, they were badly wounded, and, having thrashed them, he proceeded to
+operate upon them in a rough surgical fashion and to dress their wounds. I
+served as assistant while he probed and cleansed the passages made by the
+bullets, and I saw the two men endure his crude surgery without anæsthetics and
+with no more to uphold them than a stiff tumbler of whisky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, in the first dog-watch, trouble came to a head in the forecastle. It took
+its rise out of the tittle-tattle and tale-bearing which had been the cause of
+Johnson&rsquo;s beating, and from the noise we heard, and from the sight of the
+bruised men next day, it was patent that half the forecastle had soundly
+drubbed the other half.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second dog-watch and the day were wound up by a fight between Johansen and
+the lean, Yankee-looking hunter, Latimer. It was caused by remarks of
+Latimer&rsquo;s concerning the noises made by the mate in his sleep, and though
+Johansen was whipped, he kept the steerage awake for the rest of the night
+while he blissfully slumbered and fought the fight over and over again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for myself, I was oppressed with nightmare. The day had been like some
+horrible dream. Brutality had followed brutality, and flaming passions and
+cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek one another&rsquo;s lives, and to
+strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy. My nerves were shocked. My mind itself
+was shocked. All my days had been passed in comparative ignorance of the
+animality of man. In fact, I had known life only in its intellectual phases.
+Brutality I had experienced, but it was the brutality of the
+intellect&mdash;the cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth, the cruel epigrams and
+occasional harsh witticisms of the fellows at the Bibelot, and the nasty
+remarks of some of the professors during my undergraduate days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all. But that men should wreak their anger on others by the bruising
+of the flesh and the letting of blood was something strangely and fearfully new
+to me. Not for nothing had I been called &ldquo;Sissy&rdquo; Van Weyden, I
+thought, as I tossed restlessly on my bunk between one nightmare and another.
+And it seemed to me that my innocence of the realities of life had been
+complete indeed. I laughed bitterly to myself, and seemed to find in Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s forbidding philosophy a more adequate explanation of life than I
+found in my own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I was frightened when I became conscious of the trend of my thought. The
+continual brutality around me was degenerative in its effect. It bid fair to
+destroy for me all that was best and brightest in life. My reason dictated that
+the beating Thomas Mugridge had received was an ill thing, and yet for the life
+of me I could not prevent my soul joying in it. And even while I was oppressed
+by the enormity of my sin,&mdash;for sin it was,&mdash;I chuckled with an
+insane delight. I was no longer Humphrey Van Weyden. I was Hump, cabin-boy on
+the schooner <i>Ghost</i>. Wolf Larsen was my captain, Thomas Mugridge and the
+rest were my companions, and I was receiving repeated impresses from the die
+which had stamped them all.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap13"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+For three days I did my own work and Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s too; and I flatter
+myself that I did his work well. I know that it won Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction during the brief time my
+<i>régime</i> lasted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The first clean bite since I come aboard,&rdquo; Harrison said to me at
+the galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans from the forecastle.
+&ldquo;Somehow Tommy&rsquo;s grub always tastes of grease, stale grease, and I
+reckon he ain&rsquo;t changed his shirt since he left &rsquo;Frisco.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know he hasn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll bet he sleeps in it,&rdquo; Harrison added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you won&rsquo;t lose,&rdquo; I agreed. &ldquo;The same shirt, and he
+hasn&rsquo;t had it off once in all this time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But three days was all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to recover from the
+effects of the beating. On the fourth day, lame and sore, scarcely able to see,
+so closed were his eyes, he was haled from his bunk by the nape of the neck and
+set to his duty. He sniffled and wept, but Wolf Larsen was pitiless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And see that you serve no more slops,&rdquo; was his parting injunction.
+&ldquo;No more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean shirt occasionally, or
+you&rsquo;ll get a tow over the side. Understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and a short lurch of
+the <i>Ghost</i> sent him staggering. In attempting to recover himself, he
+reached for the iron railing which surrounded the stove and kept the pots from
+sliding off; but he missed the railing, and his hand, with his weight behind
+it, landed squarely on the hot surface. There was a sizzle and odour of burning
+flesh, and a sharp cry of pain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot &rsquo;ave I done?&rdquo; he wailed; sitting down in
+the coal-box and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth.
+&ldquo;W&rsquo;y &rsquo;as all this come on me? It mykes me fair sick, it does,
+an&rsquo; I try so &rsquo;ard to go through life &rsquo;armless an&rsquo;
+&rsquo;urtin&rsquo; nobody.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tears were running down his puffed and discoloured cheeks, and his face was
+drawn with pain. A savage expression flitted across it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, &rsquo;ow I &rsquo;ate &rsquo;im! &rsquo;Ow I &rsquo;ate
+&rsquo;im!&rdquo; he gritted out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whom?&rdquo; I asked; but the poor wretch was weeping again over his
+misfortunes. Less difficult it was to guess whom he hated than whom he did not
+hate. For I had come to see a malignant devil in him which impelled him to hate
+all the world. I sometimes thought that he hated even himself, so grotesquely
+had life dealt with him, and so monstrously. At such moments a great sympathy
+welled up within me, and I felt shame that I had ever joyed in his discomfiture
+or pain. Life had been unfair to him. It had played him a scurvy trick when it
+fashioned him into the thing he was, and it had played him scurvy tricks ever
+since. What chance had he to be anything else than he was? And as though
+answering my unspoken thought, he wailed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never &rsquo;ad no chance, not &rsquo;arf a chance! &rsquo;Oo was
+there to send me to school, or put tommy in my &rsquo;ungry belly, or wipe my
+bloody nose for me, w&rsquo;en I was a kiddy? &rsquo;Oo ever did anything for
+me, heh? &rsquo;Oo, I s&rsquo;y?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind, Tommy,&rdquo; I said, placing a soothing hand on his
+shoulder. &ldquo;Cheer up. It&rsquo;ll all come right in the end. You&rsquo;ve
+long years before you, and you can make anything you please of yourself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lie! a bloody lie!&rdquo; he shouted in my face, flinging
+off the hand. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lie, and you know it. I&rsquo;m already myde,
+an&rsquo; myde out of leavin&rsquo;s an&rsquo; scraps. It&rsquo;s all right for
+you, &rsquo;Ump. You was born a gentleman. You never knew wot it was to go
+&rsquo;ungry, to cry yerself asleep with yer little belly gnawin&rsquo;
+an&rsquo; gnawin&rsquo;, like a rat inside yer. It carn&rsquo;t come right. If
+I was President of the United Stytes to-morrer, &rsquo;ow would it fill my
+belly for one time w&rsquo;en I was a kiddy and it went empty?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Ow could it, I s&rsquo;y? I was born to sufferin&rsquo; and
+sorrer. I&rsquo;ve had more cruel sufferin&rsquo; than any ten men, I
+&rsquo;ave. I&rsquo;ve been in orspital arf my bleedin&rsquo; life. I&rsquo;ve
+&rsquo;ad the fever in Aspinwall, in &rsquo;Avana, in New Orleans. I near died
+of the scurvy and was rotten with it six months in Barbadoes. Smallpox in
+&rsquo;Onolulu, two broken legs in Shanghai, pnuemonia in Unalaska, three
+busted ribs an&rsquo; my insides all twisted in &rsquo;Frisco. An&rsquo;
+&rsquo;ere I am now. Look at me! Look at me! My ribs kicked loose from my back
+again. I&rsquo;ll be coughin&rsquo; blood before eyght bells. &rsquo;Ow can it
+be myde up to me, I arsk? &rsquo;Oo&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; to do it? Gawd?
+&rsquo;Ow Gawd must &rsquo;ave &rsquo;ated me w&rsquo;en &rsquo;e signed me on
+for a voyage in this bloomin&rsquo; world of &rsquo;is!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This tirade against destiny went on for an hour or more, and then he buckled to
+his work, limping and groaning, and in his eyes a great hatred for all created
+things. His diagnosis was correct, however, for he was seized with occasional
+sicknesses, during which he vomited blood and suffered great pain. And as he
+said, it seemed God hated him too much to let him die, for he ultimately grew
+better and waxed more malignant than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several days more passed before Johnson crawled on deck and went about his work
+in a half-hearted way. He was still a sick man, and I more than once observed
+him creeping painfully aloft to a topsail, or drooping wearily as he stood at
+the wheel. But, still worse, it seemed that his spirit was broken. He was
+abject before Wolf Larsen and almost grovelled to Johansen. Not so was the
+conduct of Leach. He went about the deck like a tiger cub, glaring his hatred
+openly at Wolf Larsen and Johansen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do for you yet, you slab-footed Swede,&rdquo; I heard him say
+to Johansen one night on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mate cursed him in the darkness, and the next moment some missile struck
+the galley a sharp rap. There was more cursing, and a mocking laugh, and when
+all was quiet I stole outside and found a heavy knife imbedded over an inch in
+the solid wood. A few minutes later the mate came fumbling about in search of
+it, but I returned it privily to Leach next day. He grinned when I handed it
+over, yet it was a grin that contained more sincere thanks than a multitude of
+the verbosities of speech common to the members of my own class.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unlike any one else in the ship&rsquo;s company, I now found myself with no
+quarrels on my hands and in the good graces of all. The hunters possibly no
+more than tolerated me, though none of them disliked me; while Smoke and
+Henderson, convalescent under a deck awning and swinging day and night in their
+hammocks, assured me that I was better than any hospital nurse, and that they
+would not forget me at the end of the voyage when they were paid off. (As
+though I stood in need of their money! I, who could have bought them out, bag
+and baggage, and the schooner and its equipment, a score of times over!) But
+upon me had devolved the task of tending their wounds, and pulling them
+through, and I did my best by them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen underwent another bad attack of headache which lasted two days. He
+must have suffered severely, for he called me in and obeyed my commands like a
+sick child. But nothing I could do seemed to relieve him. At my suggestion,
+however, he gave up smoking and drinking; though why such a magnificent animal
+as he should have headaches at all puzzles me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis the hand of God, I&rsquo;m tellin&rsquo; you,&rdquo; is the
+way Louis sees it. &ldquo;&rsquo;Tis a visitation for his black-hearted deeds,
+and there&rsquo;s more behind and comin&rsquo;, or else&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or else,&rdquo; I prompted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;God is noddin&rsquo; and not doin&rsquo; his duty, though it&rsquo;s me
+as shouldn&rsquo;t say it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was mistaken when I said that I was in the good graces of all. Not only does
+Thomas Mugridge continue to hate me, but he has discovered a new reason for
+hating me. It took me no little while to puzzle it out, but I finally
+discovered that it was because I was more luckily born than
+he&mdash;&ldquo;gentleman born,&rdquo; he put it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And still no more dead men,&rdquo; I twitted Louis, when Smoke and
+Henderson, side by side, in friendly conversation, took their first exercise on
+deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis surveyed me with his shrewd grey eyes, and shook his head portentously.
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s a-comin&rsquo;, I tell you, and it&rsquo;ll be sheets and
+halyards, stand by all hands, when she begins to howl. I&rsquo;ve had the feel
+iv it this long time, and I can feel it now as plainly as I feel the rigging iv
+a dark night. She&rsquo;s close, she&rsquo;s close.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who goes first?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not fat old Louis, I promise you,&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;For
+&rsquo;tis in the bones iv me I know that come this time next year I&rsquo;ll
+be gazin&rsquo; in the old mother&rsquo;s eyes, weary with watchin&rsquo; iv
+the sea for the five sons she gave to it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wot&rsquo;s &rsquo;e been s&rsquo;yin&rsquo; to yer?&rdquo; Thomas
+Mugridge demanded a moment later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That he&rsquo;s going home some day to see his mother,&rdquo; I answered
+diplomatically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never &rsquo;ad none,&rdquo; was the Cockney&rsquo;s comment, as he
+gazed with lustreless, hopeless eyes into mine.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap14"></a>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+It has dawned upon me that I have never placed a proper valuation upon
+womankind. For that matter, though not amative to any considerable degree so
+far as I have discovered, I was never outside the atmosphere of women until
+now. My mother and sisters were always about me, and I was always trying to
+escape them; for they worried me to distraction with their solicitude for my
+health and with their periodic inroads on my den, when my orderly confusion,
+upon which I prided myself, was turned into worse confusion and less order,
+though it looked neat enough to the eye. I never could find anything when they
+had departed. But now, alas, how welcome would have been the feel of their
+presence, the frou-frou and swish-swish of their skirts which I had so
+cordially detested! I am sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be
+irritable with them again. They may dose me and doctor me morning, noon, and
+night, and dust and sweep and put my den to rights every minute of the day, and
+I shall only lean back and survey it all and be thankful in that I am possessed
+of a mother and some several sisters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which has set me wondering. Where are the mothers of these twenty and
+odd men on the <i>Ghost</i>? It strikes me as unnatural and unhealthful that
+men should be totally separated from women and herd through the world by
+themselves. Coarseness and savagery are the inevitable results. These men about
+me should have wives, and sisters, and daughters; then would they be capable of
+softness, and tenderness, and sympathy. As it is, not one of them is married.
+In years and years not one of them has been in contact with a good woman, or
+within the influence, or redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a
+creature. There is no balance in their lives. Their masculinity, which in
+itself is of the brute, has been over-developed. The other and spiritual side
+of their natures has been dwarfed&mdash;atrophied, in fact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one another and
+growing daily more calloused from the grinding. It seems to me impossible
+sometimes that they ever had mothers. It would appear that they are a
+half-brute, half-human species, a race apart, wherein there is no such thing as
+sex; that they are hatched out by the sun like turtle eggs, or receive life in
+some similar and sordid fashion; and that all their days they fester in
+brutality and viciousness, and in the end die as unlovely as they have lived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with Johansen last
+night&mdash;the first superfluous words with which he has favoured me since the
+voyage began. He left Sweden when he was eighteen, is now thirty-eight, and in
+all the intervening time has not been home once. He had met a townsman, a
+couple of years before, in some sailor boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew
+his mother to be still alive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She must be a pretty old woman now,&rdquo; he said, staring meditatively
+into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who was steering
+a point off the course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When did you last write to her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He performed his mental arithmetic aloud. &ldquo;Eighty-one;
+no&mdash;eighty-two, eh? no&mdash;eighty-three? Yes, eighty-three. Ten years
+ago. From some little port in Madagascar. I was trading.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother
+across half the girth of the earth, &ldquo;each year I was going home. So what
+was the good to write? It was only a year. And each year something happened,
+and I did not go. But I am mate, now, and when I pay off at &rsquo;Frisco,
+maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a windjammer round the
+Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money; and then I will pay my
+passage from there home. Then she will not do any more work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But does she work? now? How old is she?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About seventy,&rdquo; he answered. And then, boastingly, &ldquo;We work
+from the time we are born until we die, in my country. That&rsquo;s why we live
+so long. I will live to a hundred.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall never forget this conversation. The words were the last I ever heard
+him utter. Perhaps they were the last he did utter, too. For, going down into
+the cabin to turn in, I decided that it was too stuffy to sleep below. It was a
+calm night. We were out of the Trades, and the <i>Ghost</i> was forging ahead
+barely a knot an hour. So I tucked a blanket and pillow under my arm and went
+up on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I passed between Harrison and the binnacle, which was built into the top of
+the cabin, I noticed that he was this time fully three points off. Thinking
+that he was asleep, and wishing him to escape reprimand or worse, I spoke to
+him. But he was not asleep. His eyes were wide and staring. He seemed greatly
+perturbed, unable to reply to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;Are you sick?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head, and with a deep sign as of awakening, caught his breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better get on your course, then,&rdquo; I chided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He put a few spokes over, and I watched the compass-card swing slowly to N.N.W.
+and steady itself with slight oscillations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I took a fresh hold on my bedclothes and was preparing to start on, when some
+movement caught my eye and I looked astern to the rail. A sinewy hand, dripping
+with water, was clutching the rail. A second hand took form in the darkness
+beside it. I watched, fascinated. What visitant from the gloom of the deep was
+I to behold? Whatever it was, I knew that it was climbing aboard by the
+log-line. I saw a head, the hair wet and straight, shape itself, and then the
+unmistakable eyes and face of Wolf Larsen. His right cheek was red with blood,
+which flowed from some wound in the head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drew himself inboard with a quick effort, and arose to his feet, glancing
+swiftly, as he did so, at the man at the wheel, as though to assure himself of
+his identity and that there was nothing to fear from him. The sea-water was
+streaming from him. It made little audible gurgles which distracted me. As he
+stepped toward me I shrank back instinctively, for I saw that in his eyes which
+spelled death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, Hump,&rdquo; he said in a low voice. &ldquo;Where&rsquo;s the
+mate?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Johansen!&rdquo; he called softly. &ldquo;Johansen!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where is he?&rdquo; he demanded of Harrison.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young fellow seemed to have recovered his composure, for he answered
+steadily enough, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, sir. I saw him go for&rsquo;ard a
+little while ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So did I go for&rsquo;ard. But you will observe that I didn&rsquo;t come
+back the way I went. Can you explain it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must have been overboard, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shall I look for him in the steerage, sir?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen shook his head. &ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t find him, Hump. But
+you&rsquo;ll do. Come on. Never mind your bedding. Leave it where it is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I followed at his heels. There was nothing stirring amidships.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Those cursed hunters,&rdquo; was his comment. &ldquo;Too damned fat and
+lazy to stand a four-hour watch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But on the forecastle-head we found three sailors asleep. He turned them over
+and looked at their faces. They composed the watch on deck, and it was the
+ship&rsquo;s custom, in good weather, to let the watch sleep with the exception
+of the officer, the helmsman, and the look-out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s look-out?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Me, sir,&rdquo; answered Holyoak, one of the deep-water sailors, a
+slight tremor in his voice. &ldquo;I winked off just this very minute, sir.
+I&rsquo;m sorry, sir. It won&rsquo;t happen again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you hear or see anything on deck?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, sir, I&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Wolf Larsen had turned away with a snort of disgust, leaving the sailor
+rubbing his eyes with surprise at having been let off so easily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Softly, now,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen warned me in a whisper, as he doubled
+his body into the forecastle scuttle and prepared to descend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I followed with a quaking heart. What was to happen I knew no more than did I
+know what had happened. But blood had been shed, and it was through no whim of
+Wolf Larsen that he had gone over the side with his scalp laid open. Besides,
+Johansen was missing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was my first descent into the forecastle, and I shall not soon forget my
+impression of it, caught as I stood on my feet at the bottom of the ladder.
+Built directly in the eyes of the schooner, it was of the shape of a triangle,
+along the three sides of which stood the bunks, in double-tier, twelve of them.
+It was no larger than a hall bedroom in Grub Street, and yet twelve men were
+herded into it to eat and sleep and carry on all the functions of living. My
+bedroom at home was not large, yet it could have contained a dozen similar
+forecastles, and taking into consideration the height of the ceiling, a score
+at least.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It smelled sour and musty, and by the dim light of the swinging sea-lamp I saw
+every bit of available wall-space hung deep with sea-boots, oilskins, and
+garments, clean and dirty, of various sorts. These swung back and forth with
+every roll of the vessel, giving rise to a brushing sound, as of trees against
+a roof or wall. Somewhere a boot thumped loudly and at irregular intervals
+against the wall; and, though it was a mild night on the sea, there was a
+continual chorus of the creaking timbers and bulkheads and of abysmal noises
+beneath the flooring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sleepers did not mind. There were eight of them,&mdash;the two watches
+below,&mdash;and the air was thick with the warmth and odour of their
+breathing, and the ear was filled with the noise of their snoring and of their
+sighs and half-groans, tokens plain of the rest of the animal-man. But were
+they sleeping? all of them? Or had they been sleeping? This was evidently Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s quest&mdash;to find the men who appeared to be asleep and who
+were not asleep or who had not been asleep very recently. And he went about it
+in a way that reminded me of a story out of Boccaccio.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took the sea-lamp from its swinging frame and handed it to me. He began at
+the first bunks forward on the star-board side. In the top one lay Oofty-Oofty,
+a Kanaka and splendid seaman, so named by his mates. He was asleep on his back
+and breathing as placidly as a woman. One arm was under his head, the other lay
+on top of the blankets. Wolf Larsen put thumb and forefinger to the wrist and
+counted the pulse. In the midst of it the Kanaka roused. He awoke as gently as
+he slept. There was no movement of the body whatever. The eyes, only, moved.
+They flashed wide open, big and black, and stared, unblinking, into our faces.
+Wolf Larsen put his finger to his lips as a sign for silence, and the eyes
+closed again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the lower bunk lay Louis, grossly fat and warm and sweaty, asleep
+unfeignedly and sleeping laboriously. While Wolf Larsen held his wrist he
+stirred uneasily, bowing his body so that for a moment it rested on shoulders
+and heels. His lips moved, and he gave voice to this enigmatic utterance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A shilling&rsquo;s worth a quarter; but keep your lamps out for
+thruppenny-bits, or the publicans &rsquo;ll shove &rsquo;em on you for
+sixpence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he rolled over on his side with a heavy, sobbing sigh, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A sixpence is a tanner, and a shilling a bob; but what a pony is I
+don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Satisfied with the honesty of his and the Kanaka&rsquo;s sleep, Wolf Larsen
+passed on to the next two bunks on the starboard side, occupied top and bottom,
+as we saw in the light of the sea-lamp, by Leach and Johnson.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Wolf Larsen bent down to the lower bunk to take Johnson&rsquo;s pulse, I,
+standing erect and holding the lamp, saw Leach&rsquo;s head rise stealthily as
+he peered over the side of his bunk to see what was going on. He must have
+divined Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s trick and the sureness of detection, for the light
+was at once dashed from my hand and the forecastle was left in darkness. He
+must have leaped, also, at the same instant, straight down on Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first sounds were those of a conflict between a bull and a wolf. I heard a
+great infuriated bellow go up from Wolf Larsen, and from Leach a snarling that
+was desperate and blood-curdling. Johnson must have joined him immediately, so
+that his abject and grovelling conduct on deck for the past few days had been
+no more than planned deception.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was so terror-stricken by this fight in the dark that I leaned against the
+ladder, trembling and unable to ascend. And upon me was that old sickness at
+the pit of the stomach, caused always by the spectacle of physical violence. In
+this instance I could not see, but I could hear the impact of the
+blows&mdash;the soft crushing sound made by flesh striking forcibly against
+flesh. Then there was the crashing about of the entwined bodies, the laboured
+breathing, the short quick gasps of sudden pain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There must have been more men in the conspiracy to murder the captain and mate,
+for by the sounds I knew that Leach and Johnson had been quickly reinforced by
+some of their mates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get a knife somebody!&rdquo; Leach was shouting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pound him on the head! Mash his brains out!&rdquo; was Johnson&rsquo;s
+cry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But after his first bellow, Wolf Larsen made no noise. He was fighting grimly
+and silently for life. He was sore beset. Down at the very first, he had been
+unable to gain his feet, and for all of his tremendous strength I felt that
+there was no hope for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The force with which they struggled was vividly impressed on me; for I was
+knocked down by their surging bodies and badly bruised. But in the confusion I
+managed to crawl into an empty lower bunk out of the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All hands! We&rsquo;ve got him! We&rsquo;ve got him!&rdquo; I could hear
+Leach crying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who?&rdquo; demanded those who had been really asleep, and who had
+wakened to they knew not what.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the bloody mate!&rdquo; was Leach&rsquo;s crafty answer,
+strained from him in a smothered sort of way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was greeted with whoops of joy, and from then on Wolf Larsen had seven
+strong men on top of him, Louis, I believe, taking no part in it. The
+forecastle was like an angry hive of bees aroused by some marauder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What ho! below there!&rdquo; I heard Latimer shout down the scuttle, too
+cautious to descend into the inferno of passion he could hear raging beneath
+him in the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t somebody get a knife? Oh, won&rsquo;t somebody get a
+knife?&rdquo; Leach pleaded in the first interval of comparative silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The number of the assailants was a cause of confusion. They blocked their own
+efforts, while Wolf Larsen, with but a single purpose, achieved his. This was
+to fight his way across the floor to the ladder. Though in total darkness, I
+followed his progress by its sound. No man less than a giant could have done
+what he did, once he had gained the foot of the ladder. Step by step, by the
+might of his arms, the whole pack of men striving to drag him back and down, he
+drew his body up from the floor till he stood erect. And then, step by step,
+hand and foot, he slowly struggled up the ladder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The very last of all, I saw. For Latimer, having finally gone for a lantern,
+held it so that its light shone down the scuttle. Wolf Larsen was nearly to the
+top, though I could not see him. All that was visible was the mass of men
+fastened upon him. It squirmed about, like some huge many-legged spider, and
+swayed back and forth to the regular roll of the vessel. And still, step by
+step with long intervals between, the mass ascended. Once it tottered, about to
+fall back, but the broken hold was regained and it still went up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo; Latimer cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the rays of the lantern I could see his perplexed face peering down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Larsen,&rdquo; I heard a muffled voice from within the mass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Latimer reached down with his free hand. I saw a hand shoot up to clasp his.
+Latimer pulled, and the next couple of steps were made with a rush. Then Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s other hand reached up and clutched the edge of the scuttle. The
+mass swung clear of the ladder, the men still clinging to their escaping foe.
+They began to drop off, to be brushed off against the sharp edge of the
+scuttle, to be knocked off by the legs which were now kicking powerfully. Leach
+was the last to go, falling sheer back from the top of the scuttle and striking
+on head and shoulders upon his sprawling mates beneath. Wolf Larsen and the
+lantern disappeared, and we were left in darkness.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap15"></a>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+There was a deal of cursing and groaning as the men at the bottom of the ladder
+crawled to their feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Somebody strike a light, my thumb&rsquo;s out of joint,&rdquo; said one
+of the men, Parsons, a swarthy, saturnine man, boat-steerer in Standish&rsquo;s
+boat, in which Harrison was puller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find it knockin&rsquo; about by the bitts,&rdquo; Leach
+said, sitting down on the edge of the bunk in which I was concealed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a fumbling and a scratching of matches, and the sea-lamp flared up,
+dim and smoky, and in its weird light bare-legged men moved about nursing their
+bruises and caring for their hurts. Oofty-Oofty laid hold of Parsons&rsquo;s
+thumb, pulling it out stoutly and snapping it back into place. I noticed at the
+same time that the Kanaka&rsquo;s knuckles were laid open clear across and to
+the bone. He exhibited them, exposing beautiful white teeth in a grin as he did
+so, and explaining that the wounds had come from striking Wolf Larsen in the
+mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So it was you, was it, you black beggar?&rdquo; belligerently demanded
+one Kelly, an Irish-American and a longshoreman, making his first trip to sea,
+and boat-puller for Kerfoot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he made the demand he spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth and shoved his
+pugnacious face close to Oofty-Oofty. The Kanaka leaped backward to his bunk,
+to return with a second leap, flourishing a long knife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aw, go lay down, you make me tired,&rdquo; Leach interfered. He was
+evidently, for all of his youth and inexperience, cock of the forecastle.
+&ldquo;G&rsquo;wan, you Kelly. You leave Oofty alone. How in hell did he know
+it was you in the dark?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kelly subsided with some muttering, and the Kanaka flashed his white teeth in a
+grateful smile. He was a beautiful creature, almost feminine in the pleasing
+lines of his figure, and there was a softness and dreaminess in his large eyes
+which seemed to contradict his well-earned reputation for strife and action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How did he get away?&rdquo; Johnson asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was sitting on the side of his bunk, the whole pose of his figure indicating
+utter dejection and hopelessness. He was still breathing heavily from the
+exertion he had made. His shirt had been ripped entirely from him in the
+struggle, and blood from a gash in the cheek was flowing down his naked chest,
+marking a red path across his white thigh and dripping to the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because he is the devil, as I told you before,&rdquo; was Leach&rsquo;s
+answer; and thereat he was on his feet and raging his disappointment with tears
+in his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And not one of you to get a knife!&rdquo; was his unceasing lament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the rest of the hands had a lively fear of consequences to come and gave no
+heed to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How&rsquo;ll he know which was which?&rdquo; Kelly asked, and as he went
+on he looked murderously about him&mdash;&ldquo;unless one of us
+peaches.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll know as soon as ever he claps eyes on us,&rdquo; Parsons
+replied. &ldquo;One look at you&rsquo;d be enough.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell him the deck flopped up and gouged yer teeth out iv yer jaw,&rdquo;
+Louis grinned. He was the only man who was not out of his bunk, and he was
+jubilant in that he possessed no bruises to advertise that he had had a hand in
+the night&rsquo;s work. &ldquo;Just wait till he gets a glimpse iv yer mugs
+to-morrow, the gang iv ye,&rdquo; he chuckled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll say we thought it was the mate,&rdquo; said one. And
+another, &ldquo;I know what I&rsquo;ll say&mdash;that I heered a row, jumped
+out of my bunk, got a jolly good crack on the jaw for my pains, and sailed in
+myself. Couldn&rsquo;t tell who or what it was in the dark and just hit
+out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; &rsquo;twas me you hit, of course,&rdquo; Kelly seconded, his
+face brightening for the moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leach and Johnson took no part in the discussion, and it was plain to see that
+their mates looked upon them as men for whom the worst was inevitable, who were
+beyond hope and already dead. Leach stood their fears and reproaches for some
+time. Then he broke out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You make me tired! A nice lot of gazabas you are! If you talked less
+with yer mouth and did something with yer hands, he&rsquo;d a-ben done with by
+now. Why couldn&rsquo;t one of you, just one of you, get me a knife when I sung
+out? You make me sick! A-beefin&rsquo; and bellerin&rsquo; &rsquo;round, as
+though he&rsquo;d kill you when he gets you! You know damn well he wont.
+Can&rsquo;t afford to. No shipping masters or beach-combers over here, and he
+wants yer in his business, and he wants yer bad. Who&rsquo;s to pull or steer
+or sail ship if he loses yer? It&rsquo;s me and Johnson have to face the music.
+Get into yer bunks, now, and shut yer faces; I want to get some sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right all right,&rdquo; Parsons spoke up. &ldquo;Mebbe
+he won&rsquo;t do for us, but mark my words, hell &rsquo;ll be an ice-box to
+this ship from now on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the while I had been apprehensive concerning my own predicament. What would
+happen to me when these men discovered my presence? I could never fight my way
+out as Wolf Larsen had done. And at this moment Latimer called down the
+scuttles:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hump! The old man wants you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He ain&rsquo;t down here!&rdquo; Parsons called back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, he is,&rdquo; I said, sliding out of the bunk and striving my
+hardest to keep my voice steady and bold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sailors looked at me in consternation. Fear was strong in their faces, and
+the devilishness which comes of fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming!&rdquo; I shouted up to Latimer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No you don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; Kelly cried, stepping between me and the
+ladder, his right hand shaped into a veritable strangler&rsquo;s clutch.
+&ldquo;You damn little sneak! I&rsquo;ll shut yer mouth!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let him go,&rdquo; Leach commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not on yer life,&rdquo; was the angry retort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leach never changed his position on the edge of the bunk. &ldquo;Let him go, I
+say,&rdquo; he repeated; but this time his voice was gritty and metallic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Irishman wavered. I made to step by him, and he stood aside. When I had
+gained the ladder, I turned to the circle of brutal and malignant faces peering
+at me through the semi-darkness. A sudden and deep sympathy welled up in me. I
+remembered the Cockney&rsquo;s way of putting it. How God must have hated them
+that they should be tortured so!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have seen and heard nothing, believe me,&rdquo; I said quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I tell yer, he&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; I could hear Leach saying as I
+went up the ladder. &ldquo;He don&rsquo;t like the old man no more nor you or
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I found Wolf Larsen in the cabin, stripped and bloody, waiting for me. He
+greeted me with one of his whimsical smiles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come, get to work, Doctor. The signs are favourable for an extensive
+practice this voyage. I don&rsquo;t know what the <i>Ghost</i> would have been
+without you, and if I could only cherish such noble sentiments I would tell you
+her master is deeply grateful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I knew the run of the simple medicine-chest the <i>Ghost</i> carried, and while
+I was heating water on the cabin stove and getting the things ready for
+dressing his wounds, he moved about, laughing and chatting, and examining his
+hurts with a calculating eye. I had never before seen him stripped, and the
+sight of his body quite took my breath away. It has never been my weakness to
+exalt the flesh&mdash;far from it; but there is enough of the artist in me to
+appreciate its wonder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I must say that I was fascinated by the perfect lines of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+figure, and by what I may term the terrible beauty of it. I had noted the men
+in the forecastle. Powerfully muscled though some of them were, there had been
+something wrong with all of them, an insufficient development here, an undue
+development there, a twist or a crook that destroyed symmetry, legs too short
+or too long, or too much sinew or bone exposed, or too little. Oofty-Oofty had
+been the only one whose lines were at all pleasing, while, in so far as they
+pleased, that far had they been what I should call feminine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Wolf Larsen was the man-type, the masculine, and almost a god in his
+perfectness. As he moved about or raised his arms the great muscles leapt and
+moved under the satiny skin. I have forgotten to say that the bronze ended with
+his face. His body, thanks to his Scandinavian stock, was fair as the fairest
+woman&rsquo;s. I remember his putting his hand up to feel of the wound on his
+head, and my watching the biceps move like a living thing under its white
+sheath. It was the biceps that had nearly crushed out my life once, that I had
+seen strike so many killing blows. I could not take my eyes from him. I stood
+motionless, a roll of antiseptic cotton in my hand unwinding and spilling
+itself down to the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He noticed me, and I became conscious that I was staring at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;God made you well,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did he?&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;I have often thought so myself, and
+wondered why.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Purpose&mdash;&rdquo; I began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Utility,&rdquo; he interrupted. &ldquo;This body was made for use. These
+muscles were made to grip, and tear, and destroy living things that get between
+me and life. But have you thought of the other living things? They, too, have
+muscles, of one kind and another, made to grip, and tear, and destroy; and when
+they come between me and life, I out-grip them, out-tear them, out-destroy
+them. Purpose does not explain that. Utility does.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not beautiful,&rdquo; I protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Life isn&rsquo;t, you mean,&rdquo; he smiled. &ldquo;Yet you say I was
+made well. Do you see this?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He braced his legs and feet, pressing the cabin floor with his toes in a
+clutching sort of way. Knots and ridges and mounds of muscles writhed and
+bunched under the skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Feel them,&rdquo; he commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were hard as iron. And I observed, also, that his whole body had
+unconsciously drawn itself together, tense and alert; that muscles were softly
+crawling and shaping about the hips, along the back, and across the shoulders;
+that the arms were slightly lifted, their muscles contracting, the fingers
+crooking till the hands were like talons; and that even the eyes had changed
+expression and into them were coming watchfulness and measurement and a light
+none other than of battle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stability, equilibrium,&rdquo; he said, relaxing on the instant and
+sinking his body back into repose. &ldquo;Feet with which to clutch the ground,
+legs to stand on and to help withstand, while with arms and hands, teeth and
+nails, I struggle to kill and to be not killed. Purpose? Utility is the better
+word.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I did not argue. I had seen the mechanism of the primitive fighting beast, and
+I was as strongly impressed as if I had seen the engines of a great battleship
+or Atlantic liner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was surprised, considering the fierce struggle in the forecastle, at the
+superficiality of his hurts, and I pride myself that I dressed them
+dexterously. With the exception of several bad wounds, the rest were merely
+severe bruises and lacerations. The blow which he had received before going
+overboard had laid his scalp open several inches. This, under his direction, I
+cleansed and sewed together, having first shaved the edges of the wound. Then
+the calf of his leg was badly lacerated and looked as though it had been
+mangled by a bulldog. Some sailor, he told me, had laid hold of it by his
+teeth, at the beginning of the fight, and hung on and been dragged to the top
+of the forecastle ladder, when he was kicked loose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By the way, Hump, as I have remarked, you are a handy man,&rdquo; Wolf
+Larsen began, when my work was done. &ldquo;As you know, we&rsquo;re short a
+mate. Hereafter you shall stand watches, receive seventy-five dollars per
+month, and be addressed fore and aft as Mr. Van Weyden.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I don&rsquo;t understand navigation, you know,&rdquo; I gasped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not necessary at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I really do not care to sit in the high places,&rdquo; I objected.
+&ldquo;I find life precarious enough in my present humble situation. I have no
+experience. Mediocrity, you see, has its compensations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He smiled as though it were all settled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t be mate on this hell-ship!&rdquo; I cried defiantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw his face grow hard and the merciless glitter come into his eyes. He
+walked to the door of his room, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now, Mr. Van Weyden, good-night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-night, Mr. Larsen,&rdquo; I answered weakly.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap16"></a>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I cannot say that the position of mate carried with it anything more joyful
+than that there were no more dishes to wash. I was ignorant of the simplest
+duties of mate, and would have fared badly indeed, had the sailors not
+sympathized with me. I knew nothing of the minutiæ of ropes and rigging, of the
+trimming and setting of sails; but the sailors took pains to put me to
+rights,&mdash;Louis proving an especially good teacher,&mdash;and I had little
+trouble with those under me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the hunters it was otherwise. Familiar in varying degree with the sea,
+they took me as a sort of joke. In truth, it was a joke to me, that I, the
+veriest landsman, should be filling the office of mate; but to be taken as a
+joke by others was a different matter. I made no complaint, but Wolf Larsen
+demanded the most punctilious sea etiquette in my case,&mdash;far more than
+poor Johansen had ever received; and at the expense of several rows, threats,
+and much grumbling, he brought the hunters to time. I was &ldquo;Mr. Van
+Weyden&rdquo; fore and aft, and it was only unofficially that Wolf Larsen
+himself ever addressed me as &ldquo;Hump.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was amusing. Perhaps the wind would haul a few points while we were at
+dinner, and as I left the table he would say, &ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden, will you
+kindly put about on the port tack.&rdquo; And I would go on deck, beckon Louis
+to me, and learn from him what was to be done. Then, a few minutes later,
+having digested his instructions and thoroughly mastered the manœuvre, I would
+proceed to issue my orders. I remember an early instance of this kind, when
+Wolf Larsen appeared on the scene just as I had begun to give orders. He smoked
+his cigar and looked on quietly till the thing was accomplished, and then paced
+aft by my side along the weather poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I beg pardon, Mr. Van Weyden, I
+congratulate you. I think you can now fire your father&rsquo;s legs back into
+the grave to him. You&rsquo;ve discovered your own and learned to stand on
+them. A little rope-work, sail-making, and experience with storms and such
+things, and by the end of the voyage you could ship on any coasting
+schooner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was during this period, between the death of Johansen and the arrival on the
+sealing grounds, that I passed my pleasantest hours on the <i>Ghost</i>. Wolf
+Larsen was quite considerate, the sailors helped me, and I was no longer in
+irritating contact with Thomas Mugridge. And I make free to say, as the days
+went by, that I found I was taking a certain secret pride in myself. Fantastic
+as the situation was,&mdash;a land-lubber second in command,&mdash;I was,
+nevertheless, carrying it off well; and during that brief time I was proud of
+myself, and I grew to love the heave and roll of the <i>Ghost</i> under my feet
+as she wallowed north and west through the tropic sea to the islet where we
+filled our water-casks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But my happiness was not unalloyed. It was comparative, a period of less misery
+slipped in between a past of great miseries and a future of great miseries. For
+the <i>Ghost</i>, so far as the seamen were concerned, was a hell-ship of the
+worst description. They never had a moment&rsquo;s rest or peace. Wolf Larsen
+treasured against them the attempt on his life and the drubbing he had received
+in the forecastle; and morning, noon, and night, and all night as well, he
+devoted himself to making life unlivable for them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He knew well the psychology of the little thing, and it was the little things
+by which he kept the crew worked up to the verge of madness. I have seen
+Harrison called from his bunk to put properly away a misplaced paintbrush, and
+the two watches below haled from their tired sleep to accompany him and see him
+do it. A little thing, truly, but when multiplied by the thousand ingenious
+devices of such a mind, the mental state of the men in the forecastle may be
+slightly comprehended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course much grumbling went on, and little outbursts were continually
+occurring. Blows were struck, and there were always two or three men nursing
+injuries at the hands of the human beast who was their master. Concerted action
+was impossible in face of the heavy arsenal of weapons carried in the steerage
+and cabin. Leach and Johnson were the two particular victims of Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s diabolic temper, and the look of profound melancholy which had
+settled on Johnson&rsquo;s face and in his eyes made my heart bleed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With Leach it was different. There was too much of the fighting beast in him.
+He seemed possessed by an insatiable fury which gave no time for grief. His
+lips had become distorted into a permanent snarl, which at mere sight of Wolf
+Larsen broke out in sound, horrible and menacing and, I do believe,
+unconsciously. I have seen him follow Wolf Larsen about with his eyes, like an
+animal its keeper, the while the animal-like snarl sounded deep in his throat
+and vibrated forth between his teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remember once, on deck, in bright day, touching him on the shoulder as
+preliminary to giving an order. His back was toward me, and at the first feel
+of my hand he leaped upright in the air and away from me, snarling and turning
+his head as he leaped. He had for the moment mistaken me for the man he hated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both he and Johnson would have killed Wolf Larsen at the slightest opportunity,
+but the opportunity never came. Wolf Larsen was too wise for that, and,
+besides, they had no adequate weapons. With their fists alone they had no
+chance whatever. Time and again he fought it out with Leach who fought back
+always, like a wildcat, tooth and nail and fist, until stretched, exhausted or
+unconscious, on the deck. And he was never averse to another encounter. All the
+devil that was in him challenged the devil in Wolf Larsen. They had but to
+appear on deck at the same time, when they would be at it, cursing, snarling,
+striking; and I have seen Leach fling himself upon Wolf Larsen without warning
+or provocation. Once he threw his heavy sheath-knife, missing Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s throat by an inch. Another time he dropped a steel marlinspike
+from the mizzen crosstree. It was a difficult cast to make on a rolling ship,
+but the sharp point of the spike, whistling seventy-five feet through the air,
+barely missed Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s head as he emerged from the cabin
+companion-way and drove its length two inches and over into the solid
+deck-planking. Still another time, he stole into the steerage, possessed
+himself of a loaded shot-gun, and was making a rush for the deck with it when
+caught by Kerfoot and disarmed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I often wondered why Wolf Larsen did not kill him and make an end of it. But he
+only laughed and seemed to enjoy it. There seemed a certain spice about it,
+such as men must feel who take delight in making pets of ferocious animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It gives a thrill to life,&rdquo; he explained to me, &ldquo;when life
+is carried in one&rsquo;s hand. Man is a natural gambler, and life is the
+biggest stake he can lay. The greater the odds, the greater the thrill. Why
+should I deny myself the joy of exciting Leach&rsquo;s soul to fever-pitch? For
+that matter, I do him a kindness. The greatness of sensation is mutual. He is
+living more royally than any man for&rsquo;ard, though he does not know it. For
+he has what they have not&mdash;purpose, something to do and be done, an
+all-absorbing end to strive to attain, the desire to kill me, the hope that he
+may kill me. Really, Hump, he is living deep and high. I doubt that he has ever
+lived so swiftly and keenly before, and I honestly envy him, sometimes, when I
+see him raging at the summit of passion and sensibility.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, but it is cowardly, cowardly!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;You have all
+the advantage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of the two of us, you and I, who is the greater coward?&rdquo; he asked
+seriously. &ldquo;If the situation is unpleasing, you compromise with your
+conscience when you make yourself a party to it. If you were really great,
+really true to yourself, you would join forces with Leach and Johnson. But you
+are afraid, you are afraid. You want to live. The life that is in you cries out
+that it must live, no matter what the cost; so you live ignominiously, untrue
+to the best you dream of, sinning against your whole pitiful little code, and,
+if there were a hell, heading your soul straight for it. Bah! I play the braver
+part. I do no sin, for I am true to the promptings of the life that is in me. I
+am sincere with my soul at least, and that is what you are not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a sting in what he said. Perhaps, after all, I was playing a cowardly
+part. And the more I thought about it the more it appeared that my duty to
+myself lay in doing what he had advised, lay in joining forces with Johnson and
+Leach and working for his death. Right here, I think, entered the austere
+conscience of my Puritan ancestry, impelling me toward lurid deeds and
+sanctioning even murder as right conduct. I dwelt upon the idea. It would be a
+most moral act to rid the world of such a monster. Humanity would be better and
+happier for it, life fairer and sweeter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I pondered it long, lying sleepless in my bunk and reviewing in endless
+procession the facts of the situation. I talked with Johnson and Leach, during
+the night watches when Wolf Larsen was below. Both men had lost
+hope&mdash;Johnson, because of temperamental despondency; Leach, because he had
+beaten himself out in the vain struggle and was exhausted. But he caught my
+hand in a passionate grip one night, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think yer square, Mr. Van Weyden. But stay where you are and keep yer
+mouth shut. Say nothin&rsquo; but saw wood. We&rsquo;re dead men, I know it;
+but all the same you might be able to do us a favour some time when we need it
+damn bad.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was only next day, when Wainwright Island loomed to windward, close abeam,
+that Wolf Larsen opened his mouth in prophecy. He had attacked Johnson, been
+attacked by Leach, and had just finished whipping the pair of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Leach,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you know I&rsquo;m going to kill you some
+time or other, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A snarl was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And as for you, Johnson, you&rsquo;ll get so tired of life before
+I&rsquo;m through with you that you&rsquo;ll fling yourself over the side. See
+if you don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a suggestion,&rdquo; he added, in an aside to me.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet you a month&rsquo;s pay he acts upon it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had cherished a hope that his victims would find an opportunity to escape
+while filling our water-barrels, but Wolf Larsen had selected his spot well.
+The <i>Ghost</i> lay half-a-mile beyond the surf-line of a lonely beach. Here
+debouched a deep gorge, with precipitous, volcanic walls which no man could
+scale. And here, under his direct supervision&mdash;for he went ashore
+himself&mdash;Leach and Johnson filled the small casks and rolled them down to
+the beach. They had no chance to make a break for liberty in one of the boats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Harrison and Kelly, however, made such an attempt. They composed one of the
+boats&rsquo; crews, and their task was to ply between the schooner and the
+shore, carrying a single cask each trip. Just before dinner, starting for the
+beach with an empty barrel, they altered their course and bore away to the left
+to round the promontory which jutted into the sea between them and liberty.
+Beyond its foaming base lay the pretty villages of the Japanese colonists and
+smiling valleys which penetrated deep into the interior. Once in the fastnesses
+they promised, and the two men could defy Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had observed Henderson and Smoke loitering about the deck all morning, and I
+now learned why they were there. Procuring their rifles, they opened fire in a
+leisurely manner, upon the deserters. It was a cold-blooded exhibition of
+marksmanship. At first their bullets zipped harmlessly along the surface of the
+water on either side the boat; but, as the men continued to pull lustily, they
+struck closer and closer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, watch me take Kelly&rsquo;s right oar,&rdquo; Smoke said, drawing a
+more careful aim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was looking through the glasses, and I saw the oar-blade shatter as he shot.
+Henderson duplicated it, selecting Harrison&rsquo;s right oar. The boat slewed
+around. The two remaining oars were quickly broken. The men tried to row with
+the splinters, and had them shot out of their hands. Kelly ripped up a bottom
+board and began paddling, but dropped it with a cry of pain as its splinters
+drove into his hands. Then they gave up, letting the boat drift till a second
+boat, sent from the shore by Wolf Larsen, took them in tow and brought them
+aboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Late that afternoon we hove up anchor and got away. Nothing was before us but
+the three or four months&rsquo; hunting on the sealing grounds. The outlook was
+black indeed, and I went about my work with a heavy heart. An almost funereal
+gloom seemed to have descended upon the <i>Ghost</i>. Wolf Larsen had taken to
+his bunk with one of his strange, splitting headaches. Harrison stood
+listlessly at the wheel, half supporting himself by it, as though wearied by
+the weight of his flesh. The rest of the men were morose and silent. I came
+upon Kelly crouching to the lee of the forecastle scuttle, his head on his
+knees, his arms about his head, in an attitude of unutterable despondency.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson I found lying full length on the forecastle head, staring at the
+troubled churn of the forefoot, and I remembered with horror the suggestion
+Wolf Larsen had made. It seemed likely to bear fruit. I tried to break in on
+the man&rsquo;s morbid thoughts by calling him away, but he smiled sadly at me
+and refused to obey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leach approached me as I returned aft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want to ask a favour, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If
+it&rsquo;s yer luck to ever make &rsquo;Frisco once more, will you hunt up Matt
+McCarthy? He&rsquo;s my old man. He lives on the Hill, back of the Mayfair
+bakery, runnin&rsquo; a cobbler&rsquo;s shop that everybody knows, and
+you&rsquo;ll have no trouble. Tell him I lived to be sorry for the trouble I
+brought him and the things I done, and&mdash;and just tell him &lsquo;God bless
+him,&rsquo; for me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded my head, but said, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll all win back to San Francisco,
+Leach, and you&rsquo;ll be with me when I go to see Matt McCarthy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to believe you,&rdquo; he answered, shaking my hand,
+&ldquo;but I can&rsquo;t. Wolf Larsen &rsquo;ll do for me, I know it; and all I
+can hope is, he&rsquo;ll do it quick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as he left me I was aware of the same desire at my heart. Since it was to
+be done, let it be done with despatch. The general gloom had gathered me into
+its folds. The worst appeared inevitable; and as I paced the deck, hour after
+hour, I found myself afflicted with Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s repulsive ideas. What
+was it all about? Where was the grandeur of life that it should permit such
+wanton destruction of human souls? It was a cheap and sordid thing after all,
+this life, and the sooner over the better. Over and done with! I, too, leaned
+upon the rail and gazed longingly into the sea, with the certainty that sooner
+or later I should be sinking down, down, through the cool green depths of its
+oblivion.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap17"></a>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Strange to say, in spite of the general foreboding, nothing of especial moment
+happened on the <i>Ghost</i>. We ran on to the north and west till we raised
+the coast of Japan and picked up with the great seal herd. Coming from no man
+knew where in the illimitable Pacific, it was travelling north on its annual
+migration to the rookeries of Bering Sea. And north we travelled with it,
+ravaging and destroying, flinging the naked carcasses to the shark and salting
+down the skins so that they might later adorn the fair shoulders of the women
+of the cities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was wanton slaughter, and all for woman&rsquo;s sake. No man ate of the seal
+meat or the oil. After a good day&rsquo;s killing I have seen our decks covered
+with hides and bodies, slippery with fat and blood, the scuppers running red;
+masts, ropes, and rails spattered with the sanguinary colour; and the men, like
+butchers plying their trade, naked and red of arm and hand, hard at work with
+ripping and flensing-knives, removing the skins from the pretty sea-creatures
+they had killed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was my task to tally the pelts as they came aboard from the boats, to
+oversee the skinning and afterward the cleansing of the decks and bringing
+things ship-shape again. It was not pleasant work. My soul and my stomach
+revolted at it; and yet, in a way, this handling and directing of many men was
+good for me. It developed what little executive ability I possessed, and I was
+aware of a toughening or hardening which I was undergoing and which could not
+be anything but wholesome for &ldquo;Sissy&rdquo; Van Weyden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing I was beginning to feel, and that was that I could never again be
+quite the same man I had been. While my hope and faith in human life still
+survived Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s destructive criticism, he had nevertheless been a
+cause of change in minor matters. He had opened up for me the world of the
+real, of which I had known practically nothing and from which I had always
+shrunk. I had learned to look more closely at life as it was lived, to
+recognize that there were such things as facts in the world, to emerge from the
+realm of mind and idea and to place certain values on the concrete and
+objective phases of existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw more of Wolf Larsen than ever when we had gained the grounds. For when
+the weather was fair and we were in the midst of the herd, all hands were away
+in the boats, and left on board were only he and I, and Thomas Mugridge, who
+did not count. But there was no play about it. The six boats, spreading out
+fan-wise from the schooner until the first weather boat and the last lee boat
+were anywhere from ten to twenty miles apart, cruised along a straight course
+over the sea till nightfall or bad weather drove them in. It was our duty to
+sail the <i>Ghost</i> well to leeward of the last lee boat, so that all the
+boats should have fair wind to run for us in case of squalls or threatening
+weather.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is no slight matter for two men, particularly when a stiff wind has sprung
+up, to handle a vessel like the <i>Ghost</i>, steering, keeping look-out for
+the boats, and setting or taking in sail; so it devolved upon me to learn, and
+learn quickly. Steering I picked up easily, but running aloft to the crosstrees
+and swinging my whole weight by my arms when I left the ratlines and climbed
+still higher, was more difficult. This, too, I learned, and quickly, for I felt
+somehow a wild desire to vindicate myself in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s eyes, to prove
+my right to live in ways other than of the mind. Nay, the time came when I took
+joy in the run of the masthead and in the clinging on by my legs at that
+precarious height while I swept the sea with glasses in search of the boats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remember one beautiful day, when the boats left early and the reports of the
+hunters&rsquo; guns grew dim and distant and died away as they scattered far
+and wide over the sea. There was just the faintest wind from the westward; but
+it breathed its last by the time we managed to get to leeward of the last lee
+boat. One by one&mdash;I was at the masthead and saw&mdash;the six boats
+disappeared over the bulge of the earth as they followed the seal into the
+west. We lay, scarcely rolling on the placid sea, unable to follow. Wolf Larsen
+was apprehensive. The barometer was down, and the sky to the east did not
+please him. He studied it with unceasing vigilance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If she comes out of there,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;hard and snappy,
+putting us to windward of the boats, it&rsquo;s likely there&rsquo;ll be empty
+bunks in steerage and fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By eleven o&rsquo;clock the sea had become glass. By midday, though we were
+well up in the northerly latitudes, the heat was sickening. There was no
+freshness in the air. It was sultry and oppressive, reminding me of what the
+old Californians term &ldquo;earthquake weather.&rdquo; There was something
+ominous about it, and in intangible ways one was made to feel that the worst
+was about to come. Slowly the whole eastern sky filled with clouds that
+over-towered us like some black sierra of the infernal regions. So clearly
+could one see ca&ntilde;on, gorge, and precipice, and the shadows that lie
+therein, that one looked unconsciously for the white surf-line and bellowing
+caverns where the sea charges on the land. And still we rocked gently, and
+there was no wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no squall,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said. &ldquo;Old Mother
+Nature&rsquo;s going to get up on her hind legs and howl for all that&rsquo;s
+in her, and it&rsquo;ll keep us jumping, Hump, to pull through with half our
+boats. You&rsquo;d better run up and loosen the topsails.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if it is going to howl, and there are only two of us?&rdquo; I
+asked, a note of protest in my voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why we&rsquo;ve got to make the best of the first of it and run down to
+our boats before our canvas is ripped out of us. After that I don&rsquo;t give
+a rap what happens. The sticks &rsquo;ll stand it, and you and I will have to,
+though we&rsquo;ve plenty cut out for us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still the calm continued. We ate dinner, a hurried and anxious meal for me with
+eighteen men abroad on the sea and beyond the bulge of the earth, and with that
+heaven-rolling mountain range of clouds moving slowly down upon us. Wolf Larsen
+did not seem affected, however; though I noticed, when we returned to the deck,
+a slight twitching of the nostrils, a perceptible quickness of movement. His
+face was stern, the lines of it had grown hard, and yet in his eyes&mdash;blue,
+clear blue this day&mdash;there was a strange brilliancy, a bright
+scintillating light. It struck me that he was joyous, in a ferocious sort of
+way; that he was glad there was an impending struggle; that he was thrilled and
+upborne with knowledge that one of the great moments of living, when the tide
+of life surges up in flood, was upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, and unwitting that he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud, mockingly
+and defiantly, at the advancing storm. I see him yet standing there like a
+pigmy out of the <i>Arabian Nights</i> before the huge front of some malignant
+genie. He was daring destiny, and he was unafraid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He walked to the galley. &ldquo;Cooky, by the time you&rsquo;ve finished pots
+and pans you&rsquo;ll be wanted on deck. Stand ready for a call.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said, becoming cognizant of the fascinated gaze I bent
+upon him, &ldquo;this beats whisky and is where your Omar misses. I think he
+only half lived after all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The western half of the sky had by now grown murky. The sun had dimmed and
+faded out of sight. It was two in the afternoon, and a ghostly twilight, shot
+through by wandering purplish lights, had descended upon us. In this purplish
+light Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s face glowed and glowed, and to my excited fancy he
+appeared encircled by a halo. We lay in the midst of an unearthly quiet, while
+all about us were signs and omens of oncoming sound and movement. The sultry
+heat had become unendurable. The sweat was standing on my forehead, and I could
+feel it trickling down my nose. I felt as though I should faint, and reached
+out to the rail for support.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, just then, the faintest possible whisper of air passed by. It was
+from the east, and like a whisper it came and went. The drooping canvas was not
+stirred, and yet my face had felt the air and been cooled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cooky,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called in a low voice. Thomas Mugridge turned
+a pitiable scared face. &ldquo;Let go that foreboom tackle and pass it across,
+and when she&rsquo;s willing let go the sheet and come in snug with the tackle.
+And if you make a mess of it, it will be the last you ever make.
+Understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden, stand by to pass the head-sails over. Then jump for the
+topsails and spread them quick as God&rsquo;ll let you&mdash;the quicker you do
+it the easier you&rsquo;ll find it. As for Cooky, if he isn&rsquo;t lively bat
+him between the eyes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was aware of the compliment and pleased, in that no threat had accompanied my
+instructions. We were lying head to north-west, and it was his intention to
+jibe over all with the first puff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll have the breeze on our quarter,&rdquo; he explained to me.
+&ldquo;By the last guns the boats were bearing away slightly to the
+south&rsquo;ard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned and walked aft to the wheel. I went forward and took my station at
+the jibs. Another whisper of wind, and another, passed by. The canvas flapped
+lazily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank Gawd she&rsquo;s not comin&rsquo; all of a bunch, Mr. Van
+Weyden,&rdquo; was the Cockney&rsquo;s fervent ejaculation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I was indeed thankful, for I had by this time learned enough to know, with
+all our canvas spread, what disaster in such event awaited us. The whispers of
+wind became puffs, the sails filled, the <i>Ghost</i> moved. Wolf Larsen put
+the wheel hard up, to port, and we began to pay off. The wind was now dead
+astern, muttering and puffing stronger and stronger, and my head-sails were
+pounding lustily. I did not see what went on elsewhere, though I felt the
+sudden surge and heel of the schooner as the wind-pressures changed to the
+jibing of the fore- and main-sails. My hands were full with the flying-jib,
+jib, and staysail; and by the time this part of my task was accomplished the
+<i>Ghost</i> was leaping into the south-west, the wind on her quarter and all
+her sheets to starboard. Without pausing for breath, though my heart was
+beating like a trip-hammer from my exertions, I sprang to the topsails, and
+before the wind had become too strong we had them fairly set and were coiling
+down. Then I went aft for orders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen nodded approval and relinquished the wheel to me. The wind was
+strengthening steadily and the sea rising. For an hour I steered, each moment
+becoming more difficult. I had not the experience to steer at the gait we were
+going on a quartering course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now take a run up with the glasses and raise some of the boats.
+We&rsquo;ve made at least ten knots, and we&rsquo;re going twelve or thirteen
+now. The old girl knows how to walk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I contested myself with the fore crosstrees, some seventy feet above the deck.
+As I searched the vacant stretch of water before me, I comprehended thoroughly
+the need for haste if we were to recover any of our men. Indeed, as I gazed at
+the heavy sea through which we were running, I doubted that there was a boat
+afloat. It did not seem possible that such frail craft could survive such
+stress of wind and water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could not feel the full force of the wind, for we were running with it; but
+from my lofty perch I looked down as though outside the <i>Ghost</i> and apart
+from her, and saw the shape of her outlined sharply against the foaming sea as
+she tore along instinct with life. Sometimes she would lift and send across
+some great wave, burying her starboard-rail from view, and covering her deck to
+the hatches with the boiling ocean. At such moments, starting from a windward
+roll, I would go flying through the air with dizzying swiftness, as though I
+clung to the end of a huge, inverted pendulum, the arc of which, between the
+greater rolls, must have been seventy feet or more. Once, the terror of this
+giddy sweep overpowered me, and for a while I clung on, hand and foot, weak and
+trembling, unable to search the sea for the missing boats or to behold aught of
+the sea but that which roared beneath and strove to overwhelm the <i>Ghost</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the thought of the men in the midst of it steadied me, and in my quest for
+them I forgot myself. For an hour I saw nothing but the naked, desolate sea.
+And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight struck the ocean and turned its
+surface to wrathful silver, I caught a small black speck thrust skyward for an
+instant and swallowed up. I waited patiently. Again the tiny point of black
+projected itself through the wrathful blaze a couple of points off our
+port-bow. I did not attempt to shout, but communicated the news to Wolf Larsen
+by waving my arm. He changed the course, and I signalled affirmation when the
+speck showed dead ahead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It grew larger, and so swiftly that for the first time I fully appreciated the
+speed of our flight. Wolf Larsen motioned for me to come down, and when I stood
+beside him at the wheel gave me instructions for heaving to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Expect all hell to break loose,&rdquo; he cautioned me, &ldquo;but
+don&rsquo;t mind it. Yours is to do your own work and to have Cooky stand by
+the fore-sheet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I managed to make my way forward, but there was little choice of sides, for the
+weather-rail seemed buried as often as the lee. Having instructed Thomas
+Mugridge as to what he was to do, I clambered into the fore-rigging a few feet.
+The boat was now very close, and I could make out plainly that it was lying
+head to wind and sea and dragging on its mast and sail, which had been thrown
+overboard and made to serve as a sea-anchor. The three men were bailing. Each
+rolling mountain whelmed them from view, and I would wait with sickening
+anxiety, fearing that they would never appear again. Then, and with black
+suddenness, the boat would shoot clear through the foaming crest, bow pointed
+to the sky, and the whole length of her bottom showing, wet and dark, till she
+seemed on end. There would be a fleeting glimpse of the three men flinging
+water in frantic haste, when she would topple over and fall into the yawning
+valley, bow down and showing her full inside length to the stern upreared
+almost directly above the bow. Each time that she reappeared was a miracle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Ghost</i> suddenly changed her course, keeping away, and it came to me
+with a shock that Wolf Larsen was giving up the rescue as impossible. Then I
+realized that he was preparing to heave to, and dropped to the deck to be in
+readiness. We were now dead before the wind, the boat far away and abreast of
+us. I felt an abrupt easing of the schooner, a loss for the moment of all
+strain and pressure, coupled with a swift acceleration of speed. She was
+rushing around on her heel into the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she arrived at right angles to the sea, the full force of the wind (from
+which we had hitherto run away) caught us. I was unfortunately and ignorantly
+facing it. It stood up against me like a wall, filling my lungs with air which
+I could not expel. And as I choked and strangled, and as the <i>Ghost</i>
+wallowed for an instant, broadside on and rolling straight over and far into
+the wind, I beheld a huge sea rise far above my head. I turned aside, caught my
+breath, and looked again. The wave over-topped the <i>Ghost</i>, and I gazed
+sheer up and into it. A shaft of sunlight smote the over-curl, and I caught a
+glimpse of translucent, rushing green, backed by a milky smother of foam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it descended, pandemonium broke loose, everything happened at once. I was
+struck a crushing, stunning blow, nowhere in particular and yet everywhere. My
+hold had been broken loose, I was under water, and the thought passed through
+my mind that this was the terrible thing of which I had heard, the being swept
+in the trough of the sea. My body struck and pounded as it was dashed
+helplessly along and turned over and over, and when I could hold my breath no
+longer, I breathed the stinging salt water into my lungs. But through it all I
+clung to the one idea&mdash;<i>I must get the jib backed over to windward</i>.
+I had no fear of death. I had no doubt but that I should come through somehow.
+And as this idea of fulfilling Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s order persisted in my dazed
+consciousness, I seemed to see him standing at the wheel in the midst of the
+wild welter, pitting his will against the will of the storm and defying it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I brought up violently against what I took to be the rail, breathed, and
+breathed the sweet air again. I tried to rise, but struck my head and was
+knocked back on hands and knees. By some freak of the waters I had been swept
+clear under the forecastle-head and into the eyes. As I scrambled out on all
+fours, I passed over the body of Thomas Mugridge, who lay in a groaning heap.
+There was no time to investigate. I must get the jib backed over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I emerged on deck it seemed that the end of everything had come. On all
+sides there was a rending and crashing of wood and steel and canvas. The
+<i>Ghost</i> was being wrenched and torn to fragments. The foresail and
+fore-topsail, emptied of the wind by the manœuvre, and with no one to bring in
+the sheet in time, were thundering into ribbons, the heavy boom threshing and
+splintering from rail to rail. The air was thick with flying wreckage, detached
+ropes and stays were hissing and coiling like snakes, and down through it all
+crashed the gaff of the foresail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spar could not have missed me by many inches, while it spurred me to
+action. Perhaps the situation was not hopeless. I remembered Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s caution. He had expected all hell to break loose, and here it
+was. And where was he? I caught sight of him toiling at the main-sheet, heaving
+it in and flat with his tremendous muscles, the stern of the schooner lifted
+high in the air and his body outlined against a white surge of sea sweeping
+past. All this, and more,&mdash;a whole world of chaos and wreck,&mdash;in
+possibly fifteen seconds I had seen and heard and grasped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I did not stop to see what had become of the small boat, but sprang to the
+jib-sheet. The jib itself was beginning to slap, partially filling and emptying
+with sharp reports; but with a turn of the sheet and the application of my
+whole strength each time it slapped, I slowly backed it. This I know: I did my
+best. I pulled till I burst open the ends of all my fingers; and while I
+pulled, the flying-jib and staysail split their cloths apart and thundered into
+nothingness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still I pulled, holding what I gained each time with a double turn until the
+next slap gave me more. Then the sheet gave with greater ease, and Wolf Larsen
+was beside me, heaving in alone while I was busied taking up the slack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Make fast!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;And come on!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I followed him, I noted that in spite of rack and ruin a rough order
+obtained. The <i>Ghost</i> was hove to. She was still in working order, and she
+was still working. Though the rest of her sails were gone, the jib, backed to
+windward, and the mainsail hauled down flat, were themselves holding, and
+holding her bow to the furious sea as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked for the boat, and, while Wolf Larsen cleared the boat-tackles, saw it
+lift to leeward on a big sea and not a score of feet away. And, so nicely had he
+made his calculation, we drifted fairly down upon it, so that nothing remained
+to do but hook the tackles to either end and hoist it aboard. But this was not
+done so easily as it is written.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the bow was Kerfoot, Oofty-Oofty in the stern, and Kelly amidships. As we
+drifted closer the boat would rise on a wave while we sank in the trough, till
+almost straight above me I could see the heads of the three men craned overside
+and looking down. Then, the next moment, we would lift and soar upward while
+they sank far down beneath us. It seemed incredible that the next surge should
+not crush the <i>Ghost</i> down upon the tiny eggshell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, at the right moment, I passed the tackle to the Kanaka, while Wolf Larsen
+did the same thing forward to Kerfoot. Both tackles were hooked in a trice, and
+the three men, deftly timing the roll, made a simultaneous leap aboard the
+schooner. As the <i>Ghost</i> rolled her side out of water, the boat was lifted
+snugly against her, and before the return roll came, we had heaved it in over
+the side and turned it bottom up on the deck. I noticed blood spouting from
+Kerfoot&rsquo;s left hand. In some way the third finger had been crushed to a
+pulp. But he gave no sign of pain, and with his single right hand helped us
+lash the boat in its place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stand by to let that jib over, you Oofty!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen commanded,
+the very second we had finished with the boat. &ldquo;Kelly, come aft and slack
+off the main-sheet! You, Kerfoot, go for&rsquo;ard and see what&rsquo;s become
+of Cooky! Mr. Van Weyden, run aloft again, and cut away any stray stuff on your
+way!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And having commanded, he went aft with his peculiar tigerish leaps to the
+wheel. While I toiled up the fore-shrouds the <i>Ghost</i> slowly paid off.
+This time, as we went into the trough of the sea and were swept, there were no
+sails to carry away. And, halfway to the crosstrees and flattened against the
+rigging by the full force of the wind so that it would have been impossible for
+me to have fallen, the <i>Ghost</i> almost on her beam-ends and the masts
+parallel with the water, I looked, not down, but at almost right angles from
+the perpendicular, to the deck of the <i>Ghost</i>. But I saw, not the deck,
+but where the deck should have been, for it was buried beneath a wild tumbling
+of water. Out of this water I could see the two masts rising, and that was all.
+The <i>Ghost</i>, for the moment, was buried beneath the sea. As she squared
+off more and more, escaping from the side pressure, she righted herself and
+broke her deck, like a whale&rsquo;s back, through the ocean surface.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then we raced, and wildly, across the wild sea, the while I hung like a fly in
+the crosstrees and searched for the other boats. In half-an-hour I sighted the
+second one, swamped and bottom up, to which were desperately clinging Jock
+Horner, fat Louis, and Johnson. This time I remained aloft, and Wolf Larsen
+succeeded in heaving to without being swept. As before, we drifted down upon
+it. Tackles were made fast and lines flung to the men, who scrambled aboard
+like monkeys. The boat itself was crushed and splintered against the
+schooner&rsquo;s side as it came inboard; but the wreck was securely lashed,
+for it could be patched and made whole again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once more the <i>Ghost</i> bore away before the storm, this time so submerging
+herself that for some seconds I thought she would never reappear. Even the
+wheel, quite a deal higher than the waist, was covered and swept again and
+again. At such moments I felt strangely alone with God, alone with him and
+watching the chaos of his wrath. And then the wheel would reappear, and Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s broad shoulders, his hands gripping the spokes and holding the
+schooner to the course of his will, himself an earth-god, dominating the storm,
+flinging its descending waters from him and riding it to his own ends. And oh,
+the marvel of it! the marvel of it! That tiny men should live and breathe and
+work, and drive so frail a contrivance of wood and cloth through so tremendous
+an elemental strife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As before, the <i>Ghost</i> swung out of the trough, lifting her deck again out
+of the sea, and dashed before the howling blast. It was now half-past five, and
+half-an-hour later, when the last of the day lost itself in a dim and furious
+twilight, I sighted a third boat. It was bottom up, and there was no sign of
+its crew. Wolf Larsen repeated his manœuvre, holding off and then rounding up
+to windward and drifting down upon it. But this time he missed by forty feet,
+the boat passing astern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Number four boat!&rdquo; Oofty-Oofty cried, his keen eyes reading its
+number in the one second when it lifted clear of the foam, and upside down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Henderson&rsquo;s boat and with him had been lost Holyoak and Williams,
+another of the deep-water crowd. Lost they indubitably were; but the boat
+remained, and Wolf Larsen made one more reckless effort to recover it. I had
+come down to the deck, and I saw Horner and Kerfoot vainly protest against the
+attempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By God, I&rsquo;ll not be robbed of my boat by any storm that ever blew
+out of hell!&rdquo; he shouted, and though we four stood with our heads
+together that we might hear, his voice seemed faint and far, as though removed
+from us an immense distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden!&rdquo; he cried, and I heard through the tumult as one
+might hear a whisper. &ldquo;Stand by that jib with Johnson and Oofty! The rest
+of you tail aft to the mainsheet! Lively now! or I&rsquo;ll sail you all into
+Kingdom Come! Understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when he put the wheel hard over and the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> bow swung off,
+there was nothing for the hunters to do but obey and make the best of a risky
+chance. How great the risk I realized when I was once more buried beneath the
+pounding seas and clinging for life to the pinrail at the foot of the foremast.
+My fingers were torn loose, and I swept across to the side and over the side
+into the sea. I could not swim, but before I could sink I was swept back again.
+A strong hand gripped me, and when the <i>Ghost</i> finally emerged, I found
+that I owed my life to Johnson. I saw him looking anxiously about him, and
+noted that Kelly, who had come forward at the last moment, was missing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This time, having missed the boat, and not being in the same position as in the
+previous instances, Wolf Larsen was compelled to resort to a different
+manœuvre. Running off before the wind with everything to starboard, he came
+about, and returned close-hauled on the port tack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Grand!&rdquo; Johnson shouted in my ear, as we successfully came through
+the attendant deluge, and I knew he referred, not to Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+seamanship, but to the performance of the <i>Ghost</i> herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was now so dark that there was no sign of the boat; but Wolf Larsen held
+back through the frightful turmoil as if guided by unerring instinct. This
+time, though we were continually half-buried, there was no trough in which to
+be swept, and we drifted squarely down upon the upturned boat, badly smashing
+it as it was heaved inboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two hours of terrible work followed, in which all hands of us&mdash;two
+hunters, three sailors, Wolf Larsen and I&mdash;reefed, first one and then the
+other, the jib and mainsail. Hove to under this short canvas, our decks were
+comparatively free of water, while the <i>Ghost</i> bobbed and ducked amongst
+the combers like a cork.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had burst open the ends of my fingers at the very first, and during the
+reefing I had worked with tears of pain running down my cheeks. And when all
+was done, I gave up like a woman and rolled upon the deck in the agony of
+exhaustion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime Thomas Mugridge, like a drowned rat, was being dragged out from
+under the forecastle head where he had cravenly ensconced himself. I saw him
+pulled aft to the cabin, and noted with a shock of surprise that the galley had
+disappeared. A clean space of deck showed where it had stood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the cabin I found all hands assembled, sailors as well, and while coffee was
+being cooked over the small stove we drank whisky and crunched hard-tack. Never
+in my life had food been so welcome. And never had hot coffee tasted so good.
+So violently did the <i>Ghost</i> pitch and toss and tumble that it was
+impossible for even the sailors to move about without holding on, and several
+times, after a cry of &ldquo;Now she takes it!&rdquo; we were heaped upon the
+wall of the port cabins as though it had been the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To hell with a look-out,&rdquo; I heard Wolf Larsen say when we had
+eaten and drunk our fill. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing can be done on deck. If
+anything&rsquo;s going to run us down we couldn&rsquo;t get out of its way.
+Turn in, all hands, and get some sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sailors slipped forward, setting the side-lights as they went, while the
+two hunters remained to sleep in the cabin, it not being deemed advisable to
+open the slide to the steerage companion-way. Wolf Larsen and I, between us,
+cut off Kerfoot&rsquo;s crushed finger and sewed up the stump. Mugridge, who,
+during all the time he had been compelled to cook and serve coffee and keep the
+fire going, had complained of internal pains, now swore that he had a broken
+rib or two. On examination we found that he had three. But his case was
+deferred to next day, principally for the reason that I did not know anything
+about broken ribs and would first have to read it up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it was worth it,&rdquo; I said to Wolf Larsen,
+&ldquo;a broken boat for Kelly&rsquo;s life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But Kelly didn&rsquo;t amount to much,&rdquo; was the reply.
+&ldquo;Good-night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After all that had passed, suffering intolerable anguish in my finger-ends, and
+with three boats missing, to say nothing of the wild capers the <i>Ghost</i>
+was cutting, I should have thought it impossible to sleep. But my eyes must
+have closed the instant my head touched the pillow, and in utter exhaustion I
+slept throughout the night, the while the <i>Ghost</i>, lonely and undirected,
+fought her way through the storm.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap18"></a>CHAPTER XVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The next day, while the storm was blowing itself out, Wolf Larsen and I crammed
+anatomy and surgery and set Mugridge&rsquo;s ribs. Then, when the storm broke,
+Wolf Larsen cruised back and forth over that portion of the ocean where we had
+encountered it, and somewhat more to the westward, while the boats were being
+repaired and new sails made and bent. Sealing schooner after sealing schooner
+we sighted and boarded, most of which were in search of lost boats, and most of
+which were carrying boats and crews they had picked up and which did not belong
+to them. For the thick of the fleet had been to the westward of us, and the
+boats, scattered far and wide, had headed in mad flight for the nearest refuge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the <i>Cisco</i>, and, to Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s huge delight and my own grief, he culled Smoke, with Nilson and
+Leach, from the <i>San Diego</i>. So that, at the end of five days, we found
+ourselves short but four men&mdash;Henderson, Holyoak, Williams, and
+Kelly,&mdash;and were once more hunting on the flanks of the herd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we followed it north we began to encounter the dreaded sea-fogs. Day after
+day the boats lowered and were swallowed up almost ere they touched the water,
+while we on board pumped the horn at regular intervals and every fifteen
+minutes fired the bomb gun. Boats were continually being lost and found, it
+being the custom for a boat to hunt, on lay, with whatever schooner picked it
+up, until such time it was recovered by its own schooner. But Wolf Larsen, as
+was to be expected, being a boat short, took possession of the first stray one
+and compelled its men to hunt with the <i>Ghost</i>, not permitting them to
+return to their own schooner when we sighted it. I remember how he forced the
+hunter and his two men below, a rifle at their breasts, when their captain
+passed by at biscuit-toss and hailed us for information.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life, was soon
+limping about again and performing his double duties of cook and cabin-boy.
+Johnson and Leach were bullied and beaten as much as ever, and they looked for
+their lives to end with the end of the hunting season; while the rest of the
+crew lived the lives of dogs and were worked like dogs by their pitiless
+master. As for Wolf Larsen and myself, we got along fairly well; though I could
+not quite rid myself of the idea that right conduct, for me, lay in killing
+him. He fascinated me immeasurably, and I feared him immeasurably. And yet, I
+could not imagine him lying prone in death. There was an endurance, as of
+perpetual youth, about him, which rose up and forbade the picture. I could see
+him only as living always, and dominating always, fighting and destroying,
+himself surviving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One diversion of his, when we were in the midst of the herd and the sea was too
+rough to lower the boats, was to lower with two boat-pullers and a steerer and
+go out himself. He was a good shot, too, and brought many a skin aboard under
+what the hunters termed impossible hunting conditions. It seemed the breath of
+his nostrils, this carrying his life in his hands and struggling for it against
+tremendous odds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was learning more and more seamanship; and one clear day&mdash;a thing we
+rarely encountered now&mdash;I had the satisfaction of running and handling the
+<i>Ghost</i> and picking up the boats myself. Wolf Larsen had been smitten with
+one of his headaches, and I stood at the wheel from morning until evening,
+sailing across the ocean after the last lee boat, and heaving to and picking it
+and the other five up without command or suggestion from him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gales we encountered now and again, for it was a raw and stormy region, and, in
+the middle of June, a typhoon most memorable to me and most important because
+of the changes wrought through it upon my future. We must have been caught
+nearly at the centre of this circular storm, and Wolf Larsen ran out of it and
+to the southward, first under a double-reefed jib, and finally under bare
+poles. Never had I imagined so great a sea. The seas previously encountered
+were as ripples compared with these, which ran a half-mile from crest to crest
+and which upreared, I am confident, above our masthead. So great was it that
+Wolf Larsen himself did not dare heave to, though he was being driven far to
+the southward and out of the seal herd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We must have been well in the path of the trans-Pacific steamships when the
+typhoon moderated, and here, to the surprise of the hunters, we found ourselves
+in the midst of seals&mdash;a second herd, or sort of rear-guard, they
+declared, and a most unusual thing. But it was &ldquo;Boats over!&rdquo; the
+boom-boom of guns, and the pitiful slaughter through the long day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this time that I was approached by Leach. I had just finished
+tallying the skins of the last boat aboard, when he came to my side, in the
+darkness, and said in a low tone:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can you tell me, Mr. Van Weyden, how far we are off the coast, and what
+the bearings of Yokohama are?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My heart leaped with gladness, for I knew what he had in mind, and I gave him
+the bearings&mdash;west-north-west, and five hundred miles away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you, sir,&rdquo; was all he said as he slipped back into the
+darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next morning No. 3 boat and Johnson and Leach were missing. The water-breakers
+and grub-boxes from all the other boats were likewise missing, as were the beds
+and sea bags of the two men. Wolf Larsen was furious. He set sail and bore away
+into the west-north-west, two hunters constantly at the mastheads and sweeping
+the sea with glasses, himself pacing the deck like an angry lion. He knew too
+well my sympathy for the runaways to send me aloft as look-out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle in a
+haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity. But he put the
+<i>Ghost</i> through her best paces so as to get between the deserters and the
+land. This accomplished, he cruised back and forth across what he knew must be
+their course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the morning of the third day, shortly after eight bells, a cry that the boat
+was sighted came down from Smoke at the masthead. All hands lined the rail. A
+snappy breeze was blowing from the west with the promise of more wind behind
+it; and there, to leeward, in the troubled silver of the rising sun, appeared
+and disappeared a black speck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We squared away and ran for it. My heart was as lead. I felt myself turning
+sick in anticipation; and as I looked at the gleam of triumph in Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s eyes, his form swam before me, and I felt almost irresistibly
+impelled to fling myself upon him. So unnerved was I by the thought of
+impending violence to Leach and Johnson that my reason must have left me. I
+know that I slipped down into the steerage in a daze, and that I was just
+beginning the ascent to the deck, a loaded shot-gun in my hands, when I heard
+the startled cry:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s five men in that boat!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I supported myself in the companion-way, weak and trembling, while the
+observation was being verified by the remarks of the rest of the men. Then my
+knees gave from under me and I sank down, myself again, but overcome by shock
+at knowledge of what I had so nearly done. Also, I was very thankful as I put
+the gun away and slipped back on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one had remarked my absence. The boat was near enough for us to make out
+that it was larger than any sealing boat and built on different lines. As we
+drew closer, the sail was taken in and the mast unstepped. Oars were shipped,
+and its occupants waited for us to heave to and take them aboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smoke, who had descended to the deck and was now standing by my side, began to
+chuckle in a significant way. I looked at him inquiringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Talk of a mess!&rdquo; he giggled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s wrong?&rdquo; I demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again he chuckled. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you see there, in the stern-sheets, on
+the bottom? May I never shoot a seal again if that ain&rsquo;t a woman!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked closely, but was not sure until exclamations broke out on all sides.
+The boat contained four men, and its fifth occupant was certainly a woman. We
+were agog with excitement, all except Wolf Larsen, who was too evidently
+disappointed in that it was not his own boat with the two victims of his
+malice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We ran down the flying jib, hauled the jib-sheets to wind-ward and the
+main-sheet flat, and came up into the wind. The oars struck the water, and with
+a few strokes the boat was alongside. I now caught my first fair glimpse of the
+woman. She was wrapped in a long ulster, for the morning was raw; and I could
+see nothing but her face and a mass of light brown hair escaping from under the
+seaman&rsquo;s cap on her head. The eyes were large and brown and lustrous, the
+mouth sweet and sensitive, and the face itself a delicate oval, though sun and
+exposure to briny wind had burnt the face scarlet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She seemed to me like a being from another world. I was aware of a hungry
+out-reaching for her, as of a starving man for bread. But then, I had not seen
+a woman for a very long time. I know that I was lost in a great wonder, almost
+a stupor,&mdash;this, then, was a woman?&mdash;so that I forgot myself and my
+mate&rsquo;s duties, and took no part in helping the new-comers aboard. For
+when one of the sailors lifted her into Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s downstretched arms,
+she looked up into our curious faces and smiled amusedly and sweetly, as only a
+woman can smile, and as I had seen no one smile for so long that I had
+forgotten such smiles existed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s voice brought me sharply back to myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you take the lady below and see to her comfort? Make up that spare
+port cabin. Put Cooky to work on it. And see what you can do for that face.
+It&rsquo;s burned badly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned brusquely away from us and began to question the new men. The boat
+was cast adrift, though one of them called it a &ldquo;bloody shame&rdquo; with
+Yokohama so near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I found myself strangely afraid of this woman I was escorting aft. Also I was
+awkward. It seemed to me that I was realizing for the first time what a
+delicate, fragile creature a woman is; and as I caught her arm to help her down
+the companion stairs, I was startled by its smallness and softness. Indeed, she
+was a slender, delicate woman as women go, but to me she was so ethereally
+slender and delicate that I was quite prepared for her arm to crumble in my
+grasp. All this, in frankness, to show my first impression, after long denial
+of women in general and of Maud Brewster in particular.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No need to go to any great trouble for me,&rdquo; she protested, when I
+had seated her in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s arm-chair, which I had dragged hastily
+from his cabin. &ldquo;The men were looking for land at any moment this
+morning, and the vessel should be in by night; don&rsquo;t you think so?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her simple faith in the immediate future took me aback. How could I explain to
+her the situation, the strange man who stalked the sea like Destiny, all that
+it had taken me months to learn? But I answered honestly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it were any other captain except ours, I should say you would be
+ashore in Yokohama to-morrow. But our captain is a strange man, and I beg of
+you to be prepared for anything&mdash;understand?&mdash;for anything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I confess I hardly do understand,&rdquo; she hesitated, a
+perturbed but not frightened expression in her eyes. &ldquo;Or is it a
+misconception of mine that shipwrecked people are always shown every
+consideration? This is such a little thing, you know. We are so close to
+land.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Candidly, I do not know,&rdquo; I strove to reassure her. &ldquo;I
+wished merely to prepare you for the worst, if the worst is to come. This man,
+this captain, is a brute, a demon, and one can never tell what will be his next
+fantastic act.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was growing excited, but she interrupted me with an &ldquo;Oh, I see,&rdquo;
+and her voice sounded weary. To think was patently an effort. She was clearly
+on the verge of physical collapse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She asked no further questions, and I vouchsafed no remark, devoting myself to
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s command, which was to make her comfortable. I bustled about
+in quite housewifely fashion, procuring soothing lotions for her sunburn,
+raiding Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s private stores for a bottle of port I knew to be
+there, and directing Thomas Mugridge in the preparation of the spare
+state-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind was freshening rapidly, the <i>Ghost</i> heeling over more and more,
+and by the time the state-room was ready she was dashing through the water at a
+lively clip. I had quite forgotten the existence of Leach and Johnson, when
+suddenly, like a thunderclap, &ldquo;Boat ho!&rdquo; came down the open
+companion-way. It was Smoke&rsquo;s unmistakable voice, crying from the
+masthead. I shot a glance at the woman, but she was leaning back in the
+arm-chair, her eyes closed, unutterably tired. I doubted that she had heard,
+and I resolved to prevent her seeing the brutality I knew would follow the
+capture of the deserters. She was tired. Very good. She should sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were swift commands on deck, a stamping of feet and a slapping of
+reef-points as the <i>Ghost</i> shot into the wind and about on the other tack.
+As she filled away and heeled, the arm-chair began to slide across the cabin
+floor, and I sprang for it just in time to prevent the rescued woman from being
+spilled out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes were too heavy to suggest more than a hint of the sleepy surprise that
+perplexed her as she looked up at me, and she half stumbled, half tottered, as
+I led her to her cabin. Mugridge grinned insinuatingly in my face as I shoved
+him out and ordered him back to his galley work; and he won his revenge by
+spreading glowing reports among the hunters as to what an excellent
+&ldquo;lydy&rsquo;s-myde&rdquo; I was proving myself to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She leaned heavily against me, and I do believe that she had fallen asleep
+again between the arm-chair and the state-room. This I discovered when she
+nearly fell into the bunk during a sudden lurch of the schooner. She aroused,
+smiled drowsily, and was off to sleep again; and asleep I left her, under a
+heavy pair of sailor&rsquo;s blankets, her head resting on a pillow I had
+appropriated from Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s bunk.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap19"></a>CHAPTER XIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I came on deck to find the <i>Ghost</i> heading up close on the port tack and
+cutting in to windward of a familiar spritsail close-hauled on the same tack
+ahead of us. All hands were on deck, for they knew that something was to happen
+when Leach and Johnson were dragged aboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was four bells. Louis came aft to relieve the wheel. There was a dampness in
+the air, and I noticed he had on his oilskins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are we going to have?&rdquo; I asked him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A healthy young slip of a gale from the breath iv it, sir,&rdquo; he
+answered, &ldquo;with a splatter iv rain just to wet our gills an&rsquo; no
+more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too bad we sighted them,&rdquo; I said, as the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> bow
+was flung off a point by a large sea and the boat leaped for a moment past the
+jibs and into our line of vision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis gave a spoke and temporized. &ldquo;They&rsquo;d never iv made the land,
+sir, I&rsquo;m thinkin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Think not?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, sir. Did you feel that?&rdquo; (A puff had caught the schooner, and
+he was forced to put the wheel up rapidly to keep her out of the wind.)
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis no egg-shell&rsquo;ll float on this sea an hour come,
+an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s a stroke iv luck for them we&rsquo;re here to pick
+&rsquo;em up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen strode aft from amidships, where he had been talking with the
+rescued men. The cat-like springiness in his tread was a little more pronounced
+than usual, and his eyes were bright and snappy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three oilers and a fourth engineer,&rdquo; was his greeting. &ldquo;But
+we&rsquo;ll make sailors out of them, or boat-pullers at any rate. Now, what of
+the lady?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I know not why, but I was aware of a twinge or pang like the cut of a knife
+when he mentioned her. I thought it a certain silly fastidiousness on my part,
+but it persisted in spite of me, and I merely shrugged my shoulders in answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen pursed his lips in a long, quizzical whistle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s her name, then?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;She is asleep. She was very
+tired. In fact, I am waiting to hear the news from you. What vessel was
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mail steamer,&rdquo; he answered shortly. &ldquo;<i>The City of
+Tokio</i>, from &rsquo;Frisco, bound for Yokohama. Disabled in that typhoon.
+Old tub. Opened up top and bottom like a sieve. They were adrift four days. And
+you don&rsquo;t know who or what she is, eh?&mdash;maid, wife, or widow? Well,
+well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head in a bantering way, and regarded me with laughing eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you&mdash;&rdquo; I began. It was on the verge of my tongue to ask
+if he were going to take the castaways into Yokohama.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Am I what?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you intend doing with Leach and Johnson?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head. &ldquo;Really, Hump, I don&rsquo;t know. You see, with these
+additions I&rsquo;ve about all the crew I want.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And they&rsquo;ve about all the escaping they want,&rdquo; I said.
+&ldquo;Why not give them a change of treatment? Take them aboard, and deal
+gently with them. Whatever they have done they have been hounded into
+doing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By you,&rdquo; I answered steadily. &ldquo;And I give you warning, Wolf
+Larsen, that I may forget love of my own life in the desire to kill you if you
+go too far in maltreating those poor wretches.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bravo!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;You do me proud, Hump! You&rsquo;ve found
+your legs with a vengeance. You&rsquo;re quite an individual. You were
+unfortunate in having your life cast in easy places, but you&rsquo;re
+developing, and I like you the better for it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice and expression changed. His face was serious. &ldquo;Do you believe
+in promises?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Are they sacred things?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then here&rsquo;s a compact,&rdquo; he went on, consummate actor.
+&ldquo;If I promise not to lay my hands upon Leach will you promise, in turn,
+not to attempt to kill me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, not that I&rsquo;m afraid of you, not that I&rsquo;m afraid of
+you,&rdquo; he hastened to add.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could hardly believe my ears. What was coming over the man?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it a go?&rdquo; he asked impatiently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A go,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His hand went out to mine, and as I shook it heartily I could have sworn I saw
+the mocking devil shine up for a moment in his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We strolled across the poop to the lee side. The boat was close at hand now,
+and in desperate plight. Johnson was steering, Leach bailing. We overhauled
+them about two feet to their one. Wolf Larsen motioned Louis to keep off
+slightly, and we dashed abreast of the boat, not a score of feet to windward.
+The <i>Ghost</i> blanketed it. The spritsail flapped emptily and the boat
+righted to an even keel, causing the two men swiftly to change position. The
+boat lost headway, and, as we lifted on a huge surge, toppled and fell into the
+trough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this moment that Leach and Johnson looked up into the faces of their
+shipmates, who lined the rail amidships. There was no greeting. They were as
+dead men in their comrades&rsquo; eyes, and between them was the gulf that
+parts the living and the dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next instant they were opposite the poop, where stood Wolf Larsen and I. We
+were falling in the trough, they were rising on the surge. Johnson looked at
+me, and I could see that his face was worn and haggard. I waved my hand to him,
+and he answered the greeting, but with a wave that was hopeless and despairing.
+It was as if he were saying farewell. I did not see into the eyes of Leach, for
+he was looking at Wolf Larsen, the old and implacable snarl of hatred strong as
+ever on his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then they were gone astern. The spritsail filled with the wind, suddenly,
+careening the frail open craft till it seemed it would surely capsize. A
+whitecap foamed above it and broke across in a snow-white smother. Then the
+boat emerged, half swamped, Leach flinging the water out and Johnson clinging
+to the steering-oar, his face white and anxious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen barked a short laugh in my ear and strode away to the weather side
+of the poop. I expected him to give orders for the <i>Ghost</i> to heave to,
+but she kept on her course and he made no sign. Louis stood imperturbably at
+the wheel, but I noticed the grouped sailors forward turning troubled faces in
+our direction. Still the <i>Ghost</i> tore along, till the boat dwindled to a
+speck, when Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s voice rang out in command and he went about on
+the starboard tack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Back we held, two miles and more to windward of the struggling cockle-shell,
+when the flying jib was run down and the schooner hove to. The sealing boats
+are not made for windward work. Their hope lies in keeping a weather position
+so that they may run before the wind for the schooner when it breezes up. But
+in all that wild waste there was no refuge for Leach and Johnson save on the
+<i>Ghost</i>, and they resolutely began the windward beat. It was slow work in
+the heavy sea that was running. At any moment they were liable to be
+overwhelmed by the hissing combers. Time and again and countless times we
+watched the boat luff into the big whitecaps, lose headway, and be flung back
+like a cork.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson was a splendid seaman, and he knew as much about small boats as he did
+about ships. At the end of an hour and a half he was nearly alongside, standing
+past our stern on the last leg out, aiming to fetch us on the next leg back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you&rsquo;ve changed your mind?&rdquo; I heard Wolf Larsen mutter,
+half to himself, half to them as though they could hear. &ldquo;You want to
+come aboard, eh? Well, then, just keep a-coming.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hard up with that helm!&rdquo; he commanded Oofty-Oofty, the Kanaka, who
+had in the meantime relieved Louis at the wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Command followed command. As the schooner paid off, the fore- and main-sheets
+were slacked away for fair wind. And before the wind we were, and leaping, when
+Johnson, easing his sheet at imminent peril, cut across our wake a hundred feet
+away. Again Wolf Larsen laughed, at the same time beckoning them with his arm
+to follow. It was evidently his intention to play with them,&mdash;a lesson, I
+took it, in lieu of a beating, though a dangerous lesson, for the frail craft
+stood in momentary danger of being overwhelmed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Johnson squared away promptly and ran after us. There was nothing else for him
+to do. Death stalked everywhere, and it was only a matter of time when some one
+of those many huge seas would fall upon the boat, roll over it, and pass on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis the fear iv death at the hearts iv them,&rdquo; Louis
+muttered in my ear, as I passed forward to see to taking in the flying jib and
+staysail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;ll heave to in a little while and pick them up,&rdquo; I
+answered cheerfully. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s bent upon giving them a lesson,
+that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis looked at me shrewdly. &ldquo;Think so?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think nothing but iv my own skin, these days,&rdquo; was his answer.
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; &rsquo;tis with wonder I&rsquo;m filled as to the
+workin&rsquo; out iv things. A pretty mess that &rsquo;Frisco whisky got me
+into, an&rsquo; a prettier mess that woman&rsquo;s got you into aft there. Ah,
+it&rsquo;s myself that knows ye for a blitherin&rsquo; fool.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; I demanded; for, having sped his shaft, he was
+turning away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do I mean?&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;And it&rsquo;s you that asks me!
+&rsquo;Tis not what I mean, but what the Wolf &rsquo;ll mean. The Wolf, I said,
+the Wolf!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If trouble comes, will you stand by?&rdquo; I asked impulsively, for he
+had voiced my own fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stand by? &rsquo;Tis old fat Louis I stand by, an&rsquo; trouble enough
+it&rsquo;ll be. We&rsquo;re at the beginnin&rsquo; iv things, I&rsquo;m
+tellin&rsquo; ye, the bare beginnin&rsquo; iv things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had not thought you so great a coward,&rdquo; I sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He favoured me with a contemptuous stare. &ldquo;If I raised never a hand for
+that poor fool,&rdquo;&mdash;pointing astern to the tiny
+sail,&mdash;&ldquo;d&rsquo;ye think I&rsquo;m hungerin&rsquo; for a broken head
+for a woman I never laid me eyes upon before this day?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I turned scornfully away and went aft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better get in those topsails, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said,
+as I came on the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I felt relief, at least as far as the two men were concerned. It was clear he
+did not wish to run too far away from them. I picked up hope at the thought and
+put the order swiftly into execution. I had scarcely opened my mouth to issue
+the necessary commands, when eager men were springing to halyards and
+downhauls, and others were racing aloft. This eagerness on their part was noted
+by Wolf Larsen with a grim smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still we increased our lead, and when the boat had dropped astern several miles
+we hove to and waited. All eyes watched it coming, even Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s;
+but he was the only unperturbed man aboard. Louis, gazing fixedly, betrayed a
+trouble in his face he was not quite able to hide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boat drew closer and closer, hurling along through the seething green like
+a thing alive, lifting and sending and uptossing across the huge-backed
+breakers, or disappearing behind them only to rush into sight again and shoot
+skyward. It seemed impossible that it could continue to live, yet with each
+dizzying sweep it did achieve the impossible. A rain-squall drove past, and out
+of the flying wet the boat emerged, almost upon us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hard up, there!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen shouted, himself springing to the
+wheel and whirling it over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again the <i>Ghost</i> sprang away and raced before the wind, and for two hours
+Johnson and Leach pursued us. We hove to and ran away, hove to and ran away,
+and ever astern the struggling patch of sail tossed skyward and fell into the
+rushing valleys. It was a quarter of a mile away when a thick squall of rain
+veiled it from view. It never emerged. The wind blew the air clear again, but
+no patch of sail broke the troubled surface. I thought I saw, for an instant,
+the boat&rsquo;s bottom show black in a breaking crest. At the best, that was
+all. For Johnson and Leach the travail of existence had ceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men remained grouped amidships. No one had gone below, and no one was
+speaking. Nor were any looks being exchanged. Each man seemed
+stunned&mdash;deeply contemplative, as it were, and, not quite sure, trying to
+realize just what had taken place. Wolf Larsen gave them little time for
+thought. He at once put the <i>Ghost</i> upon her course&mdash;a course which
+meant the seal herd and not Yokohama harbour. But the men were no longer eager
+as they pulled and hauled, and I heard curses amongst them, which left their
+lips smothered and as heavy and lifeless as were they. Not so was it with the
+hunters. Smoke the irrepressible related a story, and they descended into the
+steerage, bellowing with laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I passed to leeward of the galley on my way aft I was approached by the
+engineer we had rescued. His face was white, his lips were trembling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good God! sir, what kind of a craft is this?&rdquo; he cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have eyes, you have seen,&rdquo; I answered, almost brutally, what
+of the pain and fear at my own heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your promise?&rdquo; I said to Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was not thinking of taking them aboard when I made that
+promise,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;And anyway, you&rsquo;ll agree I&rsquo;ve
+not laid my hands upon them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Far from it, far from it,&rdquo; he laughed a moment later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I made no reply. I was incapable of speaking, my mind was too confused. I must
+have time to think, I knew. This woman, sleeping even now in the spare cabin,
+was a responsibility, which I must consider, and the only rational thought that
+flickered through my mind was that I must do nothing hastily if I were to be
+any help to her at all.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap20"></a>CHAPTER XX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The remainder of the day passed uneventfully. The young slip of a gale, having
+wetted our gills, proceeded to moderate. The fourth engineer and the three
+oilers, after a warm interview with Wolf Larsen, were furnished with outfits
+from the slop-chests, assigned places under the hunters in the various boats
+and watches on the vessel, and bundled forward into the forecastle. They went
+protestingly, but their voices were not loud. They were awed by what they had
+already seen of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s character, while the tale of woe they
+speedily heard in the forecastle took the last bit of rebellion out of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Brewster&mdash;we had learned her name from the engineer&mdash;slept on
+and on. At supper I requested the hunters to lower their voices, so she was not
+disturbed; and it was not till next morning that she made her appearance. It
+had been my intention to have her meals served apart, but Wolf Larsen put down
+his foot. Who was she that she should be too good for cabin table and cabin
+society? had been his demand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But her coming to the table had something amusing in it. The hunters fell
+silent as clams. Jock Horner and Smoke alone were unabashed, stealing stealthy
+glances at her now and again, and even taking part in the conversation. The
+other four men glued their eyes on their plates and chewed steadily and with
+thoughtful precision, their ears moving and wobbling, in time with their jaws,
+like the ears of so many animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen had little to say at first, doing no more than reply when he was
+addressed. Not that he was abashed. Far from it. This woman was a new type to
+him, a different breed from any he had ever known, and he was curious. He
+studied her, his eyes rarely leaving her face unless to follow the movements of
+her hands or shoulders. I studied her myself, and though it was I who
+maintained the conversation, I know that I was a bit shy, not quite
+self-possessed. His was the perfect poise, the supreme confidence in self,
+which nothing could shake; and he was no more timid of a woman than he was of
+storm and battle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And when shall we arrive at Yokohama?&rdquo; she asked, turning to him
+and looking him squarely in the eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There it was, the question flat. The jaws stopped working, the ears ceased
+wobbling, and though eyes remained glued on plates, each man listened greedily
+for the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In four months, possibly three if the season closes early,&rdquo; Wolf
+Larsen said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She caught her breath and stammered, &ldquo;I&mdash;I thought&mdash;I was given
+to understand that Yokohama was only a day&rsquo;s sail away. It&mdash;&rdquo;
+Here she paused and looked about the table at the circle of unsympathetic faces
+staring hard at the plates. &ldquo;It is not right,&rdquo; she concluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is a question you must settle with Mr. Van Weyden there,&rdquo; he
+replied, nodding to me with a mischievous twinkle. &ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden is
+what you may call an authority on such things as rights. Now I, who am only a
+sailor, would look upon the situation somewhat differently. It may possibly be
+your misfortune that you have to remain with us, but it is certainly our good
+fortune.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He regarded her smilingly. Her eyes fell before his gaze, but she lifted them
+again, and defiantly, to mine. I read the unspoken question there: was it
+right? But I had decided that the part I was to play must be a neutral one, so
+I did not answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you think?&rdquo; she demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That it is unfortunate, especially if you have any engagements falling
+due in the course of the next several months. But, since you say that you were
+voyaging to Japan for your health, I can assure you that it will improve no
+better anywhere than aboard the <i>Ghost</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw her eyes flash with indignation, and this time it was I who dropped mine,
+while I felt my face flushing under her gaze. It was cowardly, but what else
+could I do?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden speaks with the voice of authority,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded my head, and she, having recovered herself, waited expectantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not that he is much to speak of now,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen went on,
+&ldquo;but he has improved wonderfully. You should have seen him when he came
+on board. A more scrawny, pitiful specimen of humanity one could hardly
+conceive. Isn&rsquo;t that so, Kerfoot?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kerfoot, thus directly addressed, was startled into dropping his knife on the
+floor, though he managed to grunt affirmation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Developed himself by peeling potatoes and washing dishes. Eh,
+Kerfoot?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again that worthy grunted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at him now. True, he is not what you would term muscular, but still
+he has muscles, which is more than he had when he came aboard. Also, he has
+legs to stand on. You would not think so to look at him, but he was quite
+unable to stand alone at first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hunters were snickering, but she looked at me with a sympathy in her eyes
+which more than compensated for Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s nastiness. In truth, it had
+been so long since I had received sympathy that I was softened, and I became
+then, and gladly, her willing slave. But I was angry with Wolf Larsen. He was
+challenging my manhood with his slurs, challenging the very legs he claimed to
+be instrumental in getting for me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I may have learned to stand on my own legs,&rdquo; I retorted.
+&ldquo;But I have yet to stamp upon others with them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at me insolently. &ldquo;Your education is only half completed,
+then,&rdquo; he said dryly, and turned to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We are very hospitable upon the <i>Ghost</i>. Mr. Van Weyden has
+discovered that. We do everything to make our guests feel at home, eh, Mr. Van
+Weyden?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Even to the peeling of potatoes and the washing of dishes,&rdquo; I
+answered, &ldquo;to say nothing to wringing their necks out of very
+fellowship.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I beg of you not to receive false impressions of us from Mr. Van
+Weyden,&rdquo; he interposed with mock anxiety. &ldquo;You will observe, Miss
+Brewster, that he carries a dirk in his belt, a&mdash;ahem&mdash;a most unusual
+thing for a ship&rsquo;s officer to do. While really very estimable, Mr. Van
+Weyden is sometimes&mdash;how shall I say?&mdash;er&mdash;quarrelsome, and
+harsh measures are necessary. He is quite reasonable and fair in his calm
+moments, and as he is calm now he will not deny that only yesterday he
+threatened my life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was well-nigh choking, and my eyes were certainly fiery. He drew attention to
+me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at him now. He can scarcely control himself in your presence. He is
+not accustomed to the presence of ladies anyway. I shall have to arm myself
+before I dare go on deck with him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head sadly, murmuring, &ldquo;Too bad, too bad,&rdquo; while the
+hunters burst into guffaws of laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deep-sea voices of these men, rumbling and bellowing in the confined space,
+produced a wild effect. The whole setting was wild, and for the first time,
+regarding this strange woman and realizing how incongruous she was in it, I was
+aware of how much a part of it I was myself. I knew these men and their mental
+processes, was one of them myself, living the seal-hunting life, eating the
+seal-hunting fare, thinking, largely, the seal-hunting thoughts. There was for
+me no strangeness to it, to the rough clothes, the coarse faces, the wild
+laughter, and the lurching cabin walls and swaying sea-lamps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I buttered a piece of bread my eyes chanced to rest upon my hand. The
+knuckles were skinned and inflamed clear across, the fingers swollen, the nails
+rimmed with black. I felt the mattress-like growth of beard on my neck, knew
+that the sleeve of my coat was ripped, that a button was missing from the
+throat of the blue shirt I wore. The dirk mentioned by Wolf Larsen rested in
+its sheath on my hip. It was very natural that it should be there,&mdash;how
+natural I had not imagined until now, when I looked upon it with her eyes and
+knew how strange it and all that went with it must appear to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she divined the mockery in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s words, and again favoured me
+with a sympathetic glance. But there was a look of bewilderment also in her
+eyes. That it was mockery made the situation more puzzling to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I may be taken off by some passing vessel, perhaps,&rdquo; she
+suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There will be no passing vessels, except other sealing-schooners,&rdquo;
+Wolf Larsen made answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have no clothes, nothing,&rdquo; she objected. &ldquo;You hardly
+realize, sir, that I am not a man, or that I am unaccustomed to the vagrant,
+careless life which you and your men seem to lead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The sooner you get accustomed to it, the better,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll furnish you with cloth, needles, and thread,&rdquo; he added.
+&ldquo;I hope it will not be too dreadful a hardship for you to make yourself a
+dress or two.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made a wry pucker with her mouth, as though to advertise her ignorance of
+dressmaking. That she was frightened and bewildered, and that she was bravely
+striving to hide it, was quite plain to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;re like Mr. Van Weyden there, accustomed to having
+things done for you. Well, I think doing a few things for yourself will hardly
+dislocate any joints. By the way, what do you do for a living?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She regarded him with amazement unconcealed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean no offence, believe me. People eat, therefore they must procure
+the wherewithal. These men here shoot seals in order to live; for the same
+reason I sail this schooner; and Mr. Van Weyden, for the present at any rate,
+earns his salty grub by assisting me. Now what do you do?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you feed yourself? Or does some one else feed you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid some one else has fed me most of my life,&rdquo; she
+laughed, trying bravely to enter into the spirit of his quizzing, though I
+could see a terror dawning and growing in her eyes as she watched Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I suppose some one else makes your bed for you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I <i>have</i> made beds,&rdquo; she replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very often?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head with mock ruefulness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know what they do to poor men in the States, who, like you, do
+not work for their living?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am very ignorant,&rdquo; she pleaded. &ldquo;What do they do to the
+poor men who are like me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They send them to jail. The crime of not earning a living, in their
+case, is called vagrancy. If I were Mr. Van Weyden, who harps eternally on
+questions of right and wrong, I&rsquo;d ask, by what right do you live when you
+do nothing to deserve living?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But as you are not Mr. Van Weyden, I don&rsquo;t have to answer, do
+I?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She beamed upon him through her terror-filled eyes, and the pathos of it cut me
+to the heart. I must in some way break in and lead the conversation into other
+channels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you ever earned a dollar by your own labour?&rdquo; he demanded,
+certain of her answer, a triumphant vindictiveness in his voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I have,&rdquo; she answered slowly, and I could have laughed aloud
+at his crestfallen visage. &ldquo;I remember my father giving me a dollar once,
+when I was a little girl, for remaining absolutely quiet for five
+minutes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He smiled indulgently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that was long ago,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;And you would
+scarcely demand a little girl of nine to earn her own living.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At present, however,&rdquo; she said, after another slight pause,
+&ldquo;I earn about eighteen hundred dollars a year.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With one accord, all eyes left the plates and settled on her. A woman who
+earned eighteen hundred dollars a year was worth looking at. Wolf Larsen was
+undisguised in his admiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Salary, or piece-work?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Piece-work,&rdquo; she answered promptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eighteen hundred,&rdquo; he calculated. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a hundred
+and fifty dollars a month. Well, Miss Brewster, there is nothing small about
+the <i>Ghost</i>. Consider yourself on salary during the time you remain with
+us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made no acknowledgment. She was too unused as yet to the whims of the man
+to accept them with equanimity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I forgot to inquire,&rdquo; he went on suavely, &ldquo;as to the nature
+of your occupation. What commodities do you turn out? What tools and materials
+do you require?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Paper and ink,&rdquo; she laughed. &ldquo;And, oh! also a
+typewriter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are Maud Brewster,&rdquo; I said slowly and with certainty, almost
+as though I were charging her with a crime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes lifted curiously to mine. &ldquo;How do you know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; I demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She acknowledged her identity with a nod. It was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s turn to be
+puzzled. The name and its magic signified nothing to him. I was proud that it
+did mean something to me, and for the first time in a weary while I was
+convincingly conscious of a superiority over him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I remember writing a review of a thin little volume&mdash;&rdquo; I had
+begun carelessly, when she interrupted me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;You are&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was now staring at me in wide-eyed wonder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded my identity, in turn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Humphrey Van Weyden,&rdquo; she concluded; then added with a sigh of
+relief, and unaware that she had glanced that relief at Wolf Larsen, &ldquo;I
+am so glad.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I remember the review,&rdquo; she went on hastily, becoming aware of the
+awkwardness of her remark; &ldquo;that too, too flattering review.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; I denied valiantly. &ldquo;You impeach my sober
+judgment and make my canons of little worth. Besides, all my brother critics
+were with me. Didn&rsquo;t Lang include your &lsquo;Kiss Endured&rsquo; among
+the four supreme sonnets by women in the English language?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you called me the American Mrs. Meynell!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Was it not true?&rdquo; I demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, not that,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I was hurt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We can measure the unknown only by the known,&rdquo; I replied, in my
+finest academic manner. &ldquo;As a critic I was compelled to place you. You
+have now become a yardstick yourself. Seven of your thin little volumes are on
+my shelves; and there are two thicker volumes, the essays, which, you will
+pardon my saying, and I know not which is flattered more, fully equal your
+verse. The time is not far distant when some unknown will arise in England and
+the critics will name her the English Maud Brewster.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are very kind, I am sure,&rdquo; she murmured; and the very
+conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of associations it
+aroused of the old life on the other side of the world, gave me a quick
+thrill&mdash;rich with remembrance but stinging sharp with home-sickness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you are Maud Brewster,&rdquo; I said solemnly, gazing across at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you are Humphrey Van Weyden,&rdquo; she said, gazing back at me with
+equal solemnity and awe. &ldquo;How unusual! I don&rsquo;t understand. We
+surely are not to expect some wildly romantic sea-story from your sober
+pen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I am not gathering material, I assure you,&rdquo; was my answer.
+&ldquo;I have neither aptitude nor inclination for fiction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me, why have you always buried yourself in California?&rdquo; she
+next asked. &ldquo;It has not been kind of you. We of the East have seen so
+very little of you&mdash;too little, indeed, of the Dean of American Letters,
+the Second.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I bowed to, and disclaimed, the compliment. &ldquo;I nearly met you, once, in
+Philadelphia, some Browning affair or other&mdash;you were to lecture, you
+know. My train was four hours late.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then we quite forgot where we were, leaving Wolf Larsen stranded and silent
+in the midst of our flood of gossip. The hunters left the table and went on
+deck, and still we talked. Wolf Larsen alone remained. Suddenly I became aware
+of him, leaning back from the table and listening curiously to our alien speech
+of a world he did not know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I broke short off in the middle of a sentence. The present, with all its perils
+and anxieties, rushed upon me with stunning force. It smote Miss Brewster
+likewise, a vague and nameless terror rushing into her eyes as she regarded
+Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose to his feet and laughed awkwardly. The sound of it was metallic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t mind me,&rdquo; he said, with a self-depreciatory wave
+of his hand. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t count. Go on, go on, I pray you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the gates of speech were closed, and we, too, rose from the table and
+laughed awkwardly.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap21"></a>CHAPTER XXI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The chagrin Wolf Larsen felt from being ignored by Maud Brewster and me in the
+conversation at table had to express itself in some fashion, and it fell to
+Thomas Mugridge to be the victim. He had not mended his ways nor his shirt,
+though the latter he contended he had changed. The garment itself did not bear
+out the assertion, nor did the accumulations of grease on stove and pot and pan
+attest a general cleanliness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve given you warning, Cooky,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said, &ldquo;and
+now you&rsquo;ve got to take your medicine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mugridge&rsquo;s face turned white under its sooty veneer, and when Wolf Larsen
+called for a rope and a couple of men, the miserable Cockney fled wildly out of
+the galley and dodged and ducked about the deck with the grinning crew in
+pursuit. Few things could have been more to their liking than to give him a tow
+over the side, for to the forecastle he had sent messes and concoctions of the
+vilest order. Conditions favoured the undertaking. The <i>Ghost</i> was
+slipping through the water at no more than three miles an hour, and the sea was
+fairly calm. But Mugridge had little stomach for a dip in it. Possibly he had
+seen men towed before. Besides, the water was frightfully cold, and his was
+anything but a rugged constitution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As usual, the watches below and the hunters turned out for what promised sport.
+Mugridge seemed to be in rabid fear of the water, and he exhibited a nimbleness
+and speed we did not dream he possessed. Cornered in the right-angle of the
+poop and galley, he sprang like a cat to the top of the cabin and ran aft. But
+his pursuers forestalling him, he doubled back across the cabin, passed over
+the galley, and gained the deck by means of the steerage-scuttle. Straight
+forward he raced, the boat-puller Harrison at his heels and gaining on him. But
+Mugridge, leaping suddenly, caught the jib-boom-lift. It happened in an
+instant. Holding his weight by his arms, and in mid-air doubling his body at
+the hips, he let fly with both feet. The oncoming Harrison caught the kick
+squarely in the pit of the stomach, groaned involuntarily, and doubled up and
+sank backward to the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hand-clapping and roars of laughter from the hunters greeted the exploit, while
+Mugridge, eluding half of his pursuers at the foremast, ran aft and through the
+remainder like a runner on the football field. Straight aft he held, to the
+poop and along the poop to the stern. So great was his speed that as he curved
+past the corner of the cabin he slipped and fell. Nilson was standing at the
+wheel, and the Cockney&rsquo;s hurtling body struck his legs. Both went down
+together, but Mugridge alone arose. By some freak of pressures, his frail body
+had snapped the strong man&rsquo;s leg like a pipe-stem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Parsons took the wheel, and the pursuit continued. Round and round the decks
+they went, Mugridge sick with fear, the sailors hallooing and shouting
+directions to one another, and the hunters bellowing encouragement and
+laughter. Mugridge went down on the fore-hatch under three men; but he emerged
+from the mass like an eel, bleeding at the mouth, the offending shirt ripped
+into tatters, and sprang for the main-rigging. Up he went, clear up, beyond the
+ratlines, to the very masthead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half-a-dozen sailors swarmed to the crosstrees after him, where they clustered
+and waited while two of their number, Oofty-Oofty and Black (who was
+Latimer&rsquo;s boat-steerer), continued up the thin steel stays, lifting their
+bodies higher and higher by means of their arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a perilous undertaking, for, at a height of over a hundred feet from the
+deck, holding on by their hands, they were not in the best of positions to
+protect themselves from Mugridge&rsquo;s feet. And Mugridge kicked savagely,
+till the Kanaka, hanging on with one hand, seized the Cockney&rsquo;s foot with
+the other. Black duplicated the performance a moment later with the other foot.
+Then the three writhed together in a swaying tangle, struggling, sliding, and
+falling into the arms of their mates on the crosstrees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The aërial battle was over, and Thomas Mugridge, whining and gibbering, his
+mouth flecked with bloody foam, was brought down to deck. Wolf Larsen rove a
+bowline in a piece of rope and slipped it under his shoulders. Then he was
+carried aft and flung into the sea. Forty,&mdash;fifty,&mdash;sixty feet of
+line ran out, when Wolf Larsen cried &ldquo;Belay!&rdquo; Oofty-Oofty took a
+turn on a bitt, the rope tautened, and the <i>Ghost</i>, lunging onward, jerked
+the cook to the surface.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a pitiful spectacle. Though he could not drown, and was nine-lived in
+addition, he was suffering all the agonies of half-drowning. The <i>Ghost</i>
+was going very slowly, and when her stern lifted on a wave and she slipped
+forward she pulled the wretch to the surface and gave him a moment in which to
+breathe; but between each lift the stern fell, and while the bow lazily climbed
+the next wave the line slacked and he sank beneath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had forgotten the existence of Maud Brewster, and I remembered her with a
+start as she stepped lightly beside me. It was her first time on deck since she
+had come aboard. A dead silence greeted her appearance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the cause of the merriment?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ask Captain Larsen,&rdquo; I answered composedly and coldly, though
+inwardly my blood was boiling at the thought that she should be witness to such
+brutality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She took my advice and was turning to put it into execution, when her eyes
+lighted on Oofty-Oofty, immediately before her, his body instinct with
+alertness and grace as he held the turn of the rope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you fishing?&rdquo; she asked him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made no reply. His eyes, fixed intently on the sea astern, suddenly flashed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shark ho, sir!&rdquo; he cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Heave in! Lively! All hands tail on!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen shouted,
+springing himself to the rope in advance of the quickest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mugridge had heard the Kanaka&rsquo;s warning cry and was screaming madly. I
+could see a black fin cutting the water and making for him with greater
+swiftness than he was being pulled aboard. It was an even toss whether the
+shark or we would get him, and it was a matter of moments. When Mugridge was
+directly beneath us, the stern descended the slope of a passing wave, thus
+giving the advantage to the shark. The fin disappeared. The belly flashed white
+in swift upward rush. Almost equally swift, but not quite, was Wolf Larsen. He
+threw his strength into one tremendous jerk. The Cockney&rsquo;s body left the
+water; so did part of the shark&rsquo;s. He drew up his legs, and the man-eater
+seemed no more than barely to touch one foot, sinking back into the water with
+a splash. But at the moment of contact Thomas Mugridge cried out. Then he came
+in like a fresh-caught fish on a line, clearing the rail generously and
+striking the deck in a heap, on hands and knees, and rolling over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But a fountain of blood was gushing forth. The right foot was missing,
+amputated neatly at the ankle. I looked instantly to Maud Brewster. Her face
+was white, her eyes dilated with horror. She was gazing, not at Thomas
+Mugridge, but at Wolf Larsen. And he was aware of it, for he said, with one of
+his short laughs:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Man-play, Miss Brewster. Somewhat rougher, I warrant, than what you have
+been used to, but still-man-play. The shark was not in the reckoning.
+It&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at this juncture, Mugridge, who had lifted his head and ascertained the
+extent of his loss, floundered over on the deck and buried his teeth in Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s leg. Wolf Larsen stooped, coolly, to the Cockney, and pressed
+with thumb and finger at the rear of the jaws and below the ears. The jaws
+opened with reluctance, and Wolf Larsen stepped free.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As I was saying,&rdquo; he went on, as though nothing unwonted had
+happened, &ldquo;the shark was not in the reckoning. It
+was&mdash;ahem&mdash;shall we say Providence?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave no sign that she had heard, though the expression of her eyes changed
+to one of inexpressible loathing as she started to turn away. She no more than
+started, for she swayed and tottered, and reached her hand weakly out to mine.
+I caught her in time to save her from falling, and helped her to a seat on the
+cabin. I thought she might faint outright, but she controlled herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you get a tourniquet, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called to
+me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I hesitated. Her lips moved, and though they formed no words, she commanded me
+with her eyes, plainly as speech, to go to the help of the unfortunate man.
+&ldquo;Please,&rdquo; she managed to whisper, and I could but obey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By now I had developed such skill at surgery that Wolf Larsen, with a few words
+of advice, left me to my task with a couple of sailors for assistants. For his
+task he elected a vengeance on the shark. A heavy swivel-hook, baited with fat
+salt-pork, was dropped overside; and by the time I had compressed the severed
+veins and arteries, the sailors were singing and heaving in the offending
+monster. I did not see it myself, but my assistants, first one and then the
+other, deserted me for a few moments to run amidships and look at what was
+going on. The shark, a sixteen-footer, was hoisted up against the main-rigging.
+Its jaws were pried apart to their greatest extension, and a stout stake,
+sharpened at both ends, was so inserted that when the pries were removed the
+spread jaws were fixed upon it. This accomplished, the hook was cut out. The
+shark dropped back into the sea, helpless, yet with its full strength,
+doomed&mdash;to lingering starvation&mdash;a living death less meet for it than
+for the man who devised the punishment.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap22"></a>CHAPTER XXII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I knew what it was as she came toward me. For ten minutes I had watched her
+talking earnestly with the engineer, and now, with a sign for silence, I drew
+her out of earshot of the helmsman. Her face was white and set; her large eyes,
+larger than usual what of the purpose in them, looked penetratingly into mine.
+I felt rather timid and apprehensive, for she had come to search Humphrey Van
+Weyden&rsquo;s soul, and Humphrey Van Weyden had nothing of which to be
+particularly proud since his advent on the <i>Ghost</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We walked to the break of the poop, where she turned and faced me. I glanced
+around to see that no one was within hearing distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; I asked gently; but the expression of determination
+on her face did not relax.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can readily understand,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;that this
+morning&rsquo;s affair was largely an accident; but I have been talking with
+Mr. Haskins. He tells me that the day we were rescued, even while I was in the
+cabin, two men were drowned, deliberately drowned&mdash;murdered.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a query in her voice, and she faced me accusingly, as though I were
+guilty of the deed, or at least a party to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The information is quite correct,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;The two men
+were murdered.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you permitted it!&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was unable to prevent it, is a better way of phrasing it,&rdquo; I
+replied, still gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you tried to prevent it?&rdquo; There was an emphasis on the
+&ldquo;tried,&rdquo; and a pleading little note in her voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, but you didn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she hurried on, divining my answer.
+&ldquo;But why didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shrugged my shoulders. &ldquo;You must remember, Miss Brewster, that you are
+a new inhabitant of this little world, and that you do not yet understand the
+laws which operate within it. You bring with you certain fine conceptions of
+humanity, manhood, conduct, and such things; but here you will find them
+misconceptions. I have found it so,&rdquo; I added, with an involuntary sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head incredulously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What would you advise, then?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;That I should take a
+knife, or a gun, or an axe, and kill this man?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She half started back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, not that!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then what should I do? Kill myself?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You speak in purely materialistic terms,&rdquo; she objected.
+&ldquo;There is such a thing as moral courage, and moral courage is never
+without effect.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; I smiled, &ldquo;you advise me to kill neither him nor
+myself, but to let him kill me.&rdquo; I held up my hand as she was about to
+speak. &ldquo;For moral courage is a worthless asset on this little floating
+world. Leach, one of the men who were murdered, had moral courage to an unusual
+degree. So had the other man, Johnson. Not only did it not stand them in good
+stead, but it destroyed them. And so with me if I should exercise what little
+moral courage I may possess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must understand, Miss Brewster, and understand clearly, that this
+man is a monster. He is without conscience. Nothing is sacred to him, nothing
+is too terrible for him to do. It was due to his whim that I was detained
+aboard in the first place. It is due to his whim that I am still alive. I do
+nothing, can do nothing, because I am a slave to this monster, as you are now a
+slave to him; because I desire to live, as you will desire to live; because I
+cannot fight and overcome him, just as you will not be able to fight and
+overcome him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She waited for me to go on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What remains? Mine is the role of the weak. I remain silent and suffer
+ignominy, as you will remain silent and suffer ignominy. And it is well. It is
+the best we can do if we wish to live. The battle is not always to the strong.
+We have not the strength with which to fight this man; we must dissimulate, and
+win, if win we can, by craft. If you will be advised by me, this is what you
+will do. I know my position is perilous, and I may say frankly that yours is
+even more perilous. We must stand together, without appearing to do so, in
+secret alliance. I shall not be able to side with you openly, and, no matter
+what indignities may be put upon me, you are to remain likewise silent. We must
+provoke no scenes with this man, nor cross his will. And we must keep smiling
+faces and be friendly with him no matter how repulsive it may be.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She brushed her hand across her forehead in a puzzled way, saying, &ldquo;Still
+I do not understand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must do as I say,&rdquo; I interrupted authoritatively, for I saw
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s gaze wandering toward us from where he paced up and down
+with Latimer amidships. &ldquo;Do as I say, and ere long you will find I am
+right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What shall I do, then?&rdquo; she asked, detecting the anxious glance I
+had shot at the object of our conversation, and impressed, I flatter myself,
+with the earnestness of my manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dispense with all the moral courage you can,&rdquo; I said briskly.
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t arouse this man&rsquo;s animosity. Be quite friendly with
+him, talk with him, discuss literature and art with him&mdash;he is fond of
+such things. You will find him an interested listener and no fool. And for your
+own sake try to avoid witnessing, as much as you can, the brutalities of the
+ship. It will make it easier for you to act your part.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am to lie,&rdquo; she said in steady, rebellious tones, &ldquo;by
+speech and action to lie.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen had separated from Latimer and was coming toward us. I was
+desperate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please, please understand me,&rdquo; I said hurriedly, lowering my
+voice. &ldquo;All your experience of men and things is worthless here. You must
+begin over again. I know,&mdash;I can see it&mdash;you have, among other ways,
+been used to managing people with your eyes, letting your moral courage speak
+out through them, as it were. You have already managed me with your eyes,
+commanded me with them. But don&rsquo;t try it on Wolf Larsen. You could as
+easily control a lion, while he would make a mock of you. He would&mdash;I have
+always been proud of the fact that I discovered him,&rdquo; I said, turning the
+conversation as Wolf Larsen stepped on the poop and joined us. &ldquo;The
+editors were afraid of him and the publishers would have none of him. But I
+knew, and his genius and my judgment were vindicated when he made that
+magnificent hit with his &lsquo;Forge.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it was a newspaper poem,&rdquo; she said glibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It did happen to see the light in a newspaper,&rdquo; I replied,
+&ldquo;but not because the magazine editors had been denied a glimpse at
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We were talking of Harris,&rdquo; I said to Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; he acknowledged. &ldquo;I remember the
+&lsquo;Forge.&rsquo; Filled with pretty sentiments and an almighty faith in
+human illusions. By the way, Mr. Van Weyden, you&rsquo;d better look in on
+Cooky. He&rsquo;s complaining and restless.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus was I bluntly dismissed from the poop, only to find Mugridge sleeping
+soundly from the morphine I had given him. I made no haste to return on deck,
+and when I did I was gratified to see Miss Brewster in animated conversation
+with Wolf Larsen. As I say, the sight gratified me. She was following my
+advice. And yet I was conscious of a slight shock or hurt in that she was able
+to do the thing I had begged her to do and which she had notably disliked.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap23"></a>CHAPTER XXIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Brave winds, blowing fair, swiftly drove the <i>Ghost</i> northward into the
+seal herd. We encountered it well up to the forty-fourth parallel, in a raw and
+stormy sea across which the wind harried the fog-banks in eternal flight. For
+days at a time we could never see the sun nor take an observation; then the
+wind would sweep the face of the ocean clean, the waves would ripple and flash,
+and we would learn where we were. A day of clear weather might follow, or three
+days or four, and then the fog would settle down upon us, seemingly thicker
+than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hunting was perilous; yet the boats, lowered day after day, were swallowed
+up in the grey obscurity, and were seen no more till nightfall, and often not
+till long after, when they would creep in like sea-wraiths, one by one, out of
+the grey. Wainwright&mdash;the hunter whom Wolf Larsen had stolen with boat and
+men&mdash;took advantage of the veiled sea and escaped. He disappeared one
+morning in the encircling fog with his two men, and we never saw them again,
+though it was not many days when we learned that they had passed from schooner
+to schooner until they finally regained their own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the thing I had set my mind upon doing, but the opportunity never
+offered. It was not in the mate&rsquo;s province to go out in the boats, and
+though I manœuvred cunningly for it, Wolf Larsen never granted me the
+privilege. Had he done so, I should have managed somehow to carry Miss Brewster
+away with me. As it was, the situation was approaching a stage which I was
+afraid to consider. I involuntarily shunned the thought of it, and yet the
+thought continually arose in my mind like a haunting spectre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had read sea-romances in my time, wherein figured, as a matter of course, the
+lone woman in the midst of a shipload of men; but I learned, now, that I had
+never comprehended the deeper significance of such a situation&mdash;the thing
+the writers harped upon and exploited so thoroughly. And here it was, now, and
+I was face to face with it. That it should be as vital as possible, it required
+no more than that the woman should be Maud Brewster, who now charmed me in
+person as she had long charmed me through her work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one more out of environment could be imagined. She was a delicate, ethereal
+creature, swaying and willowy, light and graceful of movement. It never seemed
+to me that she walked, or, at least, walked after the ordinary manner of
+mortals. Hers was an extreme lithesomeness, and she moved with a certain
+indefinable airiness, approaching one as down might float or as a bird on
+noiseless wings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was like a bit of Dresden china, and I was continually impressed with what
+I may call her fragility. As at the time I caught her arm when helping her
+below, so at any time I was quite prepared, should stress or rough handling
+befall her, to see her crumble away. I have never seen body and spirit in such
+perfect accord. Describe her verse, as the critics have described it, as
+sublimated and spiritual, and you have described her body. It seemed to partake
+of her soul, to have analogous attributes, and to link it to life with the
+slenderest of chains. Indeed, she trod the earth lightly, and in her
+constitution there was little of the robust clay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was in striking contrast to Wolf Larsen. Each was nothing that the other
+was, everything that the other was not. I noted them walking the deck together
+one morning, and I likened them to the extreme ends of the human ladder of
+evolution&mdash;the one the culmination of all savagery, the other the finished
+product of the finest civilization. True, Wolf Larsen possessed intellect to an
+unusual degree, but it was directed solely to the exercise of his savage
+instincts and made him but the more formidable a savage. He was splendidly
+muscled, a heavy man, and though he strode with the certitude and directness of
+the physical man, there was nothing heavy about his stride. The jungle and the
+wilderness lurked in the uplift and downput of his feet. He was cat-footed, and
+lithe, and strong, always strong. I likened him to some great tiger, a beast of
+prowess and prey. He looked it, and the piercing glitter that arose at times in
+his eyes was the same piercing glitter I had observed in the eyes of caged
+leopards and other preying creatures of the wild.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this day, as I noted them pacing up and down, I saw that it was she who
+terminated the walk. They came up to where I was standing by the entrance to
+the companion-way. Though she betrayed it by no outward sign, I felt, somehow,
+that she was greatly perturbed. She made some idle remark, looking at me, and
+laughed lightly enough; but I saw her eyes return to his, involuntarily, as
+though fascinated; then they fell, but not swiftly enough to veil the rush of
+terror that filled them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation. Ordinarily grey
+and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all a-dance
+with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till the full orbs were
+flooded with a glowing radiance. Perhaps it was to this that the golden colour
+was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time
+luring and compelling, and speaking a demand and clamour of the blood which no
+woman, much less Maud Brewster, could misunderstand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear&mdash;the most
+terrible fear a man can experience&mdash;I knew that in inexpressible ways she
+was dear to me. The knowledge that I loved her rushed upon me with the terror,
+and with both emotions gripping at my heart and causing my blood at the same
+time to chill and to leap riotously, I felt myself drawn by a power without me
+and beyond me, and found my eyes returning against my will to gaze into the
+eyes of Wolf Larsen. But he had recovered himself. The golden colour and the
+dancing lights were gone. Cold and grey and glittering they were as he bowed
+brusquely and turned away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am afraid,&rdquo; she whispered, with a shiver. &ldquo;I am so
+afraid.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I, too, was afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant to me my
+mind was in a turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite calmly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All will come right, Miss Brewster. Trust me, it will come right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered with a grateful little smile that sent my heart pounding, and
+started to descend the companion-stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a long while I remained standing where she had left me. There was
+imperative need to adjust myself, to consider the significance of the changed
+aspect of things. It had come, at last, love had come, when I least expected it
+and under the most forbidding conditions. Of course, my philosophy had always
+recognized the inevitableness of the love-call sooner or later; but long years
+of bookish silence had made me inattentive and unprepared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now it had come! Maud Brewster! My memory flashed back to that first thin
+little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as though in the concrete, the
+row of thin little volumes on my library shelf. How I had welcomed each of
+them! Each year one had come from the press, and to me each was the advent of
+the year. They had voiced a kindred intellect and spirit, and as such I had
+received them into a camaraderie of the mind; but now their place was in my
+heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My heart? A revulsion of feeling came over me. I seemed to stand outside myself
+and to look at myself incredulously. Maud Brewster! Humphrey Van Weyden,
+&ldquo;the cold-blooded fish,&rdquo; the &ldquo;emotionless monster,&rdquo; the
+&ldquo;analytical demon,&rdquo; of Charley Furuseth&rsquo;s christening, in
+love! And then, without rhyme or reason, all sceptical, my mind flew back to a
+small biographical note in the red-bound <i>Who&rsquo;s Who</i>, and I said to
+myself, &ldquo;She was born in Cambridge, and she is twenty-seven years
+old.&rdquo; And then I said, &ldquo;Twenty-seven years old and still free and
+fancy free?&rdquo; But how did I know she was fancy free? And the pang of
+new-born jealousy put all incredulity to flight. There was no doubt about it. I
+was jealous; therefore I loved. And the woman I loved was Maud Brewster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I, Humphrey Van Weyden, was in love! And again the doubt assailed me. Not that
+I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet it. On the contrary, idealist
+that I was to the most pronounced degree, my philosophy had always recognized
+and guerdoned love as the greatest thing in the world, the aim and the summit
+of being, the most exquisite pitch of joy and happiness to which life could
+thrill, the thing of all things to be hailed and welcomed and taken into the
+heart. But now that it had come I could not believe. I could not be so
+fortunate. It was too good, too good to be true. Symons&rsquo;s lines came into
+my head:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;I wandered all these years among<br/>
+A world of women, seeking you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then I had ceased seeking. It was not for me, this greatest thing in the
+world, I had decided. Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an &ldquo;emotionless
+monster,&rdquo; a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuring in sensations
+only of the mind. And though I had been surrounded by women all my days, my
+appreciation of them had been æsthetic and nothing more. I had actually, at
+times, considered myself outside the pale, a monkish fellow denied the eternal
+or the passing passions I saw and understood so well in others. And now it had
+come! Undreamed of and unheralded, it had come. In what could have been no less
+than an ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the companion-way and started
+along the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs. Browning:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;I lived with visions for my company<br/>
+Instead of men and women years ago,<br/>
+And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know<br/>
+A sweeter music than they played to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and oblivious to
+all about me. The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What the hell are you up to?&rdquo; he was demanding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came to myself to
+find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sleep-walking, sunstroke,&mdash;what?&rdquo; he barked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; indigestion,&rdquo; I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing
+untoward had occurred.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap24"></a>CHAPTER XXIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Among the most vivid memories of my life are those of the events on the
+<i>Ghost</i> which occurred during the forty hours succeeding the discovery of
+my love for Maud Brewster. I, who had lived my life in quiet places, only to
+enter at the age of thirty-five upon a course of the most irrational adventure
+I could have imagined, never had more incident and excitement crammed into any
+forty hours of my experience. Nor can I quite close my ears to a small voice of
+pride which tells me I did not do so badly, all things considered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To begin with, at the midday dinner, Wolf Larsen informed the hunters that they
+were to eat thenceforth in the steerage. It was an unprecedented thing on
+sealing-schooners, where it is the custom for the hunters to rank, unofficially
+as officers. He gave no reason, but his motive was obvious enough. Horner and
+Smoke had been displaying a gallantry toward Maud Brewster, ludicrous in itself
+and inoffensive to her, but to him evidently distasteful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The announcement was received with black silence, though the other four hunters
+glanced significantly at the two who had been the cause of their banishment.
+Jock Horner, quiet as was his way, gave no sign; but the blood surged darkly
+across Smoke&rsquo;s forehead, and he half opened his mouth to speak. Wolf
+Larsen was watching him, waiting for him, the steely glitter in his eyes; but
+Smoke closed his mouth again without having said anything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anything to say?&rdquo; the other demanded aggressively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a challenge, but Smoke refused to accept it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About what?&rdquo; he asked, so innocently that Wolf Larsen was
+disconcerted, while the others smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, nothing,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said lamely. &ldquo;I just thought you
+might want to register a kick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About what?&rdquo; asked the imperturbable Smoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smoke&rsquo;s mates were now smiling broadly. His captain could have killed
+him, and I doubt not that blood would have flowed had not Maud Brewster been
+present. For that matter, it was her presence which enabled Smoke to act as he
+did. He was too discreet and cautious a man to incur Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s anger
+at a time when that anger could be expressed in terms stronger than words. I
+was in fear that a struggle might take place, but a cry from the helmsman made
+it easy for the situation to save itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Smoke ho!&rdquo; the cry came down the open companion-way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How&rsquo;s it bear?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dead astern, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maybe it&rsquo;s a Russian,&rdquo; suggested Latimer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His words brought anxiety into the faces of the other hunters. A Russian could
+mean but one thing&mdash;a cruiser. The hunters, never more than roughly aware
+of the position of the ship, nevertheless knew that we were close to the
+boundaries of the forbidden sea, while Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s record as a poacher
+was notorious. All eyes centred upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re dead safe,&rdquo; he assured them with a laugh. &ldquo;No
+salt mines this time, Smoke. But I&rsquo;ll tell you what&mdash;I&rsquo;ll lay
+odds of five to one it&rsquo;s the <i>Macedonia</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one accepted his offer, and he went on: &ldquo;In which event, I&rsquo;ll
+lay ten to one there&rsquo;s trouble breezing up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, thank you,&rdquo; Latimer spoke up. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t object to
+losing my money, but I like to get a run for it anyway. There never was a time
+when there wasn&rsquo;t trouble when you and that brother of yours got
+together, and I&rsquo;ll lay twenty to one on that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A general smile followed, in which Wolf Larsen joined, and the dinner went on
+smoothly, thanks to me, for he treated me abominably the rest of the meal,
+sneering at me and patronizing me till I was all a-tremble with suppressed
+rage. Yet I knew I must control myself for Maud Brewster&rsquo;s sake, and I
+received my reward when her eyes caught mine for a fleeting second, and they
+said, as distinctly as if she spoke, &ldquo;Be brave, be brave.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We left the table to go on deck, for a steamer was a welcome break in the
+monotony of the sea on which we floated, while the conviction that it was Death
+Larsen and the <i>Macedonia</i> added to the excitement. The stiff breeze and
+heavy sea which had sprung up the previous afternoon had been moderating all
+morning, so that it was now possible to lower the boats for an
+afternoon&rsquo;s hunt. The hunting promised to be profitable. We had sailed
+since daylight across a sea barren of seals, and were now running into the
+herd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The smoke was still miles astern, but overhauling us rapidly, when we lowered
+our boats. They spread out and struck a northerly course across the ocean. Now
+and again we saw a sail lower, heard the reports of the shot-guns, and saw the
+sail go up again. The seals were thick, the wind was dying away; everything
+favoured a big catch. As we ran off to get our leeward position of the last lee
+boat, we found the ocean fairly carpeted with sleeping seals. They were all
+about us, thicker than I had ever seen them before, in twos and threes and
+bunches, stretched full length on the surface and sleeping for all the world
+like so many lazy young dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under the approaching smoke the hull and upper-works of a steamer were growing
+larger. It was the <i>Macedonia</i>. I read her name through the glasses as she
+passed by scarcely a mile to starboard. Wolf Larsen looked savagely at the
+vessel, while Maud Brewster was curious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where is the trouble you were so sure was breezing up, Captain
+Larsen?&rdquo; she asked gaily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced at her, a moment&rsquo;s amusement softening his features.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you expect? That they&rsquo;d come aboard and cut our
+throats?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something like that,&rdquo; she confessed. &ldquo;You understand,
+seal-hunters are so new and strange to me that I am quite ready to expect
+anything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head. &ldquo;Quite right, quite right. Your error is that you
+failed to expect the worst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, what can be worse than cutting our throats?&rdquo; she asked, with
+pretty naïve surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cutting our purses,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;Man is so made these days
+that his capacity for living is determined by the money he possesses.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Who steals my purse steals trash,&rsquo;&rdquo; she quoted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who steals my purse steals my right to live,&rdquo; was the reply,
+&ldquo;old saws to the contrary. For he steals my bread and meat and bed, and
+in so doing imperils my life. There are not enough soup-kitchens and
+bread-lines to go around, you know, and when men have nothing in their purses
+they usually die, and die miserably&mdash;unless they are able to fill their
+purses pretty speedily.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I fail to see that this steamer has any designs on your
+purse.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wait and you will see,&rdquo; he answered grimly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We did not have long to wait. Having passed several miles beyond our line of
+boats, the <i>Macedonia</i> proceeded to lower her own. We knew she carried
+fourteen boats to our five (we were one short through the desertion of
+Wainwright), and she began dropping them far to leeward of our last boat,
+continued dropping them athwart our course, and finished dropping them far to
+windward of our first weather boat. The hunting, for us, was spoiled. There
+were no seals behind us, and ahead of us the line of fourteen boats, like a
+huge broom, swept the herd before it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our boats hunted across the two or three miles of water between them and the
+point where the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> had been dropped, and then headed for
+home. The wind had fallen to a whisper, the ocean was growing calmer and
+calmer, and this, coupled with the presence of the great herd, made a perfect
+hunting day&mdash;one of the two or three days to be encountered in the whole
+of a lucky season. An angry lot of men, boat-pullers and steerers as well as
+hunters, swarmed over our side. Each man felt that he had been robbed; and the
+boats were hoisted in amid curses, which, if curses had power, would have
+settled Death Larsen for all eternity&mdash;&ldquo;Dead and damned for a dozen
+iv eternities,&rdquo; commented Louis, his eyes twinkling up at me as he rested
+from hauling taut the lashings of his boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Listen to them, and find if it is hard to discover the most vital thing
+in their souls,&rdquo; said Wolf Larsen. &ldquo;Faith? and love? and high
+ideals? The good? the beautiful? the true?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Their innate sense of right has been violated,&rdquo; Maud Brewster
+said, joining the conversation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was standing a dozen feet away, one hand resting on the main-shrouds and
+her body swaying gently to the slight roll of the ship. She had not raised her
+voice, and yet I was struck by its clear and bell-like tone. Ah, it was sweet
+in my ears! I scarcely dared look at her just then, for the fear of betraying
+myself. A boy&rsquo;s cap was perched on her head, and her hair, light brown
+and arranged in a loose and fluffy order that caught the sun, seemed an aureole
+about the delicate oval of her face. She was positively bewitching, and,
+withal, sweetly spirituelle, if not saintly. All my old-time marvel at life
+returned to me at sight of this splendid incarnation of it, and Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s cold explanation of life and its meaning was truly ridiculous
+and laughable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A sentimentalist,&rdquo; he sneered, &ldquo;like Mr. Van Weyden. Those
+men are cursing because their desires have been outraged. That is all. What
+desires? The desires for the good grub and soft beds ashore which a handsome
+pay-day brings them&mdash;the women and the drink, the gorging and the
+beastliness which so truly expresses them, the best that is in them, their
+highest aspirations, their ideals, if you please. The exhibition they make of
+their feelings is not a touching sight, yet it shows how deeply they have been
+touched, how deeply their purses have been touched, for to lay hands on their
+purses is to lay hands on their souls.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;You hardly behave as if your purse had been touched,&rdquo; she
+said, smilingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it so happens that I am behaving differently, for my purse and my
+soul have both been touched. At the current price of skins in the London
+market, and based on a fair estimate of what the afternoon&rsquo;s catch would
+have been had not the <i>Macedonia</i> hogged it, the <i>Ghost</i> has lost
+about fifteen hundred dollars&rsquo; worth of skins.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You speak so calmly&mdash;&rdquo; she began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I do not feel calm; I could kill the man who robbed me,&rdquo; he
+interrupted. &ldquo;Yes, yes, I know, and that man my brother&mdash;more
+sentiment! Bah!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His face underwent a sudden change. His voice was less harsh and wholly sincere
+as he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must be happy, you sentimentalists, really and truly happy at
+dreaming and finding things good, and, because you find some of them good,
+feeling good yourself. Now, tell me, you two, do you find me good?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are good to look upon&mdash;in a way,&rdquo; I qualified.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are in you all powers for good,&rdquo; was Maud Brewster&rsquo;s
+answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There you are!&rdquo; he cried at her, half angrily. &ldquo;Your words
+are empty to me. There is nothing clear and sharp and definite about the
+thought you have expressed. You cannot pick it up in your two hands and look at
+it. In point of fact, it is not a thought. It is a feeling, a sentiment, a
+something based upon illusion and not a product of the intellect at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came into it.
+&ldquo;Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to
+the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They&rsquo;re wrong,
+all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason
+tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater
+delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living
+is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead.
+He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are
+less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head slowly, pondering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must
+be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and
+lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of
+intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no
+more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical
+smiles, as he added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart.
+My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober
+man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were
+drunk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a
+fool,&rdquo; I laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of
+fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet we spend as freely as you,&rdquo; was Maud Brewster&rsquo;s
+contribution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More freely, because it costs you nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And because we draw upon eternity,&rdquo; she retorted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whether you do or think you do, it&rsquo;s the same thing. You spend
+what you haven&rsquo;t got, and in return you get greater value from spending
+what you haven&rsquo;t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I
+have sweated to get.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you change the basis of your coinage, then?&rdquo; she
+queried teasingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully:
+&ldquo;Too late. I&rsquo;d like to, perhaps, but I can&rsquo;t. My pocketbook
+is stuffed with the old coinage, and it&rsquo;s a stubborn thing. I can never
+bring myself to recognize anything else as valid.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ceased speaking, and his gaze wandered absently past her and became lost in
+the placid sea. The old primal melancholy was strong upon him. He was quivering
+to it. He had reasoned himself into a spell of the blues, and within few hours
+one could look for the devil within him to be up and stirring. I remembered
+Charley Furuseth, and knew this man&rsquo;s sadness as the penalty which the
+materialist ever pays for his materialism.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap25"></a>CHAPTER XXV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said, the
+following morning at the breakfast-table, &ldquo;How do things look?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Clear enough,&rdquo; I answered, glancing at the sunshine which streamed
+down the open companion-way. &ldquo;Fair westerly breeze, with a promise of
+stiffening, if Louis predicts correctly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head in a pleased way. &ldquo;Any signs of fog?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thick banks in the north and north-west.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head again, evincing even greater satisfaction than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What of the <i>Macedonia</i>?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not sighted,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could have sworn his face fell at the intelligence, but why he should be
+disappointed I could not conceive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was soon to learn. &ldquo;Smoke ho!&rdquo; came the hail from on deck, and
+his face brightened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he exclaimed, and left the table at once to go on deck and
+into the steerage, where the hunters were taking the first breakfast of their
+exile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud Brewster and I scarcely touched the food before us, gazing, instead, in
+silent anxiety at each other, and listening to Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s voice, which
+easily penetrated the cabin through the intervening bulkhead. He spoke at
+length, and his conclusion was greeted with a wild roar of cheers. The bulkhead
+was too thick for us to hear what he said; but whatever it was it affected the
+hunters strongly, for the cheering was followed by loud exclamations and shouts
+of joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the sounds on deck I knew that the sailors had been routed out and were
+preparing to lower the boats. Maud Brewster accompanied me on deck, but I left
+her at the break of the poop, where she might watch the scene and not be in it.
+The sailors must have learned whatever project was on hand, and the vim and
+snap they put into their work attested their enthusiasm. The hunters came
+trooping on deck with shot-guns and ammunition-boxes, and, most unusual, their
+rifles. The latter were rarely taken in the boats, for a seal shot at long
+range with a rifle invariably sank before a boat could reach it. But each
+hunter this day had his rifle and a large supply of cartridges. I noticed they
+grinned with satisfaction whenever they looked at the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i>
+smoke, which was rising higher and higher as she approached from the west.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The five boats went over the side with a rush, spread out like the ribs of a
+fan, and set a northerly course, as on the preceding afternoon, for us to
+follow. I watched for some time, curiously, but there seemed nothing
+extraordinary about their behaviour. They lowered sails, shot seals, and
+hoisted sails again, and continued on their way as I had always seen them do.
+The <i>Macedonia</i> repeated her performance of yesterday,
+&ldquo;hogging&rdquo; the sea by dropping her line of boats in advance of ours
+and across our course. Fourteen boats require a considerable spread of ocean
+for comfortable hunting, and when she had completely lapped our line she
+continued steaming into the north-east, dropping more boats as she went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s up?&rdquo; I asked Wolf Larsen, unable longer to keep my
+curiosity in check.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind what&rsquo;s up,&rdquo; he answered gruffly. &ldquo;You
+won&rsquo;t be a thousand years in finding out, and in the meantime just pray
+for plenty of wind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, well, I don&rsquo;t mind telling you,&rdquo; he said the next
+moment. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to give that brother of mine a taste of his own
+medicine. In short, I&rsquo;m going to play the hog myself, and not for one
+day, but for the rest of the season,&mdash;if we&rsquo;re in luck.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if we&rsquo;re not?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not to be considered,&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;We simply must be in
+luck, or it&rsquo;s all up with us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had the wheel at the time, and I went forward to my hospital in the
+forecastle, where lay the two crippled men, Nilson and Thomas Mugridge. Nilson
+was as cheerful as could be expected, for his broken leg was knitting nicely;
+but the Cockney was desperately melancholy, and I was aware of a great sympathy
+for the unfortunate creature. And the marvel of it was that still he lived and
+clung to life. The brutal years had reduced his meagre body to splintered
+wreckage, and yet the spark of life within burned brightly as ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With an artificial foot&mdash;and they make excellent ones&mdash;you
+will be stumping ships&rsquo; galleys to the end of time,&rdquo; I assured him
+jovially.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his answer was serious, nay, solemn. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know about wot
+you s&rsquo;y, Mr. Van W&rsquo;yden, but I do know I&rsquo;ll never rest
+&rsquo;appy till I see that &rsquo;ell-&rsquo;ound bloody well dead. &rsquo;E
+cawn&rsquo;t live as long as me. &rsquo;E&rsquo;s got no right to live,
+an&rsquo; as the Good Word puts it, &lsquo;&rsquo;E shall shorely die,&rsquo;
+an&rsquo; I s&rsquo;y, &lsquo;Amen, an&rsquo; damn soon at that.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I returned on deck I found Wolf Larsen steering mainly with one hand,
+while with the other hand he held the marine glasses and studied the situation
+of the boats, paying particular attention to the position of the
+<i>Macedonia</i>. The only change noticeable in our boats was that they had
+hauled close on the wind and were heading several points west of north. Still,
+I could not see the expediency of the manœuvre, for the free sea was still
+intercepted by the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> five weather boats, which, in turn,
+had hauled close on the wind. Thus they slowly diverged toward the west,
+drawing farther away from the remainder of the boats in their line. Our boats
+were rowing as well as sailing. Even the hunters were pulling, and with three
+pairs of oars in the water they rapidly overhauled what I may appropriately
+term the enemy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The smoke of the <i>Macedonia</i> had dwindled to a dim blot on the
+north-eastern horizon. Of the steamer herself nothing was to be seen. We had
+been loafing along, till now, our sails shaking half the time and spilling the
+wind; and twice, for short periods, we had been hove to. But there was no more
+loafing. Sheets were trimmed, and Wolf Larsen proceeded to put the <i>Ghost</i>
+through her paces. We ran past our line of boats and bore down upon the first
+weather boat of the other line.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Down that flying jib, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen commanded.
+&ldquo;And stand by to back over the jibs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I ran forward and had the downhaul of the flying jib all in and fast as we
+slipped by the boat a hundred feet to leeward. The three men in it gazed at us
+suspiciously. They had been hogging the sea, and they knew Wolf Larsen, by
+reputation at any rate. I noted that the hunter, a huge Scandinavian sitting in
+the bow, held his rifle, ready to hand, across his knees. It should have been
+in its proper place in the rack. When they came opposite our stern, Wolf Larsen
+greeted them with a wave of the hand, and cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on board and have a &rsquo;gam&rsquo;!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To gam,&rdquo; among the sealing-schooners, is a substitute for the
+verbs &ldquo;to visit,&rdquo; &ldquo;to gossip.&rdquo; It expresses the
+garrulity of the sea, and is a pleasant break in the monotony of the life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Ghost</i> swung around into the wind, and I finished my work forward in
+time to run aft and lend a hand with the mainsheet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will please stay on deck, Miss Brewster,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said, as
+he started forward to meet his guest. &ldquo;And you too, Mr. Van
+Weyden.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boat had lowered its sail and run alongside. The hunter, golden bearded
+like a sea-king, came over the rail and dropped on deck. But his hugeness could
+not quite overcome his apprehensiveness. Doubt and distrust showed strongly in
+his face. It was a transparent face, for all of its hairy shield, and
+advertised instant relief when he glanced from Wolf Larsen to me, noted that
+there was only the pair of us, and then glanced over his own two men who had
+joined him. Surely he had little reason to be afraid. He towered like a Goliath
+above Wolf Larsen. He must have measured six feet eight or nine inches in
+stature, and I subsequently learned his weight&mdash;240 pounds. And there was
+no fat about him. It was all bone and muscle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A return of apprehension was apparent when, at the top of the companion-way,
+Wolf Larsen invited him below. But he reassured himself with a glance down at
+his host&mdash;a big man himself but dwarfed by the propinquity of the giant.
+So all hesitancy vanished, and the pair descended into the cabin. In the
+meantime, his two men, as was the wont of visiting sailors, had gone forward
+into the forecastle to do some visiting themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly, from the cabin came a great, choking bellow, followed by all the
+sounds of a furious struggle. It was the leopard and the lion, and the lion
+made all the noise. Wolf Larsen was the leopard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see the sacredness of our hospitality,&rdquo; I said bitterly to
+Maud Brewster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head that she heard, and I noted in her face the signs of the
+same sickness at sight or sound of violent struggle from which I had suffered
+so severely during my first weeks on the <i>Ghost</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t it be better if you went forward, say by the steerage
+companion-way, until it is over?&rdquo; I suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head and gazed at me pitifully. She was not frightened, but
+appalled, rather, at the human animality of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will understand,&rdquo; I took advantage of the opportunity to say,
+&ldquo;whatever part I take in what is going on and what is to come, that I am
+compelled to take it&mdash;if you and I are ever to get out of this scrape with
+our lives.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not nice&mdash;for me,&rdquo; I added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; she said, in a weak, far-away voice, and her eyes
+showed me that she did understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sounds from below soon died away. Then Wolf Larsen came alone on deck.
+There was a slight flush under his bronze, but otherwise he bore no signs of
+the battle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Send those two men aft, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I obeyed, and a minute or two later they stood before him. &ldquo;Hoist in your
+boat,&rdquo; he said to them. &ldquo;Your hunter&rsquo;s decided to stay aboard
+awhile and doesn&rsquo;t want it pounding alongside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hoist in your boat, I said,&rdquo; he repeated, this time in sharper
+tones as they hesitated to do his bidding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who knows? you may have to sail with me for a time,&rdquo; he said,
+quite softly, with a silken threat that belied the softness, as they moved
+slowly to comply, &ldquo;and we might as well start with a friendly
+understanding. Lively now! Death Larsen makes you jump better than that, and
+you know it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their movements perceptibly quickened under his coaching, and as the boat swung
+inboard I was sent forward to let go the jibs. Wolf Larsen, at the wheel,
+directed the <i>Ghost</i> after the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> second weather
+boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under way, and with nothing for the time being to do, I turned my attention to
+the situation of the boats. The <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> third weather boat was
+being attacked by two of ours, the fourth by our remaining three; and the
+fifth, turn about, was taking a hand in the defence of its nearest mate. The
+fight had opened at long distance, and the rifles were cracking steadily. A
+quick, snappy sea was being kicked up by the wind, a condition which prevented
+fine shooting; and now and again, as we drew closer, we could see the bullets
+zip-zipping from wave to wave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boat we were pursuing had squared away and was running before the wind to
+escape us, and, in the course of its flight, to take part in repulsing our
+general boat attack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Attending to sheets and tacks now left me little time to see what was taking
+place, but I happened to be on the poop when Wolf Larsen ordered the two
+strange sailors forward and into the forecastle. They went sullenly, but they
+went. He next ordered Miss Brewster below, and smiled at the instant horror
+that leapt into her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find nothing gruesome down there,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;only an unhurt man securely made fast to the ring-bolts. Bullets are
+liable to come aboard, and I don&rsquo;t want you killed, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as he spoke, a bullet was deflected by a brass-capped spoke of the wheel
+between his hands and screeched off through the air to windward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said to her; and then to me, &ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden,
+will you take the wheel?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud Brewster had stepped inside the companion-way so that only her head was
+exposed. Wolf Larsen had procured a rifle and was throwing a cartridge into the
+barrel. I begged her with my eyes to go below, but she smiled and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We may be feeble land-creatures without legs, but we can show Captain
+Larsen that we are at least as brave as he.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave her a quick look of admiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I like you a hundred per cent. better for that,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;Books, and brains, and bravery. You are well-rounded, a blue-stocking
+fit to be the wife of a pirate chief. Ahem, we&rsquo;ll discuss that
+later,&rdquo; he smiled, as a bullet struck solidly into the cabin wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw his eyes flash golden as he spoke, and I saw the terror mount in her own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We are braver,&rdquo; I hastened to say. &ldquo;At least, speaking for
+myself, I know I am braver than Captain Larsen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was I who was now favoured by a quick look. He was wondering if I were
+making fun of him. I put three or four spokes over to counteract a sheer toward
+the wind on the part of the <i>Ghost</i>, and then steadied her. Wolf Larsen
+was still waiting an explanation, and I pointed down to my knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will observe there,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;a slight trembling. It is
+because I am afraid, the flesh is afraid; and I am afraid in my mind because I
+do not wish to die. But my spirit masters the trembling flesh and the qualms of
+the mind. I am more than brave. I am courageous. Your flesh is not afraid. You
+are not afraid. On the one hand, it costs you nothing to encounter danger; on
+the other hand, it even gives you delight. You enjoy it. You may be unafraid,
+Mr. Larsen, but you must grant that the bravery is mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right,&rdquo; he acknowledged at once. &ldquo;I never
+thought of it in that way before. But is the opposite true? If you are braver
+than I, am I more cowardly than you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We both laughed at the absurdity, and he dropped down to the deck and rested
+his rifle across the rail. The bullets we had received had travelled nearly a
+mile, but by now we had cut that distance in half. He fired three careful
+shots. The first struck fifty feet to windward of the boat, the second
+alongside; and at the third the boat-steerer let loose his steering-oar and
+crumpled up in the bottom of the boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess that&rsquo;ll fix them,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said, rising to his
+feet. &ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t afford to let the hunter have it, and there is a
+chance the boat-puller doesn&rsquo;t know how to steer. In which case, the
+hunter cannot steer and shoot at the same time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His reasoning was justified, for the boat rushed at once into the wind and the
+hunter sprang aft to take the boat-steerer&rsquo;s place. There was no more
+shooting, though the rifles were still cracking merrily from the other boats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hunter had managed to get the boat before the wind again, but we ran down
+upon it, going at least two feet to its one. A hundred yards away, I saw the
+boat-puller pass a rifle to the hunter. Wolf Larsen went amidships and took the
+coil of the throat-halyards from its pin. Then he peered over the rail with
+levelled rifle. Twice I saw the hunter let go the steering-oar with one hand,
+reach for his rifle, and hesitate. We were now alongside and foaming past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, you!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen cried suddenly to the boat-puller.
+&ldquo;Take a turn!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same time he flung the coil of rope. It struck fairly, nearly knocking
+the man over, but he did not obey. Instead, he looked to his hunter for orders.
+The hunter, in turn, was in a quandary. His rifle was between his knees, but if
+he let go the steering-oar in order to shoot, the boat would sweep around and
+collide with the schooner. Also he saw Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s rifle bearing upon
+him and knew he would be shot ere he could get his rifle into play.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take a turn,&rdquo; he said quietly to the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boat-puller obeyed, taking a turn around the little forward thwart and
+paying the line as it jerked taut. The boat sheered out with a rush, and the
+hunter steadied it to a parallel course some twenty feet from the side of the
+<i>Ghost</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, get that sail down and come alongside!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen ordered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He never let go his rifle, even passing down the tackles with one hand. When
+they were fast, bow and stern, and the two uninjured men prepared to come
+aboard, the hunter picked up his rifle as if to place it in a secure position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Drop it!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen cried, and the hunter dropped it as though
+it were hot and had burned him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once aboard, the two prisoners hoisted in the boat and under Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s direction carried the wounded boat-steerer down into the
+forecastle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If our five boats do as well as you and I have done, we&rsquo;ll have a
+pretty full crew,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The man you shot&mdash;he is&mdash;I hope?&rdquo; Maud Brewster
+quavered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the shoulder,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;Nothing serious, Mr. Van
+Weyden will pull him around as good as ever in three or four weeks.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he won&rsquo;t pull those chaps around, from the look of it,&rdquo;
+he added, pointing at the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> third boat, for which I had
+been steering and which was now nearly abreast of us. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
+Horner&rsquo;s and Smoke&rsquo;s work. I told them we wanted live men, not
+carcasses. But the joy of shooting to hit is a most compelling thing, when once
+you&rsquo;ve learned how to shoot. Ever experienced it, Mr. Van Weyden?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head and regarded their work. It had indeed been bloody, for they
+had drawn off and joined our other three boats in the attack on the remaining
+two of the enemy. The deserted boat was in the trough of the sea, rolling
+drunkenly across each comber, its loose spritsail out at right angles to it and
+fluttering and flapping in the wind. The hunter and boat-puller were both lying
+awkwardly in the bottom, but the boat-steerer lay across the gunwale, half in
+and half out, his arms trailing in the water and his head rolling from side to
+side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t look, Miss Brewster, please don&rsquo;t look,&rdquo; I had
+begged of her, and I was glad that she had minded me and been spared the sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Head right into the bunch, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; was Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we drew nearer, the firing ceased, and we saw that the fight was over. The
+remaining two boats had been captured by our five, and the seven were grouped
+together, waiting to be picked up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at that!&rdquo; I cried involuntarily, pointing to the north-east.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blot of smoke which indicated the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> position had
+reappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;ve been watching it,&rdquo; was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s calm
+reply. He measured the distance away to the fog-bank, and for an instant paused
+to feel the weight of the wind on his cheek. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll make it, I
+think; but you can depend upon it that blessed brother of mine has twigged our
+little game and is just a-humping for us. Ah, look at that!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blot of smoke had suddenly grown larger, and it was very black.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll beat you out, though, brother mine,&rdquo; he chuckled.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll beat you out, and I hope you no worse than that you rack your
+old engines into scrap.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When we hove to, a hasty though orderly confusion reigned. The boats came
+aboard from every side at once. As fast as the prisoners came over the rail
+they were marshalled forward to the forecastle by our hunters, while our
+sailors hoisted in the boats, pell-mell, dropping them anywhere upon the deck
+and not stopping to lash them. We were already under way, all sails set and
+drawing, and the sheets being slacked off for a wind abeam, as the last boat
+lifted clear of the water and swung in the tackles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was need for haste. The <i>Macedonia</i>, belching the blackest of smoke
+from her funnel, was charging down upon us from out of the north-east.
+Neglecting the boats that remained to her, she had altered her course so as to
+anticipate ours. She was not running straight for us, but ahead of us. Our
+courses were converging like the sides of an angle, the vertex of which was at
+the edge of the fog-bank. It was there, or not at all, that the
+<i>Macedonia</i> could hope to catch us. The hope for the <i>Ghost</i> lay in
+that she should pass that point before the <i>Macedonia</i> arrived at it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen was steering, his eyes glistening and snapping as they dwelt upon
+and leaped from detail to detail of the chase. Now he studied the sea to
+windward for signs of the wind slackening or freshening, now the
+<i>Macedonia</i>; and again, his eyes roved over every sail, and he gave
+commands to slack a sheet here a trifle, to come in on one there a trifle, till
+he was drawing out of the <i>Ghost</i> the last bit of speed she possessed. All
+feuds and grudges were forgotten, and I was surprised at the alacrity with
+which the men who had so long endured his brutality sprang to execute his
+orders. Strange to say, the unfortunate Johnson came into my mind as we lifted
+and surged and heeled along, and I was aware of a regret that he was not alive
+and present; he had so loved the <i>Ghost</i> and delighted in her sailing
+powers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better get your rifles, you fellows,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called to our
+hunters; and the five men lined the lee rail, guns in hand, and waited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Macedonia</i> was now but a mile away, the black smoke pouring from her
+funnel at a right angle, so madly she raced, pounding through the sea at a
+seventeen-knot gait&mdash;&ldquo;&rsquo;Sky-hooting through the brine,&rdquo;
+as Wolf Larsen quoted while gazing at her. We were not making more than nine
+knots, but the fog-bank was very near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A puff of smoke broke from the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> deck, we heard a heavy
+report, and a round hole took form in the stretched canvas of our mainsail.
+They were shooting at us with one of the small cannon which rumour had said
+they carried on board. Our men, clustering amidships, waved their hats and
+raised a derisive cheer. Again there was a puff of smoke and a loud report,
+this time the cannon-ball striking not more than twenty feet astern and
+glancing twice from sea to sea to windward ere it sank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was no rifle-firing for the reason that all their hunters were out in
+the boats or our prisoners. When the two vessels were half-a-mile apart, a
+third shot made another hole in our mainsail. Then we entered the fog. It was
+about us, veiling and hiding us in its dense wet gauze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sudden transition was startling. The moment before we had been leaping
+through the sunshine, the clear sky above us, the sea breaking and rolling wide
+to the horizon, and a ship, vomiting smoke and fire and iron missiles, rushing
+madly upon us. And at once, as in an instant&rsquo;s leap, the sun was blotted
+out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon
+was such as tear-blinded eyes may see. The grey mist drove by us like a rain.
+Every woollen filament of our garments, every hair of our heads and faces, was
+jewelled with a crystal globule. The shrouds were wet with moisture; it dripped
+from our rigging overhead; and on the underside of our booms drops of water
+took shape in long swaying lines, which were detached and flung to the deck in
+mimic showers at each surge of the schooner. I was aware of a pent, stifled
+feeling. As the sounds of the ship thrusting herself through the waves were
+hurled back upon us by the fog, so were one&rsquo;s thoughts. The mind recoiled
+from contemplation of a world beyond this wet veil which wrapped us around.
+This was the world, the universe itself, its bounds so near one felt impelled
+to reach out both arms and push them back. It was impossible, that the rest
+could be beyond these walls of grey. The rest was a dream, no more than the
+memory of a dream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was weird, strangely weird. I looked at Maud Brewster and knew that she was
+similarly affected. Then I looked at Wolf Larsen, but there was nothing
+subjective about his state of consciousness. His whole concern was with the
+immediate, objective present. He still held the wheel, and I felt that he was
+timing Time, reckoning the passage of the minutes with each forward lunge and
+leeward roll of the <i>Ghost</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go for&rsquo;ard and hard alee without any noise,&rdquo; he said to me
+in a low voice. &ldquo;Clew up the topsails first. Set men at all the sheets.
+Let there be no rattling of blocks, no sound of voices. No noise, understand,
+no noise.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When all was ready, the word &ldquo;hard-a-lee&rdquo; was passed forward to me
+from man to man; and the <i>Ghost</i> heeled about on the port tack with
+practically no noise at all. And what little there was,&mdash;the slapping of a
+few reef-points and the creaking of a sheave in a block or two,&mdash;was
+ghostly under the hollow echoing pall in which we were swathed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had scarcely filled away, it seemed, when the fog thinned abruptly and we
+were again in the sunshine, the wide-stretching sea breaking before us to the
+sky-line. But the ocean was bare. No wrathful <i>Macedonia</i> broke its
+surface nor blackened the sky with her smoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen at once squared away and ran down along the rim of the fog-bank.
+His trick was obvious. He had entered the fog to windward of the steamer, and
+while the steamer had blindly driven on into the fog in the chance of catching
+him, he had come about and out of his shelter and was now running down to
+re-enter to leeward. Successful in this, the old simile of the needle in the
+haystack would be mild indeed compared with his brother&rsquo;s chance of
+finding him. He did not run long. Jibing the fore- and main-sails and setting
+the topsails again, we headed back into the bank. As we entered I could have
+sworn I saw a vague bulk emerging to windward. I looked quickly at Wolf Larsen.
+Already we were ourselves buried in the fog, but he nodded his head. He, too,
+had seen it&mdash;the <i>Macedonia</i>, guessing his manœuvre and failing by a
+moment in anticipating it. There was no doubt that we had escaped unseen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He can&rsquo;t keep this up,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said. &ldquo;He&rsquo;ll
+have to go back for the rest of his boats. Send a man to the wheel, Mr. Van
+Weyden, keep this course for the present, and you might as well set the
+watches, for we won&rsquo;t do any lingering to-night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d give five hundred dollars, though,&rdquo; he added,
+&ldquo;just to be aboard the <i>Macedonia</i> for five minutes, listening to my
+brother curse.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; he said to me when he had been relieved
+from the wheel, &ldquo;we must make these new-comers welcome. Serve out plenty
+of whisky to the hunters and see that a few bottles slip for&rsquo;ard.
+I&rsquo;ll wager every man Jack of them is over the side to-morrow, hunting for
+Wolf Larsen as contentedly as ever they hunted for Death Larsen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But won&rsquo;t they escape as Wainwright did?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He laughed shrewdly. &ldquo;Not as long as our old hunters have anything to say
+about it. I&rsquo;m dividing amongst them a dollar a skin for all the skins
+shot by our new hunters. At least half of their enthusiasm to-day was due to
+that. Oh, no, there won&rsquo;t be any escaping if they have anything to say
+about it. And now you&rsquo;d better get for&rsquo;ard to your hospital duties.
+There must be a full ward waiting for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap26"></a>CHAPTER XXVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen took the distribution of the whisky off my hands, and the bottles
+began to make their appearance while I worked over the fresh batch of wounded
+men in the forecastle. I had seen whisky drunk, such as whisky-and-soda by the
+men of the clubs, but never as these men drank it, from pannikins and mugs, and
+from the bottles&mdash;great brimming drinks, each one of which was in itself a
+debauch. But they did not stop at one or two. They drank and drank, and ever
+the bottles slipped forward and they drank more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everybody drank; the wounded drank; Oofty-Oofty, who helped me, drank. Only
+Louis refrained, no more than cautiously wetting his lips with the liquor,
+though he joined in the revels with an abandon equal to that of most of them.
+It was a saturnalia. In loud voices they shouted over the day&rsquo;s fighting,
+wrangled about details, or waxed affectionate and made friends with the men
+whom they had fought. Prisoners and captors hiccoughed on one another&rsquo;s
+shoulders, and swore mighty oaths of respect and esteem. They wept over the
+miseries of the past and over the miseries yet to come under the iron rule of
+Wolf Larsen. And all cursed him and told terrible tales of his brutality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a strange and frightful spectacle&mdash;the small, bunk-lined space, the
+floor and walls leaping and lurching, the dim light, the swaying shadows
+lengthening and fore-shortening monstrously, the thick air heavy with smoke and
+the smell of bodies and iodoform, and the inflamed faces of the
+men&mdash;half-men, I should call them. I noted Oofty-Oofty, holding the end of
+a bandage and looking upon the scene, his velvety and luminous eyes glistening
+in the light like a deer&rsquo;s eyes, and yet I knew the barbaric devil that
+lurked in his breast and belied all the softness and tenderness, almost
+womanly, of his face and form. And I noticed the boyish face of
+Harrison,&mdash;a good face once, but now a demon&rsquo;s,&mdash;convulsed with
+passion as he told the new-comers of the hell-ship they were in and shrieked
+curses upon the head of Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen it was, always Wolf Larsen, enslaver and tormentor of men, a male
+Circe and these his swine, suffering brutes that grovelled before him and
+revolted only in drunkenness and in secrecy. And was I, too, one of his swine?
+I thought. And Maud Brewster? No! I ground my teeth in my anger and
+determination till the man I was attending winced under my hand and Oofty-Oofty
+looked at me with curiosity. I felt endowed with a sudden strength. What of my
+new-found love, I was a giant. I feared nothing. I would work my will through
+it all, in spite of Wolf Larsen and of my own thirty-five bookish years. All
+would be well. I would make it well. And so, exalted, upborne by a sense of
+power, I turned my back on the howling inferno and climbed to the deck, where
+the fog drifted ghostly through the night and the air was sweet and pure and
+quiet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steerage, where were two wounded hunters, was a repetition of the
+forecastle, except that Wolf Larsen was not being cursed; and it was with a
+great relief that I again emerged on deck and went aft to the cabin. Supper was
+ready, and Wolf Larsen and Maud were waiting for me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While all his ship was getting drunk as fast as it could, he remained sober.
+Not a drop of liquor passed his lips. He did not dare it under the
+circumstances, for he had only Louis and me to depend upon, and Louis was even
+now at the wheel. We were sailing on through the fog without a look-out and
+without lights. That Wolf Larsen had turned the liquor loose among his men
+surprised me, but he evidently knew their psychology and the best method of
+cementing in cordiality, what had begun in bloodshed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His victory over Death Larsen seemed to have had a remarkable effect upon him.
+The previous evening he had reasoned himself into the blues, and I had been
+waiting momentarily for one of his characteristic outbursts. Yet nothing had
+occurred, and he was now in splendid trim. Possibly his success in capturing so
+many hunters and boats had counteracted the customary reaction. At any rate,
+the blues were gone, and the blue devils had not put in an appearance. So I
+thought at the time; but, ah me, little I knew him or knew that even then,
+perhaps, he was meditating an outbreak more terrible than any I had seen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I say, he discovered himself in splendid trim when I entered the cabin. He
+had had no headaches for weeks, his eyes were clear blue as the sky, his bronze
+was beautiful with perfect health; life swelled through his veins in full and
+magnificent flood. While waiting for me he had engaged Maud in animated
+discussion. Temptation was the topic they had hit upon, and from the few words
+I heard I made out that he was contending that temptation was temptation only
+when a man was seduced by it and fell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For look you,&rdquo; he was saying, &ldquo;as I see it, a man does
+things because of desire. He has many desires. He may desire to escape pain, or
+to enjoy pleasure. But whatever he does, he does because he desires to do
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But suppose he desires to do two opposite things, neither of which will
+permit him to do the other?&rdquo; Maud interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The very thing I was coming to,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And between these two desires is just where the soul of the man is
+manifest,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;If it is a good soul, it will desire and
+do the good action, and the contrary if it is a bad soul. It is the soul that
+decides.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bosh and nonsense!&rdquo; he exclaimed impatiently. &ldquo;It is the
+desire that decides. Here is a man who wants to, say, get drunk. Also, he
+doesn&rsquo;t want to get drunk. What does he do? How does he do it? He is a
+puppet. He is the creature of his desires, and of the two desires he obeys the
+strongest one, that is all. His soul hasn&rsquo;t anything to do with it. How
+can he be tempted to get drunk and refuse to get drunk? If the desire to remain
+sober prevails, it is because it is the strongest desire. Temptation plays no
+part, unless&mdash;&rdquo; he paused while grasping the new thought which had
+come into his mind&mdash;&ldquo;unless he is tempted to remain sober.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ha! ha!&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;What do you think of that, Mr. Van
+Weyden?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That both of you are hair-splitting,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;The
+man&rsquo;s soul is his desires. Or, if you will, the sum of his desires is his
+soul. Therein you are both wrong. You lay the stress upon the desire apart from
+the soul, Miss Brewster lays the stress on the soul apart from the desire, and
+in point of fact soul and desire are the same thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;However,&rdquo; I continued, &ldquo;Miss Brewster is right in contending
+that temptation is temptation whether the man yield or overcome. Fire is fanned
+by the wind until it leaps up fiercely. So is desire like fire. It is fanned,
+as by a wind, by sight of the thing desired, or by a new and luring description
+or comprehension of the thing desired. There lies the temptation. It is the
+wind that fans the desire until it leaps up to mastery. That&rsquo;s
+temptation. It may not fan sufficiently to make the desire overmastering, but
+in so far as it fans at all, that far is it temptation. And, as you say, it may
+tempt for good as well as for evil.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I felt proud of myself as we sat down to the table. My words had been decisive.
+At least they had put an end to the discussion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Wolf Larsen seemed voluble, prone to speech as I had never seen him before.
+It was as though he were bursting with pent energy which must find an outlet
+somehow. Almost immediately he launched into a discussion on love. As usual,
+his was the sheer materialistic side, and Maud&rsquo;s was the idealistic. For
+myself, beyond a word or so of suggestion or correction now and again, I took
+no part.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was brilliant, but so was Maud, and for some time I lost the thread of the
+conversation through studying her face as she talked. It was a face that rarely
+displayed colour, but to-night it was flushed and vivacious. Her wit was
+playing keenly, and she was enjoying the tilt as much as Wolf Larsen, and he
+was enjoying it hugely. For some reason, though I know not why in the argument,
+so utterly had I lost it in the contemplation of one stray brown lock of
+Maud&rsquo;s hair, he quoted from Iseult at Tintagel, where she says:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Blessed am I beyond women even herein,<br/>
+That beyond all born women is my sin,<br/>
+And perfect my transgression.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he had read pessimism into Omar, so now he read triumph, stinging triumph
+and exultation, into Swinburne&rsquo;s lines. And he read rightly, and he read
+well. He had hardly ceased reading when Louis put his head into the
+companion-way and whispered down:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Be easy, will ye? The fog&rsquo;s lifted, an&rsquo; &rsquo;tis the port
+light iv a steamer that&rsquo;s crossin&rsquo; our bow this blessed
+minute.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen sprang on deck, and so swiftly that by the time we followed him he
+had pulled the steerage-slide over the drunken clamour and was on his way
+forward to close the forecastle-scuttle. The fog, though it remained, had
+lifted high, where it obscured the stars and made the night quite black.
+Directly ahead of us I could see a bright red light and a white light, and I
+could hear the pulsing of a steamer&rsquo;s engines. Beyond a doubt it was the
+<i>Macedonia</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wolf Larsen had returned to the poop, and we stood in a silent group, watching
+the lights rapidly cross our bow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lucky for me he doesn&rsquo;t carry a searchlight,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What if I should cry out loudly?&rdquo; I queried in a whisper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be all up,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;But have you thought upon
+what would immediately happen?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before I had time to express any desire to know, he had me by the throat with
+his gorilla grip, and by a faint quiver of the muscles&mdash;a hint, as it
+were&mdash;he suggested to me the twist that would surely have broken my neck.
+The next moment he had released me and we were gazing at the
+<i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> lights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What if I should cry out?&rdquo; Maud asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I like you too well to hurt you,&rdquo; he said softly&mdash;nay, there
+was a tenderness and a caress in his voice that made me wince.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t do it, just the same, for I&rsquo;d promptly break Mr.
+Van Weyden&rsquo;s neck.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then she has my permission to cry out,&rdquo; I said defiantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hardly think you&rsquo;ll care to sacrifice the Dean of American
+Letters the Second,&rdquo; he sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We spoke no more, though we had become too used to one another for the silence
+to be awkward; and when the red light and the white had disappeared we returned
+to the cabin to finish the interrupted supper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again they fell to quoting, and Maud gave Dowson&rsquo;s &ldquo;Impenitentia
+Ultima.&rdquo; She rendered it beautifully, but I watched not her, but Wolf
+Larsen. I was fascinated by the fascinated look he bent upon Maud. He was quite
+out of himself, and I noticed the unconscious movement of his lips as he shaped
+word for word as fast as she uttered them. He interrupted her when she gave the
+lines:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;And her eyes should be my light while the sun went out behind me,<br/>
+And the viols in her voice be the last sound in my ear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are viols in your voice,&rdquo; he said bluntly, and his eyes
+flashed their golden light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could have shouted with joy at her control. She finished the concluding
+stanza without faltering and then slowly guided the conversation into less
+perilous channels. And all the while I sat in a half-daze, the drunken riot of
+the steerage breaking through the bulkhead, the man I feared and the woman I
+loved talking on and on. The table was not cleared. The man who had taken
+Mugridge&rsquo;s place had evidently joined his comrades in the forecastle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If ever Wolf Larsen attained the summit of living, he attained it then. From
+time to time I forsook my own thoughts to follow him, and I followed in amaze,
+mastered for the moment by his remarkable intellect, under the spell of his
+passion, for he was preaching the passion of revolt. It was inevitable that
+Milton&rsquo;s Lucifer should be instanced, and the keenness with which Wolf
+Larsen analysed and depicted the character was a revelation of his stifled
+genius. It reminded me of Taine, yet I knew the man had never heard of that
+brilliant though dangerous thinker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God&rsquo;s
+thunderbolts,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen was saying. &ldquo;Hurled into hell, he was
+unbeaten. A third of God&rsquo;s angels he had led with him, and straightway he
+incited man to rebel against God, and gained for himself and hell the major
+portion of all the generations of man. Why was he beaten out of heaven? Because
+he was less brave than God? less proud? less aspiring? No! A thousand times no!
+God was more powerful, as he said, Whom thunder hath made greater. But Lucifer
+was a free spirit. To serve was to suffocate. He preferred suffering in freedom
+to all the happiness of a comfortable servility. He did not care to serve God.
+He cared to serve nothing. He was no figure-head. He stood on his own legs. He
+was an individual.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The first Anarchist,&rdquo; Maud laughed, rising and preparing to
+withdraw to her state-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it is good to be an anarchist!&rdquo; he cried. He, too, had risen,
+and he stood facing her, where she had paused at the door of her room, as he
+went on:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Here at least<br/>
+We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built<br/>
+Here for his envy; will not drive us hence;<br/>
+Here we may reign secure; and in my choice<br/>
+To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:<br/>
+Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the defiant cry of a mighty spirit. The cabin still rang with his voice,
+as he stood there, swaying, his bronzed face shining, his head up and dominant,
+and his eyes, golden and masculine, intensely masculine and insistently soft,
+flashing upon Maud at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again that unnamable and unmistakable terror was in her eyes, and she said,
+almost in a whisper, &ldquo;You are Lucifer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door closed and she was gone. He stood staring after her for a minute, then
+returned to himself and to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll relieve Louis at the wheel,&rdquo; he said shortly,
+&ldquo;and call upon you to relieve at midnight. Better turn in now and get
+some sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pulled on a pair of mittens, put on his cap, and ascended the
+companion-stairs, while I followed his suggestion by going to bed. For some
+unknown reason, prompted mysteriously, I did not undress, but lay down fully
+clothed. For a time I listened to the clamour in the steerage and marvelled
+upon the love which had come to me; but my sleep on the <i>Ghost</i> had become
+most healthful and natural, and soon the songs and cries died away, my eyes
+closed, and my consciousness sank down into the half-death of slumber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I knew not what had aroused me, but I found myself out of my bunk, on my feet,
+wide awake, my soul vibrating to the warning of danger as it might have
+thrilled to a trumpet call. I threw open the door. The cabin light was burning
+low. I saw Maud, my Maud, straining and struggling and crushed in the embrace
+of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s arms. I could see the vain beat and flutter of her as
+she strove, pressing her face against his breast, to escape from him. All this
+I saw on the very instant of seeing and as I sprang forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I struck him with my fist, on the face, as he raised his head, but it was a
+puny blow. He roared in a ferocious, animal-like way, and gave me a shove with
+his hand. It was only a shove, a flirt of the wrist, yet so tremendous was his
+strength that I was hurled backward as from a catapult. I struck the door of
+the state-room which had formerly been Mugridge&rsquo;s, splintering and
+smashing the panels with the impact of my body. I struggled to my feet, with
+difficulty dragging myself clear of the wrecked door, unaware of any hurt
+whatever. I was conscious only of an overmastering rage. I think I, too, cried
+aloud, as I drew the knife at my hip and sprang forward a second time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But something had happened. They were reeling apart. I was close upon him, my
+knife uplifted, but I withheld the blow. I was puzzled by the strangeness of
+it. Maud was leaning against the wall, one hand out for support; but he was
+staggering, his left hand pressed against his forehead and covering his eyes,
+and with the right he was groping about him in a dazed sort of way. It struck
+against the wall, and his body seemed to express a muscular and physical relief
+at the contact, as though he had found his bearings, his location in space as
+well as something against which to lean.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I saw red again. All my wrongs and humiliations flashed upon me with a
+dazzling brightness, all that I had suffered and others had suffered at his
+hands, all the enormity of the man&rsquo;s very existence. I sprang upon him,
+blindly, insanely, and drove the knife into his shoulder. I knew, then, that it
+was no more than a flesh wound,&mdash;I had felt the steel grate on his
+shoulder-blade,&mdash;and I raised the knife to strike at a more vital part.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Maud had seen my first blow, and she cried, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t! Please
+don&rsquo;t!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I dropped my arm for a moment, and a moment only. Again the knife was raised,
+and Wolf Larsen would have surely died had she not stepped between. Her arms
+were around me, her hair was brushing my face. My pulse rushed up in an
+unwonted manner, yet my rage mounted with it. She looked me bravely in the
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For my sake,&rdquo; she begged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I would kill him for your sake!&rdquo; I cried, trying to free my arm
+without hurting her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; she said, and laid her fingers lightly on my lips. I could
+have kissed them, had I dared, even then, in my rage, the touch of them was so
+sweet, so very sweet. &ldquo;Please, please,&rdquo; she pleaded, and she
+disarmed me by the words, as I was to discover they would ever disarm me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I stepped back, separating from her, and replaced the knife in its sheath. I
+looked at Wolf Larsen. He still pressed his left hand against his forehead. It
+covered his eyes. His head was bowed. He seemed to have grown limp. His body
+was sagging at the hips, his great shoulders were drooping and shrinking
+forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Van Weyden!&rdquo; he called hoarsely, and with a note of fright in his
+voice. &ldquo;Oh, Van Weyden! where are you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked at Maud. She did not speak, but nodded her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here I am,&rdquo; I answered, stepping to his side. &ldquo;What is the
+matter?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Help me to a seat,&rdquo; he said, in the same hoarse, frightened voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am a sick man; a very sick man, Hump,&rdquo; he said, as he left my
+sustaining grip and sank into a chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His head dropped forward on the table and was buried in his hands. From time to
+time it rocked back and forward as with pain. Once, when he half raised it, I
+saw the sweat standing in heavy drops on his forehead about the roots of his
+hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am a sick man, a very sick man,&rdquo; he repeated again, and yet once
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo; I asked, resting my hand on his shoulder.
+&ldquo;What can I do for you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he shook my hand off with an irritated movement, and for a long time I
+stood by his side in silence. Maud was looking on, her face awed and
+frightened. What had happened to him we could not imagine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;I must get into my bunk. Lend me a
+hand. I&rsquo;ll be all right in a little while. It&rsquo;s those damn
+headaches, I believe. I was afraid of them. I had a feeling&mdash;no, I
+don&rsquo;t know what I&rsquo;m talking about. Help me into my bunk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when I got him into his bunk he again buried his face in his hands,
+covering his eyes, and as I turned to go I could hear him murmuring, &ldquo;I
+am a sick man, a very sick man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud looked at me inquiringly as I emerged. I shook my head, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something has happened to him. What, I don&rsquo;t know. He is helpless,
+and frightened, I imagine, for the first time in his life. It must have
+occurred before he received the knife-thrust, which made only a superficial
+wound. You must have seen what happened.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head. &ldquo;I saw nothing. It is just as mysterious to me. He
+suddenly released me and staggered away. But what shall we do? What shall I
+do?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you will wait, please, until I come back,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I went on deck. Louis was at the wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You may go for&rsquo;ard and turn in,&rdquo; I said, taking it from him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was quick to obey, and I found myself alone on the deck of the <i>Ghost</i>.
+As quietly as was possible, I clewed up the topsails, lowered the flying jib
+and staysail, backed the jib over, and flattened the mainsail. Then I went
+below to Maud. I placed my finger on my lips for silence, and entered Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s room. He was in the same position in which I had left him, and
+his head was rocking&mdash;almost writhing&mdash;from side to side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anything I can do for you?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made no reply at first, but on my repeating the question he answered,
+&ldquo;No, no; I&rsquo;m all right. Leave me alone till morning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But as I turned to go I noted that his head had resumed its rocking motion.
+Maud was waiting patiently for me, and I took notice, with a thrill of joy, of
+the queenly poise of her head and her glorious, calm eyes. Calm and sure they
+were as her spirit itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you trust yourself to me for a journey of six hundred miles or
+so?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean&mdash;?&rdquo; she asked, and I knew she had guessed aright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I mean just that,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;There is nothing left
+for us but the open boat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For me, you mean,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You are certainly as safe here
+as you have been.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, there is nothing left for us but the open boat,&rdquo; I iterated
+stoutly. &ldquo;Will you please dress as warmly as you can, at once, and make
+into a bundle whatever you wish to bring with you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And make all haste,&rdquo; I added, as she turned toward her state-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lazarette was directly beneath the cabin, and, opening the trap-door in the
+floor and carrying a candle with me, I dropped down and began overhauling the
+ship&rsquo;s stores. I selected mainly from the canned goods, and by the time I
+was ready, willing hands were extended from above to receive what I passed up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We worked in silence. I helped myself also to blankets, mittens, oilskins,
+caps, and such things, from the slop-chest. It was no light adventure, this
+trusting ourselves in a small boat to so raw and stormy a sea, and it was
+imperative that we should guard ourselves against the cold and wet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We worked feverishly at carrying our plunder on deck and depositing it
+amidships, so feverishly that Maud, whose strength was hardly a positive
+quantity, had to give over, exhausted, and sit on the steps at the break of the
+poop. This did not serve to recover her, and she lay on her back, on the hard
+deck, arms stretched out, and whole body relaxed. It was a trick I remembered
+of my sister, and I knew she would soon be herself again. I knew, also, that
+weapons would not come in amiss, and I re-entered Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+state-room to get his rifle and shot-gun. I spoke to him, but he made no
+answer, though his head was still rocking from side to side and he was not
+asleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-bye, Lucifer,&rdquo; I whispered to myself as I softly closed the
+door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next to obtain was a stock of ammunition,&mdash;an easy matter, though I had to
+enter the steerage companion-way to do it. Here the hunters stored the
+ammunition-boxes they carried in the boats, and here, but a few feet from their
+noisy revels, I took possession of two boxes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next, to lower a boat. Not so simple a task for one man. Having cast off the
+lashings, I hoisted first on the forward tackle, then on the aft, till the boat
+cleared the rail, when I lowered away, one tackle and then the other, for a
+couple of feet, till it hung snugly, above the water, against the
+schooner&rsquo;s side. I made certain that it contained the proper equipment of
+oars, rowlocks, and sail. Water was a consideration, and I robbed every boat
+aboard of its breaker. As there were nine boats all told, it meant that we
+should have plenty of water, and ballast as well, though there was the chance
+that the boat would be overloaded, what of the generous supply of other things
+I was taking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Maud was passing me the provisions and I was storing them in the boat, a
+sailor came on deck from the forecastle. He stood by the weather rail for a
+time (we were lowering over the lee rail), and then sauntered slowly amidships,
+where he again paused and stood facing the wind, with his back toward us. I
+could hear my heart beating as I crouched low in the boat. Maud had sunk down
+upon the deck and was, I knew, lying motionless, her body in the shadow of the
+bulwark. But the man never turned, and, after stretching his arms above his
+head and yawning audibly, he retraced his steps to the forecastle scuttle and
+disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few minutes sufficed to finish the loading, and I lowered the boat into the
+water. As I helped Maud over the rail and felt her form close to mine, it was
+all I could do to keep from crying out, &ldquo;I love you! I love you!&rdquo;
+Truly Humphrey Van Weyden was at last in love, I thought, as her fingers clung
+to mine while I lowered her down to the boat. I held on to the rail with one
+hand and supported her weight with the other, and I was proud at the moment of
+the feat. It was a strength I had not possessed a few months before, on the day
+I said good-bye to Charley Furuseth and started for San Francisco on the
+ill-fated <i>Martinez</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the boat ascended on a sea, her feet touched and I released her hands. I
+cast off the tackles and leaped after her. I had never rowed in my life, but I
+put out the oars and at the expense of much effort got the boat clear of the
+<i>Ghost</i>. Then I experimented with the sail. I had seen the boat-steerers
+and hunters set their spritsails many times, yet this was my first attempt.
+What took them possibly two minutes took me twenty, but in the end I succeeded
+in setting and trimming it, and with the steering-oar in my hands hauled on the
+wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There lies Japan,&rdquo; I remarked, &ldquo;straight before us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Humphrey Van Weyden,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you are a brave man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; I answered, &ldquo;it is you who are a brave woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We turned our heads, swayed by a common impulse to see the last of the
+<i>Ghost</i>. Her low hull lifted and rolled to windward on a sea; her canvas
+loomed darkly in the night; her lashed wheel creaked as the rudder kicked; then
+sight and sound of her faded away, and we were alone on the dark sea.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap27"></a>CHAPTER XXVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Day broke, grey and chill. The boat was close-hauled on a fresh breeze and the
+compass indicated that we were just making the course which would bring us to
+Japan. Though stoutly mittened, my fingers were cold, and they pained from the
+grip on the steering-oar. My feet were stinging from the bite of the frost, and
+I hoped fervently that the sun would shine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before me, in the bottom of the boat, lay Maud. She, at least, was warm, for
+under her and over her were thick blankets. The top one I had drawn over her
+face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing but the vague shape
+of her, and her light-brown hair, escaped from the covering and jewelled with
+moisture from the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Long I looked at her, dwelling upon that one visible bit of her as only a man
+would who deemed it the most precious thing in the world. So insistent was my
+gaze that at last she stirred under the blankets, the top fold was thrown back
+and she smiled out on me, her eyes yet heavy with sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-morning, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Have you sighted
+land yet?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I answered, &ldquo;but we are approaching it at a rate of six
+miles an hour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made a <i>moue</i> of disappointment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that is equivalent to one hundred and forty-four miles in
+twenty-four hours,&rdquo; I added reassuringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her face brightened. &ldquo;And how far have we to go?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Siberia lies off there,&rdquo; I said, pointing to the west. &ldquo;But
+to the south-west, some six hundred miles, is Japan. If this wind should hold,
+we&rsquo;ll make it in five days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if it storms? The boat could not live?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had a way of looking one in the eyes and demanding the truth, and thus she
+looked at me as she asked the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would have to storm very hard,&rdquo; I temporized.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if it storms very hard?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded my head. &ldquo;But we may be picked up any moment by a
+sealing-schooner. They are plentifully distributed over this part of the
+ocean.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, you are chilled through!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Look! You are
+shivering. Don&rsquo;t deny it; you are. And here I have been lying warm as
+toast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see that it would help matters if you, too, sat up and
+were chilled,&rdquo; I laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It will, though, when I learn to steer, which I certainly shall.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sat up and began making her simple toilet. She shook down her hair, and it
+fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and shoulders. Dear, damp
+brown hair! I wanted to kiss it, to ripple it through my fingers, to bury my
+face in it. I gazed entranced, till the boat ran into the wind and the flapping
+sail warned me I was not attending to my duties. Idealist and romanticist that
+I was and always had been in spite of my analytical nature, yet I had failed
+till now in grasping much of the physical characteristics of love. The love of
+man and woman, I had always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit,
+a spiritual bond that linked and drew their souls together. The bonds of the
+flesh had little part in my cosmos of love. But I was learning the sweet lesson
+for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself, through the
+flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of the loved one&rsquo;s hair was as
+much breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the light that shone from
+the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips. After all, pure spirit was
+unknowable, a thing to be sensed and divined only; nor could it express itself
+in terms of itself. Jehovah was anthropomorphic because he could address
+himself to the Jews only in terms of their understanding; so he was conceived
+as in their own image, as a cloud, a pillar of fire, a tangible, physical
+something which the mind of the Israelites could grasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so I gazed upon Maud&rsquo;s light-brown hair, and loved it, and learned
+more of love than all the poets and singers had taught me with all their songs
+and sonnets. She flung it back with a sudden adroit movement, and her face
+emerged, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t women wear their hair down always?&rdquo; I asked.
+&ldquo;It is so much more beautiful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it didn&rsquo;t tangle so dreadfully,&rdquo; she laughed.
+&ldquo;There! I&rsquo;ve lost one of my precious hair-pins!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and again, such
+was my delight in following her every movement as she searched through the
+blankets for the pin. I was surprised, and joyfully, that she was so much the
+woman, and the display of each trait and mannerism that was characteristically
+feminine gave me keener joy. For I had been elevating her too highly in my
+concepts of her, removing her too far from the plane of the human, and too far
+from me. I had been making of her a creature goddess-like and unapproachable.
+So I hailed with delight the little traits that proclaimed her only woman after
+all, such as the toss of the head which flung back the cloud of hair, and the
+search for the pin. She was woman, my kind, on my plane, and the delightful
+intimacy of kind, of man and woman, was possible, as well as the reverence and
+awe in which I knew I should always hold her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She found the pin with an adorable little cry, and I turned my attention more
+fully to my steering. I proceeded to experiment, lashing and wedging the
+steering-oar until the boat held on fairly well by the wind without my
+assistance. Occasionally it came up too close, or fell off too freely; but it
+always recovered itself and in the main behaved satisfactorily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now we shall have breakfast,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But first you
+must be more warmly clad.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I got out a heavy shirt, new from the slop-chest and made from blanket goods. I
+knew the kind, so thick and so close of texture that it could resist the rain
+and not be soaked through after hours of wetting. When she had slipped this on
+over her head, I exchanged the boy&rsquo;s cap she wore for a man&rsquo;s cap,
+large enough to cover her hair, and, when the flap was turned down, to
+completely cover her neck and ears. The effect was charming. Her face was of
+the sort that cannot but look well under all circumstances. Nothing could
+destroy its exquisite oval, its well-nigh classic lines, its delicately
+stencilled brows, its large brown eyes, clear-seeing and calm, gloriously calm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us just then. The boat was caught
+as it obliquely crossed the crest of a wave. It went over suddenly, burying its
+gunwale level with the sea and shipping a bucketful or so of water. I was
+opening a can of tongue at the moment, and I sprang to the sheet and cast it
+off just in time. The sail flapped and fluttered, and the boat paid off. A few
+minutes of regulating sufficed to put it on its course again, when I returned
+to the preparation of breakfast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It does very well, it seems, though I am not versed in things
+nautical,&rdquo; she said, nodding her head with grave approval at my steering
+contrivance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind,&rdquo; I
+explained. &ldquo;When running more freely, with the wind astern abeam, or on
+the quarter, it will be necessary for me to steer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must say I don&rsquo;t understand your technicalities,&rdquo; she
+said, &ldquo;but I do your conclusion, and I don&rsquo;t like it. You cannot
+steer night and day and for ever. So I shall expect, after breakfast, to
+receive my first lesson. And then you shall lie down and sleep. We&rsquo;ll
+stand watches just as they do on ships.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see how I am to teach you,&rdquo; I made protest. &ldquo;I
+am just learning for myself. You little thought when you trusted yourself to me
+that I had had no experience whatever with small boats. This is the first time
+I have ever been in one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then we&rsquo;ll learn together, sir. And since you&rsquo;ve had a
+night&rsquo;s start you shall teach me what you have learned. And now,
+breakfast. My! this air does give one an appetite!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No coffee,&rdquo; I said regretfully, passing her buttered sea-biscuits
+and a slice of canned tongue. &ldquo;And there will be no tea, no soups,
+nothing hot, till we have made land somewhere, somehow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the simple breakfast, capped with a cup of cold water, Maud took her
+lesson in steering. In teaching her I learned quite a deal myself, though I was
+applying the knowledge already acquired by sailing the <i>Ghost</i> and by
+watching the boat-steerers sail the small boats. She was an apt pupil, and soon
+learned to keep the course, to luff in the puffs and to cast off the sheet in
+an emergency.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having grown tired, apparently, of the task, she relinquished the oar to me. I
+had folded up the blankets, but she now proceeded to spread them out on the
+bottom. When all was arranged snugly, she said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, sir, to bed. And you shall sleep until luncheon. Till
+dinner-time,&rdquo; she corrected, remembering the arrangement on the
+<i>Ghost</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What could I do? She insisted, and said, &ldquo;Please, please,&rdquo;
+whereupon I turned the oar over to her and obeyed. I experienced a positive
+sensuous delight as I crawled into the bed she had made with her hands. The
+calm and control which were so much a part of her seemed to have been
+communicated to the blankets, so that I was aware of a soft dreaminess and
+content, and of an oval face and brown eyes framed in a fisherman&rsquo;s cap
+and tossing against a background now of grey cloud, now of grey sea, and then I
+was aware that I had been asleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked at my watch. It was one o&rsquo;clock. I had slept seven hours! And
+she had been steering seven hours! When I took the steering-oar I had first to
+unbend her cramped fingers. Her modicum of strength had been exhausted, and she
+was unable even to move from her position. I was compelled to let go the sheet
+while I helped her to the nest of blankets and chafed her hands and arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am so tired,&rdquo; she said, with a quick intake of the breath and a
+sigh, drooping her head wearily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she straightened it the next moment. &ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t scold,
+don&rsquo;t you dare scold,&rdquo; she cried with mock defiance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope my face does not appear angry,&rdquo; I answered seriously;
+&ldquo;for I assure you I am not in the least angry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;N-no,&rdquo; she considered. &ldquo;It looks only reproachful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it is an honest face, for it looks what I feel. You were not fair
+to yourself, nor to me. How can I ever trust you again?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked penitent. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be good,&rdquo; she said, as a naughty
+child might say it. &ldquo;I promise&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To obey as a sailor would obey his captain?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;It was stupid of me, I know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you must promise something else,&rdquo; I ventured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Readily.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That you will not say, &lsquo;Please, please,&rsquo; too often; for when
+you do you are sure to override my authority.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed with amused appreciation. She, too, had noticed the power of the
+repeated &ldquo;please.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a good word&mdash;&rdquo; I began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I must not overwork it,&rdquo; she broke in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she laughed weakly, and her head drooped again. I left the oar long enough
+to tuck the blankets about her feet and to pull a single fold across her face.
+Alas! she was not strong. I looked with misgiving toward the south-west and
+thought of the six hundred miles of hardship before us&mdash;ay, if it were no
+worse than hardship. On this sea a storm might blow up at any moment and
+destroy us. And yet I was unafraid. I was without confidence in the future,
+extremely doubtful, and yet I felt no underlying fear. It must come right, it
+must come right, I repeated to myself, over and over again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind freshened in the afternoon, raising a stiffer sea and trying the boat
+and me severely. But the supply of food and the nine breakers of water enabled
+the boat to stand up to the sea and wind, and I held on as long as I dared.
+Then I removed the sprit, tightly hauling down the peak of the sail, and we
+raced along under what sailors call a leg-of-mutton.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Late in the afternoon I sighted a steamer&rsquo;s smoke on the horizon to
+leeward, and I knew it either for a Russian cruiser, or, more likely, the
+<i>Macedonia</i> still seeking the <i>Ghost</i>. The sun had not shone all day,
+and it had been bitter cold. As night drew on, the clouds darkened and the wind
+freshened, so that when Maud and I ate supper it was with our mittens on and
+with me still steering and eating morsels between puffs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the time it was dark, wind and sea had become too strong for the boat, and I
+reluctantly took in the sail and set about making a drag or sea-anchor. I had
+learned of the device from the talk of the hunters, and it was a simple thing
+to manufacture. Furling the sail and lashing it securely about the mast, boom,
+sprit, and two pairs of spare oars, I threw it overboard. A line connected it
+with the bow, and as it floated low in the water, practically unexposed to the
+wind, it drifted less rapidly than the boat. In consequence it held the boat
+bow on to the sea and wind&mdash;the safest position in which to escape being
+swamped when the sea is breaking into whitecaps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now?&rdquo; Maud asked cheerfully, when the task was accomplished
+and I pulled on my mittens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now we are no longer travelling toward Japan,&rdquo; I answered.
+&ldquo;Our drift is to the south-east, or south-south-east, at the rate of at
+least two miles an hour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That will be only twenty-four miles,&rdquo; she urged, &ldquo;if the
+wind remains high all night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, and only one hundred and forty miles if it continues for three days
+and nights.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it won&rsquo;t continue,&rdquo; she said with easy confidence.
+&ldquo;It will turn around and blow fair.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The sea is the great faithless one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the wind!&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;I have heard you grow eloquent
+over the brave trade-wind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish I had thought to bring Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s chronometer and
+sextant,&rdquo; I said, still gloomily. &ldquo;Sailing one direction, drifting
+another direction, to say nothing of the set of the current in some third
+direction, makes a resultant which dead reckoning can never calculate. Before
+long we won&rsquo;t know where we are by five hundred miles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I begged her pardon and promised I should not be disheartened any more. At
+her solicitation I let her take the watch till midnight,&mdash;it was then nine
+o&rsquo;clock, but I wrapped her in blankets and put an oilskin about her
+before I lay down. I slept only cat-naps. The boat was leaping and pounding as
+it fell over the crests, I could hear the seas rushing past, and spray was
+continually being thrown aboard. And still, it was not a bad night, I
+mused&mdash;nothing to the nights I had been through on the <i>Ghost</i>;
+nothing, perhaps, to the nights we should go through in this cockle-shell. Its
+planking was three-quarters of an inch thick. Between us and the bottom of the
+sea was less than an inch of wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid. The death which Wolf
+Larsen and even Thomas Mugridge had made me fear, I no longer feared. The
+coming of Maud Brewster into my life seemed to have transformed me. After all,
+I thought, it is better and finer to love than to be loved, if it makes
+something in life so worth while that one is not loath to die for it. I forget
+my own life in the love of another life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never
+wanted so much to live as right now when I place the least value upon my own
+life. I never had so much reason for living, was my concluding thought; and
+after that, until I dozed, I contented myself with trying to pierce the
+darkness to where I knew Maud crouched low in the stern-sheets, watchful of the
+foaming sea and ready to call me on an instant&rsquo;s notice.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap28"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+There is no need of going into an extended recital of our suffering in the
+small boat during the many days we were driven and drifted, here and there,
+willy-nilly, across the ocean. The high wind blew from the north-west for
+twenty-four hours, when it fell calm, and in the night sprang up from the
+south-west. This was dead in our teeth, but I took in the sea-anchor and set
+sail, hauling a course on the wind which took us in a south-south-easterly
+direction. It was an even choice between this and the west-north-westerly
+course which the wind permitted; but the warm airs of the south fanned my
+desire for a warmer sea and swayed my decision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In three hours&mdash;it was midnight, I well remember, and as dark as I had
+ever seen it on the sea&mdash;the wind, still blowing out of the south-west,
+rose furiously, and once again I was compelled to set the sea-anchor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Day broke and found me wan-eyed and the ocean lashed white, the boat pitching,
+almost on end, to its drag. We were in imminent danger of being swamped by the
+whitecaps. As it was, spray and spume came aboard in such quantities that I
+bailed without cessation. The blankets were soaking. Everything was wet except
+Maud, and she, in oilskins, rubber boots, and sou&rsquo;wester, was dry, all
+but her face and hands and a stray wisp of hair. She relieved me at the
+bailing-hole from time to time, and bravely she threw out the water and faced
+the storm. All things are relative. It was no more than a stiff blow, but to
+us, fighting for life in our frail craft, it was indeed a storm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cold and cheerless, the wind beating on our faces, the white seas roaring by,
+we struggled through the day. Night came, but neither of us slept. Day came,
+and still the wind beat on our faces and the white seas roared past. By the
+second night Maud was falling asleep from exhaustion. I covered her with
+oilskins and a tarpaulin. She was comparatively dry, but she was numb with the
+cold. I feared greatly that she might die in the night; but day broke, cold and
+cheerless, with the same clouded sky and beating wind and roaring seas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours. I was wet and chilled to the marrow,
+till I felt more dead than alive. My body was stiff from exertion as well as
+from cold, and my aching muscles gave me the severest torture whenever I used
+them, and I used them continually. And all the time we were being driven off
+into the north-east, directly away from Japan and toward bleak Bering Sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated. In fact,
+toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle and something more. The
+boat&rsquo;s bow plunged under a crest, and we came through quarter-full of
+water. I bailed like a madman. The liability of shipping another such sea was
+enormously increased by the water that weighed the boat down and robbed it of
+its buoyancy. And another such sea meant the end. When I had the boat empty
+again I was forced to take away the tarpaulin which covered Maud, in order that
+I might lash it down across the bow. It was well I did, for it covered the boat
+fully a third of the way aft, and three times, in the next several hours, it
+flung off the bulk of the down-rushing water when the bow shoved under the
+seas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud&rsquo;s condition was pitiable. She sat crouched in the bottom of the
+boat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing the pain she suffered.
+But ever her eyes looked bravely at me, and ever her lips uttered brave words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little I noticed it.
+I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-sheets. The morning of the
+fourth day found the wind diminished to a gentle whisper, the sea dying down
+and the sun shining upon us. Oh, the blessed sun! How we bathed our poor bodies
+in its delicious warmth, reviving like bugs and crawling things after a storm.
+We smiled again, said amusing things, and waxed optimistic over our situation.
+Yet it was, if anything, worse than ever. We were farther from Japan than the
+night we left the <i>Ghost</i>. Nor could I more than roughly guess our
+latitude and longitude. At a calculation of a two-mile drift per hour, during
+the seventy and odd hours of the storm, we had been driven at least one hundred
+and fifty miles to the north-east. But was such calculated drift correct? For
+all I knew, it might have been four miles per hour instead of two. In which
+case we were another hundred and fifty miles to the bad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where we were I did not know, though there was quite a likelihood that we were
+in the vicinity of the <i>Ghost</i>. There were seals about us, and I was
+prepared to sight a sealing-schooner at any time. We did sight one, in the
+afternoon, when the north-west breeze had sprung up freshly once more. But the
+strange schooner lost itself on the sky-line and we alone occupied the circle
+of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came days of fog, when even Maud&rsquo;s spirit drooped and there were no merry
+words upon her lips; days of calm, when we floated on the lonely immensity of
+sea, oppressed by its greatness and yet marvelling at the miracle of tiny life,
+for we still lived and struggled to live; days of sleet and wind and
+snow-squalls, when nothing could keep us warm; or days of drizzling rain, when
+we filled our water-breakers from the drip of the wet sail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And ever I loved Maud with an increasing love. She was so many-sided, so
+many-mooded&mdash;&ldquo;protean-mooded&rdquo; I called her. But I called her
+this, and other and dearer things, in my thoughts only. Though the declaration
+of my love urged and trembled on my tongue a thousand times, I knew that it was
+no time for such a declaration. If for no other reason, it was no time, when
+one was protecting and trying to save a woman, to ask that woman for her love.
+Delicate as was the situation, not alone in this but in other ways, I flattered
+myself that I was able to deal delicately with it; and also I flattered myself
+that by look or sign I gave no advertisement of the love I felt for her. We
+were like good comrades, and we grew better comrades as the days went by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and fear. The
+terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering, the strangeness and
+isolation of the situation,&mdash;all that should have frightened a robust
+woman,&mdash;seemed to make no impression upon her who had known life only in
+its most sheltered and consummately artificial aspects, and who was herself all
+fire and dew and mist, sublimated spirit, all that was soft and tender and
+clinging in woman. And yet I am wrong. She <i>was</i> timid and afraid, but she
+possessed courage. The flesh and the qualms of the flesh she was heir to, but
+the flesh bore heavily only on the flesh. And she was spirit, first and always
+spirit, etherealized essence of life, calm as her calm eyes, and sure of
+permanence in the changing order of the universe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came days of storm, days and nights of storm, when the ocean menaced us with
+its roaring whiteness, and the wind smote our struggling boat with a
+Titan&rsquo;s buffets. And ever we were flung off, farther and farther, to the
+north-east. It was in such a storm, and the worst that we had experienced, that
+I cast a weary glance to leeward, not in quest of anything, but more from the
+weariness of facing the elemental strife, and in mute appeal, almost, to the
+wrathful powers to cease and let us be. What I saw I could not at first
+believe. Days and nights of sleeplessness and anxiety had doubtless turned my
+head. I looked back at Maud, to identify myself, as it were, in time and space.
+The sight of her dear wet cheeks, her flying hair, and her brave brown eyes
+convinced me that my vision was still healthy. Again I turned my face to
+leeward, and again I saw the jutting promontory, black and high and naked, the
+raging surf that broke about its base and beat its front high up with spouting
+fountains, the black and forbidding coast-line running toward the south-east and
+fringed with a tremendous scarf of white.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maud,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Maud.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned her head and beheld the sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It cannot be Alaska!&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Alas, no,&rdquo; I answered, and asked, &ldquo;Can you swim?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Neither can I,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;So we must get ashore without
+swimming, in some opening between the rocks through which we can drive the boat
+and clamber out. But we must be quick, most quick&mdash;and sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I spoke with a confidence she knew I did not feel, for she looked at me with
+that unfaltering gaze of hers and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have not thanked you yet for all you have done for me
+but&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She hesitated, as if in doubt how best to word her gratitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said, brutally, for I was not quite pleased with her
+thanking me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You might help me,&rdquo; she smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To acknowledge your obligations before you die? Not at all. We are not
+going to die. We shall land on that island, and we shall be snug and sheltered
+before the day is done.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I spoke stoutly, but I did not believe a word. Nor was I prompted to lie
+through fear. I felt no fear, though I was sure of death in that boiling surge
+amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing nearer. It was impossible to hoist
+sail and claw off that shore. The wind would instantly capsize the boat; the
+seas would swamp it the moment it fell into the trough; and, besides, the sail,
+lashed to the spare oars, dragged in the sea ahead of us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few hundred yards to
+leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that Maud must die. My cursed
+imagination saw her beaten and mangled against the rocks, and it was too
+terrible. I strove to compel myself to think we would make the landing safely,
+and so I spoke, not what I believed, but what I preferred to believe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a moment I
+entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and leaping overboard.
+Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment, when we entered on the final
+stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim my love, and, with her in my
+embrace, to make the desperate struggle and die.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat. I felt her
+mittened hand come out to mine. And thus, without speech, we waited the end. We
+were not far off the line the wind made with the western edge of the
+promontory, and I watched in the hope that some set of the current or send of
+the sea would drift us past before we reached the surf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall go clear,&rdquo; I said, with a confidence which I knew
+deceived neither of us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By God, we <i>will</i> go clear!&rdquo; I cried, five minutes later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The oath left my lips in my excitement&mdash;the first, I do believe, in my
+life, unless &ldquo;trouble it,&rdquo; an expletive of my youth, be accounted
+an oath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have convinced me of your sincerity,&rdquo; she said, with a faint
+smile. &ldquo;I do know, now, that we shall go clear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory, and as
+we looked we could see grow the intervening coastline of what was evidently a
+deep cove. At the same time there broke upon our ears a continuous and mighty
+bellowing. It partook of the magnitude and volume of distant thunder, and it
+came to us directly from leeward, rising above the crash of the surf and
+travelling directly in the teeth of the storm. As we passed the point the whole
+cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of white sandy beach upon which broke a
+huge surf, and which was covered with myriads of seals. It was from them that
+the great bellowing went up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A rookery!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;Now are we indeed saved. There must be
+men and cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters. Possibly there is a
+station ashore.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, &ldquo;Still bad,
+but not so bad. And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall drift by that next
+headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered beach, where we may land without
+wetting our feet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the gods were kind. The first and second headlands were directly in line
+with the south-west wind; but once around the second,&mdash;and we went
+perilously near,&mdash;we picked up the third headland, still in line with the
+wind and with the other two. But the cove that intervened! It penetrated deep
+into the land, and the tide, setting in, drifted us under the shelter of the
+point. Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy but smooth ground-swell, and I
+took in the sea-anchor and began to row. From the point the shore curved away,
+more and more to the south and west, until at last it disclosed a cove within
+the cove, a little land-locked harbour, the water level as a pond, broken only
+by tiny ripples where vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from
+over the frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet inshore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here were no seals whatever. The boat&rsquo;s stern touched the hard shingle. I
+sprang out, extending my hand to Maud. The next moment she was beside me. As my
+fingers released hers, she clutched for my arm hastily. At the same moment I
+swayed, as about to fall to the sand. This was the startling effect of the
+cessation of motion. We had been so long upon the moving, rocking sea that the
+stable land was a shock to us. We expected the beach to lift up this way and
+that, and the rocky walls to swing back and forth like the sides of a ship; and
+when we braced ourselves, automatically, for these various expected movements,
+their non-occurrence quite overcame our equilibrium.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I really must sit down,&rdquo; Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a
+dizzy gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I attended to making the boat secure and joined her. Thus we landed on
+Endeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long custom of the sea.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap29"></a>CHAPTER XXIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fool!&rdquo; I cried aloud in my vexation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had unloaded the boat and carried its contents high up on the beach, where I
+had set about making a camp. There was driftwood, though not much, on the
+beach, and the sight of a coffee tin I had taken from the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i>
+larder had given me the idea of a fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Blithering idiot!&rdquo; I was continuing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Maud said, &ldquo;Tut, tut,&rdquo; in gentle reproval, and then asked why I
+was a blithering idiot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No matches,&rdquo; I groaned. &ldquo;Not a match did I bring. And now we
+shall have no hot coffee, soup, tea, or anything!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wasn&rsquo;t it&mdash;er&mdash;Crusoe who rubbed sticks together?&rdquo;
+she drawled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I have read the personal narratives of a score of shipwrecked men
+who tried, and tried in vain,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;I remember Winters, a
+newspaper fellow with an Alaskan and Siberian reputation. Met him at the
+Bibelot once, and he was telling us how he attempted to make a fire with a
+couple of sticks. It was most amusing. He told it inimitably, but it was the
+story of a failure. I remember his conclusion, his black eyes flashing as he
+said, &lsquo;Gentlemen, the South Sea Islander may do it, the Malay may do it,
+but take my word it&rsquo;s beyond the white man.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, well, we&rsquo;ve managed so far without it,&rdquo; she said
+cheerfully. &ldquo;And there&rsquo;s no reason why we cannot still manage
+without it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But think of the coffee!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s good coffee,
+too, I know. I took it from Larsen&rsquo;s private stores. And look at that
+good wood.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I confess, I wanted the coffee badly; and I learned, not long afterward, that
+the berry was likewise a little weakness of Maud&rsquo;s. Besides, we had been
+so long on a cold diet that we were numb inside as well as out. Anything warm
+would have been most gratifying. But I complained no more and set about making
+a tent of the sail for Maud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had looked upon it as a simple task, what of the oars, mast, boom, and sprit,
+to say nothing of plenty of lines. But as I was without experience, and as
+every detail was an experiment and every successful detail an invention, the
+day was well gone before her shelter was an accomplished fact. And then, that
+night, it rained, and she was flooded out and driven back into the boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next morning I dug a shallow ditch around the tent, and, an hour later, a
+sudden gust of wind, whipping over the rocky wall behind us, picked up the tent
+and smashed it down on the sand thirty yards away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud laughed at my crestfallen expression, and I said, &ldquo;As soon as the
+wind abates I intend going in the boat to explore the island. There must be a
+station somewhere, and men. And ships must visit the station. Some Government
+must protect all these seals. But I wish to have you comfortable before I
+start.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should like to go with you,&rdquo; was all she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be better if you remained. You have had enough of hardship. It
+is a miracle that you have survived. And it won&rsquo;t be comfortable in the
+boat rowing and sailing in this rainy weather. What you need is rest, and I
+should like you to remain and get it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something suspiciously akin to moistness dimmed her beautiful eyes before she
+dropped them and partly turned away her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should prefer going with you,&rdquo; she said in a low voice, in which
+there was just a hint of appeal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I might be able to help you a&mdash;&rdquo; her voice
+broke,&mdash;&ldquo;a little. And if anything should happen to you, think of me
+left here alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I intend being very careful,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;And I shall
+not go so far but what I can get back before night. Yes, all said and done, I
+think it vastly better for you to remain, and sleep, and rest and do
+nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned and looked me in the eyes. Her gaze was unfaltering, but soft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please, please,&rdquo; she said, oh, so softly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I stiffened myself to refuse, and shook my head. Still she waited and looked at
+me. I tried to word my refusal, but wavered. I saw the glad light spring into
+her eyes and knew that I had lost. It was impossible to say no after that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind died down in the afternoon, and we were prepared to start the
+following morning. There was no way of penetrating the island from our cove,
+for the walls rose perpendicularly from the beach, and, on either side of the
+cove, rose from the deep water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning broke dull and grey, but calm, and I was awake early and had the boat
+in readiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fool! Imbecile! Yahoo!&rdquo; I shouted, when I thought it was meet to
+arouse Maud; but this time I shouted in merriment as I danced about the beach,
+bareheaded, in mock despair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her head appeared under the flap of the sail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What now?&rdquo; she asked sleepily, and, withal, curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Coffee!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;What do you say to a cup of coffee? hot
+coffee? piping hot?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My!&rdquo; she murmured, &ldquo;you startled me, and you are cruel. Here
+I have been composing my soul to do without it, and here you are vexing me with
+your vain suggestions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Watch me,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From under clefts among the rocks I gathered a few dry sticks and chips. These
+I whittled into shavings or split into kindling. From my note-book I tore out a
+page, and from the ammunition box took a shot-gun shell. Removing the wads from
+the latter with my knife, I emptied the powder on a flat rock. Next I pried the
+primer, or cap, from the shell, and laid it on the rock, in the midst of the
+scattered powder. All was ready. Maud still watched from the tent. Holding the
+paper in my left hand, I smashed down upon the cap with a rock held in my
+right. There was a puff of white smoke, a burst of flame, and the rough edge of
+the paper was alight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud clapped her hands gleefully. &ldquo;Prometheus!&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I was too occupied to acknowledge her delight. The feeble flame must be
+cherished tenderly if it were to gather strength and live. I fed it, shaving by
+shaving, and sliver by sliver, till at last it was snapping and crackling as it
+laid hold of the smaller chips and sticks. To be cast away on an island had not
+entered into my calculations, so we were without a kettle or cooking utensils
+of any sort; but I made shift with the tin used for bailing the boat, and
+later, as we consumed our supply of canned goods, we accumulated quite an
+imposing array of cooking vessels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I boiled the water, but it was Maud who made the coffee. And how good it was!
+My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled sea-biscuit and water. The
+breakfast was a success, and we sat about the fire much longer than
+enterprising explorers should have done, sipping the hot black coffee and
+talking over our situation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was confident that we should find a station in some one of the coves, for I
+knew that the rookeries of Bering Sea were thus guarded; but Maud advanced the
+theory&mdash;to prepare me for disappointment, I do believe, if disappointment
+were to come&mdash;that we had discovered an unknown rookery. She was in very
+good spirits, however, and made quite merry in accepting our plight as a grave
+one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you are right,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;then we must prepare to winter
+here. Our food will not last, but there are the seals. They go away in the
+fall, so I must soon begin to lay in a supply of meat. Then there will be huts
+to build and driftwood to gather. Also we shall try out seal fat for lighting
+purposes. Altogether, we&rsquo;ll have our hands full if we find the island
+uninhabited. Which we shall not, I know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she was right. We sailed with a beam wind along the shore, searching the
+coves with our glasses and landing occasionally, without finding a sign of
+human life. Yet we learned that we were not the first who had landed on
+Endeavour Island. High up on the beach of the second cove from ours, we
+discovered the splintered wreck of a boat&mdash;a sealer&rsquo;s boat, for the
+rowlocks were bound in sennit, a gun-rack was on the starboard side of the bow,
+and in white letters was faintly visible <i>Gazelle</i> No. 2. The boat had
+lain there for a long time, for it was half filled with sand, and the
+splintered wood had that weather-worn appearance due to long exposure to the
+elements. In the stern-sheets I found a rusty ten-gauge shot-gun and a
+sailor&rsquo;s sheath-knife broken short across and so rusted as to be almost
+unrecognizable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They got away,&rdquo; I said cheerfully; but I felt a sinking at the
+heart and seemed to divine the presence of bleached bones somewhere on that
+beach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I did not wish Maud&rsquo;s spirits to be dampened by such a find, so I turned
+seaward again with our boat and skirted the north-eastern point of the island.
+There were no beaches on the southern shore, and by early afternoon we rounded
+the black promontory and completed the circumnavigation of the island. I
+estimated its circumference at twenty-five miles, its width as varying from two
+to five miles; while my most conservative calculation placed on its beaches two
+hundred thousand seals. The island was highest at its extreme south-western
+point, the headlands and backbone diminishing regularly until the north-eastern
+portion was only a few feet above the sea. With the exception of our little
+cove, the other beaches sloped gently back for a distance of half-a-mile or so,
+into what I might call rocky meadows, with here and there patches of moss and
+tundra grass. Here the seals hauled out, and the old bulls guarded their
+harems, while the young bulls hauled out by themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This brief description is all that Endeavour Island merits. Damp and soggy
+where it was not sharp and rocky, buffeted by storm winds and lashed by the
+sea, with the air continually a-tremble with the bellowing of two hundred
+thousand amphibians, it was a melancholy and miserable sojourning-place. Maud,
+who had prepared me for disappointment, and who had been sprightly and
+vivacious all day, broke down as we landed in our own little cove. She strove
+bravely to hide it from me, but while I was kindling another fire I knew she
+was stifling her sobs in the blankets under the sail-tent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was my turn to be cheerful, and I played the part to the best of my ability,
+and with such success that I brought the laughter back into her dear eyes and
+song on her lips; for she sang to me before she went to an early bed. It was
+the first time I had heard her sing, and I lay by the fire, listening and
+transported, for she was nothing if not an artist in everything she did, and
+her voice, though not strong, was wonderfully sweet and expressive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I still slept in the boat, and I lay awake long that night, gazing up at the
+first stars I had seen in many nights and pondering the situation.
+Responsibility of this sort was a new thing to me. Wolf Larsen had been quite
+right. I had stood on my father&rsquo;s legs. My lawyers and agents had taken
+care of my money for me. I had had no responsibilities at all. Then, on the
+<i>Ghost</i> I had learned to be responsible for myself. And now, for the first
+time in my life, I found myself responsible for some one else. And it was
+required of me that this should be the gravest of responsibilities, for she was
+the one woman in the world&mdash;the one small woman, as I loved to think of
+her.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap30"></a>CHAPTER XXX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+No wonder we called it Endeavour Island. For two weeks we toiled at building a
+hut. Maud insisted on helping, and I could have wept over her bruised and
+bleeding hands. And still, I was proud of her because of it. There was
+something heroic about this gently-bred woman enduring our terrible hardship
+and with her pittance of strength bending to the tasks of a peasant woman. She
+gathered many of the stones which I built into the walls of the hut; also, she
+turned a deaf ear to my entreaties when I begged her to desist. She
+compromised, however, by taking upon herself the lighter labours of cooking and
+gathering driftwood and moss for our winter&rsquo;s supply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hut&rsquo;s walls rose without difficulty, and everything went smoothly
+until the problem of the roof confronted me. Of what use the four walls without
+a roof? And of what could a roof be made? There were the spare oars, very true.
+They would serve as roof-beams; but with what was I to cover them? Moss would
+never do. Tundra grass was impracticable. We needed the sail for the boat, and
+the tarpaulin had begun to leak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Winters used walrus skins on his hut,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are the seals,&rdquo; she suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So next day the hunting began. I did not know how to shoot, but I proceeded to
+learn. And when I had expended some thirty shells for three seals, I decided
+that the ammunition would be exhausted before I acquired the necessary
+knowledge. I had used eight shells for lighting fires before I hit upon the
+device of banking the embers with wet moss, and there remained not over a
+hundred shells in the box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We must club the seals,&rdquo; I announced, when convinced of my poor
+marksmanship. &ldquo;I have heard the sealers talk about clubbing them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are so pretty,&rdquo; she objected. &ldquo;I cannot bear to think
+of it being done. It is so directly brutal, you know; so different from
+shooting them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That roof must go on,&rdquo; I answered grimly. &ldquo;Winter is almost
+here. It is our lives against theirs. It is unfortunate we haven&rsquo;t plenty
+of ammunition, but I think, anyway, that they suffer less from being clubbed
+than from being all shot up. Besides, I shall do the clubbing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s just it,&rdquo; she began eagerly, and broke off in sudden
+confusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I began, &ldquo;if you prefer&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what shall I be doing?&rdquo; she interrupted, with that softness I
+knew full well to be insistence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gathering firewood and cooking dinner,&rdquo; I answered lightly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head. &ldquo;It is too dangerous for you to attempt alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know, I know,&rdquo; she waived my protest. &ldquo;I am only a weak
+woman, but just my small assistance may enable you to escape disaster.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the clubbing?&rdquo; I suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course, you will do that. I shall probably scream. I&rsquo;ll look
+away when&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The danger is most serious,&rdquo; I laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall use my judgment when to look and when not to look,&rdquo; she
+replied with a grand air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The upshot of the affair was that she accompanied me next morning. I rowed into
+the adjoining cove and up to the edge of the beach. There were seals all about
+us in the water, and the bellowing thousands on the beach compelled us to shout
+at each other to make ourselves heard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know men club them,&rdquo; I said, trying to reassure myself, and
+gazing doubtfully at a large bull, not thirty feet away, upreared on his
+fore-flippers and regarding me intently. &ldquo;But the question is, How do
+they club them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let us gather tundra grass and thatch the roof,&rdquo; Maud said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was as frightened as I at the prospect, and we had reason to be gazing at
+close range at the gleaming teeth and dog-like mouths.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I always thought they were afraid of men,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do I know they are not afraid?&rdquo; I queried a moment later,
+after having rowed a few more strokes along the beach. &ldquo;Perhaps, if I
+were to step boldly ashore, they would cut for it, and I could not catch up
+with one.&rdquo; And still I hesitated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I heard of a man, once, who invaded the nesting grounds of wild
+geese,&rdquo; Maud said. &ldquo;They killed him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The geese?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, the geese. My brother told me about it when I was a little
+girl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I know men club them,&rdquo; I persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think the tundra grass will make just as good a roof,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Far from her intention, her words were maddening me, driving me on. I could not
+play the coward before her eyes. &ldquo;Here goes,&rdquo; I said, backing water
+with one oar and running the bow ashore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I stepped out and advanced valiantly upon a long-maned bull in the midst of his
+wives. I was armed with the regular club with which the boat-pullers killed the
+wounded seals gaffed aboard by the hunters. It was only a foot and a half long,
+and in my superb ignorance I never dreamed that the club used ashore when
+raiding the rookeries measured four to five feet. The cows lumbered out of my
+way, and the distance between me and the bull decreased. He raised himself on
+his flippers with an angry movement. We were a dozen feet apart. Still I
+advanced steadily, looking for him to turn tail at any moment and run.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At six feet the panicky thought rushed into my mind, What if he will not run?
+Why, then I shall club him, came the answer. In my fear I had forgotten that I
+was there to get the bull instead of to make him run. And just then he gave a
+snort and a snarl and rushed at me. His eyes were blazing, his mouth was wide
+open; the teeth gleamed cruelly white. Without shame, I confess that it was I
+who turned and footed it. He ran awkwardly, but he ran well. He was but two
+paces behind when I tumbled into the boat, and as I shoved off with an oar his
+teeth crunched down upon the blade. The stout wood was crushed like an
+egg-shell. Maud and I were astounded. A moment later he had dived under the
+boat, seized the keel in his mouth, and was shaking the boat violently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My!&rdquo; said Maud. &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head. &ldquo;I can do what other men have done, and I know that
+other men have clubbed seals. But I think I&rsquo;ll leave the bulls alone next
+time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t say, &lsquo;Please, please,&rsquo;&rdquo; I cried, half
+angrily, I do believe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made no reply, and I knew my tone must have hurt her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; I said, or shouted, rather, in order to make
+myself heard above the roar of the rookery. &ldquo;If you say so, I&rsquo;ll
+turn and go back; but honestly, I&rsquo;d rather stay.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t say that this is what you get for bringing a woman
+along,&rdquo; she said. She smiled at me whimsically, gloriously, and I knew
+there was no need for forgiveness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I rowed a couple of hundred feet along the beach so as to recover my nerves,
+and then stepped ashore again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do be cautious,&rdquo; she called after me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded my head and proceeded to make a flank attack on the nearest harem. All
+went well until I aimed a blow at an outlying cow's head and fell short. She
+snorted and tried to scramble away. I ran in close and struck another blow,
+hitting the shoulder instead of the head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Watch out!&rdquo; I heard Maud scream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In my excitement I had not been taking notice of other things, and I looked up
+to see the lord of the harem charging down upon me. Again I fled to the boat,
+hotly pursued; but this time Maud made no suggestion of turning back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be better, I imagine, if you let harems alone and devoted your
+attention to lonely and inoffensive-looking seals,&rdquo; was what she said.
+&ldquo;I think I have read something about them. Dr. Jordan&rsquo;s book, I
+believe. They are the young bulls, not old enough to have harems of their own.
+He called them the holluschickie, or something like that. It seems to me if we
+find where they haul out&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems to me that your fighting instinct is aroused,&rdquo; I laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She flushed quickly and prettily. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll admit I don&rsquo;t like
+defeat any more than you do, or any more than I like the idea of killing such
+pretty, inoffensive creatures.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pretty!&rdquo; I sniffed. &ldquo;I failed to mark anything pre-eminently
+pretty about those foamy-mouthed beasts that raced me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your point of view,&rdquo; she laughed. &ldquo;You lacked perspective.
+Now if you did not have to get so close to the subject&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The very thing!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;What I need is a longer club. And
+there&rsquo;s that broken oar ready to hand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It just comes to me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that Captain Larsen was
+telling me how the men raided the rookeries. They drive the seals, in small
+herds, a short distance inland before they kill them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care to undertake the herding of one of those
+harems,&rdquo; I objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there are the holluschickie,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The
+holluschickie haul out by themselves, and Dr. Jordan says that paths are left
+between the harems, and that as long as the holluschickie keep strictly to the
+path they are unmolested by the masters of the harem.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s one now,&rdquo; I said, pointing to a young bull in the
+water. &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s watch him, and follow him if he hauls out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He swam directly to the beach and clambered out into a small opening between
+two harems, the masters of which made warning noises but did not attack him. We
+watched him travel slowly inward, threading about among the harems along what
+must have been the path.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here goes,&rdquo; I said, stepping out; but I confess my heart was in my
+mouth as I thought of going through the heart of that monstrous herd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be wise to make the boat fast,&rdquo; Maud said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had stepped out beside me, and I regarded her with wonderment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head determinedly. &ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;m going with you, so you
+may as well secure the boat and arm me with a club.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go back,&rdquo; I said dejectedly. &ldquo;I think tundra
+grass, will do, after all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know it won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; was her reply. &ldquo;Shall I
+lead?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a shrug of the shoulders, but with the warmest admiration and pride at
+heart for this woman, I equipped her with the broken oar and took another for
+myself. It was with nervous trepidation that we made the first few rods of the
+journey. Once Maud screamed in terror as a cow thrust an inquisitive nose
+toward her foot, and several times I quickened my pace for the same reason.
+But, beyond warning coughs from either side, there were no signs of hostility.
+It was a rookery which had never been raided by the hunters, and in consequence
+the seals were mild-tempered and at the same time unafraid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the very heart of the herd the din was terrific. It was almost dizzying in
+its effect. I paused and smiled reassuringly at Maud, for I had recovered my
+equanimity sooner than she. I could see that she was still badly frightened.
+She came close to me and shouted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m dreadfully afraid!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I was not. Though the novelty had not yet worn off, the peaceful
+comportment of the seals had quieted my alarm. Maud was trembling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid, and I&rsquo;m not afraid,&rdquo; she chattered with
+shaking jaws. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s my miserable body, not I.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right, it&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; I reassured her, my
+arm passing instinctively and protectingly around her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall never forget, in that moment, how instantly conscious I became of my
+manhood. The primitive deeps of my nature stirred. I felt myself masculine, the
+protector of the weak, the fighting male. And, best of all, I felt myself the
+protector of my loved one. She leaned against me, so light and lily-frail, and
+as her trembling eased away it seemed as though I became aware of prodigious
+strength. I felt myself a match for the most ferocious bull in the herd, and I
+know, had such a bull charged upon me, that I should have met it unflinchingly
+and quite coolly, and I know that I should have killed it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am all right now,&rdquo; she said, looking up at me gratefully.
+&ldquo;Let us go on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that the strength in me had quieted her and given her confidence, filled me
+with an exultant joy. The youth of the race seemed burgeoning in me,
+over-civilized man that I was, and I lived for myself the old hunting days and
+forest nights of my remote and forgotten ancestry. I had much for which to
+thank Wolf Larsen, was my thought as we went along the path between the
+jostling harems.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A quarter of a mile inland we came upon the holluschickie&mdash;sleek young
+bulls, living out the loneliness of their bachelorhood and gathering strength
+against the day when they would fight their way into the ranks of the
+Benedicts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everything now went smoothly. I seemed to know just what to do and how to do
+it. Shouting, making threatening gestures with my club, and even prodding the
+lazy ones, I quickly cut out a score of the young bachelors from their
+companions. Whenever one made an attempt to break back toward the water, I
+headed it off. Maud took an active part in the drive, and with her cries and
+flourishings of the broken oar was of considerable assistance. I noticed,
+though, that whenever one looked tired and lagged, she let it slip past. But I
+noticed, also, whenever one, with a show of fight, tried to break past, that
+her eyes glinted and showed bright, and she rapped it smartly with her club.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My, it&rsquo;s exciting!&rdquo; she cried, pausing from sheer weakness.
+&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll sit down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I drove the little herd (a dozen strong, now, what of the escapes she had
+permitted) a hundred yards farther on; and by the time she joined me I had
+finished the slaughter and was beginning to skin. An hour later we went proudly
+back along the path between the harems. And twice again we came down the path
+burdened with skins, till I thought we had enough to roof the hut. I set the
+sail, laid one tack out of the cove, and on the other tack made our own little
+inner cove.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s just like home-coming,&rdquo; Maud said, as I ran the boat
+ashore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I heard her words with a responsive thrill, it was all so dearly intimate and
+natural, and I said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems as though I have lived this life always. The world of books and
+bookish folk is very vague, more like a dream memory than an actuality. I
+surely have hunted and forayed and fought all the days of my life. And you,
+too, seem a part of it. You are&mdash;&rdquo; I was on the verge of saying,
+&ldquo;my woman, my mate,&rdquo; but glibly changed it to&mdash;&ldquo;standing
+the hardship well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But her ear had caught the flaw. She recognized a flight that midmost broke.
+She gave me a quick look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not that. You were saying&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That the American Mrs. Meynell was living the life of a savage and
+living it quite successfully,&rdquo; I said easily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; was all she replied; but I could have sworn there was a note
+of disappointment in her voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But &ldquo;my woman, my mate&rdquo; kept ringing in my head for the rest of the
+day and for many days. Yet never did it ring more loudly than that night, as I
+watched her draw back the blanket of moss from the coals, blow up the fire, and
+cook the evening meal. It must have been latent savagery stirring in me, for
+the old words, so bound up with the roots of the race, to grip me and thrill
+me. And grip and thrill they did, till I fell asleep, murmuring them to myself
+over and over again.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap31"></a>CHAPTER XXXI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It will smell,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;but it will keep in the heat and
+keep out the rain and snow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were surveying the completed seal-skin roof.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is clumsy, but it will serve the purpose, and that is the main
+thing,&rdquo; I went on, yearning for her praise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she clapped her hands and declared that she was hugely pleased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it is dark in here,&rdquo; she said the next moment, her shoulders
+shrinking with a little involuntary shiver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You might have suggested a window when the walls were going up,&rdquo; I
+said. &ldquo;It was for you, and you should have seen the need of a
+window.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I never do see the obvious, you know,&rdquo; she laughed back.
+&ldquo;And besides, you can knock a hole in the wall at any time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite true; I had not thought of it,&rdquo; I replied, wagging my head
+sagely. &ldquo;But have you thought of ordering the window-glass? Just call up
+the firm,&mdash;Red, 4451, I think it is,&mdash;and tell them what size and
+kind of glass you wish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That means&mdash;&rdquo; she began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No window.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a dark and evil-appearing thing, that hut, not fit for aught better than
+swine in a civilized land; but for us, who had known the misery of the open
+boat, it was a snug little habitation. Following the housewarming, which was
+accomplished by means of seal-oil and a wick made from cotton calking, came the
+hunting for our winter&rsquo;s meat and the building of the second hut. It was
+a simple affair, now, to go forth in the morning and return by noon with a
+boatload of seals. And then, while I worked at building the hut, Maud tried out
+the oil from the blubber and kept a slow fire under the frames of meat. I had
+heard of jerking beef on the plains, and our seal-meat, cut in thin strips and
+hung in the smoke, cured excellently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second hut was easier to erect, for I built it against the first, and only
+three walls were required. But it was work, hard work, all of it. Maud and I
+worked from dawn till dark, to the limit of our strength, so that when night
+came we crawled stiffly to bed and slept the animal-like sleep of exhaustion.
+And yet Maud declared that she had never felt better or stronger in her life. I
+knew this was true of myself, but hers was such a lily strength that I feared
+she would break down. Often and often, her last-reserve force gone, I have seen
+her stretched flat on her back on the sand in the way she had of resting and
+recuperating. And then she would be up on her feet and toiling hard as ever.
+Where she obtained this strength was the marvel to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Think of the long rest this winter,&rdquo; was her reply to my
+remonstrances. &ldquo;Why, we&rsquo;ll be clamorous for something to do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We held a housewarming in my hut the night it was roofed. It was the end of the
+third day of a fierce storm which had swung around the compass from the
+south-east to the north-west, and which was then blowing directly in upon us.
+The beaches of the outer cove were thundering with the surf, and even in our
+land-locked inner cove a respectable sea was breaking. No high backbone of
+island sheltered us from the wind, and it whistled and bellowed about the hut
+till at times I feared for the strength of the walls. The skin roof, stretched
+tightly as a drumhead, I had thought, sagged and bellied with every gust; and
+innumerable interstices in the walls, not so tightly stuffed with moss as Maud
+had supposed, disclosed themselves. Yet the seal-oil burned brightly and we
+were warm and comfortable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a pleasant evening indeed, and we voted that as a social function on
+Endeavour Island it had not yet been eclipsed. Our minds were at ease. Not only
+had we resigned ourselves to the bitter winter, but we were prepared for it.
+The seals could depart on their mysterious journey into the south at any time,
+now, for all we cared; and the storms held no terror for us. Not only were we
+sure of being dry and warm and sheltered from the wind, but we had the softest
+and most luxurious mattresses that could be made from moss. This had been
+Maud&rsquo;s idea, and she had herself jealously gathered all the moss. This
+was to be my first night on the mattress, and I knew I should sleep the sweeter
+because she had made it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she rose to go she turned to me with the whimsical way she had, and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something is going to happen&mdash;is happening, for that matter. I feel
+it. Something is coming here, to us. It is coming now. I don&rsquo;t know what,
+but it is coming.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good or bad?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, but it is there,
+somewhere.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pointed in the direction of the sea and wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lee shore,&rdquo; I laughed, &ldquo;and I am sure I&rsquo;d
+rather be here than arriving, a night like this.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are not frightened?&rdquo; I asked, as I stepped to open the door
+for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes looked bravely into mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you feel well? perfectly well?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never better,&rdquo; was her answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We talked a little longer before she went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-night, Maud,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-night, Humphrey,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This use of our given names had come about quite as a matter of course, and was
+as unpremeditated as it was natural. In that moment I could have put my arms
+around her and drawn her to me. I should certainly have done so out in that
+world to which we belonged. As it was, the situation stopped there in the only
+way it could; but I was left alone in my little hut, glowing warmly through and
+through with a pleasant satisfaction; and I knew that a tie, or a tacit
+something, existed between us which had not existed before.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap32"></a>CHAPTER XXXII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I awoke, oppressed by a mysterious sensation. There seemed something missing in
+my environment. But the mystery and oppressiveness vanished after the first few
+seconds of waking, when I identified the missing something as the wind. I had
+fallen asleep in that state of nerve tension with which one meets the
+continuous shock of sound or movement, and I had awakened, still tense, bracing
+myself to meet the pressure of something which no longer bore upon me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the first night I had spent under cover in several months, and I lay
+luxuriously for some minutes under my blankets (for once not wet with fog or
+spray), analysing, first, the effect produced upon me by the cessation of the
+wind, and next, the joy which was mine from resting on the mattress made by
+Maud&rsquo;s hands. When I had dressed and opened the door, I heard the waves
+still lapping on the beach, garrulously attesting the fury of the night. It was
+a clear day, and the sun was shining. I had slept late, and I stepped outside
+with sudden energy, bent upon making up lost time as befitted a dweller on
+Endeavour Island.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when outside, I stopped short. I believed my eyes without question, and yet
+I was for the moment stunned by what they disclosed to me. There, on the beach,
+not fifty feet away, bow on, dismasted, was a black-hulled vessel. Masts and
+booms, tangled with shrouds, sheets, and rent canvas, were rubbing gently
+alongside. I could have rubbed my eyes as I looked. There was the home-made
+galley we had built, the familiar break of the poop, the low yacht-cabin
+scarcely rising above the rail. It was the <i>Ghost</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What freak of fortune had brought it here&mdash;here of all spots? what chance
+of chances? I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall at my back and knew the
+profundity of despair. Escape was hopeless, out of the question. I thought of
+Maud, asleep there in the hut we had reared; I remembered her
+&ldquo;Good-night, Humphrey&rdquo;; &ldquo;my woman, my mate,&rdquo; went
+ringing through my brain, but now, alas, it was a knell that sounded. Then
+everything went black before my eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Possibly it was the fraction of a second, but I had no knowledge of how long an
+interval had lapsed before I was myself again. There lay the <i>Ghost</i>, bow
+on to the beach, her splintered bowsprit projecting over the sand, her tangled
+spars rubbing against her side to the lift of the crooning waves. Something
+must be done, must be done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It came upon me suddenly, as strange, that nothing moved aboard. Wearied from
+the night of struggle and wreck, all hands were yet asleep, I thought. My next
+thought was that Maud and I might yet escape. If we could take to the boat and
+make round the point before any one awoke? I would call her and start. My hand
+was lifted at her door to knock, when I recollected the smallness of the
+island. We could never hide ourselves upon it. There was nothing for us but the
+wide raw ocean. I thought of our snug little huts, our supplies of meat and oil
+and moss and firewood, and I knew that we could never survive the wintry sea
+and the great storms which were to come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So I stood, with hesitant knuckle, without her door. It was impossible,
+impossible. A wild thought of rushing in and killing her as she slept rose in
+my mind. And then, in a flash, the better solution came to me. All hands were
+asleep. Why not creep aboard the <i>Ghost</i>,&mdash;well I knew the way to
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s bunk,&mdash;and kill him in his sleep? After
+that&mdash;well, we would see. But with him dead there was time and space in
+which to prepare to do other things; and besides, whatever new situation arose,
+it could not possibly be worse than the present one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My knife was at my hip. I returned to my hut for the shot-gun, made sure it was
+loaded, and went down to the <i>Ghost</i>. With some difficulty, and at the
+expense of a wetting to the waist, I climbed aboard. The forecastle scuttle was
+open. I paused to listen for the breathing of the men, but there was no
+breathing. I almost gasped as the thought came to me: What if the <i>Ghost</i>
+is deserted? I listened more closely. There was no sound. I cautiously
+descended the ladder. The place had the empty and musty feel and smell usual to
+a dwelling no longer inhabited. Everywhere was a thick litter of discarded and
+ragged garments, old sea-boots, leaky oilskins&mdash;all the worthless
+forecastle dunnage of a long voyage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abandoned hastily, was my conclusion, as I ascended to the deck. Hope was alive
+again in my breast, and I looked about me with greater coolness. I noted that
+the boats were missing. The steerage told the same tale as the forecastle. The
+hunters had packed their belongings with similar haste. The <i>Ghost</i> was
+deserted. It was Maud&rsquo;s and mine. I thought of the ship&rsquo;s stores
+and the lazarette beneath the cabin, and the idea came to me of surprising Maud
+with something nice for breakfast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reaction from my fear, and the knowledge that the terrible deed I had come
+to do was no longer necessary, made me boyish and eager. I went up the steerage
+companion-way two steps at a time, with nothing distinct in my mind except joy
+and the hope that Maud would sleep on until the surprise breakfast was quite
+ready for her. As I rounded the galley, a new satisfaction was mine at thought
+of all the splendid cooking utensils inside. I sprang up the break of the poop,
+and saw&mdash;Wolf Larsen. What of my impetus and the stunning surprise, I
+clattered three or four steps along the deck before I could stop myself. He was
+standing in the companion-way, only his head and shoulders visible, staring
+straight at me. His arms were resting on the half-open slide. He made no
+movement whatever&mdash;simply stood there, staring at me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I began to tremble. The old stomach sickness clutched me. I put one hand on the
+edge of the house to steady myself. My lips seemed suddenly dry and I moistened
+them against the need of speech. Nor did I for an instant take my eyes off him.
+Neither of us spoke. There was something ominous in his silence, his
+immobility. All my old fear of him returned and my new fear was increased an
+hundred-fold. And still we stood, the pair of us, staring at each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was aware of the demand for action, and, my old helplessness strong upon me,
+I was waiting for him to take the initiative. Then, as the moments went by, it
+came to me that the situation was analogous to the one in which I had
+approached the long-maned bull, my intention of clubbing obscured by fear until
+it became a desire to make him run. So it was at last impressed upon me that I
+was there, not to have Wolf Larsen take the initiative, but to take it myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cocked both barrels and levelled the shot-gun at him. Had he moved, attempted
+to drop down the companion-way, I know I would have shot him. But he stood
+motionless and staring as before. And as I faced him, with levelled gun shaking
+in my hands, I had time to note the worn and haggard appearance of his face. It
+was as if some strong anxiety had wasted it. The cheeks were sunken, and there
+was a wearied, puckered expression on the brow. And it seemed to me that his
+eyes were strange, not only the expression, but the physical seeming, as though
+the optic nerves and supporting muscles had suffered strain and slightly
+twisted the eyeballs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this I saw, and my brain now working rapidly, I thought a thousand
+thoughts; and yet I could not pull the triggers. I lowered the gun and stepped
+to the corner of the cabin, primarily to relieve the tension on my nerves and
+to make a new start, and incidentally to be closer. Again I raised the gun. He
+was almost at arm&rsquo;s length. There was no hope for him. I was resolved.
+There was no possible chance of missing him, no matter how poor my
+marksmanship. And yet I wrestled with myself and could not pull the triggers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he demanded impatiently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I strove vainly to force my fingers down on the triggers, and vainly I strove
+to say something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you shoot?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cleared my throat of a huskiness which prevented speech. &ldquo;Hump,&rdquo;
+he said slowly, &ldquo;you can&rsquo;t do it. You are not exactly afraid. You
+are impotent. Your conventional morality is stronger than you. You are the
+slave to the opinions which have credence among the people you have known and
+have read about. Their code has been drummed into your head from the time you
+lisped, and in spite of your philosophy, and of what I have taught you, it
+won&rsquo;t let you kill an unarmed, unresisting man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; I said hoarsely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you know that I would kill an unarmed man as readily as I would
+smoke a cigar,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;You know me for what I am,&mdash;my
+worth in the world by your standard. You have called me snake, tiger, shark,
+monster, and Caliban. And yet, you little rag puppet, you little echoing
+mechanism, you are unable to kill me as you would a snake or a shark, because I
+have hands, feet, and a body shaped somewhat like yours. Bah! I had hoped
+better things of you, Hump.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stepped out of the companion-way and came up to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Put down that gun. I want to ask you some questions. I haven&rsquo;t had
+a chance to look around yet. What place is this? How is the <i>Ghost</i> lying?
+How did you get wet? Where&rsquo;s Maud?&mdash;I beg your pardon, Miss
+Brewster&mdash;or should I say, &lsquo;Mrs. Van Weyden&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had backed away from him, almost weeping at my inability to shoot him, but
+not fool enough to put down the gun. I hoped, desperately, that he might commit
+some hostile act, attempt to strike me or choke me; for in such way only I knew
+I could be stirred to shoot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is Endeavour Island,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never heard of it,&rdquo; he broke in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At least, that&rsquo;s our name for it,&rdquo; I amended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our?&rdquo; he queried. &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s our?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Brewster and myself. And the <i>Ghost</i> is lying, as you can see
+for yourself, bow on to the beach.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are seals here,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They woke me up with their
+barking, or I&rsquo;d be sleeping yet. I heard them when I drove in last night.
+They were the first warning that I was on a lee shore. It&rsquo;s a rookery,
+the kind of a thing I&rsquo;ve hunted for years. Thanks to my brother Death,
+I&rsquo;ve lighted on a fortune. It&rsquo;s a mint. What&rsquo;s its
+bearings?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t the least idea,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But you ought to
+know quite closely. What were your last observations?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He smiled inscrutably, but did not answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, where&rsquo;s all hands?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;How does it come
+that you are alone?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was prepared for him again to set aside my question, and was surprised at the
+readiness of his reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My brother got me inside forty-eight hours, and through no fault of
+mine. Boarded me in the night with only the watch on deck. Hunters went back on
+me. He gave them a bigger lay. Heard him offering it. Did it right before me.
+Of course the crew gave me the go-by. That was to be expected. All hands went
+over the side, and there I was, marooned on my own vessel. It was Death&rsquo;s
+turn, and it&rsquo;s all in the family anyway.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how did you lose the masts?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Walk over and examine those lanyards,&rdquo; he said, pointing to where
+the mizzen-rigging should have been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They have been cut with a knife!&rdquo; I exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not quite,&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;It was a neater job. Look
+again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked. The lanyards had been almost severed, with just enough left to hold
+the shrouds till some severe strain should be put upon them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cooky did that,&rdquo; he laughed again. &ldquo;I know, though I
+didn&rsquo;t spot him at it. Kind of evened up the score a bit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good for Mugridge!&rdquo; I cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s what I thought when everything went over the side.
+Only I said it on the other side of my mouth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what were you doing while all this was going on?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My best, you may be sure, which wasn&rsquo;t much under the
+circumstances.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I turned to re-examine Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess I&rsquo;ll sit down and take the sunshine,&rdquo; I heard Wolf
+Larsen saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a hint, just a slight hint, of physical feebleness in his voice, and
+it was so strange that I looked quickly at him. His hand was sweeping nervously
+across his face, as though he were brushing away cobwebs. I was puzzled. The
+whole thing was so unlike the Wolf Larsen I had known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How are your headaches?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They still trouble me,&rdquo; was his answer. &ldquo;I think I have one
+coming on now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He slipped down from his sitting posture till he lay on the deck. Then he
+rolled over on his side, his head resting on the biceps of the under arm, the
+forearm shielding his eyes from the sun. I stood regarding him wonderingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now&rsquo;s your chance, Hump,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; I lied, for I thoroughly understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, nothing,&rdquo; he added softly, as if he were drowsing; &ldquo;only
+you&rsquo;ve got me where you want me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I haven&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I retorted; &ldquo;for I want you a few
+thousand miles away from here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He chuckled, and thereafter spoke no more. He did not stir as I passed by him
+and went down into the cabin. I lifted the trap in the floor, but for some
+moments gazed dubiously into the darkness of the lazarette beneath. I hesitated
+to descend. What if his lying down were a ruse? Pretty, indeed, to be caught
+there like a rat. I crept softly up the companion-way and peeped at him. He was
+lying as I had left him. Again I went below; but before I dropped into the
+lazarette I took the precaution of casting down the door in advance. At least
+there would be no lid to the trap. But it was all needless. I regained the
+cabin with a store of jams, sea-biscuits, canned meats, and such
+things,&mdash;all I could carry,&mdash;and replaced the trap-door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A peep at Wolf Larsen showed me that he had not moved. A bright thought struck
+me. I stole into his state-room and possessed myself of his revolvers. There
+were no other weapons, though I thoroughly ransacked the three remaining
+state-rooms. To make sure, I returned and went through the steerage and
+forecastle, and in the galley gathered up all the sharp meat and vegetable
+knives. Then I bethought me of the great yachtsman&rsquo;s knife he always
+carried, and I came to him and spoke to him, first softly, then loudly. He did
+not move. I bent over and took it from his pocket. I breathed more freely. He
+had no arms with which to attack me from a distance; while I, armed, could
+always forestall him should he attempt to grapple me with his terrible gorilla
+arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Filling a coffee-pot and frying-pan with part of my plunder, and taking some
+chinaware from the cabin pantry, I left Wolf Larsen lying in the sun and went
+ashore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud was still asleep. I blew up the embers (we had not yet arranged a winter
+kitchen), and quite feverishly cooked the breakfast. Toward the end, I heard
+her moving about within the hut, making her toilet. Just as all was ready and
+the coffee poured, the door opened and she came forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not fair of you,&rdquo; was her greeting. &ldquo;You are
+usurping one of my prerogatives. You know you agreed that the cooking should
+be mine, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But just this once,&rdquo; I pleaded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you promise not to do it again,&rdquo; she smiled. &ldquo;Unless, of
+course, you have grown tired of my poor efforts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To my delight she never once looked toward the beach, and I maintained the
+banter with such success all unconsciously she sipped coffee from the china
+cup, ate fried evaporated potatoes, and spread marmalade on her biscuit. But it
+could not last. I saw the surprise that came over her. She had discovered the
+china plate from which she was eating. She looked over the breakfast, noting
+detail after detail. Then she looked at me, and her face turned slowly toward
+the beach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Humphrey!&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old unnamable terror mounted into her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is&mdash;he?&rdquo; she quavered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded my head.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap33"></a>CHAPTER XXXIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+We waited all day for Wolf Larsen to come ashore. It was an intolerable period
+of anxiety. Each moment one or the other of us cast expectant glances toward
+the <i>Ghost</i>. But he did not come. He did not even appear on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps it is his headache,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I left him lying on
+the poop. He may lie there all night. I think I&rsquo;ll go and see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud looked entreaty at me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is all right,&rdquo; I assured her. &ldquo;I shall take the
+revolvers. You know I collected every weapon on board.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there are his arms, his hands, his terrible, terrible hands!&rdquo;
+she objected. And then she cried, &ldquo;Oh, Humphrey, I am afraid of him!
+Don&rsquo;t go&mdash;please don&rsquo;t go!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She rested her hand appealingly on mine, and sent my pulse fluttering. My heart
+was surely in my eyes for a moment. The dear and lovely woman! And she was so
+much the woman, clinging and appealing, sunshine and dew to my manhood, rooting
+it deeper and sending through it the sap of a new strength. I was for putting
+my arm around her, as when in the midst of the seal herd; but I considered, and
+refrained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall not take any risks,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll merely peep
+over the bow and see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pressed my hand earnestly and let me go. But the space on deck where I had
+left him lying was vacant. He had evidently gone below. That night we stood
+alternate watches, one of us sleeping at a time; for there was no telling what
+Wolf Larsen might do. He was certainly capable of anything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next day we waited, and the next, and still he made no sign.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;These headaches of his, these attacks,&rdquo; Maud said, on the
+afternoon of the fourth day; &ldquo;Perhaps he is ill, very ill. He may be
+dead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or dying,&rdquo; was her afterthought when she had waited some time for
+me to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better so,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But think, Humphrey, a fellow-creature in his last lonely hour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; I suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, even perhaps,&rdquo; she acknowledged. &ldquo;But we do not know.
+It would be terrible if he were. I could never forgive myself. We must do
+something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; I suggested again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I waited, smiling inwardly at the woman of her which compelled a solicitude for
+Wolf Larsen, of all creatures. Where was her solicitude for me, I
+thought,&mdash;for me whom she had been afraid to have merely peep aboard?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was too subtle not to follow the trend of my silence. And she was as direct
+as she was subtle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must go aboard, Humphrey, and find out,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And
+if you want to laugh at me, you have my consent and forgiveness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I arose obediently and went down the beach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do be careful,&rdquo; she called after me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I waved my arm from the forecastle head and dropped down to the deck. Aft I
+walked to the cabin companion, where I contented myself with hailing below.
+Wolf Larsen answered, and as he started to ascend the stairs I cocked my
+revolver. I displayed it openly during our conversation, but he took no notice
+of it. He appeared the same, physically, as when last I saw him, but he was
+gloomy and silent. In fact, the few words we spoke could hardly be called a
+conversation. I did not inquire why he had not been ashore, nor did he ask why
+I had not come aboard. His head was all right again, he said, and so, without
+further parley, I left him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud received my report with obvious relief, and the sight of smoke which later
+rose in the galley put her in a more cheerful mood. The next day, and the next,
+we saw the galley smoke rising, and sometimes we caught glimpses of him on the
+poop. But that was all. He made no attempt to come ashore. This we knew, for we
+still maintained our night-watches. We were waiting for him to do something, to
+show his hand, so to say, and his inaction puzzled and worried us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A week of this passed by. We had no other interest than Wolf Larsen, and his
+presence weighed us down with an apprehension which prevented us from doing any
+of the little things we had planned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at the end of the week the smoke ceased rising from the galley, and he no
+longer showed himself on the poop. I could see Maud&rsquo;s solicitude again
+growing, though she timidly&mdash;and even proudly, I think&mdash;forbore a
+repetition of her request. After all, what censure could be put upon her? She
+was divinely altruistic, and she was a woman. Besides, I was myself aware of
+hurt at thought of this man whom I had tried to kill, dying alone with his
+fellow-creatures so near. He was right. The code of my group was stronger than
+I. The fact that he had hands, feet, and a body shaped somewhat like mine,
+constituted a claim which I could not ignore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So I did not wait a second time for Maud to send me. I discovered that we stood
+in need of condensed milk and marmalade, and announced that I was going aboard.
+I could see that she wavered. She even went so far as to murmur that they were
+non-essentials and that my trip after them might be inexpedient. And as she had
+followed the trend of my silence, she now followed the trend of my speech, and
+she knew that I was going aboard, not because of condensed milk and marmalade,
+but because of her and of her anxiety, which she knew she had failed to hide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I took off my shoes when I gained the forecastle head, and went noiselessly aft
+in my stocking feet. Nor did I call this time from the top of the
+companion-way. Cautiously descending, I found the cabin deserted. The door to
+his state-room was closed. At first I thought of knocking, then I remembered my
+ostensible errand and resolved to carry it out. Carefully avoiding noise, I
+lifted the trap-door in the floor and set it to one side. The slop-chest, as
+well as the provisions, was stored in the lazarette, and I took advantage of
+the opportunity to lay in a stock of underclothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I emerged from the lazarette I heard sounds in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+state-room. I crouched and listened. The door-knob rattled. Furtively,
+instinctively, I slunk back behind the table and drew and cocked my revolver.
+The door swung open and he came forth. Never had I seen so profound a despair
+as that which I saw on his face,&mdash;the face of Wolf Larsen the fighter, the
+strong man, the indomitable one. For all the world like a woman wringing her
+hands, he raised his clenched fists and groaned. One fist unclosed, and the
+open palm swept across his eyes as though brushing away cobwebs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;God! God!&rdquo; he groaned, and the clenched fists were raised again to
+the infinite despair with which his throat vibrated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was horrible. I was trembling all over, and I could feel the shivers running
+up and down my spine and the sweat standing out on my forehead. Surely there
+can be little in this world more awful than the spectacle of a strong man in
+the moment when he is utterly weak and broken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Wolf Larsen regained control of himself by an exertion of his remarkable
+will. And it was exertion. His whole frame shook with the struggle. He
+resembled a man on the verge of a fit. His face strove to compose itself,
+writhing and twisting in the effort till he broke down again. Once more the
+clenched fists went upward and he groaned. He caught his breath once or twice
+and sobbed. Then he was successful. I could have thought him the old Wolf
+Larsen, and yet there was in his movements a vague suggestion of weakness and
+indecision. He started for the companion-way, and stepped forward quite as I
+had been accustomed to see him do; and yet again, in his very walk, there
+seemed that suggestion of weakness and indecision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was now concerned with fear for myself. The open trap lay directly in his
+path, and his discovery of it would lead instantly to his discovery of me. I
+was angry with myself for being caught in so cowardly a position, crouching on
+the floor. There was yet time. I rose swiftly to my feet, and, I know, quite
+unconsciously assumed a defiant attitude. He took no notice of me. Nor did he
+notice the open trap. Before I could grasp the situation, or act, he had walked
+right into the trap. One foot was descending into the opening, while the other
+foot was just on the verge of beginning the uplift. But when the descending
+foot missed the solid flooring and felt vacancy beneath, it was the old Wolf
+Larsen and the tiger muscles that made the falling body spring across the
+opening, even as it fell, so that he struck on his chest and stomach, with arms
+outstretched, on the floor of the opposite side. The next instant he had drawn
+up his legs and rolled clear. But he rolled into my marmalade and underclothes
+and against the trap-door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The expression on his face was one of complete comprehension. But before I
+could guess what he had comprehended, he had dropped the trap-door into place,
+closing the lazarette. Then I understood. He thought he had me inside. Also, he
+was blind, blind as a bat. I watched him, breathing carefully so that he should
+not hear me. He stepped quickly to his state-room. I saw his hand miss the
+door-knob by an inch, quickly fumble for it, and find it. This was my chance. I
+tiptoed across the cabin and to the top of the stairs. He came back, dragging a
+heavy sea-chest, which he deposited on top of the trap. Not content with this
+he fetched a second chest and placed it on top of the first. Then he gathered
+up the marmalade and underclothes and put them on the table. When he started up
+the companion-way, I retreated, silently rolling over on top of the cabin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shoved the slide part way back and rested his arms on it, his body still in
+the companion-way. His attitude was of one looking forward the length of the
+schooner, or staring, rather, for his eyes were fixed and unblinking. I was
+only five feet away and directly in what should have been his line of vision.
+It was uncanny. I felt myself a ghost, what of my invisibility. I waved my hand
+back and forth, of course without effect; but when the moving shadow fell
+across his face I saw at once that he was susceptible to the impression. His
+face became more expectant and tense as he tried to analyze and identify the
+impression. He knew that he had responded to something from without, that his
+sensibility had been touched by a changing something in his environment; but
+what it was he could not discover. I ceased waving my hand, so that the shadow
+remained stationary. He slowly moved his head back and forth under it and
+turned from side to side, now in the sunshine, now in the shade, feeling the
+shadow, as it were, testing it by sensation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I, too, was busy, trying to reason out how he was aware of the existence of so
+intangible a thing as a shadow. If it were his eyeballs only that were
+affected, or if his optic nerve were not wholly destroyed, the explanation was
+simple. If otherwise, then the only conclusion I could reach was that the
+sensitive skin recognized the difference of temperature between shade and
+sunshine. Or, perhaps,&mdash;who can tell?&mdash;it was that fabled sixth sense
+which conveyed to him the loom and feel of an object close at hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Giving over his attempt to determine the shadow, he stepped on deck and started
+forward, walking with a swiftness and confidence which surprised me. And still
+there was that hint of the feebleness of the blind in his walk. I knew it now
+for what it was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To my amused chagrin, he discovered my shoes on the forecastle head and brought
+them back with him into the galley. I watched him build the fire and set about
+cooking food for himself; then I stole into the cabin for my marmalade and
+underclothes, slipped back past the galley, and climbed down to the beach to
+deliver my barefoot report.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap34"></a>CHAPTER XXXIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too bad the <i>Ghost</i> has lost her masts. Why we could
+sail away in her. Don&rsquo;t you think we could, Humphrey?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I sprang excitedly to my feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wonder, I wonder,&rdquo; I repeated, pacing up and down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud&rsquo;s eyes were shining with anticipation as they followed me. She had
+such faith in me! And the thought of it was so much added power. I remembered
+Michelet&rsquo;s &ldquo;To man, woman is as the earth was to her legendary son;
+he has but to fall down and kiss her breast and he is strong again.&rdquo; For
+the first time I knew the wonderful truth of his words. Why, I was living them.
+Maud was all this to me, an unfailing source of strength and courage. I had
+but to look at her, or think of her, and be strong again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It can be done, it can be done,&rdquo; I was thinking and asserting
+aloud. &ldquo;What men have done, I can do; and if they have never done this
+before, still I can do it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What? for goodness&rsquo; sake,&rdquo; Maud demanded. &ldquo;Do be
+merciful. What is it you can do?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We can do it,&rdquo; I amended. &ldquo;Why, nothing else than put the
+masts back into the <i>Ghost</i> and sail away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Humphrey!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I felt as proud of my conception as if it were already a fact accomplished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how is it possible to be done?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; was my answer. &ldquo;I know only that I am
+capable of doing anything these days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I smiled proudly at her&mdash;too proudly, for she dropped her eyes and was for
+the moment silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there is Captain Larsen,&rdquo; she objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Blind and helpless,&rdquo; I answered promptly, waving him aside as a
+straw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But those terrible hands of his! You know how he leaped across the
+opening of the lazarette.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you know also how I crept about and avoided him,&rdquo; I contended
+gaily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And lost your shoes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d hardly expect them to avoid Wolf Larsen without my feet
+inside of them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We both laughed, and then went seriously to work constructing the plan whereby
+we were to step the masts of the <i>Ghost</i> and return to the world. I
+remembered hazily the physics of my school days, while the last few months had
+given me practical experience with mechanical purchases. I must say, though,
+when we walked down to the <i>Ghost</i> to inspect more closely the task before
+us, that the sight of the great masts lying in the water almost disheartened
+me. Where were we to begin? If there had been one mast standing, something high
+up to which to fasten blocks and tackles! But there was nothing. It reminded me
+of the problem of lifting oneself by one&rsquo;s boot-straps. I understood the
+mechanics of levers; but where was I to get a fulcrum?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was the mainmast, fifteen inches in diameter at what was now the butt,
+still sixty-five feet in length, and weighing, I roughly calculated, at least
+three thousand pounds. And then came the foremast, larger in diameter, and
+weighing surely thirty-five hundred pounds. Where was I to begin? Maud stood
+silently by my side, while I evolved in my mind the contrivance known among
+sailors as &ldquo;shears.&rdquo; But, though known to sailors, I invented it
+there on Endeavour Island. By crossing and lashing the ends of two spars, and
+then elevating them in the air like an inverted &ldquo;V,&rdquo; I could get a
+point above the deck to which to make fast my hoisting tackle. To this hoisting
+tackle I could, if necessary, attach a second hoisting tackle. And then there
+was the windlass!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud saw that I had achieved a solution, and her eyes warmed sympathetically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Clear that raffle,&rdquo; I answered, pointing to the tangled wreckage
+overside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, the decisiveness, the very sound of the words, was good in my ears.
+&ldquo;Clear that raffle!&rdquo; Imagine so salty a phrase on the lips of the
+Humphrey Van Weyden of a few months gone!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There must have been a touch of the melodramatic in my pose and voice, for Maud
+smiled. Her appreciation of the ridiculous was keen, and in all things she
+unerringly saw and felt, where it existed, the touch of sham, the overshading,
+the overtone. It was this which had given poise and penetration to her own work
+and made her of worth to the world. The serious critic, with the sense of
+humour and the power of expression, must inevitably command the world&rsquo;s
+ear. And so it was that she had commanded. Her sense of humour was really the
+artist&rsquo;s instinct for proportion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure I&rsquo;ve heard it before, somewhere, in books,&rdquo;
+she murmured gleefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had an instinct for proportion myself, and I collapsed forthwith, descending
+from the dominant pose of a master of matter to a state of humble confusion
+which was, to say the least, very miserable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her hand leapt out at once to mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m so sorry,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No need to be,&rdquo; I gulped. &ldquo;It does me good. There&rsquo;s
+too much of the schoolboy in me. All of which is neither here nor there. What
+we&rsquo;ve got to do is actually and literally to clear that raffle. If
+you&rsquo;ll come with me in the boat, we&rsquo;ll get to work and straighten
+things out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;When the topmen clear the raffle with their clasp-knives in their
+teeth,&rsquo;&rdquo; she quoted at me; and for the rest of the afternoon we
+made merry over our labour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her task was to hold the boat in position while I worked at the tangle. And
+such a tangle&mdash;halyards, sheets, guys, down-hauls, shrouds, stays, all
+washed about and back and forth and through, and twined and knotted by the sea.
+I cut no more than was necessary, and what with passing the long ropes under
+and around the booms and masts, of unreeving the halyards and sheets, of
+coiling down in the boat and uncoiling in order to pass through another knot in
+the bight, I was soon wet to the skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sails did require some cutting, and the canvas, heavy with water, tried my
+strength severely; but I succeeded before nightfall in getting it all spread
+out on the beach to dry. We were both very tired when we knocked off for
+supper, and we had done good work, too, though to the eye it appeared
+insignificant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next morning, with Maud as able assistant, I went into the hold of the
+<i>Ghost</i> to clear the steps of the mast-butts. We had no more than begun
+work when the sound of my knocking and hammering brought Wolf Larsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello below!&rdquo; he cried down the open hatch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sound of his voice made Maud quickly draw close to me, as for protection,
+and she rested one hand on my arm while we parleyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello on deck,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;Good-morning to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you doing down there?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;Trying to
+scuttle my ship for me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite the opposite; I&rsquo;m repairing her,&rdquo; was my answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what in thunder are you repairing?&rdquo; There was puzzlement in
+his voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, I&rsquo;m getting everything ready for re-stepping the
+masts,&rdquo; I replied easily, as though it were the simplest project
+imaginable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems as though you&rsquo;re standing on your own legs at last,
+Hump,&rdquo; we heard him say; and then for some time he was silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I say, Hump,&rdquo; he called down. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t do
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes, I can,&rdquo; I retorted. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m doing it now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But this is my vessel, my particular property. What if I forbid
+you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You forget,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;You are no longer the biggest bit
+of the ferment. You were, once, and able to eat me, as you were pleased to
+phrase it; but there has been a diminishing, and I am now able to eat you. The
+yeast has grown stale.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave a short, disagreeable laugh. &ldquo;I see you&rsquo;re working my
+philosophy back on me for all it is worth. But don&rsquo;t make the mistake of
+under-estimating me. For your own good I warn you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Since when have you become a philanthropist?&rdquo; I queried.
+&ldquo;Confess, now, in warning me for my own good, that you are very
+consistent.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ignored my sarcasm, saying, &ldquo;Suppose I clap the hatch on, now? You
+won&rsquo;t fool me as you did in the lazarette.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wolf Larsen,&rdquo; I said sternly, for the first time addressing him by
+this his most familiar name, &ldquo;I am unable to shoot a helpless,
+unresisting man. You have proved that to my satisfaction as well as yours. But
+I warn you now, and not so much for your own good as for mine, that I shall
+shoot you the moment you attempt a hostile act. I can shoot you now, as I stand
+here; and if you are so minded, just go ahead and try to clap on the
+hatch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nevertheless, I forbid you, I distinctly forbid your tampering with my
+ship.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, man!&rdquo; I expostulated, &ldquo;you advance the fact that it is
+your ship as though it were a moral right. You have never considered moral
+rights in your dealings with others. You surely do not dream that I&rsquo;ll
+consider them in dealing with you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had stepped underneath the open hatchway so that I could see him. The lack of
+expression on his face, so different from when I had watched him unseen, was
+enhanced by the unblinking, staring eyes. It was not a pleasant face to look
+upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And none so poor, not even Hump, to do him reverence,&rdquo; he sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sneer was wholly in his voice. His face remained expressionless as ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you do, Miss Brewster,&rdquo; he said suddenly, after a pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I started. She had made no noise whatever, had not even moved. Could it be that
+some glimmer of vision remained to him? or that his vision was coming back?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you do, Captain Larsen,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Pray, how did
+you know I was here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Heard you breathing, of course. I say, Hump&rsquo;s improving,
+don&rsquo;t you think so?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; she answered, smiling at me. &ldquo;I have
+never seen him otherwise.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You should have seen him before, then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wolf Larsen, in large doses,&rdquo; I murmured, &ldquo;before and after
+taking.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want to tell you again, Hump,&rdquo; he said threateningly,
+&ldquo;that you&rsquo;d better leave things alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you care to escape as well as we?&rdquo; I asked
+incredulously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; was his answer. &ldquo;I intend dying here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, we don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I concluded defiantly, beginning again my
+knocking and hammering.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap35"></a>CHAPTER XXXV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Next day, the mast-steps clear and everything in readiness, we started to get
+the two topmasts aboard. The maintopmast was over thirty feet in length, the
+foretopmast nearly thirty, and it was of these that I intended making the
+shears. It was puzzling work. Fastening one end of a heavy tackle to the
+windlass, and with the other end fast to the butt of the foretopmast, I began
+to heave. Maud held the turn on the windlass and coiled down the slack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were astonished at the ease with which the spar was lifted. It was an
+improved crank windlass, and the purchase it gave was enormous. Of course, what
+it gave us in power we paid for in distance; as many times as it doubled my
+strength, that many times was doubled the length of rope I heaved in. The
+tackle dragged heavily across the rail, increasing its drag as the spar arose
+more and more out of the water, and the exertion on the windlass grew severe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when the butt of the topmast was level with the rail, everything came to a
+standstill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I might have known it,&rdquo; I said impatiently. &ldquo;Now we have to
+do it all over again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not fasten the tackle part way down the mast?&rdquo; Maud suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s what I should have done at first,&rdquo; I answered, hugely
+disgusted with myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slipping off a turn, I lowered the mast back into the water and fastened the
+tackle a third of the way down from the butt. In an hour, what of this and of
+rests between the heaving, I had hoisted it to the point where I could hoist no
+more. Eight feet of the butt was above the rail, and I was as far away as ever
+from getting the spar on board. I sat down and pondered the problem. It did not
+take long. I sprang jubilantly to my feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now I have it!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;I ought to make the tackle fast at
+the point of balance. And what we learn of this will serve us with everything
+else we have to hoist aboard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once again I undid all my work by lowering the mast into the water. But I
+miscalculated the point of balance, so that when I heaved the top of the mast
+came up instead of the butt. Maud looked despair, but I laughed and said it
+would do just as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instructing her how to hold the turn and be ready to slack away at command, I
+laid hold of the mast with my hands and tried to balance it inboard across the
+rail. When I thought I had it I cried to her to slack away; but the spar
+righted, despite my efforts, and dropped back toward the water. Again I heaved
+it up to its old position, for I had now another idea. I remembered the
+watch-tackle&mdash;a small double and single block affair&mdash;and fetched it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While I was rigging it between the top of the spar and the opposite rail, Wolf
+Larsen came on the scene. We exchanged nothing more than good-mornings, and,
+though he could not see, he sat on the rail out of the way and followed by the
+sound all that I did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again instructing Maud to slack away at the windlass when I gave the word, I
+proceeded to heave on the watch-tackle. Slowly the mast swung in until it
+balanced at right angles across the rail; and then I discovered to my amazement
+that there was no need for Maud to slack away. In fact, the very opposite was
+necessary. Making the watch-tackle fast, I hove on the windlass and brought in
+the mast, inch by inch, till its top tilted down to the deck and finally its
+whole length lay on the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked at my watch. It was twelve o&rsquo;clock. My back was aching sorely,
+and I felt extremely tired and hungry. And there on the deck was a single stick
+of timber to show for a whole morning&rsquo;s work. For the first time I
+thoroughly realized the extent of the task before us. But I was learning, I was
+learning. The afternoon would show far more accomplished. And it did; for we
+returned at one o&rsquo;clock, rested and strengthened by a hearty dinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In less than an hour I had the maintopmast on deck and was constructing the
+shears. Lashing the two topmasts together, and making allowance for their
+unequal length, at the point of intersection I attached the double block of the
+main throat-halyards. This, with the single block and the throat-halyards
+themselves, gave me a hoisting tackle. To prevent the butts of the masts from
+slipping on the deck, I nailed down thick cleats. Everything in readiness, I
+made a line fast to the apex of the shears and carried it directly to the
+windlass. I was growing to have faith in that windlass, for it gave me power
+beyond all expectation. As usual, Maud held the turn while I heaved. The shears
+rose in the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I discovered I had forgotten guy-ropes. This necessitated my climbing the
+shears, which I did twice, before I finished guying it fore and aft and to
+either side. Twilight had set in by the time this was accomplished. Wolf
+Larsen, who had sat about and listened all afternoon and never opened his
+mouth, had taken himself off to the galley and started his supper. I felt quite
+stiff across the small of the back, so much so that I straightened up with an
+effort and with pain. I looked proudly at my work. It was beginning to show. I
+was wild with desire, like a child with a new toy, to hoist something with my
+shears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish it weren&rsquo;t so late,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to
+see how it works.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be a glutton, Humphrey,&rdquo; Maud chided me.
+&ldquo;Remember, to-morrow is coming, and you&rsquo;re so tired now that you
+can hardly stand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you?&rdquo; I said, with sudden solicitude. &ldquo;You must be very
+tired. You have worked hard and nobly. I am proud of you, Maud.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not half so proud as I am of you, nor with half the reason,&rdquo; she
+answered, looking me straight in the eyes for a moment with an expression in
+her own and a dancing, tremulous light which I had not seen before and which
+gave me a pang of quick delight, I know not why, for I did not understand it.
+Then she dropped her eyes, to lift them again, laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If our friends could see us now,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Look at us.
+Have you ever paused for a moment to consider our appearance?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I have considered yours, frequently,&rdquo; I answered, puzzling
+over what I had seen in her eyes and puzzled by her sudden change of subject.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mercy!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;And what do I look like, pray?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A scarecrow, I&rsquo;m afraid,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;Just glance at
+your draggled skirts, for instance. Look at those three-cornered tears. And
+such a waist! It would not require a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that you have
+been cooking over a camp-fire, to say nothing of trying out seal-blubber. And
+to cap it all, that cap! And all that is the woman who wrote &lsquo;A Kiss
+Endured.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made me an elaborate and stately courtesy, and said, &ldquo;As for you,
+sir&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, through the five minutes of banter which followed, there was a serious
+something underneath the fun which I could not but relate to the strange and
+fleeting expression I had caught in her eyes. What was it? Could it be that our
+eyes were speaking beyond the will of our speech? My eyes had spoken, I knew,
+until I had found the culprits out and silenced them. This had occurred several
+times. But had she seen the clamour in them and understood? And had her eyes so
+spoken to me? What else could that expression have meant&mdash;that dancing,
+tremulous light, and a something more which words could not describe. And yet
+it could not be. It was impossible. Besides, I was not skilled in the speech of
+eyes. I was only Humphrey Van Weyden, a bookish fellow who loved. And to love,
+and to wait and win love, that surely was glorious enough for me. And thus I
+thought, even as we chaffed each other&rsquo;s appearance, until we arrived
+ashore and there were other things to think about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a shame, after working hard all day, that we cannot have an
+uninterrupted night&rsquo;s sleep,&rdquo; I complained, after supper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there can be no danger now? from a blind man?&rdquo; she queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall never be able to trust him,&rdquo; I averred, &ldquo;and far
+less now that he is blind. The liability is that his part helplessness will
+make him more malignant than ever. I know what I shall do to-morrow, the first
+thing&mdash;run out a light anchor and kedge the schooner off the beach. And
+each night when we come ashore in the boat, Mr. Wolf Larsen will be left a
+prisoner on board. So this will be the last night we have to stand watch, and
+because of that it will go the easier.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were awake early and just finishing breakfast as daylight came.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Humphrey!&rdquo; I heard Maud cry in dismay and suddenly stop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked at her. She was gazing at the <i>Ghost</i>. I followed her gaze, but
+could see nothing unusual. She looked at me, and I looked inquiry back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The shears,&rdquo; she said, and her voice trembled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had forgotten their existence. I looked again, but could not see them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If he has&mdash;&rdquo; I muttered savagely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She put her hand sympathetically on mine, and said, &ldquo;You will have to
+begin over again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, believe me, my anger means nothing; I could not hurt a fly,&rdquo; I
+smiled back bitterly. &ldquo;And the worst of it is, he knows it. You are
+right. If he has destroyed the shears, I shall do nothing except begin over
+again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I&rsquo;ll stand my watch on board hereafter,&rdquo; I blurted out a
+moment later. &ldquo;And if he interferes&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I dare not stay ashore all night alone,&rdquo; Maud was saying when
+I came back to myself. &ldquo;It would be so much nicer if he would be friendly
+with us and help us. We could all live comfortably aboard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We will,&rdquo; I asserted, still savagely, for the destruction of my
+beloved shears had hit me hard. &ldquo;That is, you and I will live aboard,
+friendly or not with Wolf Larsen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s childish,&rdquo; I laughed later, &ldquo;for him to do such
+things, and for me to grow angry over them, for that matter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But my heart smote me when we climbed aboard and looked at the havoc he had
+done. The shears were gone altogether. The guys had been slashed right and
+left. The throat-halyards which I had rigged were cut across through every
+part. And he knew I could not splice. A thought struck me. I ran to the
+windlass. It would not work. He had broken it. We looked at each other in
+consternation. Then I ran to the side. The masts, booms, and gaffs I had
+cleared were gone. He had found the lines which held them, and cast them
+adrift.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tears were in Maud&rsquo;s eyes, and I do believe they were for me. I could
+have wept myself. Where now was our project of remasting the <i>Ghost</i>? He
+had done his work well. I sat down on the hatch-combing and rested my chin on
+my hands in black despair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He deserves to die,&rdquo; I cried out; &ldquo;and God forgive me, I am
+not man enough to be his executioner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Maud was by my side, passing her hand soothingly through my hair as though
+I were a child, and saying, &ldquo;There, there; it will all come right. We are
+in the right, and it must come right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remembered Michelet and leaned my head against her; and truly I became strong
+again. The blessed woman was an unfailing fount of power to me. What did it
+matter? Only a set-back, a delay. The tide could not have carried the masts far
+to seaward, and there had been no wind. It meant merely more work to find them
+and tow them back. And besides, it was a lesson. I knew what to expect. He
+might have waited and destroyed our work more effectually when we had more
+accomplished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here he comes now,&rdquo; she whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I glanced up. He was strolling leisurely along the poop on the port side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take no notice of him,&rdquo; I whispered. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s coming to
+see how we take it. Don&rsquo;t let him know that we know. We can deny him that
+satisfaction. Take off your shoes&mdash;that&rsquo;s right&mdash;and carry them
+in your hand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then we played hide-and-seek with the blind man. As he came up the port
+side we slipped past on the starboard; and from the poop we watched him turn
+and start aft on our track.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He must have known, somehow, that we were on board, for he said
+&ldquo;Good-morning&rdquo; very confidently, and waited for the greeting to be
+returned. Then he strolled aft, and we slipped forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I know you&rsquo;re aboard,&rdquo; he called out, and I could see
+him listen intently after he had spoken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It reminded me of the great hoot-owl, listening, after its booming cry, for the
+stir of its frightened prey. But we did not stir, and we moved only when he
+moved. And so we dodged about the deck, hand in hand, like a couple of children
+chased by a wicked ogre, till Wolf Larsen, evidently in disgust, left the deck
+for the cabin. There was glee in our eyes, and suppressed titters in our
+mouths, as we put on our shoes and clambered over the side into the boat. And
+as I looked into Maud&rsquo;s clear brown eyes I forgot the evil he had done,
+and I knew only that I loved her, and that because of her the strength was mine
+to win our way back to the world.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap36"></a>CHAPTER XXXVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+For two days Maud and I ranged the sea and explored the beaches in search of
+the missing masts. But it was not till the third day that we found them, all of
+them, the shears included, and, of all perilous places, in the pounding surf of
+the grim south-western promontory. And how we worked! At the dark end of the
+first day we returned, exhausted, to our little cove, towing the mainmast
+behind us. And we had been compelled to row, in a dead calm, practically every
+inch of the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another day of heart-breaking and dangerous toil saw us in camp with the two
+topmasts to the good. The day following I was desperate, and I rafted together
+the foremast, the fore and main booms, and the fore and main gaffs. The wind
+was favourable, and I had thought to tow them back under sail, but the wind
+baffled, then died away, and our progress with the oars was a snail&rsquo;s
+pace. And it was such dispiriting effort. To throw one&rsquo;s whole strength
+and weight on the oars and to feel the boat checked in its forward lunge by the
+heavy drag behind, was not exactly exhilarating.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Night began to fall, and to make matters worse, the wind sprang up ahead. Not
+only did all forward motion cease, but we began to drift back and out to sea. I
+struggled at the oars till I was played out. Poor Maud, whom I could never
+prevent from working to the limit of her strength, lay weakly back in the
+stern-sheets. I could row no more. My bruised and swollen hands could no longer
+close on the oar handles. My wrists and arms ached intolerably, and though I
+had eaten heartily of a twelve-o&rsquo;clock lunch, I had worked so hard that I
+was faint from hunger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I pulled in the oars and bent forward to the line which held the tow. But
+Maud&rsquo;s hand leaped out restrainingly to mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo; she asked in a strained, tense voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cast it off,&rdquo; I answered, slipping a turn of the rope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But her fingers closed on mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she begged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is useless,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Here is night and the wind
+blowing us off the land.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But think, Humphrey. If we cannot sail away on the <i>Ghost</i>, we may
+remain for years on the island&mdash;for life even. If it has never been
+discovered all these years, it may never be discovered.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You forget the boat we found on the beach,&rdquo; I reminded her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a seal-hunting boat,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;and you know
+perfectly well that if the men had escaped they would have been back to make
+their fortunes from the rookery. You know they never escaped.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remained silent, undecided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Besides,&rdquo; she added haltingly, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s your idea, and I
+want to see you succeed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now I could harden my heart. As soon as she put it on a flattering personal
+basis, generosity compelled me to deny her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better years on the island than to die to-night, or to-morrow, or the
+next day, in the open boat. We are not prepared to brave the sea. We have no
+food, no water, no blankets, nothing. Why, you&rsquo;d not survive the night
+without blankets: I know how strong you are. You are shivering now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is only nervousness,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I am afraid you will
+cast off the masts in spite of me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, please, please, Humphrey, don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; she burst out, a
+moment later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so it ended, with the phrase she knew had all power over me. We shivered
+miserably throughout the night. Now and again I fitfully slept, but the pain of
+the cold always aroused me. How Maud could stand it was beyond me. I was too
+tired to thrash my arms about and warm myself, but I found strength time and
+again to chafe her hands and feet to restore the circulation. And still she
+pleaded with me not to cast off the masts. About three in the morning she was
+caught by a cold cramp, and after I had rubbed her out of that she became quite
+numb. I was frightened. I got out the oars and made her row, though she was so
+weak I thought she would faint at every stroke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning broke, and we looked long in the growing light for our island. At last
+it showed, small and black, on the horizon, fully fifteen miles away. I scanned
+the sea with my glasses. Far away in the south-west I could see a dark line on
+the water, which grew even as I looked at it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fair wind!&rdquo; I cried in a husky voice I did not recognize as my
+own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud tried to reply, but could not speak. Her lips were blue with cold, and she
+was hollow-eyed&mdash;but oh, how bravely her brown eyes looked at me! How
+piteously brave!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again I fell to chafing her hands and to moving her arms up and down and about
+until she could thrash them herself. Then I compelled her to stand up, and
+though she would have fallen had I not supported her, I forced her to walk back
+and forth the several steps between the thwart and the stern-sheets, and
+finally to spring up and down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, you brave, brave woman,&rdquo; I said, when I saw the life coming
+back into her face. &ldquo;Did you know that you were brave?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never used to be,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I was never brave till I
+knew you. It is you who have made me brave.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor I, until I knew you,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave me a quick look, and again I caught that dancing, tremulous light and
+something more in her eyes. But it was only for the moment. Then she smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It must have been the conditions,&rdquo; she said; but I knew she was
+wrong, and I wondered if she likewise knew. Then the wind came, fair and fresh,
+and the boat was soon labouring through a heavy sea toward the island. At
+half-past three in the afternoon we passed the south-western promontory. Not
+only were we hungry, but we were now suffering from thirst. Our lips were dry
+and cracked, nor could we longer moisten them with our tongues. Then the wind
+slowly died down. By night it was dead calm and I was toiling once more at the
+oars&mdash;but weakly, most weakly. At two in the morning the boat&rsquo;s bow
+touched the beach of our own inner cove and I staggered out to make the painter
+fast. Maud could not stand, nor had I strength to carry her. I fell in the sand
+with her, and, when I had recovered, contented myself with putting my hands
+under her shoulders and dragging her up the beach to the hut.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next day we did no work. In fact, we slept till three in the afternoon, or
+at least I did, for I awoke to find Maud cooking dinner. Her power of
+recuperation was wonderful. There was something tenacious about that lily-frail
+body of hers, a clutch on existence which one could not reconcile with its
+patent weakness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know I was travelling to Japan for my health,&rdquo; she said, as we
+lingered at the fire after dinner and delighted in the movelessness of loafing.
+&ldquo;I was not very strong. I never was. The doctors recommended a sea
+voyage, and I chose the longest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You little knew what you were choosing,&rdquo; I laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I shall be a different women for the experience, as well as a
+stronger woman,&rdquo; she answered; &ldquo;and, I hope a better woman. At
+least I shall understand a great deal more of life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, as the short day waned, we fell to discussing Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+blindness. It was inexplicable. And that it was grave, I instanced his
+statement that he intended to stay and die on Endeavour Island. When he, strong
+man that he was, loving life as he did, accepted his death, it was plain that
+he was troubled by something more than mere blindness. There had been his
+terrific headaches, and we were agreed that it was some sort of brain
+break-down, and that in his attacks he endured pain beyond our comprehension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I noticed as we talked over his condition, that Maud&rsquo;s sympathy went out
+to him more and more; yet I could not but love her for it, so sweetly womanly
+was it. Besides, there was no false sentiment about her feeling. She was agreed
+that the most rigorous treatment was necessary if we were to escape, though she
+recoiled at the suggestion that I might some time be compelled to take his life
+to save my own&mdash;&ldquo;our own,&rdquo; she put it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning we had breakfast and were at work by daylight. I found a light
+kedge anchor in the fore-hold, where such things were kept; and with a deal of
+exertion got it on deck and into the boat. With a long running-line coiled down
+in the stem, I rowed well out into our little cove and dropped the anchor into
+the water. There was no wind, the tide was high, and the schooner floated.
+Casting off the shore-lines, I kedged her out by main strength (the windlass
+being broken), till she rode nearly up and down to the small anchor&mdash;too
+small to hold her in any breeze. So I lowered the big starboard anchor, giving
+plenty of slack; and by afternoon I was at work on the windlass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three days I worked on that windlass. Least of all things was I a mechanic, and
+in that time I accomplished what an ordinary machinist would have done in as
+many hours. I had to learn my tools to begin with, and every simple mechanical
+principle which such a man would have at his finger ends I had likewise to
+learn. And at the end of three days I had a windlass which worked clumsily. It
+never gave the satisfaction the old windlass had given, but it worked and made
+my work possible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In half a day I got the two topmasts aboard and the shears rigged and guyed as
+before. And that night I slept on board and on deck beside my work. Maud, who
+refused to stay alone ashore, slept in the forecastle. Wolf Larsen had sat
+about, listening to my repairing the windlass and talking with Maud and me upon
+indifferent subjects. No reference was made on either side to the destruction
+of the shears; nor did he say anything further about my leaving his ship alone.
+But still I had feared him, blind and helpless and listening, always listening,
+and I never let his strong arms get within reach of me while I worked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On this night, sleeping under my beloved shears, I was aroused by his footsteps
+on the deck. It was a starlight night, and I could see the bulk of him dimly as
+he moved about. I rolled out of my blankets and crept noiselessly after him in
+my stocking feet. He had armed himself with a draw-knife from the tool-locker,
+and with this he prepared to cut across the throat-halyards I had again rigged
+to the shears. He felt the halyards with his hands and discovered that I had
+not made them fast. This would not do for a draw-knife, so he laid hold of the
+running part, hove taut, and made fast. Then he prepared to saw across with the
+draw-knife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t, if I were you,&rdquo; I said quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He heard the click of my pistol and laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello, Hump,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I knew you were here all the time.
+You can&rsquo;t fool my ears.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a lie, Wolf Larsen,&rdquo; I said, just as quietly as
+before. &ldquo;However, I am aching for a chance to kill you, so go ahead and
+cut.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have the chance always,&rdquo; he sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go ahead and cut,&rdquo; I threatened ominously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather disappoint you,&rdquo; he laughed, and turned on his
+heel and went aft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something must be done, Humphrey,&rdquo; Maud said, next morning, when I
+had told her of the night&rsquo;s occurrence. &ldquo;If he has liberty, he may
+do anything. He may sink the vessel, or set fire to it. There is no telling
+what he may do. We must make him a prisoner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how?&rdquo; I asked, with a helpless shrug. &ldquo;I dare not come
+within reach of his arms, and he knows that so long as his resistance is
+passive I cannot shoot him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There must be some way,&rdquo; she contended. &ldquo;Let me
+think.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is one way,&rdquo; I said grimly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She waited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I picked up a seal-club.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It won&rsquo;t kill him,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;And before he could
+recover I&rsquo;d have him bound hard and fast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head with a shudder. &ldquo;No, not that. There must be some less
+brutal way. Let us wait.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But we did not have to wait long, and the problem solved itself. In the
+morning, after several trials, I found the point of balance in the foremast and
+attached my hoisting tackle a few feet above it. Maud held the turn on the
+windlass and coiled down while I heaved. Had the windlass been in order it
+would not have been so difficult; as it was, I was compelled to apply all my
+weight and strength to every inch of the heaving. I had to rest frequently. In
+truth, my spells of resting were longer than those of working. Maud even
+contrived, at times when all my efforts could not budge the windlass, to hold
+the turn with one hand and with the other to throw the weight of her slim body
+to my assistance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of an hour the single and double blocks came together at the top of
+the shears. I could hoist no more. And yet the mast was not swung entirely
+inboard. The butt rested against the outside of the port rail, while the top of
+the mast overhung the water far beyond the starboard rail. My shears were too
+short. All my work had been for nothing. But I no longer despaired in the old
+way. I was acquiring more confidence in myself and more confidence in the
+possibilities of windlasses, shears, and hoisting tackles. There was a way in
+which it could be done, and it remained for me to find that way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While I was considering the problem, Wolf Larsen came on deck. We noticed
+something strange about him at once. The indecisiveness, or feebleness, of his
+movements was more pronounced. His walk was actually tottery as he came down
+the port side of the cabin. At the break of the poop he reeled, raised one hand
+to his eyes with the familiar brushing gesture, and fell down the
+steps&mdash;still on his feet&mdash;to the main deck, across which he
+staggered, falling and flinging out his arms for support. He regained his
+balance by the steerage companion-way and stood there dizzily for a space, when
+he suddenly crumpled up and collapsed, his legs bending under him as he sank to
+the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of his attacks,&rdquo; I whispered to Maud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head; and I could see sympathy warm in her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We went up to him, but he seemed unconscious, breathing spasmodically. She took
+charge of him, lifting his head to keep the blood out of it and despatching me
+to the cabin for a pillow. I also brought blankets, and we made him
+comfortable. I took his pulse. It beat steadily and strong, and was quite
+normal. This puzzled me. I became suspicious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What if he should be feigning this?&rdquo; I asked, still holding his
+wrist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud shook her head, and there was reproof in her eyes. But just then the wrist
+I held leaped from my hand, and the hand clasped like a steel trap about my
+wrist. I cried aloud in awful fear, a wild inarticulate cry; and I caught one
+glimpse of his face, malignant and triumphant, as his other hand compassed my
+body and I was drawn down to him in a terrible grip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My wrist was released, but his other arm, passed around my back, held both my
+arms so that I could not move. His free hand went to my throat, and in that
+moment I knew the bitterest foretaste of death earned by one&rsquo;s own
+idiocy. Why had I trusted myself within reach of those terrible arms? I could
+feel other hands at my throat. They were Maud&rsquo;s hands, striving vainly to
+tear loose the hand that was throttling me. She gave it up, and I heard her
+scream in a way that cut me to the soul, for it was a woman&rsquo;s scream of
+fear and heart-breaking despair. I had heard it before, during the sinking of
+the <i>Martinez</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My face was against his chest and I could not see, but I heard Maud turn and
+run swiftly away along the deck. Everything was happening quickly. I had not
+yet had a glimmering of unconsciousness, and it seemed that an interminable
+period of time was lapsing before I heard her feet flying back. And just then I
+felt the whole man sink under me. The breath was leaving his lungs and his
+chest was collapsing under my weight. Whether it was merely the expelled
+breath, or his consciousness of his growing impotence, I know not, but his
+throat vibrated with a deep groan. The hand at my throat relaxed. I breathed.
+It fluttered and tightened again. But even his tremendous will could not
+overcome the dissolution that assailed it. That will of his was breaking down.
+He was fainting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud&rsquo;s footsteps were very near as his hand fluttered for the last time
+and my throat was released. I rolled off and over to the deck on my back,
+gasping and blinking in the sunshine. Maud was pale but composed,&mdash;my eyes
+had gone instantly to her face,&mdash;and she was looking at me with mingled
+alarm and relief. A heavy seal-club in her hand caught my eyes, and at that
+moment she followed my gaze down to it. The club dropped from her hand as
+though it had suddenly stung her, and at the same moment my heart surged with a
+great joy. Truly she was my woman, my mate-woman, fighting with me and for me
+as the mate of a caveman would have fought, all the primitive in her aroused,
+forgetful of her culture, hard under the softening civilization of the only
+life she had ever known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dear woman!&rdquo; I cried, scrambling to my feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment she was in my arms, weeping convulsively on my shoulder while I
+clasped her close. I looked down at the brown glory of her hair, glinting gems
+in the sunshine far more precious to me than those in the treasure-chests of
+kings. And I bent my head and kissed her hair softly, so softly that she did
+not know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then sober thought came to me. After all, she was only a woman, crying her
+relief, now that the danger was past, in the arms of her protector or of the
+one who had been endangered. Had I been father or brother, the situation would
+have been in nowise different. Besides, time and place were not meet, and I
+wished to earn a better right to declare my love. So once again I softly kissed
+her hair as I felt her receding from my clasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a real attack this time,&rdquo; I said: &ldquo;another shock like
+the one that made him blind. He feigned at first, and in doing so brought it
+on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud was already rearranging his pillow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;not yet. Now that I have him helpless,
+helpless he shall remain. From this day we live in the cabin. Wolf Larsen shall
+live in the steerage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I caught him under the shoulders and dragged him to the companion-way. At my
+direction Maud fetched a rope. Placing this under his shoulders, I balanced him
+across the threshold and lowered him down the steps to the floor. I could not
+lift him directly into a bunk, but with Maud&rsquo;s help I lifted first his
+shoulders and head, then his body, balanced him across the edge, and rolled him
+into a lower bunk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this was not to be all. I recollected the handcuffs in his state-room,
+which he preferred to use on sailors instead of the ancient and clumsy ship
+irons. So, when we left him, he lay handcuffed hand and foot. For the first
+time in many days I breathed freely. I felt strangely light as I came on deck,
+as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I felt, also, that Maud
+and I had drawn more closely together. And I wondered if she, too, felt it, as
+we walked along the deck side by side to where the stalled foremast hung in the
+shears.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap37"></a>CHAPTER XXXVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+At once we moved aboard the <i>Ghost</i>, occupying our old state-rooms and
+cooking in the galley. The imprisonment of Wolf Larsen had happened most
+opportunely, for what must have been the Indian summer of this high latitude
+was gone and drizzling stormy weather had set in. We were very comfortable, and
+the inadequate shears, with the foremast suspended from them, gave a
+business-like air to the schooner and a promise of departure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now that we had Wolf Larsen in irons, how little did we need it! Like his
+first attack, his second had been accompanied by serious disablement. Maud made
+the discovery in the afternoon while trying to give him nourishment. He had
+shown signs of consciousness, and she had spoken to him, eliciting no response.
+He was lying on his left side at the time, and in evident pain. With a restless
+movement he rolled his head around, clearing his left ear from the pillow
+against which it had been pressed. At once he heard and answered her, and at
+once she came to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pressing the pillow against his left ear, I asked him if he heard me, but he
+gave no sign. Removing the pillow and, repeating the question he answered
+promptly that he did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know you are deaf in the right ear?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered in a low, strong voice, &ldquo;and worse than
+that. My whole right side is affected. It seems asleep. I cannot move arm or
+leg.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Feigning again?&rdquo; I demanded angrily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head, his stern mouth shaping the strangest, twisted smile. It was
+indeed a twisted smile, for it was on the left side only, the facial muscles of
+the right side moving not at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was the last play of the Wolf,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am
+paralysed. I shall never walk again. Oh, only on the other side,&rdquo; he
+added, as though divining the suspicious glance I flung at his left leg, the
+knee of which had just then drawn up, and elevated the blankets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s unfortunate,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d liked to
+have done for you first, Hump. And I thought I had that much left in me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why?&rdquo; I asked; partly in horror, partly out of curiosity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again his stern mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest bit of
+the ferment to the end, to eat you. But to die this way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged his shoulders, or attempted to shrug them, rather, for the left
+shoulder alone moved. Like the smile, the shrug was twisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how can you account for it?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;Where is the seat
+of your trouble?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The brain,&rdquo; he said at once. &ldquo;It was those cursed headaches
+brought it on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Symptoms,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head. &ldquo;There is no accounting for it. I was never sick in
+my life. Something&rsquo;s gone wrong with my brain. A cancer, a tumour, or
+something of that nature,&mdash;a thing that devours and destroys. It&rsquo;s
+attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by cell&mdash;from
+the pain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The motor-centres, too,&rdquo; I suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here,
+conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going down, breaking
+bit by bit communication with the world. I cannot see, hearing and feeling are
+leaving me, at this rate I shall soon cease to speak; yet all the time I shall
+be here, alive, active, and powerless.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you say <i>you</i> are here, I&rsquo;d suggest the likelihood of
+the soul,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bosh!&rdquo; was his retort. &ldquo;It simply means that in the attack
+on my brain the higher psychical centres are untouched. I can remember, I can
+think and reason. When that goes, I go. I am not. The soul?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke out in mocking laughter, then turned his left ear to the pillow as a
+sign that he wished no further conversation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud and I went about our work oppressed by the fearful fate which had
+overtaken him,&mdash;how fearful we were yet fully to realize. There was the
+awfulness of retribution about it. Our thoughts were deep and solemn, and we
+spoke to each other scarcely above whispers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You might remove the handcuffs,&rdquo; he said that night, as we stood
+in consultation over him. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s dead safe. I&rsquo;m a paralytic
+now. The next thing to watch out for is bed sores.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He smiled his twisted smile, and Maud, her eyes wide with horror, was compelled
+to turn away her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know that your smile is crooked?&rdquo; I asked him; for I knew
+that she must attend him, and I wished to save her as much as possible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I shall smile no more,&rdquo; he said calmly. &ldquo;I thought
+something was wrong. My right cheek has been numb all day. Yes, and I&rsquo;ve
+had warnings of this for the last three days; by spells, my right side seemed
+going to sleep, sometimes arm or hand, sometimes leg or foot.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So my smile is crooked?&rdquo; he queried a short while after.
+&ldquo;Well, consider henceforth that I smile internally, with my soul, if you
+please, my soul. Consider that I am smiling now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And for the space of several minutes he lay there, quiet, indulging his
+grotesque fancy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man of him was not changed. It was the old, indomitable, terrible Wolf
+Larsen, imprisoned somewhere within that flesh which had once been so
+invincible and splendid. Now it bound him with insentient fetters, walling his
+soul in darkness and silence, blocking it from the world which to him had been
+a riot of action. No more would he conjugate the verb &ldquo;to do in every
+mood and tense.&rdquo; &ldquo;To be&rdquo; was all that remained to
+him&mdash;to be, as he had defined death, without movement; to will, but not to
+execute; to think and reason and in the spirit of him to be as alive as ever,
+but in the flesh to be dead, quite dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust ourselves to
+his condition. Our minds revolted. To us he was full of potentiality. We knew
+not what to expect of him next, what fearful thing, rising above the flesh, he
+might break out and do. Our experience warranted this state of mind, and we
+went about our work with anxiety always upon us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had solved the problem which had arisen through the shortness of the shears.
+By means of the watch-tackle (I had made a new one), I heaved the butt of the
+foremast across the rail and then lowered it to the deck. Next, by means of the
+shears, I hoisted the main boom on board. Its forty feet of length would supply
+the height necessary properly to swing the mast. By means of a secondary tackle
+I had attached to the shears, I swung the boom to a nearly perpendicular
+position, then lowered the butt to the deck, where, to prevent slipping, I
+spiked great cleats around it. The single block of my original shears-tackle I
+had attached to the end of the boom. Thus, by carrying this tackle to the
+windlass, I could raise and lower the end of the boom at will, the butt always
+remaining stationary, and, by means of guys, I could swing the boom from side
+to side. To the end of the boom I had likewise rigged a hoisting tackle; and
+when the whole arrangement was completed I could not but be startled by the
+power and latitude it gave me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, two days&rsquo; work was required for the accomplishment of this
+part of my task, and it was not till the morning of the third day that I swung
+the foremast from the deck and proceeded to square its butt to fit the step.
+Here I was especially awkward. I sawed and chopped and chiselled the weathered
+wood till it had the appearance of having been gnawed by some gigantic mouse.
+But it fitted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It will work, I know it will work,&rdquo; I cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know Dr. Jordan&rsquo;s final test of truth?&rdquo; Maud asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head and paused in the act of dislodging the shavings which had
+drifted down my neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can we make it work? Can we trust our lives to it? is the test.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is a favourite of yours,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When I dismantled my old Pantheon and cast out Napoleon and Cæsar and
+their fellows, I straightway erected a new Pantheon,&rdquo; she answered
+gravely, &ldquo;and the first I installed was Dr. Jordan.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A modern hero.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And a greater because modern,&rdquo; she added. &ldquo;How can the Old
+World heroes compare with ours?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head. We were too much alike in many things for argument. Our points
+of view and outlook on life at least were very alike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For a pair of critics we agree famously,&rdquo; I laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And as shipwright and able assistant,&rdquo; she laughed back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was little time for laughter in those days, what of our heavy work
+and of the awfulness of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s living death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had received another stroke. He had lost his voice, or he was losing it. He
+had only intermittent use of it. As he phrased it, the wires were like the
+stock market, now up, now down. Occasionally the wires were up and he spoke as
+well as ever, though slowly and heavily. Then speech would suddenly desert him,
+in the middle of a sentence perhaps, and for hours, sometimes, we would wait
+for the connection to be re-established. He complained of great pain in his
+head, and it was during this period that he arranged a system of communication
+against the time when speech should leave him altogether&mdash;one pressure of
+the hand for &ldquo;yes,&rdquo; two for &ldquo;no.&rdquo; It was well that it
+was arranged, for by evening his voice had gone from him. By hand pressures,
+after that, he answered our questions, and when he wished to speak he scrawled
+his thoughts with his left hand, quite legibly, on a sheet of paper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fierce winter had now descended upon us. Gale followed gale, with snow and
+sleet and rain. The seals had started on their great southern migration, and
+the rookery was practically deserted. I worked feverishly. In spite of the bad
+weather, and of the wind which especially hindered me, I was on deck from
+daylight till dark and making substantial progress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I profited by my lesson learned through raising the shears and then climbing
+them to attach the guys. To the top of the foremast, which was just lifted
+conveniently from the deck, I attached the rigging, stays and throat and peak
+halyards. As usual, I had underrated the amount of work involved in this
+portion of the task, and two long days were necessary to complete it. And there
+was so much yet to be done&mdash;the sails, for instance, which practically had
+to be made over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While I toiled at rigging the foremast, Maud sewed on canvas, ready always to
+drop everything and come to my assistance when more hands than two were
+required. The canvas was heavy and hard, and she sewed with the regular
+sailor&rsquo;s palm and three-cornered sail-needle. Her hands were soon sadly
+blistered, but she struggled bravely on, and in addition doing the cooking and
+taking care of the sick man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A fig for superstition,&rdquo; I said on Friday morning. &ldquo;That
+mast goes in to-day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everything was ready for the attempt. Carrying the boom-tackle to the windlass,
+I hoisted the mast nearly clear of the deck. Making this tackle fast, I took to
+the windlass the shears-tackle (which was connected with the end of the boom),
+and with a few turns had the mast perpendicular and clear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud clapped her hands the instant she was relieved from holding the turn,
+crying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It works! It works! We&rsquo;ll trust our lives to it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she assumed a rueful expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not over the hole,&rdquo; she add. &ldquo;Will you have to
+begin all over?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I smiled in superior fashion, and, slacking off on one of the boom-guys and
+taking in on the other, swung the mast perfectly in the centre of the deck.
+Still it was not over the hole. Again the rueful expression came on her face,
+and again I smiled in a superior way. Slacking away on the boom-tackle and
+hoisting an equivalent amount on the shears-tackle, I brought the butt of the
+mast into position directly over the hole in the deck. Then I gave Maud careful
+instructions for lowering away and went into the hold to the step on the
+schooner&rsquo;s bottom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I called to her, and the mast moved easily and accurately. Straight toward the
+square hole of the step the square butt descended; but as it descended it
+slowly twisted so that square would not fit into square. But I had not even a
+moment&rsquo;s indecision. Calling to Maud to cease lowering, I went on deck
+and made the watch-tackle fast to the mast with a rolling hitch. I left Maud to
+pull on it while I went below. By the light of the lantern I saw the butt twist
+slowly around till its sides coincided with the sides of the step. Maud made
+fast and returned to the windlass. Slowly the butt descended the several
+intervening inches, at the same time slightly twisting again. Again Maud
+rectified the twist with the watch-tackle, and again she lowered away from the
+windlass. Square fitted into square. The mast was stepped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I raised a shout, and she ran down to see. In the yellow lantern light we
+peered at what we had accomplished. We looked at each other, and our hands felt
+their way and clasped. The eyes of both of us, I think, were moist with the joy
+of success.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was done so easily after all,&rdquo; I remarked. &ldquo;All the work
+was in the preparation.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And all the wonder in the completion,&rdquo; Maud added. &ldquo;I can
+scarcely bring myself to realize that that great mast is really up and in; that
+you have lifted it from the water, swung it through the air, and deposited it
+here where it belongs. It is a Titan&rsquo;s task.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And they made themselves many inventions,&rdquo; I began merrily, then
+paused to sniff the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked hastily at the lantern. It was not smoking. Again I sniffed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something is burning,&rdquo; Maud said, with sudden conviction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We sprang together for the ladder, but I raced past her to the deck. A dense
+volume of smoke was pouring out of the steerage companion-way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Wolf is not yet dead,&rdquo; I muttered to myself as I sprang down
+through the smoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was so thick in the confined space that I was compelled to feel my way; and
+so potent was the spell of Wolf Larsen on my imagination, I was quite prepared
+for the helpless giant to grip my neck in a strangle hold. I hesitated, the
+desire to race back and up the steps to the deck almost overpowering me. Then I
+recollected Maud. The vision of her, as I had last seen her, in the lantern
+light of the schooner&rsquo;s hold, her brown eyes warm and moist with joy,
+flashed before me, and I knew that I could not go back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was choking and suffocating by the time I reached Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s bunk. I
+reached my hand and felt for his. He was lying motionless, but moved slightly
+at the touch of my hand. I felt over and under his blankets. There was no
+warmth, no sign of fire. Yet that smoke which blinded me and made me cough and
+gasp must have a source. I lost my head temporarily and dashed frantically
+about the steerage. A collision with the table partially knocked the wind from
+my body and brought me to myself. I reasoned that a helpless man could start a
+fire only near to where he lay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I returned to Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s bunk. There I encountered Maud. How long she
+had been there in that suffocating atmosphere I could not guess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go up on deck!&rdquo; I commanded peremptorily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, Humphrey&mdash;&rdquo; she began to protest in a queer, husky
+voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please! please!&rdquo; I shouted at her harshly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She drew away obediently, and then I thought, What if she cannot find the
+steps? I started after her, to stop at the foot of the companion-way. Perhaps
+she had gone up. As I stood there, hesitant, I heard her cry softly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Humphrey, I am lost.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I found her fumbling at the wall of the after bulkhead, and, half leading her,
+half carrying her, I took her up the companion-way. The pure air was like
+nectar. Maud was only faint and dizzy, and I left her lying on the deck when I
+took my second plunge below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The source of the smoke must be very close to Wolf Larsen&mdash;my mind was
+made up to this, and I went straight to his bunk. As I felt about among his
+blankets, something hot fell on the back of my hand. It burned me, and I jerked
+my hand away. Then I understood. Through the cracks in the bottom of the upper
+bunk he had set fire to the mattress. He still retained sufficient use of his
+left arm to do this. The damp straw of the mattress, fired from beneath and
+denied air, had been smouldering all the while.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I dragged the mattress out of the bunk it seemed to disintegrate in mid-air,
+at the same time bursting into flames. I beat out the burning remnants of straw
+in the bunk, then made a dash for the deck for fresh air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several buckets of water sufficed to put out the burning mattress in the middle
+of the steerage floor; and ten minutes later, when the smoke had fairly
+cleared, I allowed Maud to come below. Wolf Larsen was unconscious, but it was
+a matter of minutes for the fresh air to restore him. We were working over him,
+however, when he signed for paper and pencil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pray do not interrupt me,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;I am smiling.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am still a bit of the ferment, you see,&rdquo; he wrote a little
+later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am glad you are as small a bit as you are,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;But just think of how much smaller I
+shall be before I die.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And yet I am all here, Hump,&rdquo; he wrote with a final flourish.
+&ldquo;I can think more clearly than ever in my life before. Nothing to disturb
+me. Concentration is perfect. I am all here and more than here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man&rsquo;s body
+had become his mausoleum. And there, in so strange sepulchre, his spirit
+fluttered and lived. It would flutter and live till the last line of
+communication was broken, and after that who was to say how much longer it
+might continue to flutter and live?
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap38"></a>CHAPTER XXXVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think my left side is going,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen wrote, the morning
+after his attempt to fire the ship. &ldquo;The numbness is growing. I can
+hardly move my hand. You will have to speak louder. The last lines are going
+down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you in pain?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was compelled to repeat my question loudly before he answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not all the time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and it was with
+extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl. It was like a &ldquo;spirit
+message,&rdquo; such as are delivered at séances of spiritualists for a
+dollar admission.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I am still here, all here,&rdquo; the hand scrawled more slowly and
+painfully than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pencil dropped, and we had to replace it in the hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When there is no pain I have perfect peace and quiet. I have never
+thought so clearly. I can ponder life and death like a Hindoo sage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And immortality?&rdquo; Maud queried loudly in the ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three times the hand essayed to write but fumbled hopelessly. The pencil fell.
+In vain we tried to replace it. The fingers could not close on it. Then Maud
+pressed and held the fingers about the pencil with her own hand and the hand
+wrote, in large letters, and so slowly that the minutes ticked off to each
+letter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;B-O-S-H.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s last word, &ldquo;bosh,&rdquo; sceptical and
+invincible to the end. The arm and hand relaxed. The trunk of the body moved
+slightly. Then there was no movement. Maud released the hand. The fingers
+spread slightly, falling apart of their own weight, and the pencil rolled away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you still hear?&rdquo; I shouted, holding the fingers and waiting for
+the single pressure which would signify &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; There was no
+response. The hand was dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I noticed the lips slightly move,&rdquo; Maud said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I repeated the question. The lips moved. She placed the tips of her fingers on
+them. Again I repeated the question. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Maud announced. We
+looked at each other expectantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What good is it?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;What can we say now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, ask him&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She hesitated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ask him something that requires no for an answer,&rdquo; I suggested.
+&ldquo;Then we will know for certainty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you hungry?&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lips moved under her fingers, and she answered, &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you have some beef?&rdquo; was her next query.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Beef-tea?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, he will have some beef-tea,&rdquo; she said, quietly, looking up at
+me. &ldquo;Until his hearing goes we shall be able to communicate with him. And
+after that&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at me queerly. I saw her lips trembling and the tears swimming up in
+her eyes. She swayed toward me and I caught her in my arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Humphrey,&rdquo; she sobbed, &ldquo;when will it all end? I am so
+tired, so tired.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She buried her head on my shoulder, her frail form shaken with a storm of
+weeping. She was like a feather in my arms, so slender, so ethereal. &ldquo;She
+has broken down at last,&rdquo; I thought. &ldquo;What can I do without her
+help?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I soothed and comforted her, till she pulled herself bravely together and
+recuperated mentally as quickly as she was wont to do physically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ought to be ashamed of myself,&rdquo; she said. Then added, with the
+whimsical smile I adored, &ldquo;but I am only one, small woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That phrase, the &ldquo;one small woman,&rdquo; startled me like an electric
+shock. It was my own phrase, my pet, secret phrase, my love phrase for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where did you get that phrase?&rdquo; I demanded, with an abruptness
+that in turn startled her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What phrase?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One small woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it yours?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Mine. I made it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you must have talked in your sleep,&rdquo; she smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dancing, tremulous light was in her eyes. Mine, I knew, were speaking
+beyond the will of my speech. I leaned toward her. Without volition I leaned
+toward her, as a tree is swayed by the wind. Ah, we were very close together in
+that moment. But she shook her head, as one might shake off sleep or a dream,
+saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have known it all my life. It was my father&rsquo;s name for my
+mother.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is my phrase too,&rdquo; I said stubbornly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For your mother?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I answered, and she questioned no further, though I could
+have sworn her eyes retained for some time a mocking, teasing expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the foremast in, the work now went on apace. Almost before I knew it, and
+without one serious hitch, I had the mainmast stepped. A derrick-boom, rigged
+to the foremast, had accomplished this; and several days more found all stays
+and shrouds in place, and everything set up taut. Topsails would be a nuisance
+and a danger for a crew of two, so I heaved the topmasts on deck and lashed
+them fast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several more days were consumed in finishing the sails and putting them on.
+There were only three&mdash;the jib, foresail, and mainsail; and, patched,
+shortened, and distorted, they were a ridiculously ill-fitting suit for so trim
+a craft as the <i>Ghost</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But they&rsquo;ll work!&rdquo; Maud cried jubilantly. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll
+make them work, and trust our lives to them!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly, among my many new trades, I shone least as a sail-maker. I could
+sail them better than make them, and I had no doubt of my power to bring the
+schooner to some northern port of Japan. In fact, I had crammed navigation from
+text-books aboard; and besides, there was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s star-scale, so
+simple a device that a child could work it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for its inventor, beyond an increasing deafness and the movement of the lips
+growing fainter and fainter, there had been little change in his condition for
+a week. But on the day we finished bending the schooner&rsquo;s sails, he heard
+his last, and the last movement of his lips died away&mdash;but not before I
+had asked him, &ldquo;Are you all there?&rdquo; and the lips had answered,
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last line was down. Somewhere within that tomb of the flesh still dwelt the
+soul of the man. Walled by the living clay, that fierce intelligence we had
+known burned on; but it burned on in silence and darkness. And it was
+disembodied. To that intelligence there could be no objective knowledge of a
+body. It knew no body. The very world was not. It knew only itself and the
+vastness and profundity of the quiet and the dark.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap39"></a>CHAPTER XXXIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The day came for our departure. There was no longer anything to detain us on
+Endeavour Island. The <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> stumpy masts were in place, her
+crazy sails bent. All my handiwork was strong, none of it beautiful; but I knew
+that it would work, and I felt myself a man of power as I looked at it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!&rdquo; I wanted to cry
+aloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Maud and I had a way of voicing each other&rsquo;s thoughts, and she said,
+as we prepared to hoist the mainsail:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To think, Humphrey, you did it all with your own hands?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there were two other hands,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Two small
+hands, and don&rsquo;t say that was a phrase, also, of your father.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed and shook her head, and held her hands up for inspection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can never get them clean again,&rdquo; she wailed, &ldquo;nor soften
+the weather-beat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then dirt and weather-beat shall be your guerdon of honour,&rdquo; I
+said, holding them in mine; and, spite of my resolutions, I would have kissed
+the two dear hands had she not swiftly withdrawn them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our comradeship was becoming tremulous, I had mastered my love long and well,
+but now it was mastering me. Wilfully had it disobeyed and won my eyes to
+speech, and now it was winning my tongue&mdash;ay, and my lips, for they were
+mad this moment to kiss the two small hands which had toiled so faithfully and
+hard. And I, too, was mad. There was a cry in my being like bugles calling me
+to her. And there was a wind blowing upon me which I could not resist, swaying
+the very body of me till I leaned toward her, all unconscious that I leaned.
+And she knew it. She could not but know it as she swiftly drew away her hands,
+and yet, could not forbear one quick searching look before she turned away her
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By means of deck-tackles I had arranged to carry the halyards forward to the
+windlass; and now I hoisted the mainsail, peak and throat, at the same time. It
+was a clumsy way, but it did not take long, and soon the foresail as well was
+up and fluttering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We can never get that anchor up in this narrow place, once it has left
+the bottom,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We should be on the rocks first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What can you do?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Slip it,&rdquo; was my answer. &ldquo;And when I do, you must do your
+first work on the windlass. I shall have to run at once to the wheel, and at
+the same time you must be hoisting the jib.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This manœuvre of getting under way I had studied and worked out a score of
+times; and, with the jib-halyard to the windlass, I knew Maud was capable of
+hoisting that most necessary sail. A brisk wind was blowing into the cove, and
+though the water was calm, rapid work was required to get us safely out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I knocked the shackle-bolt loose, the chain roared out through the
+hawse-hole and into the sea. I raced aft, putting the wheel up. The
+<i>Ghost</i> seemed to start into life as she heeled to the first fill of her
+sails. The jib was rising. As it filled, the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> bow swung off
+and I had to put the wheel down a few spokes and steady her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had devised an automatic jib-sheet which passed the jib across of itself, so
+there was no need for Maud to attend to that; but she was still hoisting the
+jib when I put the wheel hard down. It was a moment of anxiety, for the
+<i>Ghost</i> was rushing directly upon the beach, a stone&rsquo;s throw
+distant. But she swung obediently on her heel into the wind. There was a great
+fluttering and flapping of canvas and reef-points, most welcome to my ears,
+then she filled away on the other tack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud had finished her task and come aft, where she stood beside me, a small cap
+perched on her wind-blown hair, her cheeks flushed from exertion, her eyes wide
+and bright with the excitement, her nostrils quivering to the rush and bite of
+the fresh salt air. Her brown eyes were like a startled deer&rsquo;s. There was
+a wild, keen look in them I had never seen before, and her lips parted and her
+breath suspended as the <i>Ghost</i>, charging upon the wall of rock at the
+entrance to the inner cove, swept into the wind and filled away into safe
+water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My first mate&rsquo;s berth on the sealing grounds stood me in good stead, and
+I cleared the inner cove and laid a long tack along the shore of the outer
+cove. Once again about, and the <i>Ghost</i> headed out to open sea. She had
+now caught the bosom-breathing of the ocean, and was herself a-breath with the
+rhythm of it as she smoothly mounted and slipped down each broad-backed wave.
+The day had been dull and overcast, but the sun now burst through the clouds, a
+welcome omen, and shone upon the curving beach where together we had dared the
+lords of the harem and slain the holluschickie. All Endeavour Island brightened
+under the sun. Even the grim south-western promontory showed less grim, and
+here and there, where the sea-spray wet its surface, high lights flashed and
+dazzled in the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall always think of it with pride,&rdquo; I said to Maud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She threw her head back in a queenly way but said, &ldquo;Dear, dear Endeavour
+Island! I shall always love it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I,&rdquo; I said quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed our eyes must meet in a great understanding, and yet, loath, they
+struggled away and did not meet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a silence I might almost call awkward, till I broke it, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;See those black clouds to windward. You remember, I told you last night
+the barometer was falling.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the sun is gone,&rdquo; she said, her eyes still fixed upon our
+island, where we had proved our mastery over matter and attained to the truest
+comradeship that may fall to man and woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s slack off the sheets for Japan!&rdquo; I cried gaily.
+&ldquo;A fair wind and a flowing sheet, you know, or however it goes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lashing the wheel I ran forward, eased the fore and mainsheets, took in on the
+boom-tackles and trimmed everything for the quartering breeze which was ours.
+It was a fresh breeze, very fresh, but I resolved to run as long as I dared.
+Unfortunately, when running free, it is impossible to lash the wheel, so I
+faced an all-night watch. Maud insisted on relieving me, but proved that she
+had not the strength to steer in a heavy sea, even if she could have gained the
+wisdom on such short notice. She appeared quite heart-broken over the
+discovery, but recovered her spirits by coiling down tackles and halyards and
+all stray ropes. Then there were meals to be cooked in the galley, beds to
+make, Wolf Larsen to be attended upon, and she finished the day with a grand
+house-cleaning attack upon the cabin and steerage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All night I steered, without relief, the wind slowly and steadily increasing
+and the sea rising. At five in the morning Maud brought me hot coffee and
+biscuits she had baked, and at seven a substantial and piping hot breakfast put
+new life into me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Throughout the day, and as slowly and steadily as ever, the wind increased. It
+impressed one with its sullen determination to blow, and blow harder, and keep
+on blowing. And still the <i>Ghost</i> foamed along, racing off the miles till
+I was certain she was making at least eleven knots. It was too good to lose,
+but by nightfall I was exhausted. Though in splendid physical trim, a
+thirty-six-hour trick at the wheel was the limit of my endurance. Besides, Maud
+begged me to heave to, and I knew, if the wind and sea increased at the same
+rate during the night, that it would soon be impossible to heave to. So, as
+twilight deepened, gladly and at the same time reluctantly, I brought the
+<i>Ghost</i> up on the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I had not reckoned upon the colossal task the reefing of three sails meant
+for one man. While running away from the wind I had not appreciated its force,
+but when we ceased to run I learned to my sorrow, and well-nigh to my despair,
+how fiercely it was really blowing. The wind balked my every effort, ripping
+the canvas out of my hands and in an instant undoing what I had gained by ten
+minutes of severest struggle. At eight o&rsquo;clock I had succeeded only in
+putting the second reef into the foresail. At eleven o&rsquo;clock I was no
+farther along. Blood dripped from every finger-end, while the nails were broken
+to the quick. From pain and sheer exhaustion I wept in the darkness, secretly,
+so that Maud should not know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, in desperation, I abandoned the attempt to reef the mainsail and resolved
+to try the experiment of heaving to under the close-reefed foresail. Three
+hours more were required to gasket the mainsail and jib, and at two in the
+morning, nearly dead, the life almost buffeted and worked out of me, I had
+barely sufficient consciousness to know the experiment was a success. The
+close-reefed foresail worked. The <i>Ghost</i> clung on close to the wind and
+betrayed no inclination to fall off broadside to the trough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was famished, but Maud tried vainly to get me to eat. I dozed with my mouth
+full of food. I would fall asleep in the act of carrying food to my mouth and
+waken in torment to find the act yet uncompleted. So sleepily helpless was I
+that she was compelled to hold me in my chair to prevent my being flung to the
+floor by the violent pitching of the schooner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the passage from the galley to the cabin I knew nothing. It was a
+sleep-walker Maud guided and supported. In fact, I was aware of nothing till I
+awoke, how long after I could not imagine, in my bunk with my boots off. It was
+dark. I was stiff and lame, and cried out with pain when the bed-clothes
+touched my poor finger-ends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning had evidently not come, so I closed my eyes and went to sleep again. I
+did not know it, but I had slept the clock around and it was night again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once more I woke, troubled because I could sleep no better. I struck a match
+and looked at my watch. It marked midnight. And I had not left the deck until
+three! I should have been puzzled had I not guessed the solution. No wonder I
+was sleeping brokenly. I had slept twenty-one hours. I listened for a while to
+the behaviour of the <i>Ghost</i>, to the pounding of the seas and the muffled
+roar of the wind on deck, and then turned over on my side and slept peacefully
+until morning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I arose at seven I saw no sign of Maud and concluded she was in the galley
+preparing breakfast. On deck I found the <i>Ghost</i> doing splendidly under
+her patch of canvas. But in the galley, though a fire was burning and water
+boiling, I found no Maud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I discovered her in the steerage, by Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s bunk. I looked at him,
+the man who had been hurled down from the topmost pitch of life to be buried
+alive and be worse than dead. There seemed a relaxation of his expressionless
+face which was new. Maud looked at me and I understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His life flickered out in the storm,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he still lives,&rdquo; she answered, infinite faith in her voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He had too great strength.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but now it no longer shackles him. He is a
+free spirit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is a free spirit surely,&rdquo; I answered; and, taking her hand, I
+led her on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The storm broke that night, which is to say that it diminished as slowly as it
+had arisen. After breakfast next morning, when I had hoisted Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s body on deck ready for burial, it was still blowing heavily and
+a large sea was running. The deck was continually awash with the sea which came
+inboard over the rail and through the scuppers. The wind smote the schooner
+with a sudden gust, and she heeled over till her lee rail was buried, the roar
+in her rigging rising in pitch to a shriek. We stood in the water to our knees
+as I bared my head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I remember only one part of the service,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and that
+is, &lsquo;And the body shall be cast into the sea.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maud looked at me, surprised and shocked; but the spirit of something I had
+seen before was strong upon me, impelling me to give service to Wolf Larsen as
+Wolf Larsen had once given service to another man. I lifted the end of the
+hatch cover and the canvas-shrouded body slipped feet first into the sea. The
+weight of iron dragged it down. It was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-bye, Lucifer, proud spirit,&rdquo; Maud whispered, so low that it
+was drowned by the shouting of the wind; but I saw the movement of her lips and
+knew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we clung to the lee rail and worked our way aft, I happened to glance to
+leeward. The <i>Ghost</i>, at the moment, was uptossed on a sea, and I caught a
+clear view of a small steamship two or three miles away, rolling and pitching,
+head on to the sea, as it steamed toward us. It was painted black, and from the
+talk of the hunters of their poaching exploits I recognized it as a United
+States revenue cutter. I pointed it out to Maud and hurriedly led her aft to
+the safety of the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I started to rush below to the flag-locker, then remembered that in rigging the
+<i>Ghost</i> I had forgotten to make provision for a flag-halyard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We need no distress signal,&rdquo; Maud said. &ldquo;They have only to
+see us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We are saved,&rdquo; I said, soberly and solemnly. And then, in an
+exuberance of joy, &ldquo;I hardly know whether to be glad or not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked at her. Our eyes were not loath to meet. We leaned toward each other,
+and before I knew it my arms were about her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Need I?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she answered, &ldquo;There is no need, though the telling of it would be
+sweet, so sweet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her lips met the press of mine, and, by what strange trick of the imagination I
+know not, the scene in the cabin of the <i>Ghost</i> flashed upon me, when she
+had pressed her fingers lightly on my lips and said, &ldquo;Hush, hush.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My woman, my one small woman,&rdquo; I said, my free hand petting her
+shoulder in the way all lovers know though never learn in school.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My man,&rdquo; she said, looking at me for an instant with tremulous
+lids which fluttered down and veiled her eyes as she snuggled her head against
+my breast with a happy little sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked toward the cutter. It was very close. A boat was being lowered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One kiss, dear love,&rdquo; I whispered. &ldquo;One kiss more before
+they come.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And rescue us from ourselves,&rdquo; she completed, with a most adorable
+smile, whimsical as I had never seen it, for it was whimsical with love.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">the end</span>
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay &amp; Sons</span>,
+<span class="smcap">Limited</span>,<br/>
+<span class="smcap">Brunswick St.</span>, <span class="smcap">Stamford
+St.</span>, <span class="smcap">s.e.</span> 1, <span class="smcap">and
+Bungay</span>, <span class="smcap">Suffolk</span>
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-WOLF ***</div>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sea Wolf, by Jack London
+(#11 in our series by Jack London)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
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+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
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+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Sea Wolf
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: October, 1997  [EBook #1074]
+[This file was first posted on October 15, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: June 28, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SEA WOLF ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+The Sea Wolf
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously
+place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth's credit.  He kept a
+summer cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais,
+and never occupied it except when he loafed through the winter
+mouths and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest his brain.  When
+summer came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and dusty existence
+in the city and to toil incessantly.  Had it not been my custom to
+run up to see him every Saturday afternoon and to stop over till
+Monday morning, this particular January Monday morning would not
+have found me afloat on San Francisco Bay.
+
+Not but that I was afloat in a safe craft, for the Martinez was a
+new ferry-steamer, making her fourth or fifth trip on the run
+between Sausalito and San Francisco.  The danger lay in the heavy
+fog which blanketed the bay, and of which, as a landsman, I had
+little apprehension.  In fact, I remember the placid exaltation
+with which I took up my position on the forward upper deck,
+directly beneath the pilot-house, and allowed the mystery of the
+fog to lay hold of my imagination.  A fresh breeze was blowing, and
+for a time I was alone in the moist obscurity--yet not alone, for I
+was dimly conscious of the presence of the pilot, and of what I
+took to be the captain, in the glass house above my head.
+
+I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labour
+which made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and
+navigation, in order to visit my friend who lived across an arm of
+the sea.  It was good that men should be specialists, I mused.  The
+peculiar knowledge of the pilot and captain sufficed for many
+thousands of people who knew no more of the sea and navigation than
+I knew.  On the other hand, instead of having to devote my energy
+to the learning of a multitude of things, I concentrated it upon a
+few particular things, such as, for instance, the analysis of Poe's
+place in American literature--an essay of mine, by the way, in the
+current Atlantic.  Coming aboard, as I passed through the cabin, I
+had noticed with greedy eyes a stout gentleman reading the
+Atlantic, which was open at my very essay.  And there it was again,
+the division of labour, the special knowledge of the pilot and
+captain which permitted the stout gentleman to read my special
+knowledge on Poe while they carried him safely from Sausalito to
+San Francisco.
+
+A red-faced man, slamming the cabin door behind him and stumping
+out on the deck, interrupted my reflections, though I made a mental
+note of the topic for use in a projected essay which I had thought
+of calling "The Necessity for Freedom:  A Plea for the Artist."
+The red-faced man shot a glance up at the pilot-house, gazed around
+at the fog, stumped across the deck and back (he evidently had
+artificial legs), and stood still by my side, legs wide apart, and
+with an expression of keen enjoyment on his face.  I was not wrong
+when I decided that his days had been spent on the sea.
+
+"It's nasty weather like this here that turns heads grey before
+their time," he said, with a nod toward the pilot-house.
+
+"I had not thought there was any particular strain," I answered.
+"It seems as simple as A, B, C.  They know the direction by
+compass, the distance, and the speed.  I should not call it
+anything more than mathematical certainty."
+
+"Strain!" he snorted.  "Simple as A, B, C!  Mathematical
+certainty!"
+
+He seemed to brace himself up and lean backward against the air as
+he stared at me.  "How about this here tide that's rushin' out
+through the Golden Gate?" he demanded, or bellowed, rather.  "How
+fast is she ebbin'?  What's the drift, eh?  Listen to that, will
+you?  A bell-buoy, and we're a-top of it!  See 'em alterin' the
+course!"
+
+From out of the fog came the mournful tolling of a bell, and I
+could see the pilot turning the wheel with great rapidity.  The
+bell, which had seemed straight ahead, was now sounding from the
+side.  Our own whistle was blowing hoarsely, and from time to time
+the sound of other whistles came to us from out of the fog.
+
+"That's a ferry-boat of some sort," the new-comer said, indicating
+a whistle off to the right.  "And there!  D'ye hear that?  Blown by
+mouth.  Some scow schooner, most likely.  Better watch out, Mr.
+Schooner-man.  Ah, I thought so.  Now hell's a poppin' for
+somebody!"
+
+The unseen ferry-boat was blowing blast after blast, and the mouth-
+blown horn was tooting in terror-stricken fashion.
+
+"And now they're payin' their respects to each other and tryin' to
+get clear," the red-faced man went on, as the hurried whistling
+ceased.
+
+His face was shining, his eyes flashing with excitement as he
+translated into articulate language the speech of the horns and
+sirens.  "That's a steam-siren a-goin' it over there to the left.
+And you hear that fellow with a frog in his throat--a steam
+schooner as near as I can judge, crawlin' in from the Heads against
+the tide."
+
+A shrill little whistle, piping as if gone mad, came from directly
+ahead and from very near at hand.  Gongs sounded on the Martinez.
+Our paddle-wheels stopped, their pulsing beat died away, and then
+they started again.  The shrill little whistle, like the chirping
+of a cricket amid the cries of great beasts, shot through the fog
+from more to the side and swiftly grew faint and fainter.  I looked
+to my companion for enlightenment.
+
+"One of them dare-devil launches," he said.  "I almost wish we'd
+sunk him, the little rip!  They're the cause of more trouble.  And
+what good are they?  Any jackass gets aboard one and runs it from
+hell to breakfast, blowin' his whistle to beat the band and tellin'
+the rest of the world to look out for him, because he's comin' and
+can't look out for himself!  Because he's comin'!  And you've got
+to look out, too!  Right of way!  Common decency!  They don't know
+the meanin' of it!"
+
+I felt quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he stumped
+indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the
+fog.  And romantic it certainly was--the fog, like the grey shadow
+of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and
+men, mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish
+for work, riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart
+of the mystery, groping their way blindly through the Unseen, and
+clamouring and clanging in confident speech the while their hearts
+are heavy with incertitude and fear.
+
+The voice of my companion brought me back to myself with a laugh.
+I too had been groping and floundering, the while I thought I rode
+clear-eyed through the mystery.
+
+"Hello! somebody comin' our way," he was saying.  "And d'ye hear
+that?  He's comin' fast.  Walking right along.  Guess he don't hear
+us yet.  Wind's in wrong direction."
+
+The fresh breeze was blowing right down upon us, and I could hear
+the whistle plainly, off to one side and a little ahead.
+
+"Ferry-boat?" I asked.
+
+He nodded, then added, "Or he wouldn't be keepin' up such a clip."
+He gave a short chuckle.  "They're gettin' anxious up there."
+
+I glanced up.  The captain had thrust his head and shoulders out of
+the pilot-house, and was staring intently into the fog as though by
+sheer force of will he could penetrate it.  His face was anxious,
+as was the face of my companion, who had stumped over to the rail
+and was gazing with a like intentness in the direction of the
+invisible danger.
+
+Then everything happened, and with inconceivable rapidity.  The fog
+seemed to break away as though split by a wedge, and the bow of a
+steamboat emerged, trailing fog-wreaths on either side like seaweed
+on the snout of Leviathan.  I could see the pilot-house and a
+white-bearded man leaning partly out of it, on his elbows.  He was
+clad in a blue uniform, and I remember noting how trim and quiet he
+was.  His quietness, under the circumstances, was terrible.  He
+accepted Destiny, marched hand in hand with it, and coolly measured
+the stroke.  As he leaned there, he ran a calm and speculative eye
+over us, as though to determine the precise point of the collision,
+and took no notice whatever when our pilot, white with rage,
+shouted, "Now you've done it!"
+
+On looking back, I realize that the remark was too obvious to make
+rejoinder necessary.
+
+"Grab hold of something and hang on," the red-faced man said to me.
+All his bluster had gone, and he seemed to have caught the
+contagion of preternatural calm.  "And listen to the women scream,"
+he said grimly--almost bitterly, I thought, as though he had been
+through the experience before.
+
+The vessels came together before I could follow his advice.  We
+must have been struck squarely amidships, for I saw nothing, the
+strange steamboat having passed beyond my line of vision.  The
+Martinez heeled over, sharply, and there was a crashing and rending
+of timber.  I was thrown flat on the wet deck, and before I could
+scramble to my feet I heard the scream of the women.  This it was,
+I am certain,--the most indescribable of blood-curdling sounds,--
+that threw me into a panic.  I remembered the life-preservers
+stored in the cabin, but was met at the door and swept backward by
+a wild rush of men and women.  What happened in the next few
+minutes I do not recollect, though I have a clear remembrance of
+pulling down life-preservers from the overhead racks, while the
+red-faced man fastened them about the bodies of an hysterical group
+of women.  This memory is as distinct and sharp as that of any
+picture I have seen.  It is a picture, and I can see it now,--the
+jagged edges of the hole in the side of the cabin, through which
+the grey fog swirled and eddied; the empty upholstered seats,
+littered with all the evidences of sudden flight, such as packages,
+hand satchels, umbrellas, and wraps; the stout gentleman who had
+been reading my essay, encased in cork and canvas, the magazine
+still in his hand, and asking me with monotonous insistence if I
+thought there was any danger; the red-faced man, stumping gallantly
+around on his artificial legs and buckling life-preservers on all
+corners; and finally, the screaming bedlam of women.
+
+This it was, the screaming of the women, that most tried my nerves.
+It must have tried, too, the nerves of the red-faced man, for I
+have another picture which will never fade from my mind.  The stout
+gentleman is stuffing the magazine into his overcoat pocket and
+looking on curiously.  A tangled mass of women, with drawn, white
+faces and open mouths, is shrieking like a chorus of lost souls;
+and the red-faced man, his face now purplish with wrath, and with
+arms extended overhead as in the act of hurling thunderbolts, is
+shouting, "Shut up!  Oh, shut up!"
+
+I remember the scene impelled me to sudden laughter, and in the
+next instant I realized I was becoming hysterical myself; for these
+were women of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, with the
+fear of death upon them and unwilling to die.  And I remember that
+the sounds they made reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the
+knife of the butcher, and I was struck with horror at the vividness
+of the analogy.  These women, capable of the most sublime emotions,
+of the tenderest sympathies, were open-mouthed and screaming.  They
+wanted to live, they were helpless, like rats in a trap, and they
+screamed.
+
+The horror of it drove me out on deck.  I was feeling sick and
+squeamish, and sat down on a bench.  In a hazy way I saw and heard
+men rushing and shouting as they strove to lower the boats.  It was
+just as I had read descriptions of such scenes in books.  The
+tackles jammed.  Nothing worked.  One boat lowered away with the
+plugs out, filled with women and children and then with water, and
+capsized.  Another boat had been lowered by one end, and still hung
+in the tackle by the other end, where it had been abandoned.
+Nothing was to be seen of the strange steamboat which had caused
+the disaster, though I heard men saying that she would undoubtedly
+send boats to our assistance.
+
+I descended to the lower deck.  The Martinez was sinking fast, for
+the water was very near.  Numbers of the passengers were leaping
+overboard.  Others, in the water, were clamouring to be taken
+aboard again.  No one heeded them.  A cry arose that we were
+sinking.  I was seized by the consequent panic, and went over the
+side in a surge of bodies.  How I went over I do not know, though I
+did know, and instantly, why those in the water were so desirous of
+getting back on the steamer.  The water was cold--so cold that it
+was painful.  The pang, as I plunged into it, was as quick and
+sharp as that of fire.  It bit to the marrow.  It was like the grip
+of death.  I gasped with the anguish and shock of it, filling my
+lungs before the life-preserver popped me to the surface.  The
+taste of the salt was strong in my mouth, and I was strangling with
+the acrid stuff in my throat and lungs.
+
+But it was the cold that was most distressing.  I felt that I could
+survive but a few minutes.  People were struggling and floundering
+in the water about me.  I could hear them crying out to one
+another.  And I heard, also, the sound of oars.  Evidently the
+strange steamboat had lowered its boats.  As the time went by I
+marvelled that I was still alive.  I had no sensation whatever in
+my lower limbs, while a chilling numbness was wrapping about my
+heart and creeping into it.  Small waves, with spiteful foaming
+crests, continually broke over me and into my mouth, sending me off
+into more strangling paroxysms.
+
+The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing
+chorus of screams in the distance, and knew that the Martinez had
+gone down.  Later,--how much later I have no knowledge,--I came to
+myself with a start of fear.  I was alone.  I could hear no calls
+or cries--only the sound of the waves, made weirdly hollow and
+reverberant by the fog.  A panic in a crowd, which partakes of a
+sort of community of interest, is not so terrible as a panic when
+one is by oneself; and such a panic I now suffered.  Whither was I
+drifting?  The red-faced man had said that the tide was ebbing
+through the Golden Gate.  Was I, then, being carried out to sea?
+And the life-preserver in which I floated?  Was it not liable to go
+to pieces at any moment?  I had heard of such things being made of
+paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all
+buoyancy.  And I could not swim a stroke.  And I was alone,
+floating, apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness.
+I confess that a madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the
+women had shrieked, and beat the water with my numb hands.
+
+How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness
+intervened, of which I remember no more than one remembers of
+troubled and painful sleep.  When I aroused, it was as after
+centuries of time; and I saw, almost above me and emerging from the
+fog, the bow of a vessel, and three triangular sails, each shrewdly
+lapping the other and filled with wind.  Where the bow cut the
+water there was a great foaming and gurgling, and I seemed directly
+in its path.  I tried to cry out, but was too exhausted.  The bow
+plunged down, just missing me and sending a swash of water clear
+over my head.  Then the long, black side of the vessel began
+slipping past, so near that I could have touched it with my hands.
+I tried to reach it, in a mad resolve to claw into the wood with my
+nails, but my arms were heavy and lifeless.  Again I strove to call
+out, but made no sound.
+
+The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a
+hollow between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing
+at the wheel, and of another man who seemed to be doing little else
+than smoke a cigar.  I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he
+slowly turned his head and glanced out over the water in my
+direction.  It was a careless, unpremeditated glance, one of those
+haphazard things men do when they have no immediate call to do
+anything in particular, but act because they are alive and must do
+something.
+
+But life and death were in that glance.  I could see the vessel
+being swallowed up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the
+wheel, and the head of the other man turning, slowly turning, as
+his gaze struck the water and casually lifted along it toward me.
+His face wore an absent expression, as of deep thought, and I
+became afraid that if his eyes did light upon me he would
+nevertheless not see me.  But his eyes did light upon me, and
+looked squarely into mine; and he did see me, for he sprang to the
+wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and whirled it round and
+round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting orders of some
+sort.  The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former
+course and leapt almost instantly from view into the fog.
+
+I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the
+power of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and
+darkness that was rising around me.  A little later I heard the
+stroke of oars, growing nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man.
+When he was very near I heard him crying, in vexed fashion, "Why in
+hell don't you sing out?"  This meant me, I thought, and then the
+blankness and darkness rose over me.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.
+Sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me.  They were
+stars, I knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the
+suns.  As I reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back
+on the counter swing, a great gong struck and thundered.  For an
+immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, I
+enjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.
+
+But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told
+myself it must be.  My rhythm grew shorter and shorter.  I was
+jerked from swing to counter swing with irritating haste.  I could
+scarcely catch my breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the
+heavens.  The gong thundered more frequently and more furiously.  I
+grew to await it with a nameless dread.  Then it seemed as though I
+were being dragged over rasping sands, white and hot in the sun.
+This gave place to a sense of intolerable anguish.  My skin was
+scorching in the torment of fire.  The gong clanged and knelled.
+The sparkling points of light flashed past me in an interminable
+stream, as though the whole sidereal system were dropping into the
+void.  I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened my eyes.
+Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me.  My mighty rhythm
+was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea.  The terrific
+gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and
+clattered with each leap of the ship.  The rasping, scorching sands
+were a man's hard hands chafing my naked chest.  I squirmed under
+the pain of it, and half lifted my head.  My chest was raw and red,
+and I could see tiny blood globules starting through the torn and
+inflamed cuticle.
+
+"That'll do, Yonson," one of the men said.  "Carn't yer see you've
+bloomin' well rubbed all the gent's skin orf?"
+
+The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type,
+ceased chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet.  The man who
+had spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and
+weakly pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed
+the sound of Bow Bells with his mother's milk.  A draggled muslin
+cap on his head and a dirty gunny-sack about his slim hips
+proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty ship's galley in which I
+found myself.
+
+"An' 'ow yer feelin' now, sir?" he asked, with the subservient
+smirk which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.
+
+For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped
+by Yonson to my feet.  The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was
+grating horribly on my nerves.  I could not collect my thoughts.
+Clutching the woodwork of the galley for support,--and I confess
+the grease with which it was scummed put my teeth on edge,--I
+reached across a hot cooking-range to the offending utensil,
+unhooked it, and wedged it securely into the coal-box.
+
+The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my
+hand a steaming mug with an "'Ere, this'll do yer good."  It was a
+nauseous mess,--ship's coffee,--but the heat of it was revivifying.
+Between gulps of the molten stuff I glanced down at my raw and
+bleeding chest and turned to the Scandinavian.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Yonson," I said; "but don't you think your measures
+were rather heroic?"
+
+It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than
+of my words, that he held up his palm for inspection.  It was
+remarkably calloused.  I passed my hand over the horny projections,
+and my teeth went on edge once more from the horrible rasping
+sensation produced.
+
+"My name is Johnson, not Yonson," he said, in very good, though
+slow, English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.
+
+There was mild protest in his pale blue eyes, and withal a timid
+frankness and manliness that quite won me to him.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Johnson," I corrected, and reached out my hand for
+his.
+
+He hesitated, awkward and bashful, shifted his weight from one leg
+to the other, then blunderingly gripped my hand in a hearty shake.
+
+"Have you any dry clothes I may put on?" I asked the cook.
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered, with cheerful alacrity.  "I'll run down
+an' tyke a look over my kit, if you've no objections, sir, to
+wearin' my things."
+
+He dived out of the galley door, or glided rather, with a swiftness
+and smoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like
+as oily.  In fact, this oiliness, or greasiness, as I was later to
+learn, was probably the most salient expression of his personality.
+
+"And where am I?" I asked Johnson, whom I took, and rightly, to be
+one of the sailors.  "What vessel is this, and where is she bound?"
+
+"Off the Farallones, heading about sou-west," he answered, slowly
+and methodically, as though groping for his best English, and
+rigidly observing the order of my queries.  "The schooner Ghost,
+bound seal-hunting to Japan."
+
+"And who is the captain?  I must see him as soon as I am dressed."
+
+Johnson looked puzzled and embarrassed.  He hesitated while he
+groped in his vocabulary and framed a complete answer.  "The cap'n
+is Wolf Larsen, or so men call him.  I never heard his other name.
+But you better speak soft with him.  He is mad this morning.  The
+mate--"
+
+But he did not finish.  The cook had glided in.
+
+"Better sling yer 'ook out of 'ere, Yonson," he said.  "The old
+man'll be wantin' yer on deck, an' this ayn't no d'y to fall foul
+of 'im."
+
+Johnson turned obediently to the door, at the same time, over the
+cook's shoulder, favouring me with an amazingly solemn and
+portentous wink as though to emphasize his interrupted remark and
+the need for me to be soft-spoken with the captain.
+
+Hanging over the cook's arm was a loose and crumpled array of evil-
+looking and sour-smelling garments.
+
+"They was put aw'y wet, sir," he vouchsafed explanation.  "But
+you'll 'ave to make them do till I dry yours out by the fire."
+
+Clinging to the woodwork, staggering with the roll of the ship, and
+aided by the cook, I managed to slip into a rough woollen
+undershirt.  On the instant my flesh was creeping and crawling from
+the harsh contact.  He noticed my involuntary twitching and
+grimacing, and smirked:
+
+"I only 'ope yer don't ever 'ave to get used to such as that in
+this life, 'cos you've got a bloomin' soft skin, that you 'ave,
+more like a lydy's than any I know of.  I was bloomin' well sure
+you was a gentleman as soon as I set eyes on yer."
+
+I had taken a dislike to him at first, and as he helped to dress me
+this dislike increased.  There was something repulsive about his
+touch.  I shrank from his hand; my flesh revolted.  And between
+this and the smells arising from various pots boiling and bubbling
+on the galley fire, I was in haste to get out into the fresh air.
+Further, there was the need of seeing the captain about what
+arrangements could be made for getting me ashore.
+
+A cheap cotton shirt, with frayed collar and a bosom discoloured
+with what I took to be ancient blood-stains, was put on me amid a
+running and apologetic fire of comment.  A pair of workman's
+brogans encased my feet, and for trousers I was furnished with a
+pair of pale blue, washed-out overalls, one leg of which was fully
+ten inches shorter than the other.  The abbreviated leg looked as
+though the devil had there clutched for the Cockney's soul and
+missed the shadow for the substance.
+
+"And whom have I to thank for this kindness?" I asked, when I stood
+completely arrayed, a tiny boy's cap on my head, and for coat a
+dirty, striped cotton jacket which ended at the small of my back
+and the sleeves of which reached just below my elbows.
+
+The cook drew himself up in a smugly humble fashion, a deprecating
+smirk on his face.  Out of my experience with stewards on the
+Atlantic liners at the end of the voyage, I could have sworn he was
+waiting for his tip.  From my fuller knowledge of the creature I
+now know that the posture was unconscious.  An hereditary
+servility, no doubt, was responsible.
+
+"Mugridge, sir," he fawned, his effeminate features running into a
+greasy smile.  "Thomas Mugridge, sir, an' at yer service."
+
+"All right, Thomas," I said.  "I shall not forget you--when my
+clothes are dry."
+
+A soft light suffused his face and his eyes glistened, as though
+somewhere in the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and
+stirred with dim memories of tips received in former lives.
+
+"Thank you, sir," he said, very gratefully and very humbly indeed.
+
+Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and I
+stepped out on deck.  I was still weak from my prolonged immersion.
+A puff of wind caught me,--and I staggered across the moving deck
+to a corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support.  The
+schooner, heeled over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing
+and plunging into the long Pacific roll.  If she were heading
+south-west as Johnson had said, the wind, then, I calculated, was
+blowing nearly from the south.  The fog was gone, and in its place
+the sun sparkled crisply on the surface of the water, I turned to
+the east, where I knew California must lie, but could see nothing
+save low-lying fog-banks--the same fog, doubtless, that had brought
+about the disaster to the Martinez and placed me in my present
+situation.  To the north, and not far away, a group of naked rocks
+thrust above the sea, on one of which I could distinguish a
+lighthouse.  In the south-west, and almost in our course, I saw the
+pyramidal loom of some vessel's sails.
+
+Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more
+immediate surroundings.  My first thought was that a man who had
+come through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited
+more attention than I received.  Beyond a sailor at the wheel who
+stared curiously across the top of the cabin, I attracted no notice
+whatever.
+
+Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships.
+There, on a hatch, a large man was lying on his back.  He was fully
+clothed, though his shirt was ripped open in front.  Nothing was to
+be seen of his chest, however, for it was covered with a mass of
+black hair, in appearance like the furry coat of a dog.  His face
+and neck were hidden beneath a black beard, intershot with grey,
+which would have been stiff and bushy had it not been limp and
+draggled and dripping with water.  His eyes were closed, and he was
+apparently unconscious; but his mouth was wide open, his breast,
+heaving as though from suffocation as he laboured noisily for
+breath.  A sailor, from time to time and quite methodically, as a
+matter of routine, dropped a canvas bucket into the ocean at the
+end of a rope, hauled it in hand under hand, and sluiced its
+contents over the prostrate man.
+
+Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely
+chewing the end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had
+rescued me from the sea.  His height was probably five feet ten
+inches, or ten and a half; but my first impression, or feel of the
+man, was not of this, but of his strength.  And yet, while he was
+of massive build, with broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not
+characterize his strength as massive.  It was what might be termed
+a sinewy, knotty strength, of the kind we ascribe to lean and wiry
+men, but which, in him, because of his heavy build, partook more of
+the enlarged gorilla order.  Not that in appearance he seemed in
+the least gorilla-like.  What I am striving to express is this
+strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physical semblance.
+It was a strength we are wont to associate with things primitive,
+with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine our tree-dwelling
+prototypes to have been--a strength savage, ferocious, alive in
+itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion,
+the elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have
+been moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake
+when the head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or
+which lingers in the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and
+quivers from the prod of a finger.
+
+Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who
+paced up and down.  He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet
+struck the deck squarely and with surety; every movement of a
+muscle, from the heave of the shoulders to the tightening of the
+lips about the cigar, was decisive, and seemed to come out of a
+strength that was excessive and overwhelming.  In fact, though this
+strength pervaded every action of his, it seemed but the
+advertisement of a greater strength that lurked within, that lay
+dormant and no more than stirred from time to time, but which might
+arouse, at any moment, terrible and compelling, like the rage of a
+lion or the wrath of a storm.
+
+The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned
+encouragingly at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the
+direction of the man who paced up and down by the hatchway.  Thus I
+was given to understand that he was the captain, the "Old Man," in
+the cook's vernacular, the individual whom I must interview and put
+to the trouble of somehow getting me ashore.  I had half started
+forward, to get over with what I was certain would be a stormy five
+minutes, when a more violent suffocating paroxysm seized the
+unfortunate person who was lying on his back.  He wrenched and
+writhed about convulsively.  The chin, with the damp black beard,
+pointed higher in the air as the back muscles stiffened and the
+chest swelled in an unconscious and instinctive effort to get more
+air.  Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I knew that the skin was
+taking on a purplish hue.
+
+The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and
+gazed down at the dying man.  So fierce had this final struggle
+become that the sailor paused in the act of flinging more water
+over him and stared curiously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and
+dripping its contents to the deck.  The dying man beat a tattoo on
+the hatch with his heels, straightened out his legs, and stiffened
+in one great tense effort, and rolled his head from side to side.
+Then the muscles relaxed, the head stopped rolling, and a sigh, as
+of profound relief, floated upward from his lips.  The jaw dropped,
+the upper lip lifted, and two rows of tobacco-discoloured teeth
+appeared.  It seemed as though his features had frozen into a
+diabolical grin at the world he had left and outwitted.
+
+Then a most surprising thing occurred.  The captain broke loose
+upon the dead man like a thunderclap.  Oaths rolled from his lips
+in a continuous stream.  And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or
+mere expressions of indecency.  Each word was a blasphemy, and
+there were many words.  They crisped and crackled like electric
+sparks.  I had never heard anything like it in my life, nor could I
+have conceived it possible.  With a turn for literary expression
+myself, and a penchant for forcible figures and phrases, I
+appreciated, as no other listener, I dare say, the peculiar
+vividness and strength and absolute blasphemy of his metaphors.
+The cause of it all, as near as I could make out, was that the man,
+who was mate, had gone on a debauch before leaving San Francisco,
+and then had the poor taste to die at the beginning of the voyage
+and leave Wolf Larsen short-handed.
+
+It should be unnecessary to state, at least to my friends, that I
+was shocked.  Oaths and vile language of any sort had always been
+repellent to me.  I felt a wilting sensation, a sinking at the
+heart, and, I might just as well say, a giddiness.  To me, death
+had always been invested with solemnity and dignity.  It had been
+peaceful in its occurrence, sacred in its ceremonial.  But death in
+its more sordid and terrible aspects was a thing with which I had
+been unacquainted till now.  As I say, while I appreciated the
+power of the terrific denunciation that swept out of Wolf Larsen's
+mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked.  The scorching torrent was
+enough to wither the face of the corpse.  I should not have been
+surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled and flared
+up in smoke and flame.  But the dead man was unconcerned.  He
+continued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery
+and defiance.  He was master of the situation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+Wolf Larsen ceased swearing as suddenly as he had begun.  He
+relighted his cigar and glanced around.  His eyes chanced upon the
+cook.
+
+"Well, Cooky?" he began, with a suaveness that was cold and of the
+temper of steel.
+
+"Yes, sir," the cook eagerly interpolated, with appeasing and
+apologetic servility.
+
+"Don't you think you've stretched that neck of yours just about
+enough?  It's unhealthy, you know.  The mate's gone, so I can't
+afford to lose you too.  You must be very, very careful of your
+health, Cooky.  Understand?"
+
+His last word, in striking contrast with the smoothness of his
+previous utterance, snapped like the lash of a whip.  The cook
+quailed under it.
+
+"Yes, sir," was the meek reply, as the offending head disappeared
+into the galley.
+
+At this sweeping rebuke, which the cook had only pointed, the rest
+of the crew became uninterested and fell to work at one task or
+another.  A number of men, however, who were lounging about a
+companion-way between the galley and hatch, and who did not seem to
+be sailors, continued talking in low tones with one another.
+These, I afterward learned, were the hunters, the men who shot the
+seals, and a very superior breed to common sailor-folk.
+
+"Johansen!" Wolf Larsen called out.  A sailor stepped forward
+obediently.  "Get your palm and needle and sew the beggar up.
+You'll find some old canvas in the sail-locker.  Make it do."
+
+"What'll I put on his feet, sir?" the man asked, after the
+customary "Ay, ay, sir."
+
+"We'll see to that," Wolf Larsen answered, and elevated his voice
+in a call of "Cooky!"
+
+Thomas Mugridge popped out of his galley like a jack-in-the-box.
+
+"Go below and fill a sack with coal."
+
+"Any of you fellows got a Bible or Prayer-book?" was the captain's
+next demand, this time of the hunters lounging about the companion-
+way.
+
+They shook their heads, and some one made a jocular remark which I
+did not catch, but which raised a general laugh.
+
+Wolf Larsen made the same demand of the sailors.  Bibles and
+Prayer-books seemed scarce articles, but one of the men volunteered
+to pursue the quest amongst the watch below, returning in a minute
+with the information that there was none.
+
+The captain shrugged his shoulders.  "Then we'll drop him over
+without any palavering, unless our clerical-looking castaway has
+the burial service at sea by heart."
+
+By this time he had swung fully around and was facing me.  "You're
+a preacher, aren't you?" he asked.
+
+The hunters,--there were six of them,--to a man, turned and
+regarded me.  I was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow.
+A laugh went up at my appearance,--a laugh that was not lessened or
+softened by the dead man stretched and grinning on the deck before
+us; a laugh that was as rough and harsh and frank as the sea
+itself; that arose out of coarse feelings and blunted
+sensibilities, from natures that knew neither courtesy nor
+gentleness.
+
+Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his grey eyes lighted with a
+slight glint of amusement; and in that moment, having stepped
+forward quite close to him, I received my first impression of the
+man himself, of the man as apart from his body, and from the
+torrent of blasphemy I had heard him spew forth.  The face, with
+large features and strong lines, of the square order, yet well
+filled out, was apparently massive at first sight; but again, as
+with the body, the massiveness seemed to vanish, and a conviction
+to grow of a tremendous and excessive mental or spiritual strength
+that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps of his being.  The jaw, the
+chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and swelling heavily above
+the eyes,--these, while strong in themselves, unusually strong,
+seemed to speak an immense vigour or virility of spirit that lay
+behind and beyond and out of sight.  There was no sounding such a
+spirit, no measuring, no determining of metes and bounds, nor
+neatly classifying in some pigeon-hole with others of similar type.
+
+The eyes--and it was my destiny to know them well--were large and
+handsome, wide apart as the true artist's are wide, sheltering
+under a heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows.  The
+eyes themselves were of that baffling protean grey which is never
+twice the same; which runs through many shades and colourings like
+intershot silk in sunshine; which is grey, dark and light, and
+greenish-grey, and sometimes of the clear azure of the deep sea.
+They were eyes that masked the soul with a thousand guises, and
+that sometimes opened, at rare moments, and allowed it to rush up
+as though it were about to fare forth nakedly into the world on
+some wonderful adventure,--eyes that could brood with the hopeless
+sombreness of leaden skies; that could snap and crackle points of
+fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that could
+grow chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm
+and soften and be all a-dance with love-lights, intense and
+masculine, luring and compelling, which at the same time fascinate
+and dominate women till they surrender in a gladness of joy and of
+relief and sacrifice.
+
+But to return.  I told him that, unhappily for the burial service,
+I was not a preacher, when he sharply demanded:
+
+"What do you do for a living?"
+
+I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had
+I ever canvassed it.  I was quite taken aback, and before I could
+find myself had sillily stammered, "I--I am a gentleman."
+
+His lip curled in a swift sneer.
+
+"I have worked, I do work," I cried impetuously, as though he were
+my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much
+aware of my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.
+
+"For your living?"
+
+There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I
+was quite beside myself--"rattled," as Furuseth would have termed
+it, like a quaking child before a stern school-master.
+
+"Who feeds you?" was his next question.
+
+"I have an income," I answered stoutly, and could have bitten my
+tongue the next instant.  "All of which, you will pardon my
+observing, has nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to see you
+about."
+
+But he disregarded my protest.
+
+"Who earned it?  Eh?  I thought so.  Your father.  You stand on
+dead men's legs.  You've never had any of your own.  You couldn't
+walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly
+for three meals.  Let me see your hand."
+
+His tremendous, dormant strength must have stirred, swiftly and
+accurately, or I must have slept a moment, for before I knew it he
+had stepped two paces forward, gripped my right hand in his, and
+held it up for inspection.  I tried to withdraw it, but his fingers
+tightened, without visible effort, till I thought mine would be
+crushed.  It is hard to maintain one's dignity under such
+circumstances.  I could not squirm or struggle like a schoolboy.
+Nor could I attack such a creature who had but to twist my arm to
+break it.  Nothing remained but to stand still and accept the
+indignity.  I had time to notice that the pockets of the dead man
+had been emptied on the deck, and that his body and his grin had
+been wrapped from view in canvas, the folds of which the sailor,
+Johansen, was sewing together with coarse white twine, shoving the
+needle through with a leather contrivance fitted on the palm of his
+hand.
+
+Wolf Larsen dropped my hand with a flirt of disdain.
+
+"Dead men's hands have kept it soft.  Good for little else than
+dish-washing and scullion work."
+
+"I wish to be put ashore," I said firmly, for I now had myself in
+control.  "I shall pay you whatever you judge your delay and
+trouble to be worth."
+
+He looked at me curiously.  Mockery shone in his eyes.
+
+"I have a counter proposition to make, and for the good of your
+soul.  My mate's gone, and there'll be a lot of promotion.  A
+sailor comes aft to take mate's place, cabin-boy goes for'ard to
+take sailor's place, and you take the cabin-boy's place, sign the
+articles for the cruise, twenty dollars per month and found.  Now
+what do you say?  And mind you, it's for your own soul's sake.  It
+will be the making of you.  You might learn in time to stand on
+your own legs, and perhaps to toddle along a bit."
+
+But I took no notice.  The sails of the vessel I had seen off to
+the south-west had grown larger and plainer.  They were of the same
+schooner-rig as the Ghost, though the hull itself, I could see, was
+smaller.  She was a pretty sight, leaping and flying toward us, and
+evidently bound to pass at close range.  The wind had been
+momentarily increasing, and the sun, after a few angry gleams, had
+disappeared.  The sea had turned a dull leaden grey and grown
+rougher, and was now tossing foaming whitecaps to the sky.  We were
+travelling faster, and heeled farther over.  Once, in a gust, the
+rail dipped under the sea, and the decks on that side were for the
+moment awash with water that made a couple of the hunters hastily
+lift their feet.
+
+"That vessel will soon be passing us," I said, after a moment's
+pause.  "As she is going in the opposite direction, she is very
+probably bound for San Francisco."
+
+"Very probably," was Wolf Larsen's answer, as he turned partly away
+from me and cried out, "Cooky!  Oh, Cooky!"
+
+The Cockney popped out of the galley.
+
+"Where's that boy?  Tell him I want him."
+
+"Yes, sir;" and Thomas Mugridge fled swiftly aft and disappeared
+down another companion-way near the wheel.  A moment later he
+emerged, a heavy-set young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, with a
+glowering, villainous countenance, trailing at his heels.
+
+"'Ere 'e is, sir," the cook said.
+
+But Wolf Larsen ignored that worthy, turning at once to the cabin-
+boy.
+
+"What's your name, boy?
+
+"George Leach, sir," came the sullen answer, and the boy's bearing
+showed clearly that he divined the reason for which he had been
+summoned.
+
+"Not an Irish name," the captain snapped sharply.  "O'Toole or
+McCarthy would suit your mug a damn sight better.  Unless, very
+likely, there's an Irishman in your mother's woodpile."
+
+I saw the young fellow's hands clench at the insult, and the blood
+crawl scarlet up his neck.
+
+"But let that go," Wolf Larsen continued.  "You may have very good
+reasons for forgetting your name, and I'll like you none the worse
+for it as long as you toe the mark.  Telegraph Hill, of course, is
+your port of entry.  It sticks out all over your mug.  Tough as
+they make them and twice as nasty.  I know the kind.  Well, you can
+make up your mind to have it taken out of you on this craft.
+Understand?  Who shipped you, anyway?"
+
+"McCready and Swanson."
+
+"Sir!" Wolf Larsen thundered.
+
+"McCready and Swanson, sir," the boy corrected, his eyes burning
+with a bitter light.
+
+"Who got the advance money?"
+
+"They did, sir."
+
+"I thought as much.  And damned glad you were to let them have it.
+Couldn't make yourself scarce too quick, with several gentlemen you
+may have heard of looking for you."
+
+The boy metamorphosed into a savage on the instant.  His body
+bunched together as though for a spring, and his face became as an
+infuriated beast's as he snarled, "It's a--"
+
+"A what?" Wolf Larsen asked, a peculiar softness in his voice, as
+though he were overwhelmingly curious to hear the unspoken word.
+
+The boy hesitated, then mastered his temper.  "Nothin', sir.  I
+take it back."
+
+"And you have shown me I was right."  This with a gratified smile.
+"How old are you?"
+
+"Just turned sixteen, sir,"
+
+"A lie.  You'll never see eighteen again.  Big for your age at
+that, with muscles like a horse.  Pack up your kit and go for'ard
+into the fo'c'sle.  You're a boat-puller now.  You're promoted;
+see?"
+
+Without waiting for the boy's acceptance, the captain turned to the
+sailor who had just finished the gruesome task of sewing up the
+corpse.  "Johansen, do you know anything about navigation?"
+
+"No, sir,"
+
+"Well, never mind; you're mate just the same.  Get your traps aft
+into the mate's berth."
+
+"Ay, ay, sir," was the cheery response, as Johansen started
+forward.
+
+In the meantime the erstwhile cabin-boy had not moved.  "What are
+you waiting for?" Wolf Larsen demanded.
+
+"I didn't sign for boat-puller, sir," was the reply.  "I signed for
+cabin-boy.  An' I don't want no boat-pullin' in mine."
+
+"Pack up and go for'ard."
+
+This time Wolf Larsen's command was thrillingly imperative.  The
+boy glowered sullenly, but refused to move.
+
+Then came another stirring of Wolf Larsen's tremendous strength.
+It was utterly unexpected, and it was over and done with between
+the ticks of two seconds.  He had sprung fully six feet across the
+deck and driven his fist into the other's stomach.  At the same
+moment, as though I had been struck myself, I felt a sickening
+shock in the pit of my stomach.  I instance this to show the
+sensitiveness of my nervous organization at the time, and how
+unused I was to spectacles of brutality.  The cabin-boy--and he
+weighed one hundred and sixty-five at the very least--crumpled up.
+His body wrapped limply about the fist like a wet rag about a
+stick.  He lifted into the air, described a short curve, and struck
+the deck alongside the corpse on his head and shoulders, where he
+lay and writhed about in agony.
+
+"Well?" Larsen asked of me.  "Have you made up your mind?"
+
+I had glanced occasionally at the approaching schooner, and it was
+now almost abreast of us and not more than a couple of hundred
+yards away.  It was a very trim and neat little craft.  I could see
+a large, black number on one of its sails, and I had seen pictures
+of pilot-boats.
+
+"What vessel is that?" I asked.
+
+"The pilot-boat Lady Mine," Wolf Larsen answered grimly.  "Got rid
+of her pilots and running into San Francisco.  She'll be there in
+five or six hours with this wind."
+
+"Will you please signal it, then, so that I may be put ashore."
+
+"Sorry, but I've lost the signal book overboard," he remarked, and
+the group of hunters grinned.
+
+I debated a moment, looking him squarely in the eyes.  I had seen
+the frightful treatment of the cabin-boy, and knew that I should
+very probably receive the same, if not worse.  As I say, I debated
+with myself, and then I did what I consider the bravest act of my
+life.  I ran to the side, waving my arms and shouting:
+
+"Lady Mine ahoy!  Take me ashore!  A thousand dollars if you take
+me ashore!"
+
+I waited, watching two men who stood by the wheel, one of them
+steering.  The other was lifting a megaphone to his lips.  I did
+not turn my head, though I expected every moment a killing blow
+from the human brute behind me.  At last, after what seemed
+centuries, unable longer to stand the strain, I looked around.  He
+had not moved.  He was standing in the same position, swaying
+easily to the roll of the ship and lighting a fresh cigar.
+
+"What is the matter?  Anything wrong?"
+
+This was the cry from the Lady Mine.
+
+"Yes!" I shouted, at the top of my lungs.  "Life or death!  One
+thousand dollars if you take me ashore!"
+
+"Too much 'Frisco tanglefoot for the health of my crew!" Wolf
+Larsen shouted after.  "This one"--indicating me with his thumb--
+"fancies sea-serpents and monkeys just now!"
+
+The man on the Lady Mine laughed back through the megaphone.  The
+pilot-boat plunged past.
+
+"Give him hell for me!" came a final cry, and the two men waved
+their arms in farewell.
+
+I leaned despairingly over the rail, watching the trim little
+schooner swiftly increasing the bleak sweep of ocean between us.
+And she would probably be in San Francisco in five or six hours!
+My head seemed bursting.  There was an ache in my throat as though
+my heart were up in it.  A curling wave struck the side and
+splashed salt spray on my lips.  The wind puffed strongly, and the
+Ghost heeled far over, burying her lee rail.  I could hear the
+water rushing down upon the deck.
+
+When I turned around, a moment later, I saw the cabin-boy
+staggering to his feet.  His face was ghastly white, twitching with
+suppressed pain.  He looked very sick.
+
+"Well, Leach, are you going for'ard?" Wolf Larsen asked.
+
+"Yes, sir," came the answer of a spirit cowed.
+
+"And you?" I was asked.
+
+"I'll give you a thousand--" I began, but was interrupted.
+
+"Stow that!  Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy?  Or
+do I have to take you in hand?"
+
+What was I to do?  To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps,
+would not help my case.  I looked steadily into the cruel grey
+eyes.  They might have been granite for all the light and warmth of
+a human soul they contained.  One may see the soul stir in some
+men's eyes, but his were bleak, and cold, and grey as the sea
+itself.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Yes," I said.
+
+"Say 'yes, sir.'"
+
+"Yes, sir," I corrected.
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Van Weyden, sir."
+
+"First name?"
+
+"Humphrey, sir; Humphrey Van Weyden."
+
+"Age?"
+
+"Thirty-five, sir."
+
+"That'll do.  Go to the cook and learn your duties."
+
+And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary servitude
+to Wolf Larsen.  He was stronger than I, that was all.  But it was
+very unreal at the time.  It is no less unreal now that I look back
+upon it.  It will always be to me a monstrous, inconceivable thing,
+a horrible nightmare.
+
+"Hold on, don't go yet."
+
+I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.
+
+"Johansen, call all hands.  Now that we've everything cleaned up,
+we'll have the funeral and get the decks cleared of useless
+lumber."
+
+While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors,
+under the captain's direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse upon
+a hatch-cover.  On either side the deck, against the rail and
+bottoms up, were lashed a number of small boats.  Several men
+picked up the hatch-cover with its ghastly freight, carried it to
+the lee side, and rested it on the boats, the feet pointing
+overboard.  To the feet was attached the sack of coal which the
+cook had fetched.
+
+I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and awe-
+inspiring event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial at
+any rate.  One of the hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his
+mates called "Smoke," was telling stories, liberally intersprinkled
+with oaths and obscenities; and every minute or so the group of
+hunters gave mouth to a laughter that sounded to me like a wolf-
+chorus or the barking of hell-hounds.  The sailors trooped noisily
+aft, some of the watch below rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and
+talked in low tones together.  There was an ominous and worried
+expression on their faces.  It was evident that they did not like
+the outlook of a voyage under such a captain and begun so
+inauspiciously.  From time to time they stole glances at Wolf
+Larsen, and I could see that they were apprehensive of the man.
+
+He stepped up to the hatch-cover, and all caps came off.  I ran my
+eyes over them--twenty men all told; twenty-two including the man
+at the wheel and myself.  I was pardonably curious in my survey,
+for it appeared my fate to be pent up with them on this miniature
+floating world for I knew not how many weeks or months.  The
+sailors, in the main, were English and Scandinavian, and their
+faces seemed of the heavy, stolid order.  The hunters, on the other
+hand, had stronger and more diversified faces, with hard lines and
+the marks of the free play of passions.  Strange to say, and I
+noted it all once, Wolf Larsen's features showed no such evil
+stamp.  There seemed nothing vicious in them.  True, there were
+lines, but they were the lines of decision and firmness.  It
+seemed, rather, a frank and open countenance, which frankness or
+openness was enhanced by the fact that he was smooth-shaven.  I
+could hardly believe--until the next incident occurred--that it was
+the face of a man who could behave as he had behaved to the cabin-
+boy.
+
+At this moment, as he opened his mouth to speak, puff after puff
+struck the schooner and pressed her side under.  The wind shrieked
+a wild song through the rigging.  Some of the hunters glanced
+anxiously aloft.  The lee rail, where the dead man lay, was buried
+in the sea, and as the schooner lifted and righted the water swept
+across the deck wetting us above our shoe-tops.  A shower of rain
+drove down upon us, each drop stinging like a hailstone.  As it
+passed, Wolf Larsen began to speak, the bare-headed men swaying in
+unison, to the heave and lunge of the deck.
+
+"I only remember one part of the service," he said, "and that is,
+'And the body shall be cast into the sea.'  So cast it in."
+
+He ceased speaking.  The men holding the hatch-cover seemed
+perplexed, puzzled no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony.  He
+burst upon them in a fury.
+
+"Lift up that end there, damn you!  What the hell's the matter with
+you?"
+
+They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and,
+like a dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the
+sea.  The coal at his feet dragged him down.  He was gone.
+
+"Johansen," Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate, "keep all
+hands on deck now they're here.  Get in the topsails and jibs and
+make a good job of it.  We're in for a sou'-easter.  Better reef
+the jib and mainsail too, while you're about it."
+
+In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders
+and the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts--all
+naturally confusing to a landsman such as myself.  But it was the
+heartlessness of it that especially struck me.  The dead man was an
+episode that was past, an incident that was dropped, in a canvas
+covering with a sack of coal, while the ship sped along and her
+work went on.  Nobody had been affected.  The hunters were laughing
+at a fresh story of Smoke's; the men pulling and hauling, and two
+of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was studying the clouding sky
+to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely, buried sordidly,
+and sinking down, down--
+
+Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and
+awfulness, rushed upon me.  Life had become cheap and tawdry, a
+beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and
+slime.  I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and
+gazed out across the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-
+banks that hid San Francisco and the California coast.  Rain-
+squalls were driving in between, and I could scarcely see the fog.
+And this strange vessel, with its terrible men, pressed under by
+wind and sea and ever leaping up and out, was heading away into the
+south-west, into the great and lonely Pacific expanse.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner Ghost, as I strove
+to fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and
+pain.  The cook, who was called "the doctor" by the crew, "Tommy"
+by the hunters, and "Cooky" by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person.
+The difference worked in my status brought about a corresponding
+difference in treatment from him.  Servile and fawning as he had
+been before, he was now as domineering and bellicose.  In truth, I
+was no longer the fine gentleman with a skin soft as a "lydy's,"
+but only an ordinary and very worthless cabin-boy.
+
+He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and
+his behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my
+duties.  Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state-
+rooms, I was supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my
+colossal ignorance concerning such things as peeling potatoes or
+washing greasy pots was a source of unending and sarcastic wonder
+to him.  He refused to take into consideration what I was, or,
+rather, what my life and the things I was accustomed to had been.
+This was part of the attitude he chose to adopt toward me; and I
+confess, ere the day was done, that I hated him with more lively
+feelings than I had ever hated any one in my life before.
+
+This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that
+the Ghost, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn
+till later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an
+"'owlin' sou'-easter."  At half-past five, under his directions, I
+set the table in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and
+then carried the tea and cooked food down from the galley.  In this
+connection I cannot forbear relating my first experience with a
+boarding sea.
+
+"Look sharp or you'll get doused," was Mr. Mugridge's parting
+injunction, as I left the galley with a big tea-pot in one hand,
+and in the hollow of the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked
+bread.  One of the hunters, a tall, loose-jointed chap named
+Henderson, was going aft at the time from the steerage (the name
+the hunters facetiously gave their midships sleeping quarters) to
+the cabin.  Wolf Larsen was on the poop, smoking his everlasting
+cigar.
+
+"'Ere she comes.  Sling yer 'ook!" the cook cried.
+
+I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley
+door slide shut with a bang.  Then I saw Henderson leaping like a
+madman for the main rigging, up which he shot, on the inside, till
+he was many feet higher than my head.  Also I saw a great wave,
+curling and foaming, poised far above the rail.  I was directly
+under it.  My mind did not work quickly, everything was so new and
+strange.  I grasped that I was in danger, but that was all.  I
+stood still, in trepidation.  Then Wolf Larsen shouted from the
+poop:
+
+"Grab hold something, you--you Hump!"
+
+But it was too late.  I sprang toward the rigging, to which I might
+have clung, and was met by the descending wall of water.  What
+happened after that was very confusing.  I was beneath the water,
+suffocating and drowning.  My feet were out from under me, and I
+was turning over and over and being swept along I knew not where.
+Several times I collided against hard objects, once striking my
+right knee a terrible blow.  Then the flood seemed suddenly to
+subside and I was breathing the good air again.  I had been swept
+against the galley and around the steerage companion-way from the
+weather side into the lee scuppers.  The pain from my hurt knee was
+agonizing.  I could not put my weight on it, or, at least, I
+thought I could not put my weight on it; and I felt sure the leg
+was broken.  But the cook was after me, shouting through the lee
+galley door:
+
+"'Ere, you!  Don't tyke all night about it!  Where's the pot?  Lost
+overboard?  Serve you bloody well right if yer neck was broke!"
+
+I managed to struggle to my feet.  The great tea-pot was still in
+my hand.  I limped to the galley and handed it to him.  But he was
+consumed with indignation, real or feigned.
+
+"Gawd blime me if you ayn't a slob.  Wot 're you good for anyw'y,
+I'd like to know?  Eh?  Wot 're you good for any'wy?  Cawn't even
+carry a bit of tea aft without losin' it.  Now I'll 'ave to boil
+some more.
+
+"An' wot 're you snifflin' about?" he burst out at me, with renewed
+rage.  "'Cos you've 'urt yer pore little leg, pore little mamma's
+darlin'."
+
+I was not sniffling, though my face might well have been drawn and
+twitching from the pain.  But I called up all my resolution, set my
+teeth, and hobbled back and forth from galley to cabin and cabin to
+galley without further mishap.  Two things I had acquired by my
+accident:  an injured knee-cap that went undressed and from which I
+suffered for weary months, and the name of "Hump," which Wolf
+Larsen had called me from the poop.  Thereafter, fore and aft, I
+was known by no other name, until the term became a part of my
+thought-processes and I identified it with myself, thought of
+myself as Hump, as though Hump were I and had always been I.
+
+It was no easy task, waiting on the cabin table, where sat Wolf
+Larsen, Johansen, and the six hunters.  The cabin was small, to
+begin with, and to move around, as I was compelled to, was not made
+easier by the schooner's violent pitching and wallowing.  But what
+struck me most forcibly was the total lack of sympathy on the part
+of the men whom I served.  I could feel my knee through my clothes,
+swelling, and swelling, and I was sick and faint from the pain of
+it.  I could catch glimpses of my face, white and ghastly,
+distorted with pain, in the cabin mirror.  All the men must have
+seen my condition, but not one spoke or took notice of me, till I
+was almost grateful to Wolf Larsen, later on (I was washing the
+dishes), when he said:
+
+"Don't let a little thing like that bother you.  You'll get used to
+such things in time.  It may cripple you some, but all the same
+you'll be learning to walk.
+
+"That's what you call a paradox, isn't it?" he added.
+
+He seemed pleased when I nodded my head with the customary "Yes,
+sir."
+
+"I suppose you know a bit about literary things?  Eh?  Good.  I'll
+have some talks with you some time."
+
+And then, taking no further account of me, he turned his back and
+went up on deck.
+
+That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was
+sent to sleep in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk.  I was
+glad to get out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be
+off my feet.  To my surprise, my clothes had dried on me and there
+seemed no indications of catching cold, either from the last
+soaking or from the prolonged soaking from the foundering of the
+Martinez.  Under ordinary circumstances, after all that I had
+undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a trained nurse.
+
+But my knee was bothering me terribly.  As well as I could make
+out, the kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the
+swelling.  As I sat in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were
+all in the steerage, smoking and talking in loud voices), Henderson
+took a passing glance at it.
+
+"Looks nasty," he commented.  "Tie a rag around it, and it'll be
+all right."
+
+That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad
+of my back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict
+injunctions to do nothing but rest.  But I must do these men
+justice.  Callous as they were to my suffering, they were equally
+callous to their own when anything befell them.  And this was due,
+I believe, first, to habit; and second, to the fact that they were
+less sensitively organized.  I really believe that a finely-
+organized, high-strung man would suffer twice and thrice as much as
+they from a like injury.
+
+Tired as I was,--exhausted, in fact,--I was prevented from sleeping
+by the pain in my knee.  It was all I could do to keep from
+groaning aloud.  At home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my
+anguish; but this new and elemental environment seemed to call for
+a savage repression.  Like the savage, the attitude of these men
+was stoical in great things, childish in little things.  I
+remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the
+hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did
+not even murmur or change the expression on his face.  Yet I have
+seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous
+passion over a trifle.
+
+He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and
+cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with
+another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to
+swim.  He held that it did, that it could swim the moment it was
+born.  The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow
+with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the
+seal pup was born on the land for no other reason than that it
+could not swim, that its mother was compelled to teach it to swim
+as birds were compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.
+
+For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table
+or lay in their bunks and left the discussion to the two
+antagonists.  But they were supremely interested, for every little
+while they ardently took sides, and sometimes all were talking at
+once, till their voices surged back and forth in waves of sound
+like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined space.  Childish and
+immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was
+still more childish and immaterial.  In truth, there was very
+little reasoning or none at all.  Their method was one of
+assertion, assumption, and denunciation.  They proved that a seal
+pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very
+bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing
+man's judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history.
+Rebuttal was precisely similar.  I have related this in order to
+show the mental calibre of the men with whom I was thrown in
+contact.  Intellectually they were children, inhabiting the
+physical forms of men.
+
+And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and
+offensive-smelling tobacco.  The air was thick and murky with the
+smoke of it; and this, combined with the violent movement of the
+ship as she struggled through the storm, would surely have made me
+sea-sick had I been a victim to that malady.  As it was, it made me
+quite squeamish, though this nausea might have been due to the pain
+of my leg and exhaustion.
+
+As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my
+situation.  It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van
+Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things
+artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-
+hunting schooner.  Cabin-boy!  I had never done any hard manual
+labour, or scullion labour, in my life.  I had lived a placid,
+uneventful, sedentary existence all my days--the life of a scholar
+and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income.  Violent life
+and athletic sports had never appealed to me.  I had always been a
+book-worm; so my sisters and father had called me during my
+childhood.  I had gone camping but once in my life, and then I left
+the party almost at its start and returned to the comforts and
+conveniences of a roof.  And here I was, with dreary and endless
+vistas before me of table-setting, potato-peeling, and dish-
+washing.  And I was not strong.  The doctors had always said that I
+had a remarkable constitution, but I had never developed it or my
+body through exercise.  My muscles were small and soft, like a
+woman's, or so the doctors had said time and again in the course of
+their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads.
+But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I
+was, in no fit condition for the rough life in prospect.
+
+These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and
+are related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the
+weak and helpless role I was destined to play.  But I thought,
+also, of my mother and sisters, and pictured their grief.  I was
+among the missing dead of the Martinez disaster, an unrecovered
+body.  I could see the head-lines in the papers; the fellows at the
+University Club and the Bibelot shaking their heads and saying,
+"Poor chap!"  And I could see Charley Furuseth, as I had said good-
+bye to him that morning, lounging in a dressing-gown on the be-
+pillowed window couch and delivering himself of oracular and
+pessimistic epigrams.
+
+And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains
+and falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner
+Ghost was fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of
+the Pacific--and I was on her.  I could hear the wind above.  It
+came to my ears as a muffled roar.  Now and again feet stamped
+overhead.  An endless creaking was going on all about me, the
+woodwork and the fittings groaning and squeaking and complaining in
+a thousand keys.  The hunters were still arguing and roaring like
+some semi-human amphibious breed.  The air was filled with oaths
+and indecent expressions.  I could see their faces, flushed and
+angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly yellow
+of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship.
+Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping dens
+of animals in a menagerie.  Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging
+from the walls, and here and there rifles and shotguns rested
+securely in the racks.  It was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and
+pirates of by-gone years.  My imagination ran riot, and still I
+could not sleep.  And it was a long, long night, weary and dreary
+and long.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+But my first night in the hunters' steerage was also my last.  Next
+day Johansen, the new mate, was routed from the cabin by Wolf
+Larsen, and sent into the steerage to sleep thereafter, while I
+took possession of the tiny cabin state-room, which, on the first
+day of the voyage, had already had two occupants.  The reason for
+this change was quickly learned by the hunters, and became the
+cause of a deal of grumbling on their part.  It seemed that
+Johansen, in his sleep, lived over each night the events of the
+day.  His incessant talking and shouting and bellowing of orders
+had been too much for Wolf Larsen, who had accordingly foisted the
+nuisance upon his hunters.
+
+After a sleepless night, I arose weak and in agony, to hobble
+through my second day on the Ghost.  Thomas Mugridge routed me out
+at half-past five, much in the fashion that Bill Sykes must have
+routed out his dog; but Mr. Mugridge's brutality to me was paid
+back in kind and with interest.  The unnecessary noise he made (I
+had lain wide-eyed the whole night) must have awakened one of the
+hunters; for a heavy shoe whizzed through the semi-darkness, and
+Mr. Mugridge, with a sharp howl of pain, humbly begged everybody's
+pardon.  Later on, in the galley, I noticed that his ear was
+bruised and swollen.  It never went entirely back to its normal
+shape, and was called a "cauliflower ear" by the sailors.
+
+The day was filled with miserable variety.  I had taken my dried
+clothes down from the galley the night before, and the first thing
+I did was to exchange the cook's garments for them.  I looked for
+my purse.  In addition to some small change (and I have a good
+memory for such things), it had contained one hundred and eighty-
+five dollars in gold and paper.  The purse I found, but its
+contents, with the exception of the small silver, had been
+abstracted.  I spoke to the cook about it, when I went on deck to
+take up my duties in the galley, and though I had looked forward to
+a surly answer, I had not expected the belligerent harangue that I
+received.
+
+"Look 'ere, 'Ump," he began, a malicious light in his eyes and a
+snarl in his throat; "d'ye want yer nose punched?  If you think I'm
+a thief, just keep it to yerself, or you'll find 'ow bloody well
+mistyken you are.  Strike me blind if this ayn't gratitude for yer!
+'Ere you come, a pore mis'rable specimen of 'uman scum, an' I tykes
+yer into my galley an' treats yer 'ansom, an' this is wot I get for
+it.  Nex' time you can go to 'ell, say I, an' I've a good mind to
+give you what-for anyw'y."
+
+So saying, he put up his fists and started for me.  To my shame be
+it, I cowered away from the blow and ran out the galley door.  What
+else was I to do?  Force, nothing but force, obtained on this
+brute-ship.  Moral suasion was a thing unknown.  Picture it to
+yourself:  a man of ordinary stature, slender of build, and with
+weak, undeveloped muscles, who has lived a peaceful, placid life,
+and is unused to violence of any sort--what could such a man
+possibly do?  There was no more reason that I should stand and face
+these human beasts than that I should stand and face an infuriated
+bull.
+
+So I thought it out at the time, feeling the need for vindication
+and desiring to be at peace with my conscience.  But this
+vindication did not satisfy.  Nor, to this day can I permit my
+manhood to look back upon those events and feel entirely
+exonerated.  The situation was something that really exceeded
+rational formulas for conduct and demanded more than the cold
+conclusions of reason.  When viewed in the light of formal logic,
+there is not one thing of which to be ashamed; but nevertheless a
+shame rises within me at the recollection, and in the pride of my
+manhood I feel that my manhood has in unaccountable ways been
+smirched and sullied.
+
+All of which is neither here nor there.  The speed with which I ran
+from the galley caused excruciating pain in my knee, and I sank
+down helplessly at the break of the poop.  But the Cockney had not
+pursued me.
+
+"Look at 'im run!  Look at 'im run!" I could hear him crying.  "An'
+with a gyme leg at that!  Come on back, you pore little mamma's
+darling.  I won't 'it yer; no, I won't."
+
+I came back and went on with my work; and here the episode ended
+for the time, though further developments were yet to take place.
+I set the breakfast-table in the cabin, and at seven o'clock waited
+on the hunters and officers.  The storm had evidently broken during
+the night, though a huge sea was still running and a stiff wind
+blowing.  Sail had been made in the early watches, so that the
+Ghost was racing along under everything except the two topsails and
+the flying jib.  These three sails, I gathered from the
+conversation, were to be set immediately after breakfast.  I
+learned, also, that Wolf Larsen was anxious to make the most of the
+storm, which was driving him to the south-west into that portion of
+the sea where he expected to pick up with the north-east trades.
+It was before this steady wind that he hoped to make the major
+portion of the run to Japan, curving south into the tropics and
+north again as he approached the coast of Asia.
+
+After breakfast I had another unenviable experience.  When I had
+finished washing the dishes, I cleaned the cabin stove and carried
+the ashes up on deck to empty them.  Wolf Larsen and Henderson were
+standing near the wheel, deep in conversation.  The sailor,
+Johnson, was steering.  As I started toward the weather side I saw
+him make a sudden motion with his head, which I mistook for a token
+of recognition and good-morning.  In reality, he was attempting to
+warn me to throw my ashes over the lee side.  Unconscious of my
+blunder, I passed by Wolf Larsen and the hunter and flung the ashes
+over the side to windward.  The wind drove them back, and not only
+over me, but over Henderson and Wolf Larsen.  The next instant the
+latter kicked me, violently, as a cur is kicked.  I had not
+realized there could be so much pain in a kick.  I reeled away from
+him and leaned against the cabin in a half-fainting condition.
+Everything was swimming before my eyes, and I turned sick.  The
+nausea overpowered me, and I managed to crawl to the side of the
+vessel.  But Wolf Larsen did not follow me up.  Brushing the ashes
+from his clothes, he had resumed his conversation with Henderson.
+Johansen, who had seen the affair from the break of the poop, sent
+a couple of sailors aft to clean up the mess.
+
+Later in the morning I received a surprise of a totally different
+sort.  Following the cook's instructions, I had gone into Wolf
+Larsen's state-room to put it to rights and make the bed.  Against
+the wall, near the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books.
+I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names as
+Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey.  There were scientific
+works, too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall,
+Proctor, and Darwin.  Astronomy and physics were represented, and I
+remarked Bulfinch's Age of Fable, Shaw's History of English and
+American Literature, and Johnson's Natural History in two large
+volumes.  Then there were a number of grammars, such as Metcalf's,
+and Reed and Kellogg's; and I smiled as I saw a copy of The Dean's
+English.
+
+I could not reconcile these books with the man from what I had seen
+of him, and I wondered if he could possibly read them.  But when I
+came to make the bed I found, between the blankets, dropped
+apparently as he had sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning, the
+Cambridge Edition.  It was open at "In a Balcony," and I noticed,
+here and there, passages underlined in pencil.  Further, letting
+drop the volume during a lurch of the ship, a sheet of paper fell
+out.  It was scrawled over with geometrical diagrams and
+calculations of some sort.
+
+It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as
+one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of
+brutality.  At once he became an enigma.  One side or the other of
+his nature was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together
+were bewildering.  I had already remarked that his language was
+excellent, marred with an occasional slight inaccuracy.  Of course,
+in common speech with the sailors and hunters, it sometimes fairly
+bristled with errors, which was due to the vernacular itself; but
+in the few words he had held with me it had been clear and correct.
+
+This glimpse I had caught of his other side must have emboldened
+me, for I resolved to speak to him about the money I had lost.
+
+"I have been robbed," I said to him, a little later, when I found
+him pacing up and down the poop alone.
+
+"Sir," he corrected, not harshly, but sternly.
+
+"I have been robbed, sir," I amended.
+
+"How did it happen?" he asked.
+
+Then I told him the whole circumstance, how my clothes had been
+left to dry in the galley, and how, later, I was nearly beaten by
+the cook when I mentioned the matter.
+
+He smiled at my recital.  "Pickings," he concluded; "Cooky's
+pickings.  And don't you think your miserable life worth the price?
+Besides, consider it a lesson.  You'll learn in time how to take
+care of your money for yourself.  I suppose, up to now, your lawyer
+has done it for you, or your business agent."
+
+I could feel the quiet sneer through his words, but demanded, "How
+can I get it back again?"
+
+"That's your look-out.  You haven't any lawyer or business agent
+now, so you'll have to depend on yourself.  When you get a dollar,
+hang on to it.  A man who leaves his money lying around, the way
+you did, deserves to lose it.  Besides, you have sinned.  You have
+no right to put temptation in the way of your fellow-creatures.
+You tempted Cooky, and he fell.  You have placed his immortal soul
+in jeopardy.  By the way, do you believe in the immortal soul?"
+
+His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that
+the deeps were opening to me and that I was gazing into his soul.
+But it was an illusion.  Far as it might have seemed, no man has
+ever seen very far into Wolf Larsen's soul, or seen it at all,--of
+this I am convinced.  It was a very lonely soul, I was to learn,
+that never unmasked, though at rare moments it played at doing so.
+
+"I read immortality in your eyes," I answered, dropping the "sir,"-
+-an experiment, for I thought the intimacy of the conversation
+warranted it.
+
+He took no notice.  "By that, I take it, you see something that is
+alive, but that necessarily does not have to live for ever."
+
+"I read more than that," I continued boldly.
+
+"Then you read consciousness.  You read the consciousness of life
+that it is alive; but still no further away, no endlessness of
+life."
+
+How clearly he thought, and how well he expressed what he thought!
+From regarding me curiously, he turned his head and glanced out
+over the leaden sea to windward.  A bleakness came into his eyes,
+and the lines of his mouth grew severe and harsh.  He was evidently
+in a pessimistic mood.
+
+"Then to what end?" he demanded abruptly, turning back to me.  "If
+I am immortal--why?"
+
+I halted.  How could I explain my idealism to this man?  How could
+I put into speech a something felt, a something like the strains of
+music heard in sleep, a something that convinced yet transcended
+utterance?
+
+"What do you believe, then?" I countered.
+
+"I believe that life is a mess," he answered promptly.  "It is like
+yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an
+hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to
+move.  The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the
+strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength.  The lucky
+eat the most and move the longest, that is all.  What do you make
+of those things?"
+
+He swept his am in an impatient gesture toward a number of the
+sailors who were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships.
+
+"They move, so does the jelly-fish move.  They move in order to eat
+in order that they may keep moving.  There you have it.  They live
+for their belly's sake, and the belly is for their sake.  It's a
+circle; you get nowhere.  Neither do they.  In the end they come to
+a standstill.  They move no more.  They are dead."
+
+"They have dreams," I interrupted, "radiant, flashing dreams--"
+
+"Of grub," he concluded sententiously.
+
+"And of more--"
+
+"Grub.  Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying it."  His
+voice sounded harsh.  There was no levity in it.  "For, look you,
+they dream of making lucky voyages which will bring them more
+money, of becoming the mates of ships, of finding fortunes--in
+short, of being in a better position for preying on their fellows,
+of having all night in, good grub and somebody else to do the dirty
+work.  You and I are just like them.  There is no difference,
+except that we have eaten more and better.  I am eating them now,
+and you too.  But in the past you have eaten more than I have.  You
+have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes, and eaten good
+meals.  Who made those beds? and those clothes? and those meals?
+Not you.  You never made anything in your own sweat.  You live on
+an income which your father earned.  You are like a frigate bird
+swooping down upon the boobies and robbing them of the fish they
+have caught.  You are one with a crowd of men who have made what
+they call a government, who are masters of all the other men, and
+who eat the food the other men get and would like to eat
+themselves.  You wear the warm clothes.  They made the clothes, but
+they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business agent who
+handles your money, for a job."
+
+"But that is beside the matter," I cried.
+
+"Not at all."  He was speaking rapidly now, and his eyes were
+flashing.  "It is piggishness, and it is life.  Of what use or
+sense is an immortality of piggishness?  What is the end?  What is
+it all about?  You have made no food.  Yet the food you have eaten
+or wasted might have saved the lives of a score of wretches who
+made the food but did not eat it.  What immortal end did you serve?
+or did they?  Consider yourself and me.  What does your boasted
+immortality amount to when your life runs foul of mine?  You would
+like to go back to the land, which is a favourable place for your
+kind of piggishness.  It is a whim of mine to keep you aboard this
+ship, where my piggishness flourishes.  And keep you I will.  I may
+make or break you.  You may die to-day, this week, or next month.
+I could kill you now, with a blow of my fist, for you are a
+miserable weakling.  But if we are immortal, what is the reason for
+this?  To be piggish as you and I have been all our lives does not
+seem to be just the thing for immortals to be doing.  Again, what's
+it all about?  Why have I kept you here?--"
+
+"Because you are stronger," I managed to blurt out.
+
+"But why stronger?" he went on at once with his perpetual queries.
+"Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you?  Don't you see?
+Don't you see?"
+
+"But the hopelessness of it," I protested.
+
+"I agree with you," he answered.  "Then why move at all, since
+moving is living?  Without moving and being part of the yeast there
+would be no hopelessness.  But,--and there it is,--we want to live
+and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it
+is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move.
+If it were not for this, life would be dead.  It is because of this
+life that is in you that you dream of your immortality.  The life
+that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive for ever.
+Bah!  An eternity of piggishness!"
+
+He abruptly turned on his heel and started forward.  He stopped at
+the break of the poop and called me to him.
+
+"By the way, how much was it that Cooky got away with?" he asked.
+
+"One hundred and eighty-five dollars, sir," I answered.
+
+He nodded his head.  A moment later, as I started down the
+companion stairs to lay the table for dinner, I heard him loudly
+curing some men amidships.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+By the following morning the storm had blown itself quite out and
+the Ghost was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath of
+wind.  Occasional light airs were felt, however, and Wolf Larsen
+patrolled the poop constantly, his eyes ever searching the sea to
+the north-eastward, from which direction the great trade-wind must
+blow.
+
+The men were all on deck and busy preparing their various boats for
+the season's hunting.  There are seven boats aboard, the captain's
+dingey, and the six which the hunters will use.  Three, a hunter, a
+boat-puller, and a boat-steerer, compose a boat's crew.  On board
+the schooner the boat-pullers and steerers are the crew.  The
+hunters, too, are supposed to be in command of the watches,
+subject, always, to the orders of Wolf Larsen.
+
+All this, and more, I have learned.  The Ghost is considered the
+fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets.  In
+fact, she was once a private yacht, and was built for speed.  Her
+lines and fittings--though I know nothing about such things--speak
+for themselves.  Johnson was telling me about her in a short chat I
+had with him during yesterday's second dog-watch.  He spoke
+enthusiastically, with the love for a fine craft such as some men
+feel for horses.  He is greatly disgusted with the outlook, and I
+am given to understand that Wolf Larsen bears a very unsavoury
+reputation among the sealing captains.  It was the Ghost herself
+that lured Johnson into signing for the voyage, but he is already
+beginning to repent.
+
+As he told me, the Ghost is an eighty-ton schooner of a remarkably
+fine model.  Her beam, or width, is twenty-three feet, and her
+length a little over ninety feet.  A lead keel of fabulous but
+unknown weight makes her very stable, while she carries an immense
+spread of canvas.  From the deck to the truck of the maintopmast is
+something over a hundred feet, while the foremast with its topmast
+is eight or ten feet shorter.  I am giving these details so that
+the size of this little floating world which holds twenty-two men
+may be appreciated.  It is a very little world, a mote, a speck,
+and I marvel that men should dare to venture the sea on a
+contrivance so small and fragile.
+
+Wolf Larsen has, also, a reputation for reckless carrying on of
+sail.  I overheard Henderson and another of the hunters, Standish,
+a Californian, talking about it.  Two years ago he dismasted the
+Ghost in a gale on Bering Sea, whereupon the present masts were put
+in, which are stronger and heavier in every way.  He is said to
+have remarked, when he put them in, that he preferred turning her
+over to losing the sticks.
+
+Every man aboard, with the exception of Johansen, who is rather
+overcome by his promotion, seems to have an excuse for having
+sailed on the Ghost.  Half the men forward are deep-water sailors,
+and their excuse is that they did not know anything about her or
+her captain.  And those who do know, whisper that the hunters,
+while excellent shots, were so notorious for their quarrelsome and
+rascally proclivities that they could not sign on any decent
+schooner.
+
+I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew,--Louis he
+is called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a
+very sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a
+listener.  In the afternoon, while the cook was below asleep and I
+was peeling the everlasting potatoes, Louis dropped into the galley
+for a "yarn."  His excuse for being aboard was that he was drunk
+when he signed.  He assured me again and again that it was the last
+thing in the world he would dream of doing in a sober moment.  It
+seems that he has been seal-hunting regularly each season for a
+dozen years, and is accounted one of the two or three very best
+boat-steerers in both fleets.
+
+"Ah, my boy," he shook his head ominously at me, "'tis the worst
+schooner ye could iv selected, nor were ye drunk at the time as was
+I.  'Tis sealin' is the sailor's paradise--on other ships than
+this.  The mate was the first, but mark me words, there'll be more
+dead men before the trip is done with.  Hist, now, between you an'
+meself and the stanchion there, this Wolf Larsen is a regular
+devil, an' the Ghost'll be a hell-ship like she's always ben since
+he had hold iv her.  Don't I know?  Don't I know?  Don't I remember
+him in Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row an' shot four iv
+his men?  Wasn't I a-layin' on the Emma L., not three hundred yards
+away?  An' there was a man the same year he killed with a blow iv
+his fist.  Yes, sir, killed 'im dead-oh.  His head must iv smashed
+like an eggshell.  An' wasn't there the Governor of Kura Island,
+an' the Chief iv Police, Japanese gentlemen, sir, an' didn't they
+come aboard the Ghost as his guests, a-bringin' their wives along--
+wee an' pretty little bits of things like you see 'em painted on
+fans.  An' as he was a-gettin' under way, didn't the fond husbands
+get left astern-like in their sampan, as it might be by accident?
+An' wasn't it a week later that the poor little ladies was put
+ashore on the other side of the island, with nothin' before 'em but
+to walk home acrost the mountains on their weeny-teeny little straw
+sandals which wouldn't hang together a mile?  Don't I know?  'Tis
+the beast he is, this Wolf Larsen--the great big beast mentioned iv
+in Revelation; an' no good end will he ever come to.  But I've said
+nothin' to ye, mind ye.  I've whispered never a word; for old fat
+Louis'll live the voyage out if the last mother's son of yez go to
+the fishes."
+
+"Wolf Larsen!" he snorted a moment later.  "Listen to the word,
+will ye!  Wolf--'tis what he is.  He's not black-hearted like some
+men.  'Tis no heart he has at all.  Wolf, just wolf, 'tis what he
+is.  D'ye wonder he's well named?"
+
+"But if he is so well-known for what he is," I queried, "how is it
+that he can get men to ship with him?"
+
+"An' how is it ye can get men to do anything on God's earth an'
+sea?" Louis demanded with Celtic fire.  "How d'ye find me aboard if
+'twasn't that I was drunk as a pig when I put me name down?
+There's them that can't sail with better men, like the hunters, and
+them that don't know, like the poor devils of wind-jammers for'ard
+there.  But they'll come to it, they'll come to it, an' be sorry
+the day they was born.  I could weep for the poor creatures, did I
+but forget poor old fat Louis and the troubles before him.  But
+'tis not a whisper I've dropped, mind ye, not a whisper."
+
+"Them hunters is the wicked boys," he broke forth again, for he
+suffered from a constitutional plethora of speech.  "But wait till
+they get to cutting up iv jinks and rowin' 'round.  He's the boy'll
+fix 'em.  'Tis him that'll put the fear of God in their rotten
+black hearts.  Look at that hunter iv mine, Horner.  'Jock' Horner
+they call him, so quiet-like an' easy-goin', soft-spoken as a girl,
+till ye'd think butter wouldn't melt in the mouth iv him.  Didn't
+he kill his boat-steerer last year?  'Twas called a sad accident,
+but I met the boat-puller in Yokohama an' the straight iv it was
+given me.  An' there's Smoke, the black little devil--didn't the
+Roosians have him for three years in the salt mines of Siberia, for
+poachin' on Copper Island, which is a Roosian preserve?  Shackled
+he was, hand an' foot, with his mate.  An' didn't they have words
+or a ruction of some kind?--for 'twas the other fellow Smoke sent
+up in the buckets to the top of the mine; an' a piece at a time he
+went up, a leg to-day, an' to-morrow an arm, the next day the head,
+an' so on."
+
+"But you can't mean it!" I cried out, overcome with the horror of
+it.
+
+"Mean what!" he demanded, quick as a flash.  "'Tis nothin' I've
+said.  Deef I am, and dumb, as ye should be for the sake iv your
+mother; an' never once have I opened me lips but to say fine things
+iv them an' him, God curse his soul, an' may he rot in purgatory
+ten thousand years, and then go down to the last an' deepest hell
+iv all!"
+
+Johnson, the man who had chafed me raw when I first came aboard,
+seemed the least equivocal of the men forward or aft.  In fact,
+there was nothing equivocal about him.  One was struck at once by
+his straightforwardness and manliness, which, in turn, were
+tempered by a modesty which might be mistaken for timidity.  But
+timid he was not.  He seemed, rather, to have the courage of his
+convictions, the certainty of his manhood.  It was this that made
+him protest, at the commencement of our acquaintance, against being
+called Yonson.  And upon this, and him, Louis passed judgment and
+prophecy.
+
+"'Tis a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we've for'ard with us,"
+he said.  "The best sailorman in the fo'c'sle.  He's my boat-
+puller.  But it's to trouble he'll come with Wolf Larsen, as the
+sparks fly upward.  It's meself that knows.  I can see it brewin'
+an' comin' up like a storm in the sky.  I've talked to him like a
+brother, but it's little he sees in takin' in his lights or flyin'
+false signals.  He grumbles out when things don't go to suit him,
+and there'll be always some tell-tale carryin' word iv it aft to
+the Wolf.  The Wolf is strong, and it's the way of a wolf to hate
+strength, an' strength it is he'll see in Johnson--no knucklin'
+under, and a 'Yes, sir, thank ye kindly, sir,' for a curse or a
+blow.  Oh, she's a-comin'!  She's a-comin'!  An' God knows where
+I'll get another boat-puller!  What does the fool up an' say, when
+the old man calls him Yonson, but 'Me name is Johnson, sir,' an'
+then spells it out, letter for letter.  Ye should iv seen the old
+man's face!  I thought he'd let drive at him on the spot.  He
+didn't, but he will, an' he'll break that squarehead's heart, or
+it's little I know iv the ways iv men on the ships iv the sea."
+
+Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable.  I am compelled to Mister
+him and to Sir him with every speech.  One reason for this is that
+Wolf Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him.  It is an
+unprecedented thing, I take it, for a captain to be chummy with the
+cook; but this is certainly what Wolf Larsen is doing.  Two or
+three times he put his head into the galley and chaffed Mugridge
+good-naturedly, and once, this afternoon, he stood by the break of
+the poop and chatted with him for fully fifteen minutes.  When it
+was over, and Mugridge was back in the galley, he became greasily
+radiant, and went about his work, humming coster songs in a nerve-
+racking and discordant falsetto.
+
+"I always get along with the officers," he remarked to me in a
+confidential tone.  "I know the w'y, I do, to myke myself uppreci-
+yted.  There was my last skipper--w'y I thought nothin' of droppin'
+down in the cabin for a little chat and a friendly glass.
+'Mugridge,' sez 'e to me, 'Mugridge,' sez 'e, 'you've missed yer
+vokytion.'  'An' 'ow's that?' sez I.  'Yer should 'a been born a
+gentleman, an' never 'ad to work for yer livin'.'  God strike me
+dead, 'Ump, if that ayn't wot 'e sez, an' me a-sittin' there in 'is
+own cabin, jolly-like an' comfortable, a-smokin' 'is cigars an'
+drinkin' 'is rum."
+
+This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction.  I never heard a
+voice I hated so.  His oily, insinuating tones, his greasy smile
+and his monstrous self-conceit grated on my nerves till sometimes I
+was all in a tremble.  Positively, he was the most disgusting and
+loathsome person I have ever met.  The filth of his cooking was
+indescribable; and, as he cooked everything that was eaten aboard,
+I was compelled to select what I ate with great circumspection,
+choosing from the least dirty of his concoctions.
+
+My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work.
+The nails were discoloured and black, while the skin was already
+grained with dirt which even a scrubbing-brush could not remove.
+Then blisters came, in a painful and never-ending procession, and I
+had a great burn on my forearm, acquired by losing my balance in a
+roll of the ship and pitching against the galley stove.  Nor was my
+knee any better.  The swelling had not gone down, and the cap was
+still up on edge.  Hobbling about on it from morning till night was
+not helping it any.  What I needed was rest, if it were ever to get
+well.
+
+Rest!  I never before knew the meaning of the word.  I had been
+resting all my life and did not know it.  But now, could I sit
+still for one half-hour and do nothing, not even think, it would be
+the most pleasurable thing in the world.  But it is a revelation,
+on the other hand.  I shall be able to appreciate the lives of the
+working people hereafter.  I did not dream that work was so
+terrible a thing.  From half-past five in the morning till ten
+o'clock at night I am everybody's slave, with not one moment to
+myself, except such as I can steal near the end of the second dog-
+watch.  Let me pause for a minute to look out over the sea
+sparkling in the sun, or to gaze at a sailor going aloft to the
+gaff-topsails, or running out the bowsprit, and I am sure to hear
+the hateful voice, "'Ere, you, 'Ump, no sodgerin'.  I've got my
+peepers on yer."
+
+There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the
+gossip is going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight.
+Henderson seems the best of the hunters, a slow-going fellow, and
+hard to rouse; but roused he must have been, for Smoke had a
+bruised and discoloured eye, and looked particularly vicious when
+he came into the cabin for supper.
+
+A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the
+callousness and brutishness of these men.  There is one green hand
+in the crew, Harrison by name, a clumsy-looking country boy,
+mastered, I imagine, by the spirit of adventure, and making his
+first voyage.  In the light baffling airs the schooner had been
+tacking about a great deal, at which times the sails pass from one
+side to the other and a man is sent aloft to shift over the fore-
+gaff-topsail.  In some way, when Harrison was aloft, the sheet
+jammed in the block through which it runs at the end of the gaff.
+As I understood it, there were two ways of getting it cleared,--
+first, by lowering the foresail, which was comparatively easy and
+without danger; and second, by climbing out the peak-halyards to
+the end of the gaff itself, an exceedingly hazardous performance.
+
+Johansen called out to Harrison to go out the halyards.  It was
+patent to everybody that the boy was afraid.  And well he might be,
+eighty feet above the deck, to trust himself on those thin and
+jerking ropes.  Had there been a steady breeze it would not have
+been so bad, but the Ghost was rolling emptily in a long sea, and
+with each roll the canvas flapped and boomed and the halyards
+slacked and jerked taut.  They were capable of snapping a man off
+like a fly from a whip-lash.
+
+Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of him,
+but hesitated.  It was probably the first time he had been aloft in
+his life.  Johansen, who had caught the contagion of Wolf Larsen's
+masterfulness, burst out with a volley of abuse and curses.
+
+"That'll do, Johansen," Wolf Larsen said brusquely.  "I'll have you
+know that I do the swearing on this ship.  If I need your
+assistance, I'll call you in."
+
+"Yes, sir," the mate acknowledged submissively.
+
+In the meantime Harrison had started out on the halyards.  I was
+looking up from the galley door, and I could see him trembling, as
+if with ague, in every limb.  He proceeded very slowly and
+cautiously, an inch at a time.  Outlined against the clear blue of
+the sky, he had the appearance of an enormous spider crawling along
+the tracery of its web.
+
+It was a slight uphill climb, for the foresail peaked high; and the
+halyards, running through various blocks on the gaff and mast, gave
+him separate holds for hands and feet.  But the trouble lay in that
+the wind was not strong enough nor steady enough to keep the sail
+full.  When he was half-way out, the Ghost took a long roll to
+windward and back again into the hollow between two seas.  Harrison
+ceased his progress and held on tightly.  Eighty feet beneath, I
+could see the agonized strain of his muscles as he gripped for very
+life.  The sail emptied and the gaff swung amid-ships.  The
+halyards slackened, and, though it all happened very quickly, I
+could see them sag beneath the weight of his body.  Then the gag
+swung to the side with an abrupt swiftness, the great sail boomed
+like a cannon, and the three rows of reef-points slatted against
+the canvas like a volley of rifles.  Harrison, clinging on, made
+the giddy rush through the air.  This rush ceased abruptly.  The
+halyards became instantly taut.  It was the snap of the whip.  His
+clutch was broken.  One hand was torn loose from its hold.  The
+other lingered desperately for a moment, and followed.  His body
+pitched out and down, but in some way he managed to save himself
+with his legs.  He was hanging by them, head downward.  A quick
+effort brought his hands up to the halyards again; but he was a
+long time regaining his former position, where he hung, a pitiable
+object.
+
+"I'll bet he has no appetite for supper," I heard Wolf Larsen's
+voice, which came to me from around the corner of the galley.
+"Stand from under, you, Johansen!  Watch out!  Here she comes!"
+
+In truth, Harrison was very sick, as a person is sea-sick; and for
+a long time he clung to his precarious perch without attempting to
+move.  Johansen, however, continued violently to urge him on to the
+completion of his task.
+
+"It is a shame," I heard Johnson growling in painfully slow and
+correct English.  He was standing by the main rigging, a few feet
+away from me.  "The boy is willing enough.  He will learn if he has
+a chance.  But this is--"  He paused awhile, for the word "murder"
+was his final judgment.
+
+"Hist, will ye!" Louis whispered to him, "For the love iv your
+mother hold your mouth!"
+
+But Johnson, looking on, still continued his grumbling.
+
+"Look here," the hunter Standish spoke to Wolf Larsen, "that's my
+boat-puller, and I don't want to lose him."
+
+"That's all right, Standish," was the reply.  "He's your boat-
+puller when you've got him in the boat; but he's my sailor when I
+have him aboard, and I'll do what I damn well please with him."
+
+"But that's no reason--" Standish began in a torrent of speech.
+
+"That'll do, easy as she goes," Wolf Larsen counselled back.  "I've
+told you what's what, and let it stop at that.  The man's mine, and
+I'll make soup of him and eat it if I want to."
+
+There was an angry gleam in the hunter's eye, but he turned on his
+heel and entered the steerage companion-way, where he remained,
+looking upward.  All hands were on deck now, and all eyes were
+aloft, where a human life was at grapples with death.  The
+callousness of these men, to whom industrial organization gave
+control of the lives of other men, was appalling.  I, who had lived
+out of the whirl of the world, had never dreamed that its work was
+carried on in such fashion.  Life had always seemed a peculiarly
+sacred thing, but here it counted for nothing, was a cipher in the
+arithmetic of commerce.  I must say, however, that the sailors
+themselves were sympathetic, as instance the case of Johnson; but
+the masters (the hunters and the captain) were heartlessly
+indifferent.  Even the protest of Standish arose out of the fact
+that he did not wish to lose his boat-puller.  Had it been some
+other hunter's boat-puller, he, like them, would have been no more
+than amused.
+
+But to return to Harrison.  It took Johansen, insulting and
+reviling the poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started
+again.  A little later he made the end of the gaff, where, astride
+the spar itself, he had a better chance for holding on.  He cleared
+the sheet, and was free to return, slightly downhill now, along the
+halyards to the mast.  But he had lost his nerve.  Unsafe as was
+his present position, he was loath to forsake it for the more
+unsafe position on the halyards.
+
+He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down to
+the deck.  His eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling
+violently.  I had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human
+face.  Johansen called vainly for him to come down.  At any moment
+he was liable to be snapped off the gaff, but he was helpless with
+fright.  Wolf Larsen, walking up and down with Smoke and in
+conversation, took no more notice of him, though he cried sharply,
+once, to the man at the wheel:
+
+"You're off your course, my man!  Be careful, unless you're looking
+for trouble!"
+
+"Ay, ay, sir," the helmsman responded, putting a couple of spokes
+down.
+
+He had been guilty of running the Ghost several points off her
+course in order that what little wind there was should fill the
+foresail and hold it steady.  He had striven to help the
+unfortunate Harrison at the risk of incurring Wolf Larsen's anger.
+
+The time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible.  Thomas
+Mugridge, on the other hand, considered it a laughable affair, and
+was continually bobbing his head out the galley door to make jocose
+remarks.  How I hated him!  And how my hatred for him grew and
+grew, during that fearful time, to cyclopean dimensions.  For the
+first time in my life I experienced the desire to murder--"saw
+red," as some of our picturesque writers phrase it.  Life in
+general might still be sacred, but life in the particular case of
+Thomas Mugridge had become very profane indeed.  I was frightened
+when I became conscious that I was seeing red, and the thought
+flashed through my mind:  was I, too, becoming tainted by the
+brutality of my environment?--I, who even in the most flagrant
+crimes had denied the justice and righteousness of capital
+punishment?
+
+Fully half-an-hour went by, and then I saw Johnson and Louis in
+some sort of altercation.  It ended with Johnson flinging off
+Louis's detaining arm and starting forward.  He crossed the deck,
+sprang into the fore rigging, and began to climb.  But the quick
+eye of Wolf Larsen caught him.
+
+"Here, you, what are you up to?" he cried.
+
+Johnson's ascent was arrested.  He looked his captain in the eyes
+and replied slowly:
+
+"I am going to get that boy down."
+
+"You'll get down out of that rigging, and damn lively about it!
+D'ye hear?  Get down!"
+
+Johnson hesitated, but the long years of obedience to the masters
+of ships overpowered him, and he dropped sullenly to the deck and
+went on forward.
+
+At half after five I went below to set the cabin table, but I
+hardly knew what I did, for my eyes and my brain were filled with
+the vision of a man, white-faced and trembling, comically like a
+bug, clinging to the thrashing gaff.  At six o'clock, when I served
+supper, going on deck to get the food from the galley, I saw
+Harrison, still in the same position.  The conversation at the
+table was of other things.  Nobody seemed interested in the
+wantonly imperilled life.  But making an extra trip to the galley a
+little later, I was gladdened by the sight of Harrison staggering
+weakly from the rigging to the forecastle scuttle.  He had finally
+summoned the courage to descend.
+
+Before closing this incident, I must give a scrap of conversation I
+had with Wolf Larsen in the cabin, while I was washing the dishes.
+
+"You were looking squeamish this afternoon," he began.  "What was
+the matter?"
+
+I could see that he knew what had made me possibly as sick as
+Harrison, that he was trying to draw me, and I answered, "It was
+because of the brutal treatment of that boy."
+
+He gave a short laugh.  "Like sea-sickness, I suppose.  Some men
+are subject to it, and others are not."
+
+"Not so," I objected.
+
+"Just so," he went on.  "The earth is as full of brutality as the
+sea is full of motion.  And some men are made sick by the one, and
+some by the other.  That's the only reason."
+
+"But you, who make a mock of human life, don't you place any value
+upon it whatever?" I demanded.
+
+"Value?  What value?"  He looked at me, and though his eyes were
+steady and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile in them.  "What
+kind of value?  How do you measure it?  Who values it?"
+
+"I do," I made answer.
+
+"Then what is it worth to you?  Another man's life, I mean.  Come
+now, what is it worth?"
+
+The value of life?  How could I put a tangible value upon it?
+Somehow, I, who have always had expression, lacked expression when
+with Wolf Larsen.  I have since determined that a part of it was
+due to the man's personality, but that the greater part was due to
+his totally different outlook.  Unlike other materialists I had met
+and with whom I had something in common to start on, I had nothing
+in common with him.  Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity
+of his mind that baffled me.  He drove so directly to the core of
+the matter, divesting a question always of all superfluous details,
+and with such an air of finality, that I seemed to find myself
+struggling in deep water, with no footing under me.  Value of life?
+How could I answer the question on the spur of the moment?  The
+sacredness of life I had accepted as axiomatic.  That it was
+intrinsically valuable was a truism I had never questioned.  But
+when he challenged the truism I was speechless.
+
+"We were talking about this yesterday," he said.  "I held that life
+was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might
+live, and that living was merely successful piggishness.  Why, if
+there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing
+in the world.  There is only so much water, so much earth, so much
+air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless.
+Nature is a spendthrift.  Look at the fish and their millions of
+eggs.  For that matter, look at you and me.  In our loins are the
+possibilities of millions of lives.  Could we but find time and
+opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn
+life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and
+populate continents.  Life?  Bah!  It has no value.  Of cheap
+things it is the cheapest.  Everywhere it goes begging.  Nature
+spills it out with a lavish hand.  Where there is room for one
+life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the
+strongest and most piggish life is left."
+
+"You have read Darwin," I said.  "But you read him
+misunderstandingly when you conclude that the struggle for
+existence sanctions your wanton destruction of life."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.  "You know you only mean that in
+relation to human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish
+you destroy as much as I or any other man.  And human life is in no
+wise different, though you feel it is and think that you reason why
+it is.  Why should I be parsimonious with this life which is cheap
+and without value?  There are more sailors than there are ships on
+the sea for them, more workers than there are factories or machines
+for them.  Why, you who live on the land know that you house your
+poor people in the slums of cities and loose famine and pestilence
+upon them, and that there still remain more poor people, dying for
+want of a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which is life
+destroyed), than you know what to do with.  Have you ever seen the
+London dockers fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work?"
+
+He started for the companion stairs, but turned his head for a
+final word.  "Do you know the only value life has is what life puts
+upon itself?  And it is of course over-estimated since it is of
+necessity prejudiced in its own favour.  Take that man I had aloft.
+He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond
+diamonds or rubies.  To you?  No.  To me?  Not at all.  To himself?
+Yes.  But I do not accept his estimate.  He sadly overrates
+himself.  There is plenty more life demanding to be born.  Had he
+fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the
+comb, there would have been no loss to the world.  He was worth
+nothing to the world.  The supply is too large.  To himself only
+was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was,
+being dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself.  He alone
+rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies.  Diamonds and rubies are
+gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-
+water, and he does not even know that the diamonds and rubies are
+gone.  He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he
+loses the knowledge of loss.  Don't you see?  And what have you to
+say?"
+
+"That you are at least consistent," was all I could say, and I went
+on washing the dishes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+
+At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the
+north-east trades.  I came on deck, after a good night's rest in
+spite of my poor knee, to find the Ghost foaming along, wing-and-
+wing, and every sail drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze
+astern.  Oh, the wonder of the great trade-wind!  All day we
+sailed, and all night, and the next day, and the next, day after
+day, the wind always astern and blowing steadily and strong.  The
+schooner sailed herself.  There was no pulling and hauling on
+sheets and tackles, no shifting of topsails, no work at all for the
+sailors to do except to steer.  At night when the sun went down,
+the sheets were slackened; in the morning, when they yielded up the
+damp of the dew and relaxed, they were pulled tight again--and that
+was all.
+
+Ten knots, twelve knots, eleven knots, varying from time to time,
+is the speed we are making.  And ever out of the north-east the
+brave wind blows, driving us on our course two hundred and fifty
+miles between the dawns.  It saddens me and gladdens me, the gait
+with which we are leaving San Francisco behind and with which we
+are foaming down upon the tropics.  Each day grows perceptibly
+warmer.  In the second dog-watch the sailors come on deck,
+stripped, and heave buckets of water upon one another from
+overside.  Flying-fish are beginning to be seen, and during the
+night the watch above scrambles over the deck in pursuit of those
+that fall aboard.  In the morning, Thomas Mugridge being duly
+bribed, the galley is pleasantly areek with the odour of their
+frying; while dolphin meat is served fore and aft on such occasions
+as Johnson catches the blazing beauties from the bowsprit end.
+
+Johnson seems to spend all his spare time there or aloft at the
+crosstrees, watching the Ghost cleaving the water under press of
+sail.  There is passion, adoration, in his eyes, and he goes about
+in a sort of trance, gazing in ecstasy at the swelling sails, the
+foaming wake, and the heave and the run of her over the liquid
+mountains that are moving with us in stately procession.
+
+The days and nights are "all a wonder and a wild delight," and
+though I have little time from my dreary work, I steal odd moments
+to gaze and gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the
+world possessed.  Above, the sky is stainless blue--blue as the sea
+itself, which under the forefoot is of the colour and sheen of
+azure satin.  All around the horizon are pale, fleecy clouds, never
+changing, never moving, like a silver setting for the flawless
+turquoise sky.
+
+I do not forget one night, when I should have been asleep, of lying
+on the forecastle-head and gazing down at the spectral ripple of
+foam thrust aside by the Ghost's forefoot.  It sounded like the
+gurgling of a brook over mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the
+crooning song of it lured me away and out of myself till I was no
+longer Hump the cabin-boy, nor Van Weyden, the man who had dreamed
+away thirty-five years among books.  But a voice behind me, the
+unmistakable voice of Wolf Larsen, strong with the invincible
+certitude of the man and mellow with appreciation of the words he
+was quoting, aroused me.
+
+
+"'O the blazing tropic night, when the wake's a welt of light
+That holds the hot sky tame,
+And the steady forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors
+Where the scared whale flukes in flame.
+Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass,
+And her ropes are taut with the dew,
+For we're booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out
+trail,
+We're sagging south on the Long Trail--the trail that is always
+new.'"
+
+
+"Eh, Hump?  How's it strike you?" he asked, after the due pause
+which words and setting demanded.
+
+I looked into his face.  It was aglow with light, as the sea
+itself, and the eyes were flashing in the starshine.
+
+"It strikes me as remarkable, to say the least, that you should
+show enthusiasm," I answered coldly.
+
+"Why, man, it's living! it's life!" he cried.
+
+"Which is a cheap thing and without value."  I flung his words at
+him.
+
+He laughed, and it was the first time I had heard honest mirth in
+his voice.
+
+"Ah, I cannot get you to understand, cannot drive it into your
+head, what a thing this life is.  Of course life is valueless,
+except to itself.  And I can tell you that my life is pretty
+valuable just now--to myself.  It is beyond price, which you will
+acknowledge is a terrific overrating, but which I cannot help, for
+it is the life that is in me that makes the rating."
+
+He appeared waiting for the words with which to express the thought
+that was in him, and finally went on.
+
+"Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all
+time were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine.  I
+know truth, divine good from evil, right from wrong.  My vision is
+clear and far.  I could almost believe in God.  But," and his voice
+changed and the light went out of his face,--"what is this
+condition in which I find myself? this joy of living? this
+exultation of life? this inspiration, I may well call it?  It is
+what comes when there is nothing wrong with one's digestion, when
+his stomach is in trim and his appetite has an edge, and all goes
+well.  It is the bribe for living, the champagne of the blood, the
+effervescence of the ferment--that makes some men think holy
+thoughts, and other men to see God or to create him when they
+cannot see him.  That is all, the drunkenness of life, the stirring
+and crawling of the yeast, the babbling of the life that is insane
+with consciousness that it is alive.  And--bah!  To-morrow I shall
+pay for it as the drunkard pays.  And I shall know that I must die,
+at sea most likely, cease crawling of myself to be all a-crawl with
+the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield
+up all the strength and movement of my muscles that it may become
+strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of fishes.
+Bah!  And bah! again.  The champagne is already flat.  The sparkle
+and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink."
+
+He left me as suddenly as he had come, springing to the deck with
+the weight and softness of a tiger.  The Ghost ploughed on her way.
+I noted the gurgling forefoot was very like a snore, and as I
+listened to it the effect of Wolf Larsen's swift rush from sublime
+exultation to despair slowly left me.  Then some deep-water sailor,
+from the waist of the ship, lifted a rich tenor voice in the "Song
+of the Trade Wind":
+
+
+"Oh, I am the wind the seamen love--
+I am steady, and strong, and true;
+They follow my track by the clouds above,
+O'er the fathomless tropic blue.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Through daylight and dark I follow the bark
+I keep like a hound on her trail;
+I'm strongest at noon, yet under the moon,
+I stiffen the bunt of her sail."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+
+Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of
+his strange moods and vagaries.  At other times I take him for a
+great man, a genius who has never arrived.  And, finally, I am
+convinced that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a
+thousand years or generations too late and an anachronism in this
+culminating century of civilization.  He is certainly an
+individualist of the most pronounced type.  Not only that, but he
+is very lonely.  There is no congeniality between him and the rest
+of the men aboard ship.  His tremendous virility and mental
+strength wall him apart.  They are more like children to him, even
+the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to
+their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies.  Or
+else he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist,
+groping about in their mental processes and examining their souls
+as though to see of what soul-stuff is made.
+
+I have seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter
+or that, with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of
+interest, pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a
+curiosity almost laughable to me who stood onlooker and who
+understood.  Concerning his own rages, I am convinced that they are
+not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the main
+they are the habits of a pose or attitude he has seen fit to take
+toward his fellow-men.  I know, with the possible exception of the
+incident of the dead mate, that I have not seen him really angry;
+nor do I wish ever to see him in a genuine rage, when all the force
+of him is called into play.
+
+While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas
+Mugridge in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident
+upon which I have already touched once or twice.  The twelve
+o'clock dinner was over, one day, and I had just finished putting
+the cabin in order, when Wolf Larsen and Thomas Mugridge descended
+the companion stairs.  Though the cook had a cubby-hole of a state-
+room opening off from the cabin, in the cabin itself he had never
+dared to linger or to be seen, and he flitted to and fro, once or
+twice a day, a timid spectre.
+
+"So you know how to play 'Nap,'" Wolf Larsen was saying in a
+pleased sort of voice.  "I might have guessed an Englishman would
+know.  I learned it myself in English ships."
+
+Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile, so
+pleased was he at chumming thus with the captain.  The little airs
+he put on and the painful striving to assume the easy carriage of a
+man born to a dignified place in life would have been sickening had
+they not been ludicrous.  He quite ignored my presence, though I
+credited him with being simply unable to see me.  His pale, wishy-
+washy eyes were swimming like lazy summer seas, though what
+blissful visions they beheld were beyond my imagination.
+
+"Get the cards, Hump," Wolf Larsen ordered, as they took seats at
+the table.  "And bring out the cigars and the whisky you'll find in
+my berth."
+
+I returned with the articles in time to hear the Cockney hinting
+broadly that there was a mystery about him, that he might be a
+gentleman's son gone wrong or something or other; also, that he was
+a remittance man and was paid to keep away from England--"p'yed
+'ansomely, sir," was the way he put it; "p'yed 'ansomely to sling
+my 'ook an' keep slingin' it."
+
+I had brought the customary liquor glasses, but Wolf Larsen
+frowned, shook his head, and signalled with his hands for me to
+bring the tumblers.  These he filled two-thirds full with undiluted
+whisky--"a gentleman's drink?" quoth Thomas Mugridge,--and they
+clinked their glasses to the glorious game of "Nap," lighted
+cigars, and fell to shuffling and dealing the cards.
+
+They played for money.  They increased the amounts of the bets.
+They drank whisky, they drank it neat, and I fetched more.  I do
+not know whether Wolf Larsen cheated or not,--a thing he was
+thoroughly capable of doing,--but he won steadily.  The cook made
+repeated journeys to his bunk for money.  Each time he performed
+the journey with greater swagger, but he never brought more than a
+few dollars at a time.  He grew maudlin, familiar, could hardly see
+the cards or sit upright.  As a preliminary to another journey to
+his bunk, he hooked Wolf Larsen's buttonhole with a greasy
+forefinger and vacuously proclaimed and reiterated, "I got money, I
+got money, I tell yer, an' I'm a gentleman's son."
+
+Wolf Larsen was unaffected by the drink, yet he drank glass for
+glass, and if anything his glasses were fuller.  There was no
+change in him.  He did not appear even amused at the other's
+antics.
+
+In the end, with loud protestations that he could lose like a
+gentleman, the cook's last money was staked on the game--and lost.
+Whereupon he leaned his head on his hands and wept.  Wolf Larsen
+looked curiously at him, as though about to probe and vivisect him,
+then changed his mind, as from the foregone conclusion that there
+was nothing there to probe.
+
+"Hump," he said to me, elaborately polite, "kindly take Mr.
+Mugridge's arm and help him up on deck.  He is not feeling very
+well."
+
+"And tell Johnson to douse him with a few buckets of salt water,"
+he added, in a lower tone for my ear alone.
+
+I left Mr. Mugridge on deck, in the hands of a couple of grinning
+sailors who had been told off for the purpose.  Mr. Mugridge was
+sleepily spluttering that he was a gentleman's son.  But as I
+descended the companion stairs to clear the table I heard him
+shriek as the first bucket of water struck him.
+
+Wolf Larsen was counting his winnings.
+
+"One hundred and eighty-five dollars even," he said aloud.  "Just
+as I thought.  "The beggar came aboard without a cent."
+
+"And what you have won is mine, sir," I said boldly.
+
+He favoured me with a quizzical smile.  "Hump, I have studied some
+grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled.  'Was
+mine,' you should have said, not 'is mine.'"
+
+"It is a question, not of grammar, but of ethics," I answered.
+
+It was possibly a minute before he spoke.
+
+"D'ye know, Hump," he said, with a slow seriousness which had in it
+an indefinable strain of sadness, "that this is the first time I
+have heard the word 'ethics' in the mouth of a man.  You and I are
+the only men on this ship who know its meaning."
+
+"At one time in my life," he continued, after another pause, "I
+dreamed that I might some day talk with men who used such language,
+that I might lift myself out of the place in life in which I had
+been born, and hold conversation and mingle with men who talked
+about just such things as ethics.  And this is the first time I
+have ever heard the word pronounced.  Which is all by the way, for
+you are wrong.  It is a question neither of grammar nor ethics, but
+of fact."
+
+"I understand," I said.  "The fact is that you have the money."
+
+His face brightened.  He seemed pleased at my perspicacity.  "But
+it is avoiding the real question," I continued, "which is one of
+right."
+
+"Ah," he remarked, with a wry pucker of his mouth, "I see you still
+believe in such things as right and wrong."
+
+"But don't you?--at all?" I demanded.
+
+"Not the least bit.  Might is right, and that is all there is to
+it.  Weakness is wrong.  Which is a very poor way of saying that it
+is good for oneself to be strong, and evil for oneself to be weak--
+or better yet, it is pleasurable to be strong, because of the
+profits; painful to be weak, because of the penalties.  Just now
+the possession of this money is a pleasurable thing.  It is good
+for one to possess it.  Being able to possess it, I wrong myself
+and the life that is in me if I give it to you and forego the
+pleasure of possessing it."
+
+"But you wrong me by withholding it," I objected.
+
+"Not at all.  One man cannot wrong another man.  He can only wrong
+himself.  As I see it, I do wrong always when I consider the
+interests of others.  Don't you see?  How can two particles of the
+yeast wrong each other by striving to devour each other?  It is
+their inborn heritage to strive to devour, and to strive not to be
+devoured.  When they depart from this they sin."
+
+"Then you don't believe in altruism?" I asked.
+
+He received the word as if it had a familiar ring, though he
+pondered it thoughtfully.  "Let me see, it means something about
+cooperation, doesn't it?"
+
+"Well, in a way there has come to be a sort of connection," I
+answered unsurprised by this time at such gaps in his vocabulary,
+which, like his knowledge, was the acquirement of a self-read,
+self-educated man, whom no one had directed in his studies, and who
+had thought much and talked little or not at all.  "An altruistic
+act is an act performed for the welfare of others.  It is
+unselfish, as opposed to an act performed for self, which is
+selfish."
+
+He nodded his head.  "Oh, yes, I remember it now.  I ran across it
+in Spencer."
+
+"Spencer!" I cried.  "Have you read him?"
+
+"Not very much," was his confession.  "I understood quite a good
+deal of First Principles, but his Biology took the wind out of my
+sails, and his Psychology left me butting around in the doldrums
+for many a day.  I honestly could not understand what he was
+driving at.  I put it down to mental deficiency on my part, but
+since then I have decided that it was for want of preparation.  I
+had no proper basis.  Only Spencer and myself know how hard I
+hammered.  But I did get something out of his Data of Ethics.
+There's where I ran across 'altruism,' and I remember now how it
+was used."
+
+I wondered what this man could have got from such a work.  Spencer
+I remembered enough to know that altruism was imperative to his
+ideal of highest conduct.  Wolf Larsen, evidently, had sifted the
+great philosopher's teachings, rejecting and selecting according to
+his needs and desires.
+
+"What else did you run across?" I asked.
+
+His brows drew in slightly with the mental effort of suitably
+phrasing thoughts which he had never before put into speech.  I
+felt an elation of spirit.  I was groping into his soul-stuff as he
+made a practice of groping in the soul-stuff of others.  I was
+exploring virgin territory.  A strange, a terribly strange, region
+was unrolling itself before my eyes.
+
+"In as few words as possible," he began, "Spencer puts it something
+like this:  First, a man must act for his own benefit--to do this
+is to be moral and good.  Next, he must act for the benefit of his
+children.  And third, he must act for the benefit of his race."
+
+"And the highest, finest, right conduct," I interjected, "is that
+act which benefits at the same time the man, his children, and his
+race."
+
+"I wouldn't stand for that," he replied.  "Couldn't see the
+necessity for it, nor the common sense.  I cut out the race and the
+children.  I would sacrifice nothing for them.  It's just so much
+slush and sentiment, and you must see it yourself, at least for one
+who does not believe in eternal life.  With immortality before me,
+altruism would be a paying business proposition.  I might elevate
+my soul to all kinds of altitudes.  But with nothing eternal before
+me but death, given for a brief spell this yeasty crawling and
+squirming which is called life, why, it would be immoral for me to
+perform any act that was a sacrifice.  Any sacrifice that makes me
+lose one crawl or squirm is foolish,--and not only foolish, for it
+is a wrong against myself and a wicked thing.  I must not lose one
+crawl or squirm if I am to get the most out of the ferment.  Nor
+will the eternal movelessness that is coming to me be made easier
+or harder by the sacrifices or selfishnesses of the time when I was
+yeasty and acrawl."
+
+"Then you are an individualist, a materialist, and, logically, a
+hedonist."
+
+"Big words," he smiled.  "But what is a hedonist?"
+
+He nodded agreement when I had given the definition.  "And you are
+also," I continued, "a man one could not trust in the least thing
+where it was possible for a selfish interest to intervene?"
+
+"Now you're beginning to understand," he said, brightening.
+
+"You are a man utterly without what the world calls morals?"
+
+"That's it."
+
+"A man of whom to be always afraid--"
+
+"That's the way to put it."
+
+"As one is afraid of a snake, or a tiger, or a shark?"
+
+"Now you know me," he said.  "And you know me as I am generally
+known.  Other men call me 'Wolf.'"
+
+"You are a sort of monster," I added audaciously, "a Caliban who
+has pondered Setebos, and who acts as you act, in idle moments, by
+whim and fancy."
+
+His brow clouded at the allusion.  He did not understand, and I
+quickly learned that he did not know the poem.
+
+"I'm just reading Browning," he confessed, "and it's pretty tough.
+I haven't got very far along, and as it is I've about lost my
+bearings."
+
+Not to be tiresome, I shall say that I fetched the book from his
+state-room and read "Caliban" aloud.  He was delighted.  It was a
+primitive mode of reasoning and of looking at things that he
+understood thoroughly.  He interrupted again and again with comment
+and criticism.  When I finished, he had me read it over a second
+time, and a third.  We fell into discussion--philosophy, science,
+evolution, religion.  He betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read
+man, and, it must be granted, the sureness and directness of the
+primitive mind.  The very simplicity of his reasoning was its
+strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the
+subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth.  Not that I--a
+confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental idealist--
+was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last
+strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received respect, while
+not accorded conviction.
+
+Time passed.  Supper was at hand and the table not laid.  I became
+restless and anxious, and when Thomas Mugridge glared down the
+companion-way, sick and angry of countenance, I prepared to go
+about my duties.  But Wolf Larsen cried out to him:
+
+"Cooky, you've got to hustle to-night.  I'm busy with Hump, and
+you'll do the best you can without him."
+
+And again the unprecedented was established.  That night I sat at
+table with the captain and the hunters, while Thomas Mugridge
+waited on us and washed the dishes afterward--a whim, a Caliban-
+mood of Wolf Larsen's, and one I foresaw would bring me trouble.
+In the meantime we talked and talked, much to the disgust of the
+hunters, who could not understand a word.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+
+Three days of rest, three blessed days of rest, are what I had with
+Wolf Larsen, eating at the cabin table and doing nothing but
+discuss life, literature, and the universe, the while Thomas
+Mugridge fumed and raged and did my work as well as his own.
+
+"Watch out for squalls, is all I can say to you," was Louis's
+warning, given during a spare half-hour on deck while Wolf Larsen
+was engaged in straightening out a row among the hunters.
+
+"Ye can't tell what'll be happenin'," Louis went on, in response to
+my query for more definite information.  "The man's as contrary as
+air currents or water currents.  You can never guess the ways iv
+him.  'Tis just as you're thinkin' you know him and are makin' a
+favourable slant along him, that he whirls around, dead ahead and
+comes howlin' down upon you and a-rippin' all iv your fine-weather
+sails to rags."
+
+So I was not altogether surprised when the squall foretold by Louis
+smote me.  We had been having a heated discussion,--upon life, of
+course,--and, grown over-bold, I was passing stiff strictures upon
+Wolf Larsen and the life of Wolf Larsen.  In fact, I was
+vivisecting him and turning over his soul-stuff as keenly and
+thoroughly as it was his custom to do it to others.  It may be a
+weakness of mine that I have an incisive way of speech; but I threw
+all restraint to the winds and cut and slashed until the whole man
+of him was snarling.  The dark sun-bronze of his face went black
+with wrath, his eyes were ablaze.  There was no clearness or sanity
+in them--nothing but the terrific rage of a madman.  It was the
+wolf in him that I saw, and a mad wolf at that.
+
+He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm.  I had steeled
+myself to brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly; but the
+enormous strength of the man was too much for my fortitude.  He had
+gripped me by the biceps with his single hand, and when that grip
+tightened I wilted and shrieked aloud.  My feet went out from under
+me.  I simply could not stand upright and endure the agony.  The
+muscles refused their duty.  The pain was too great.  My biceps was
+being crushed to a pulp.
+
+He seemed to recover himself, for a lucid gleam came into his eyes,
+and he relaxed his hold with a short laugh that was more like a
+growl.  I fell to the floor, feeling very faint, while he sat down,
+lighted a cigar, and watched me as a cat watches a mouse.  As I
+writhed about I could see in his eyes that curiosity I had so often
+noted, that wonder and perplexity, that questing, that everlasting
+query of his as to what it was all about.
+
+I finally crawled to my feet and ascended the companion stairs.
+Fair weather was over, and there was nothing left but to return to
+the galley.  My left arm was numb, as though paralysed, and days
+passed before I could use it, while weeks went by before the last
+stiffness and pain went out of it.  And he had done nothing but put
+his hand upon my arm and squeeze.  There had been no wrenching or
+jerking.  He had just closed his hand with a steady pressure.  What
+he might have done I did not fully realize till next day, when he
+put his head into the galley, and, as a sign of renewed
+friendliness, asked me how my arm was getting on.
+
+"It might have been worse," he smiled.
+
+I was peeling potatoes.  He picked one up from the pan.  It was
+fair-sized, firm, and unpeeled.  He closed his hand upon it,
+squeezed, and the potato squirted out between his fingers in mushy
+streams.  The pulpy remnant he dropped back into the pan and turned
+away, and I had a sharp vision of how it might have fared with me
+had the monster put his real strength upon me.
+
+But the three days' rest was good in spite of it all, for it had
+given my knee the very chance it needed.  It felt much better, the
+swelling had materially decreased, and the cap seemed descending
+into its proper place.  Also, the three days' rest brought the
+trouble I had foreseen.  It was plainly Thomas Mugridge's intention
+to make me pay for those three days.  He treated me vilely, cursed
+me continually, and heaped his own work upon me.  He even ventured
+to raise his fist to me, but I was becoming animal-like myself, and
+I snarled in his face so terribly that it must have frightened him
+back.  It is no pleasant picture I can conjure up of myself,
+Humphrey Van Weyden, in that noisome ship's galley, crouched in a
+corner over my task, my face raised to the face of the creature
+about to strike me, my lips lifted and snarling like a dog's, my
+eyes gleaming with fear and helplessness and the courage that comes
+of fear and helplessness.  I do not like the picture.  It reminds
+me too strongly of a rat in a trap.  I do not care to think of it;
+but it was elective, for the threatened blow did not descend.
+
+Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as
+I glared.  A pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and
+showing our teeth.  He was a coward, afraid to strike me because I
+had not quailed sufficiently in advance; so he chose a new way to
+intimidate me.  There was only one galley knife that, as a knife,
+amounted to anything.  This, through many years of service and
+wear, had acquired a long, lean blade.  It was unusually cruel-
+looking, and at first I had shuddered every time I used it.  The
+cook borrowed a stone from Johansen and proceeded to sharpen the
+knife.  He did it with great ostentation, glancing significantly at
+me the while.  He whetted it up and down all day long.  Every odd
+moment he could find he had the knife and stone out and was
+whetting away.  The steel acquired a razor edge.  He tried it with
+the ball of his thumb or across the nail.  He shaved hairs from the
+back of his hand, glanced along the edge with microscopic
+acuteness, and found, or feigned that he found, always, a slight
+inequality in its edge somewhere.  Then he would put it on the
+stone again and whet, whet, whet, till I could have laughed aloud,
+it was so very ludicrous.
+
+It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using it,
+that under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice, like
+mine, that would impel him to do the very thing his whole nature
+protested against doing and was afraid of doing.  "Cooky's
+sharpening his knife for Hump," was being whispered about among the
+sailors, and some of them twitted him about it.  This he took in
+good part, and was really pleased, nodding his head with direful
+foreknowledge and mystery, until George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-
+boy, ventured some rough pleasantry on the subject.
+
+Now it happened that Leach was one of the sailors told off to douse
+Mugridge after his game of cards with the captain.  Leach had
+evidently done his task with a thoroughness that Mugridge had not
+forgiven, for words followed and evil names involving smirched
+ancestries.  Mugridge menaced with the knife he was sharpening for
+me.  Leach laughed and hurled more of his Telegraph Hill
+Billingsgate, and before either he or I knew what had happened, his
+right arm had been ripped open from elbow to wrist by a quick slash
+of the knife.  The cook backed away, a fiendish expression on his
+face, the knife held before him in a position of defence.  But
+Leach took it quite calmly, though blood was spouting upon the deck
+as generously as water from a fountain.
+
+"I'm goin' to get you, Cooky," he said, "and I'll get you hard.
+And I won't be in no hurry about it.  You'll be without that knife
+when I come for you."
+
+So saying, he turned and walked quietly forward.  Mugridge's face
+was livid with fear at what he had done and at what he might expect
+sooner or later from the man he had stabbed.  But his demeanour
+toward me was more ferocious than ever.  In spite of his fear at
+the reckoning he must expect to pay for what he had done, he could
+see that it had been an object-lesson to me, and he became more
+domineering and exultant.  Also there was a lust in him, akin to
+madness, which had come with sight of the blood he had drawn.  He
+was beginning to see red in whatever direction he looked.  The
+psychology of it is sadly tangled, and yet I could read the
+workings of his mind as clearly as though it were a printed book.
+
+Several days went by, the Ghost still foaming down the trades, and
+I could swear I saw madness growing in Thomas Mugridge's eyes.  And
+I confess that I became afraid, very much afraid.  Whet, whet,
+whet, it went all day long.  The look in his eyes as he felt the
+keen edge and glared at me was positively carnivorous.  I was
+afraid to turn my shoulder to him, and when I left the galley I
+went out backwards--to the amusement of the sailors and hunters,
+who made a point of gathering in groups to witness my exit.  The
+strain was too great.  I sometimes thought my mind would give way
+under it--a meet thing on this ship of madmen and brutes.  Every
+hour, every minute of my existence was in jeopardy.  I was a human
+soul in distress, and yet no soul, fore or aft, betrayed sufficient
+sympathy to come to my aid.  At times I thought of throwing myself
+on the mercy of Wolf Larsen, but the vision of the mocking devil in
+his eyes that questioned life and sneered at it would come strong
+upon me and compel me to refrain.  At other times I seriously
+contemplated suicide, and the whole force of my hopeful philosophy
+was required to keep me from going over the side in the darkness of
+night.
+
+Several times Wolf Larsen tried to inveigle me into discussion, but
+I gave him short answers and eluded him.  Finally, he commanded me
+to resume my seat at the cabin table for a time and let the cook do
+my work.  Then I spoke frankly, telling him what I was enduring
+from Thomas Mugridge because of the three days of favouritism which
+had been shown me.  Wolf Larsen regarded me with smiling eyes.
+
+"So you're afraid, eh?" he sneered.
+
+"Yes," I said defiantly and honestly, "I am afraid."
+
+"That's the way with you fellows," he cried, half angrily,
+"sentimentalizing about your immortal souls and afraid to die.  At
+sight of a sharp knife and a cowardly Cockney the clinging of life
+to life overcomes all your fond foolishness.  Why, my dear fellow,
+you will live for ever.  You are a god, and God cannot be killed.
+Cooky cannot hurt you.  You are sure of your resurrection.  What's
+there to be afraid of?
+
+"You have eternal life before you.  You are a millionaire in
+immortality, and a millionaire whose fortune cannot be lost, whose
+fortune is less perishable than the stars and as lasting as space
+or time.  It is impossible for you to diminish your principal.
+Immortality is a thing without beginning or end.  Eternity is
+eternity, and though you die here and now you will go on living
+somewhere else and hereafter.  And it is all very beautiful, this
+shaking off of the flesh and soaring of the imprisoned spirit.
+Cooky cannot hurt you.  He can only give you a boost on the path
+you eternally must tread.
+
+"Or, if you do not wish to be boosted just yet, why not boost
+Cooky?  According to your ideas, he, too, must be an immortal
+millionaire.  You cannot bankrupt him.  His paper will always
+circulate at par.  You cannot diminish the length of his living by
+killing him, for he is without beginning or end.  He's bound to go
+on living, somewhere, somehow.  Then boost him.  Stick a knife in
+him and let his spirit free.  As it is, it's in a nasty prison, and
+you'll do him only a kindness by breaking down the door.  And who
+knows?--it may be a very beautiful spirit that will go soaring up
+into the blue from that ugly carcass.  Boost him along, and I'll
+promote you to his place, and he's getting forty-five dollars a
+month."
+
+It was plain that I could look for no help or mercy from Wolf
+Larsen.  Whatever was to be done I must do for myself; and out of
+the courage of fear I evolved the plan of fighting Thomas Mugridge
+with his own weapons.  I borrowed a whetstone from Johansen.
+Louis, the boat-steerer, had already begged me for condensed milk
+and sugar.  The lazarette, where such delicacies were stored, was
+situated beneath the cabin floor.  Watching my chance, I stole five
+cans of the milk, and that night, when it was Louis's watch on
+deck, I traded them with him for a dirk as lean and cruel-looking
+as Thomas Mugridge's vegetable knife.  It was rusty and dull, but I
+turned the grindstone while Louis gave it an edge.  I slept more
+soundly than usual that night.
+
+Next morning, after breakfast, Thomas Mugridge began his whet,
+whet, whet.  I glanced warily at him, for I was on my knees taking
+the ashes from the stove.  When I returned from throwing them
+overside, he was talking to Harrison, whose honest yokel's face was
+filled with fascination and wonder.
+
+"Yes," Mugridge was saying, "an' wot does 'is worship do but give
+me two years in Reading.  But blimey if I cared.  The other mug was
+fixed plenty.  Should 'a seen 'im.  Knife just like this.  I stuck
+it in, like into soft butter, an' the w'y 'e squealed was better'n
+a tu-penny gaff."  He shot a glance in my direction to see if I was
+taking it in, and went on.  "'I didn't mean it Tommy,' 'e was
+snifflin'; 'so 'elp me Gawd, I didn't mean it!'  "'I'll fix yer
+bloody well right,' I sez, an' kept right after 'im.  I cut 'im in
+ribbons, that's wot I did, an' 'e a-squealin' all the time.  Once
+'e got 'is 'and on the knife an' tried to 'old it.  'Ad 'is fingers
+around it, but I pulled it through, cuttin' to the bone.  O, 'e was
+a sight, I can tell yer."
+
+A call from the mate interrupted the gory narrative, and Harrison
+went aft.  Mugridge sat down on the raised threshold to the galley
+and went on with his knife-sharpening.  I put the shovel away and
+calmly sat down on the coal-box facing him.  He favoured me with a
+vicious stare.  Still calmly, though my heart was going pitapat, I
+pulled out Louis's dirk and began to whet it on the stone.  I had
+looked for almost any sort of explosion on the Cockney's part, but
+to my surprise he did not appear aware of what I was doing.  He
+went on whetting his knife.  So did I.  And for two hours we sat
+there, face to face, whet, whet, whet, till the news of it spread
+abroad and half the ship's company was crowding the galley doors to
+see the sight.
+
+Encouragement and advice were freely tendered, and Jock Horner, the
+quiet, self-spoken hunter who looked as though he would not harm a
+mouse, advised me to leave the ribs alone and to thrust upward for
+the abdomen, at the same time giving what he called the "Spanish
+twist" to the blade.  Leach, his bandaged arm prominently to the
+fore, begged me to leave a few remnants of the cook for him; and
+Wolf Larsen paused once or twice at the break of the poop to glance
+curiously at what must have been to him a stirring and crawling of
+the yeasty thing he knew as life.
+
+And I make free to say that for the time being life assumed the
+same sordid values to me.  There was nothing pretty about it,
+nothing divine--only two cowardly moving things that sat whetting
+steel upon stone, and a group of other moving things, cowardly and
+otherwise, that looked on.  Half of them, I am sure, were anxious
+to see us shedding each other's blood.  It would have been
+entertainment.  And I do not think there was one who would have
+interfered had we closed in a death-struggle.
+
+On the other hand, the whole thing was laughable and childish.
+Whet, whet, whet,--Humphrey Van Weyden sharpening his knife in a
+ship's galley and trying its edge with his thumb!  Of all
+situations this was the most inconceivable.  I know that my own
+kind could not have believed it possible.  I had not been called
+"Sissy" Van Weyden all my days without reason, and that "Sissy" Van
+Weyden should be capable of doing this thing was a revelation to
+Humphrey Van Weyden, who knew not whether to be exultant or
+ashamed.
+
+But nothing happened.  At the end of two hours Thomas Mugridge put
+away knife and stone and held out his hand.
+
+"Wot's the good of mykin' a 'oly show of ourselves for them mugs?"
+he demanded.  "They don't love us, an' bloody well glad they'd be
+a-seein' us cuttin' our throats.  Yer not 'arf bad, 'Ump!  You've
+got spunk, as you Yanks s'y, an' I like yer in a w'y.  So come on
+an' shyke."
+
+Coward that I might be, I was less a coward than he.  It was a
+distinct victory I had gained, and I refused to forego any of it by
+shaking his detestable hand.
+
+"All right," he said pridelessly, "tyke it or leave it, I'll like
+yer none the less for it."  And to save his face he turned fiercely
+upon the onlookers.  "Get outa my galley-doors, you bloomin'
+swabs!"
+
+This command was reinforced by a steaming kettle of water, and at
+sight of it the sailors scrambled out of the way.  This was a sort
+of victory for Thomas Mugridge, and enabled him to accept more
+gracefully the defeat I had given him, though, of course, he was
+too discreet to attempt to drive the hunters away.
+
+"I see Cooky's finish," I heard Smoke say to Horner.
+
+"You bet," was the reply.  "Hump runs the galley from now on, and
+Cooky pulls in his horns."
+
+Mugridge heard and shot a swift glance at me, but I gave no sign
+that the conversation had reached me.  I had not thought my victory
+was so far-reaching and complete, but I resolved to let go nothing
+I had gained.  As the days went by, Smoke's prophecy was verified.
+The Cockney became more humble and slavish to me than even to Wolf
+Larsen.  I mistered him and sirred him no longer, washed no more
+greasy pots, and peeled no more potatoes.  I did my own work, and
+my own work only, and when and in what fashion I saw fit.  Also I
+carried the dirk in a sheath at my hip, sailor-fashion, and
+maintained toward Thomas Mugridge a constant attitude which was
+composed of equal parts of domineering, insult, and contempt.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+
+My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases--if by intimacy may be
+denoted those relations which exist between master and man, or,
+better yet, between king and jester.  I am to him no more than a
+toy, and he values me no more than a child values a toy.  My
+function is to amuse, and so long as I amuse all goes well; but let
+him become bored, or let him have one of his black moods come upon
+him, and at once I am relegated from cabin table to galley, while,
+at the same time, I am fortunate to escape with my life and a whole
+body.
+
+The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me.  There
+is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom
+he does not despise.  He seems consuming with the tremendous power
+that is in him and that seems never to have found adequate
+expression in works.  He is as Lucifer would be, were that proud
+spirit banished to a society of soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.
+
+This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he
+is oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race.  Knowing him, I
+review the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding.  The
+white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible
+pantheon were of the same fibre as he.  The frivolity of the
+laughter-loving Latins is no part of him.  When he laughs it is
+from a humour that is nothing else than ferocious.  But he laughs
+rarely; he is too often sad.  And it is a sadness as deep-reaching
+as the roots of the race.  It is the race heritage, the sadness
+which has made the race sober-minded, clean-lived and fanatically
+moral, and which, in this latter connection, has culminated among
+the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.
+
+In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been
+religion in its more agonizing forms.  But the compensations of
+such religion are denied Wolf Larsen.  His brutal materialism will
+not permit it.  So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remains
+for him, but to be devilish.  Were he not so terrible a man, I
+could sometimes feel sorry for him, as instance three mornings ago,
+when I went into his stateroom to fill his water-bottle and came
+unexpectedly upon him.  He did not see me.  His head was buried in
+his hands, and his shoulders were heaving convulsively as with
+sobs.  He seemed torn by some mighty grief.  As I softly withdrew I
+could hear him groaning, "God!  God!  God!"  Not that he was
+calling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from his
+soul.
+
+At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by
+evening, strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling
+about the cabin.
+
+"I've never been sick in my life, Hump," he said, as I guided him
+to his room.  "Nor did I ever have a headache except the time my
+head was healing after having been laid open for six inches by a
+capstan-bar."
+
+For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as
+wild animals suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer,
+without plaint, without sympathy, utterly alone.
+
+This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed
+and put things in order, I found him well and hard at work.  Table
+and bunk were littered with designs and calculations.  On a large
+transparent sheet, compass and square in hand, he was copying what
+appeared to be a scale of some sort or other.
+
+"Hello, Hump," he greeted me genially.  "I'm just finishing the
+finishing touches.  Want to see it work?"
+
+"But what is it?" I asked.
+
+"A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to
+kindergarten simplicity," he answered gaily.  "From to-day a child
+will be able to navigate a ship.  No more long-winded calculations.
+All you need is one star in the sky on a dirty night to know
+instantly where you are.  Look.  I place the transparent scale on
+this star-map, revolving the scale on the North Pole.  On the scale
+I've worked out the circles of altitude and the lines of bearing.
+All I do is to put it on a star, revolve the scale till it is
+opposite those figures on the map underneath, and presto! there you
+are, the ship's precise location!"
+
+There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear blue
+this morning as the sea, were sparkling with light.
+
+"You must be well up in mathematics," I said.  "Where did you go to
+school?"
+
+"Never saw the inside of one, worse luck," was the answer.  "I had
+to dig it out for myself."
+
+"And why do you think I have made this thing?" he demanded,
+abruptly.  "Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?"  He
+laughed one of his horrible mocking laughs.  "Not at all.  To get
+it patented, to make money from it, to revel in piggishness with
+all night in while other men do the work.  That's my purpose.
+Also, I have enjoyed working it out."
+
+"The creative joy," I murmured.
+
+"I guess that's what it ought to be called.  Which is another way
+of expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of
+movement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the
+yeast because it is yeast and crawls."
+
+I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate
+materialism and went about making the bed.  He continued copying
+lines and figures upon the transparent scale.  It was a task
+requiring the utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but
+admire the way he tempered his strength to the fineness and
+delicacy of the need.
+
+When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a
+fascinated sort of way.  He was certainly a handsome man--beautiful
+in the masculine sense.  And again, with never-failing wonder, I
+remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or
+sinfulness in his face.  It was the face, I am convinced, of a man
+who did no wrong.  And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood.
+What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing
+contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no
+conscience.  I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it.
+He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was
+of the type that came into the world before the development of the
+moral nature.  He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.
+
+As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face.
+Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and
+sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair
+skin to a dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added
+both to his savagery and his beauty.  The lips were full, yet
+possessed of the firmness, almost harshness, which is
+characteristic of thin lips.  The set of his mouth, his chin, his
+jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness and
+indomitableness of the male--the nose also.  It was the nose of a
+being born to conquer and command.  It just hinted of the eagle
+beak.  It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, only
+it was a shade too massive for the one, a shade too delicate for
+the other.  And while the whole face was the incarnation of
+fierceness and strength, the primal melancholy from which he
+suffered seemed to greaten the lines of mouth and eye and brow,
+seemed to give a largeness and completeness which otherwise the
+face would have lacked.
+
+And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him.  I cannot
+say how greatly the man had come to interest me.  Who was he?  What
+was he?  How had he happened to be?  All powers seemed his, all
+potentialities--why, then, was he no more than the obscure master
+of a seal-hunting schooner with a reputation for frightful
+brutality amongst the men who hunted seals?
+
+My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech.
+
+"Why is it that you have not done great things in this world?  With
+the power that is yours you might have risen to any height.
+Unpossessed of conscience or moral instinct, you might have
+mastered the world, broken it to your hand.  And yet here you are,
+at the top of your life, where diminishing and dying begin, living
+an obscure and sordid existence, hunting sea animals for the
+satisfaction of woman's vanity and love of decoration, revelling in
+a piggishness, to use your own words, which is anything and
+everything except splendid.  Why, with all that wonderful strength,
+have you not done something?  There was nothing to stop you,
+nothing that could stop you.  What was wrong?  Did you lack
+ambition?  Did you fall under temptation?  What was the matter?
+What was the matter?"
+
+He had lifted his eyes to me at the commencement of my outburst,
+and followed me complacently until I had done and stood before him
+breathless and dismayed.  He waited a moment, as though seeking
+where to begin, and then said:
+
+"Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth to sow?
+If you will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony places,
+where there was not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up
+because they had no deepness of earth.  And when the sun was up
+they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered
+away.  And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up and
+choked them."
+
+"Well?" I said.
+
+"Well?" he queried, half petulantly.  "It was not well.  I was one
+of those seeds."
+
+He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying.  I
+finished my work and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke to
+me.
+
+"Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway you
+will see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord.  I was born within a
+hundred miles of that stretch of water.  But I was not born
+Norwegian.  I am a Dane.  My father and mother were Danes, and how
+they ever came to that bleak bight of land on the west coast I do
+not know.  I never heard.  Outside of that there is nothing
+mysterious.  They were poor people and unlettered.  They came of
+generations of poor unlettered people--peasants of the sea who
+sowed their sons on the waves as has been their custom since time
+began.  There is no more to tell."
+
+"But there is," I objected.  "It is still obscure to me."
+
+"What can I tell you?" he demanded, with a recrudescence of
+fierceness.  "Of the meagreness of a child's life? of fish diet and
+coarse living? of going out with the boats from the time I could
+crawl? of my brothers, who went away one by one to the deep-sea
+farming and never came back? of myself, unable to read or write,
+cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the coastwise, old-country
+ships? of the rough fare and rougher usage, where kicks and blows
+were bed and breakfast and took the place of speech, and fear and
+hatred and pain were my only soul-experiences?  I do not care to
+remember.  A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think of
+it.  But there were coastwise skippers I would have returned and
+killed when a man's strength came to me, only the lines of my life
+were cast at the time in other places.  I did return, not long ago,
+but unfortunately the skippers were dead, all but one, a mate in
+the old days, a skipper when I met him, and when I left him a
+cripple who would never walk again."
+
+"But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the inside
+of a school, how did you learn to read and write?" I queried.
+
+"In the English merchant service.  Cabin-boy at twelve, ship's boy
+at fourteen, ordinary seamen at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen,
+and cock of the fo'c'sle, infinite ambition and infinite
+loneliness, receiving neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for
+myself--navigation, mathematics, science, literature, and what not.
+And of what use has it been?  Master and owner of a ship at the top
+of my life, as you say, when I am beginning to diminish and die.
+Paltry, isn't it?  And when the sun was up I was scorched, and
+because I had no root I withered away."
+
+"But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple," I chided.
+
+"And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who
+rose to the purple," he answered grimly.  "No man makes
+opportunity.  All the great men ever did was to know it when it
+came to them.  The Corsican knew.  I have dreamed as greatly as the
+Corsican.  I should have known the opportunity, but it never came.
+The thorns sprung up and choked me.  And, Hump, I can tell you that
+you know more about me than any living man, except my own brother."
+
+"And what is he?  And where is he?"
+
+"Master of the steamship Macedonia, seal-hunter," was the answer.
+"We will meet him most probably on the Japan coast.  Men call him
+'Death' Larsen."
+
+"Death Larsen!" I involuntarily cried.  "Is he like you?"
+
+"Hardly.  He is a lump of an animal without any head.  He has all
+my--my--"
+
+"Brutishness," I suggested.
+
+"Yes,--thank you for the word,--all my brutishness, but he can
+scarcely read or write."
+
+"And he has never philosophized on life," I added.
+
+"No," Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness.
+"And he is all the happier for leaving life alone.  He is too busy
+living it to think about it.  My mistake was in ever opening the
+books."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+
+The Ghost has attained the southernmost point of the arc she is
+describing across the Pacific, and is already beginning to edge
+away to the west and north toward some lone island, it is rumoured,
+where she will fill her water-casks before proceeding to the
+season's hunt along the coast of Japan.  The hunters have
+experimented and practised with their rifles and shotguns till they
+are satisfied, and the boat-pullers and steerers have made their
+spritsails, bound the oars and rowlocks in leather and sennit so
+that they will make no noise when creeping on the seals, and put
+their boats in apple-pie order--to use Leach's homely phrase.
+
+His arm, by the way, has healed nicely, though the scar will remain
+all his life.  Thomas Mugridge lives in mortal fear of him, and is
+afraid to venture on deck after dark.  There are two or three
+standing quarrels in the forecastle.  Louis tells me that the
+gossip of the sailors finds its way aft, and that two of the
+telltales have been badly beaten by their mates.  He shakes his
+head dubiously over the outlook for the man Johnson, who is boat-
+puller in the same boat with him.  Johnson has been guilty of
+speaking his mind too freely, and has collided two or three times
+with Wolf Larsen over the pronunciation of his name.  Johansen he
+thrashed on the amidships deck the other night, since which time
+the mate has called him by his proper name.  But of course it is
+out of the question that Johnson should thrash Wolf Larsen.
+
+Louis has also given me additional information about Death Larsen,
+which tallies with the captain's brief description.  We may expect
+to meet Death Larsen on the Japan coast.  "And look out for
+squalls," is Louis's prophecy, "for they hate one another like the
+wolf whelps they are."  Death Larsen is in command of the only
+sealing steamer in the fleet, the Macedonia, which carries fourteen
+boats, whereas the rest of the schooners carry only six.  There is
+wild talk of cannon aboard, and of strange raids and expeditions
+she may make, ranging from opium smuggling into the States and arms
+smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open piracy.  Yet I
+cannot but believe for I have never yet caught him in a lie, while
+he has a cyclopaedic knowledge of sealing and the men of the
+sealing fleets.
+
+As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and
+aft, on this veritable hell-ship.  Men fight and struggle
+ferociously for one another's lives.  The hunters are looking for a
+shooting scrape at any moment between Smoke and Henderson, whose
+old quarrel has not healed, while Wolf Larsen says positively that
+he will kill the survivor of the affair, if such affair comes off.
+He frankly states that the position he takes is based on no moral
+grounds, that all the hunters could kill and eat one another so far
+as he is concerned, were it not that he needs them alive for the
+hunting.  If they will only hold their hands until the season is
+over, he promises them a royal carnival, when all grudges can he
+settled and the survivors may toss the non-survivors overboard and
+arrange a story as to how the missing men were lost at sea.  I
+think even the hunters are appalled at his cold-bloodedness.
+Wicked men though they be, they are certainly very much afraid of
+him.
+
+Thomas Mugridge is cur-like in his subjection to me, while I go
+about in secret dread of him.  His is the courage of fear,--a
+strange thing I know well of myself,--and at any moment it may
+master the fear and impel him to the taking of my life.  My knee is
+much better, though it often aches for long periods, and the
+stiffness is gradually leaving the arm which Wolf Larsen squeezed.
+Otherwise I am in splendid condition, feel that I am in splendid
+condition.  My muscles are growing harder and increasing in size.
+My hands, however, are a spectacle for grief.  They have a
+parboiled appearance, are afflicted with hang-nails, while the
+nails are broken and discoloured, and the edges of the quick seem
+to be assuming a fungoid sort of growth.  Also, I am suffering from
+boils, due to the diet, most likely, for I was never afflicted in
+this manner before.
+
+I was amused, a couple of evenings back, by seeing Wolf Larsen
+reading the Bible, a copy of which, after the futile search for one
+at the beginning of the voyage, had been found in the dead mate's
+sea-chest.  I wondered what Wolf Larsen could get from it, and he
+read aloud to me from Ecclesiastes.  I could imagine he was
+speaking the thoughts of his own mind as he read to me, and his
+voice, reverberating deeply and mournfully in the confined cabin,
+charmed and held me.  He may be uneducated, but he certainly knows
+how to express the significance of the written word.  I can hear
+him now, as I shall always hear him, the primal melancholy vibrant
+in his voice as he read:
+
+
+"I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of
+kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers,
+and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and
+that of all sorts.
+
+"So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in
+Jerusalem; also my wisdom returned with me.
+
+"Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on
+the labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity
+and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.
+
+"All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous
+and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the
+unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not;
+as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that
+feareth an oath.
+
+"This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that
+there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men
+is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and
+after that they go to the dead.
+
+"For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a
+living dog is better than a dead lion.
+
+"For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not
+anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of
+them is forgotten.
+
+"Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now
+perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything
+that is done under the sun."
+
+
+"There you have it, Hump," he said, closing the book upon his
+finger and looking up at me.  "The Preacher who was king over
+Israel in Jerusalem thought as I think.  You call me a pessimist.
+Is not this pessimism of the blackest?--'All is vanity and vexation
+of spirit,' 'There is no profit under the sun,' 'There is one event
+unto all,' to the fool and the wise, the clean and the unclean, the
+sinner and the saint, and that event is death, and an evil thing,
+he says.  For the Preacher loved life, and did not want to die,
+saying, 'For a living dog is better than a dead lion.'  He
+preferred the vanity and vexation to the silence and unmovableness
+of the grave.  And so I.  To crawl is piggish; but to not crawl, to
+be as the clod and rock, is loathsome to contemplate.  It is
+loathsome to the life that is in me, the very essence of which is
+movement, the power of movement, and the consciousness of the power
+of movement.  Life itself is unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to
+death is greater unsatisfaction."
+
+"You are worse off than Omar," I said.  "He, at least, after the
+customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his
+materialism a joyous thing."
+
+"Who was Omar?" Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more work that day,
+nor the next, nor the next.
+
+In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rubaiyat, and
+it was to him like a great find of treasure.  Much I remembered,
+possibly two-thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out
+the remainder without difficulty.  We talked for hours over single
+stanzas, and I found him reading into them a wail of regret and a
+rebellion which, for the life of me, I could not discover myself.
+Possibly I recited with a certain joyous lilt which was my own,
+for--his memory was good, and at a second rendering, very often the
+first, he made a quatrain his own--he recited the same lines and
+invested them with an unrest and passionate revolt that was well-
+nigh convincing.
+
+I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was
+not surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant's
+irritability, and quite at variance with the Persian's complacent
+philosophy and genial code of life:
+
+
+"What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
+And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
+Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
+Must drown the memory of that insolence!"
+
+
+"Great!" Wolf Larsen cried.  "Great!  That's the keynote.
+Insolence!  He could not have used a better word."
+
+In vain I objected and denied.  He deluged me, overwhelmed me with
+argument.
+
+"It's not the nature of life to be otherwise.  Life, when it knows
+that it must cease living, will always rebel.  It cannot help
+itself.  The Preacher found life and the works of life all a vanity
+and vexation, an evil thing; but death, the ceasing to be able to
+be vain and vexed, he found an eviler thing.  Through chapter after
+chapter he is worried by the one event that cometh to all alike.
+So Omar, so I, so you, even you, for you rebelled against dying
+when Cooky sharpened a knife for you.  You were afraid to die; the
+life that was in you, that composes you, that is greater than you,
+did not want to die.  You have talked of the instinct of
+immortality.  I talk of the instinct of life, which is to live, and
+which, when death looms near and large, masters the instinct, so
+called, of immortality.  It mastered it in you (you cannot deny
+it), because a crazy Cockney cook sharpened a knife.
+
+"You are afraid of him now.  You are afraid of me.  You cannot deny
+it.  If I should catch you by the throat, thus,"--his hand was
+about my throat and my breath was shut off,--"and began to press
+the life out of you thus, and thus, your instinct of immortality
+will go glimmering, and your instinct of life, which is longing for
+life, will flutter up, and you will struggle to save yourself.  Eh?
+I see the fear of death in your eyes.  You beat the air with your
+arms.  You exert all your puny strength to struggle to live.  Your
+hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as a butterfly resting
+there.  Your chest is heaving, your tongue protruding, your skin
+turning dark, your eyes swimming.  'To live!  To live!  To live!'
+you are crying; and you are crying to live here and now, not
+hereafter.  You doubt your immortality, eh?  Ha! ha!  You are not
+sure of it.  You won't chance it.  This life only you are certain
+is real.  Ah, it is growing dark and darker.  It is the darkness of
+death, the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move,
+that is gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around
+you.  Your eyes are becoming set.  They are glazing.  My voice
+sounds faint and far.  You cannot see my face.  And still you
+struggle in my grip.  You kick with your legs.  Your body draws
+itself up in knots like a snake's.  Your chest heaves and strains.
+To live!  To live!  To live--"
+
+I heard no more.  Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he
+had so graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying
+on the floor and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me
+thoughtfully with that old familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.
+
+"Well, have I convinced you?" he demanded.  "Here take a drink of
+this.  I want to ask you some questions."
+
+I rolled my head negatively on the floor.  "Your arguments are too-
+-er--forcible," I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to
+my aching throat.
+
+"You'll be all right in half-an-hour," he assured me.  "And I
+promise I won't use any more physical demonstrations.  Get up now.
+You can sit on a chair."
+
+And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the
+Preacher was resumed.  And half the night we sat up over it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+The last twenty-four hours have witnessed a carnival of brutality.
+From cabin to forecastle it seems to have broken out like a
+contagion.  I scarcely know where to begin.  Wolf Larsen was really
+the cause of it.  The relations among the men, strained and made
+tense by feuds, quarrels and grudges, were in a state of unstable
+equilibrium, and evil passions flared up in flame like prairie-
+grass.
+
+Thomas Mugridge is a sneak, a spy, an informer.  He has been
+attempting to curry favour and reinstate himself in the good graces
+of the captain by carrying tales of the men forward.  He it was, I
+know, that carried some of Johnson's hasty talk to Wolf Larsen.
+Johnson, it seems, bought a suit of oilskins from the slop-chest
+and found them to be of greatly inferior quality.  Nor was he slow
+in advertising the fact.  The slop-chest is a sort of miniature
+dry-goods store which is carried by all sealing schooners and which
+is stocked with articles peculiar to the needs of the sailors.
+Whatever a sailor purchases is taken from his subsequent earnings
+on the sealing grounds; for, as it is with the hunters so it is
+with the boat-pullers and steerers--in the place of wages they
+receive a "lay," a rate of so much per skin for every skin captured
+in their particular boat.
+
+But of Johnson's grumbling at the slop-chest I knew nothing, so
+that what I witnessed came with a shock of sudden surprise.  I had
+just finished sweeping the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf
+Larsen into a discussion of Hamlet, his favourite Shakespearian
+character, when Johansen descended the companion stairs followed by
+Johnson.  The latter's cap came off after the custom of the sea,
+and he stood respectfully in the centre of the cabin, swaying
+heavily and uneasily to the roll of the schooner and facing the
+captain.
+
+"Shut the doors and draw the slide," Wolf Larsen said to me.
+
+As I obeyed I noticed an anxious light come into Johnson's eyes,
+but I did not dream of its cause.  I did not dream of what was to
+occur until it did occur, but he knew from the very first what was
+coming and awaited it bravely.  And in his action I found complete
+refutation of all Wolf Larsen's materialism.  The sailor Johnson
+was swayed by idea, by principle, and truth, and sincerity.  He was
+right, he knew he was right, and he was unafraid.  He would die for
+the right if needs be, he would be true to himself, sincere with
+his soul.  And in this was portrayed the victory of the spirit over
+the flesh, the indomitability and moral grandeur of the soul that
+knows no restriction and rises above time and space and matter with
+a surety and invincibleness born of nothing else than eternity and
+immortality.
+
+But to return.  I noticed the anxious light in Johnson's eyes, but
+mistook it for the native shyness and embarrassment of the man.
+The mate, Johansen, stood away several feet to the side of him, and
+fully three yards in front of him sat Wolf Larsen on one of the
+pivotal cabin chairs.  An appreciable pause fell after I had closed
+the doors and drawn the slide, a pause that must have lasted fully
+a minute.  It was broken by Wolf Larsen.
+
+"Yonson," he began.
+
+"My name is Johnson, sir," the sailor boldly corrected.
+
+"Well, Johnson, then, damn you!  Can you guess why I have sent for
+you?"
+
+"Yes, and no, sir," was the slow reply.  "My work is done well.
+The mate knows that, and you know it, sir.  So there cannot be any
+complaint."
+
+"And is that all?" Wolf Larsen queried, his voice soft, and low,
+and purring.
+
+"I know you have it in for me," Johnson continued with his
+unalterable and ponderous slowness.  "You do not like me.  You--
+you--"
+
+"Go on," Wolf Larsen prompted.  "Don't be afraid of my feelings."
+
+"I am not afraid," the sailor retorted, a slight angry flush rising
+through his sunburn.  "If I speak not fast, it is because I have
+not been from the old country as long as you.  You do not like me
+because I am too much of a man; that is why, sir."
+
+"You are too much of a man for ship discipline, if that is what you
+mean, and if you know what I mean," was Wolf Larsen's retort.
+
+"I know English, and I know what you mean, sir," Johnson answered,
+his flush deepening at the slur on his knowledge of the English
+language.
+
+"Johnson," Wolf Larsen said, with an air of dismissing all that had
+gone before as introductory to the main business in hand, "I
+understand you're not quite satisfied with those oilskins?"
+
+"No, I am not.  They are no good, sir."
+
+"And you've been shooting off your mouth about them."
+
+"I say what I think, sir," the sailor answered courageously, not
+failing at the same time in ship courtesy, which demanded that
+"sir" be appended to each speech he made.
+
+It was at this moment that I chanced to glance at Johansen.  His
+big fists were clenching and unclenching, and his face was
+positively fiendish, so malignantly did he look at Johnson.  I
+noticed a black discoloration, still faintly visible, under
+Johansen's eye, a mark of the thrashing he had received a few
+nights before from the sailor.  For the first time I began to
+divine that something terrible was about to be enacted,--what, I
+could not imagine.
+
+"Do you know what happens to men who say what you've said about my
+slop-chest and me?" Wolf Larsen was demanding.
+
+"I know, sir," was the answer.
+
+"What?" Wolf Larsen demanded, sharply and imperatively.
+
+"What you and the mate there are going to do to me, sir."
+
+"Look at him, Hump," Wolf Larsen said to me, "look at this bit of
+animated dust, this aggregation of matter that moves and breathes
+and defies me and thoroughly believes itself to be compounded of
+something good; that is impressed with certain human fictions such
+as righteousness and honesty, and that will live up to them in
+spite of all personal discomforts and menaces.  What do you think
+of him, Hump?  What do you think of him?"
+
+"I think that he is a better man than you are," I answered,
+impelled, somehow, with a desire to draw upon myself a portion of
+the wrath I felt was about to break upon his head.  "His human
+fictions, as you choose to call them, make for nobility and
+manhood.  You have no fictions, no dreams, no ideals.  You are a
+pauper."
+
+He nodded his head with a savage pleasantness.  "Quite true, Hump,
+quite true.  I have no fictions that make for nobility and manhood.
+A living dog is better than a dead lion, say I with the Preacher.
+My only doctrine is the doctrine of expediency, and it makes for
+surviving.  This bit of the ferment we call 'Johnson,' when he is
+no longer a bit of the ferment, only dust and ashes, will have no
+more nobility than any dust and ashes, while I shall still be alive
+and roaring."
+
+"Do you know what I am going to do?" he questioned.
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Well, I am going to exercise my prerogative of roaring and show
+you how fares nobility.  Watch me."
+
+Three yards away from Johnson he was, and sitting down.  Nine feet!
+And yet he left the chair in full leap, without first gaining a
+standing position.  He left the chair, just as he sat in it,
+squarely, springing from the sitting posture like a wild animal, a
+tiger, and like a tiger covered the intervening space.  It was an
+avalanche of fury that Johnson strove vainly to fend off.  He threw
+one arm down to protect the stomach, the other arm up to protect
+the head; but Wolf Larsen's fist drove midway between, on the
+chest, with a crushing, resounding impact.  Johnson's breath,
+suddenly expelled, shot from his mouth and as suddenly checked,
+with the forced, audible expiration of a man wielding an axe.  He
+almost fell backward, and swayed from side to side in an effort to
+recover his balance.
+
+I cannot give the further particulars of the horrible scene that
+followed.  It was too revolting.  It turns me sick even now when I
+think of it.  Johnson fought bravely enough, but he was no match
+for Wolf Larsen, much less for Wolf Larsen and the mate.  It was
+frightful.  I had not imagined a human being could endure so much
+and still live and struggle on.  And struggle on Johnson did.  Of
+course there was no hope for him, not the slightest, and he knew it
+as well as I, but by the manhood that was in him he could not cease
+from fighting for that manhood.
+
+It was too much for me to witness.  I felt that I should lose my
+mind, and I ran up the companion stairs to open the doors and
+escape on deck.  But Wolf Larsen, leaving his victim for the
+moment, and with one of his tremendous springs, gained my side and
+flung me into the far corner of the cabin.
+
+"The phenomena of life, Hump," he girded at me.  "Stay and watch
+it.  You may gather data on the immortality of the soul.  Besides,
+you know, we can't hurt Johnson's soul.  It's only the fleeting
+form we may demolish."
+
+It seemed centuries--possibly it was no more than ten minutes that
+the beating continued.  Wolf Larsen and Johansen were all about the
+poor fellow.  They struck him with their fists, kicked him with
+their heavy shoes, knocked him down, and dragged him to his feet to
+knock him down again.  His eyes were blinded so that he could not
+set, and the blood running from ears and nose and mouth turned the
+cabin into a shambles.  And when he could no longer rise they still
+continued to beat and kick him where he lay.
+
+"Easy, Johansen; easy as she goes," Wolf Larsen finally said.
+
+But the beast in the mate was up and rampant, and Wolf Larsen was
+compelled to brush him away with a back-handed sweep of the arm,
+gentle enough, apparently, but which hurled Johansen back like a
+cork, driving his head against the wall with a crash.  He fell to
+the floor, half stunned for the moment, breathing heavily and
+blinking his eyes in a stupid sort of way.
+
+"Jerk open the doors,--Hump," I was commanded.
+
+I obeyed, and the two brutes picked up the senseless man like a
+sack of rubbish and hove him clear up the companion stairs, through
+the narrow doorway, and out on deck.  The blood from his nose
+gushed in a scarlet stream over the feet of the helmsman, who was
+none other than Louis, his boat-mate.  But Louis took and gave a
+spoke and gazed imperturbably into the binnacle.
+
+Not so was the conduct of George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy.
+Fore and aft there was nothing that could have surprised us more
+than his consequent behaviour.  He it was that came up on the poop
+without orders and dragged Johnson forward, where he set about
+dressing his wounds as well as he could and making him comfortable.
+Johnson, as Johnson, was unrecognizable; and not only that, for his
+features, as human features at all, were unrecognizable, so
+discoloured and swollen had they become in the few minutes which
+had elapsed between the beginning of the beating and the dragging
+forward of the body.
+
+But of Leach's behaviour-- By the time I had finished cleansing the
+cabin he had taken care of Johnson.  I had come up on deck for a
+breath of fresh air and to try to get some repose for my
+overwrought nerves.  Wolf Larsen was smoking a cigar and examining
+the patent log which the Ghost usually towed astern, but which had
+been hauled in for some purpose.  Suddenly Leach's voice came to my
+ears.  It was tense and hoarse with an overmastering rage.  I
+turned and saw him standing just beneath the break of the poop on
+the port side of the galley.  His face was convulsed and white, his
+eyes were flashing, his clenched fists raised overhead.
+
+"May God damn your soul to hell, Wolf Larsen, only hell's too good
+for you, you coward, you murderer, you pig!" was his opening
+salutation.
+
+I was thunderstruck.  I looked for his instant annihilation.  But
+it was not Wolf Larsen's whim to annihilate him.  He sauntered
+slowly forward to the break of the poop, and, leaning his elbow on
+the corner of the cabin, gazed down thoughtfully and curiously at
+the excited boy.
+
+And the boy indicted Wolf Larsen as he had never been indicted
+before.  The sailors assembled in a fearful group just outside the
+forecastle scuttle and watched and listened.  The hunters piled
+pell-mell out of the steerage, but as Leach's tirade continued I
+saw that there was no levity in their faces.  Even they were
+frightened, not at the boy's terrible words, but at his terrible
+audacity.  It did not seem possible that any living creature could
+thus beard Wolf Larsen in his teeth.  I know for myself that I was
+shocked into admiration of the boy, and I saw in him the splendid
+invincibleness of immortality rising above the flesh and the fears
+of the flesh, as in the prophets of old, to condemn
+unrighteousness.
+
+And such condemnation!  He haled forth Wolf Larsen's soul naked to
+the scorn of men.  He rained upon it curses from God and High
+Heaven, and withered it with a heat of invective that savoured of a
+mediaeval excommunication of the Catholic Church.  He ran the gamut
+of denunciation, rising to heights of wrath that were sublime and
+almost Godlike, and from sheer exhaustion sinking to the vilest and
+most indecent abuse.
+
+His rage was a madness.  His lips were flecked with a soapy froth,
+and sometimes he choked and gurgled and became inarticulate.  And
+through it all, calm and impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing
+down, Wolf Larsen seemed lost in a great curiosity.  This wild
+stirring of yeasty life, this terrific revolt and defiance of
+matter that moved, perplexed and interested him.
+
+Each moment I looked, and everybody looked, for him to leap upon
+the boy and destroy him.  But it was not his whim.  His cigar went
+out, and he continued to gaze silently and curiously.
+
+Leach had worked himself into an ecstasy of impotent rage.
+
+"Pig!  Pig!  Pig!" he was reiterating at the top of his lungs.
+"Why don't you come down and kill me, you murderer?  You can do it!
+I ain't afraid!  There's no one to stop you!  Damn sight better
+dead and outa your reach than alive and in your clutches!  Come on,
+you coward!  Kill me!  Kill me!  Kill me!"
+
+It was at this stage that Thomas Mugridge's erratic soul brought
+him into the scene.  He had been listening at the galley door, but
+he now came out, ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side, but
+obviously to see the killing he was certain would take place.  He
+smirked greasily up into the face of Wolf Larsen, who seemed not to
+see him.  But the Cockney was unabashed, though mad, stark mad.  He
+turned to Leach, saying:
+
+"Such langwidge!  Shockin'!"
+
+Leach's rage was no longer impotent.  Here at last was something
+ready to hand.  And for the first time since the stabbing the
+Cockney had appeared outside the galley without his knife.  The
+words had barely left his mouth when he was knocked down by Leach.
+Three times he struggled to his feet, striving to gain the galley,
+and each time was knocked down.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" he cried.  "'Elp!  'Elp!  Tyke 'im aw'y, carn't yer?
+Tyke 'im aw'y!"
+
+The hunters laughed from sheer relief.  Tragedy had dwindled, the
+farce had begun.  The sailors now crowded boldly aft, grinning and
+shuffling, to watch the pummelling of the hated Cockney.  And even
+I felt a great joy surge up within me.  I confess that I delighted
+in this beating Leach was giving to Thomas Mugridge, though it was
+as terrible, almost, as the one Mugridge had caused to be given to
+Johnson.  But the expression of Wolf Larsen's face never changed.
+He did not change his position either, but continued to gaze down
+with a great curiosity.  For all his pragmatic certitude, it seemed
+as if he watched the play and movement of life in the hope of
+discovering something more about it, of discerning in its maddest
+writhings a something which had hitherto escaped him,--the key to
+its mystery, as it were, which would make all clear and plain.
+
+But the beating!  It was quite similar to the one I had witnessed
+in the cabin.  The Cockney strove in vain to protect himself from
+the infuriated boy.  And in vain he strove to gain the shelter of
+the cabin.  He rolled toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward
+it when he was knocked down.  But blow followed blow with
+bewildering rapidity.  He was knocked about like a shuttlecock,
+until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and kicked as he lay
+helpless on the deck.  And no one interfered.  Leach could have
+killed him, but, having evidently filled the measure of his
+vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate foe, who was whimpering
+and wailing in a puppyish sort of way, and walked forward.
+
+But these two affairs were only the opening events of the day's
+programme.  In the afternoon Smoke and Henderson fell foul of each
+other, and a fusillade of shots came up from the steerage, followed
+by a stampede of the other four hunters for the deck.  A column of
+thick, acrid smoke--the kind always made by black powder--was
+arising through the open companion-way, and down through it leaped
+Wolf Larsen.  The sound of blows and scuffling came to our ears.
+Both men were wounded, and he was thrashing them both for having
+disobeyed his orders and crippled themselves in advance of the
+hunting season.  In fact, they were badly wounded, and, having
+thrashed them, he proceeded to operate upon them in a rough
+surgical fashion and to dress their wounds.  I served as assistant
+while he probed and cleansed the passages made by the bullets, and
+I saw the two men endure his crude surgery without anaesthetics and
+with no more to uphold them than a stiff tumbler of whisky.
+
+Then, in the first dog-watch, trouble came to a head in the
+forecastle.  It took its rise out of the tittle-tattle and tale-
+bearing which had been the cause of Johnson's beating, and from the
+noise we heard, and from the sight of the bruised men next day, it
+was patent that half the forecastle had soundly drubbed the other
+half.
+
+The second dog-watch and the day were wound up by a fight between
+Johansen and the lean, Yankee-looking hunter, Latimer.  It was
+caused by remarks of Latimer's concerning the noises made by the
+mate in his sleep, and though Johansen was whipped, he kept the
+steerage awake for the rest of the night while he blissfully
+slumbered and fought the fight over and over again.
+
+As for myself, I was oppressed with nightmare.  The day had been
+like some horrible dream.  Brutality had followed brutality, and
+flaming passions and cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek
+one another's lives, and to strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy.
+My nerves were shocked.  My mind itself was shocked.  All my days
+had been passed in comparative ignorance of the animality of man.
+In fact, I had known life only in its intellectual phases.
+Brutality I had experienced, but it was the brutality of the
+intellect--the cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth, the cruel
+epigrams and occasional harsh witticisms of the fellows at the
+Bibelot, and the nasty remarks of some of the professors during my
+undergraduate days.
+
+That was all.  But that men should wreak their anger on others by
+the bruising of the flesh and the letting of blood was something
+strangely and fearfully new to me.  Not for nothing had I been
+called "Sissy" Van Weyden, I thought, as I tossed restlessly on my
+bunk between one nightmare and another.  And it seemed to me that
+my innocence of the realities of life had been complete indeed.  I
+laughed bitterly to myself, and seemed to find in Wolf Larsen's
+forbidding philosophy a more adequate explanation of life than I
+found in my own.
+
+And I was frightened when I became conscious of the trend of my
+thought.  The continual brutality around me was degenerative in its
+effect.  It bid fair to destroy for me all that was best and
+brightest in life.  My reason dictated that the beating Thomas
+Mugridge had received was an ill thing, and yet for the life of me
+I could not prevent my soul joying in it.  And even while I was
+oppressed by the enormity of my sin,--for sin it was,--I chuckled
+with an insane delight.  I was no longer Humphrey Van Weyden.  I
+was Hump, cabin-boy on the schooner Ghost.  Wolf Larsen was my
+captain, Thomas Mugridge and the rest were my companions, and I was
+receiving repeated impresses from the die which had stamped them
+all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+
+For three days I did my own work and Thomas Mugridge's too; and I
+flatter myself that I did his work well.  I know that it won Wolf
+Larsen's approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction
+during the brief time my regime lasted.
+
+"The first clean bite since I come aboard," Harrison said to me at
+the galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans from the
+forecastle.  "Somehow Tommy's grub always tastes of grease, stale
+grease, and I reckon he ain't changed his shirt since he left
+'Frisco."
+
+"I know he hasn't," I answered.
+
+"And I'll bet he sleeps in it," Harrison added.
+
+"And you won't lose," I agreed.  "The same shirt, and he hasn't had
+it off once in all this time."
+
+But three days was all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to recover
+from the effects of the beating.  On the fourth day, lame and sore,
+scarcely able to see, so closed were his eyes, he was haled from
+his bunk by the nape of the neck and set to his duty.  He sniffled
+and wept, but Wolf Larsen was pitiless.
+
+"And see that you serve no more slops," was his parting injunction.
+"No more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean shirt occasionally, or
+you'll get a tow over the side.  Understand?"
+
+Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and a short
+lurch of the Ghost sent him staggering.  In attempting to recover
+himself, he reached for the iron railing which surrounded the stove
+and kept the pots from sliding off; but he missed the railing, and
+his hand, with his weight behind it, landed squarely on the hot
+surface.  There was a sizzle and odour of burning flesh, and a
+sharp cry of pain.
+
+"Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot 'ave I done?" he wailed; sitting down in the
+coal-box and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth.  "W'y
+'as all this come on me?  It mykes me fair sick, it does, an' I try
+so 'ard to go through life 'armless an' 'urtin' nobody."
+
+The tears were running down his puffed and discoloured cheeks, and
+his face was drawn with pain.  A savage expression flitted across
+it.
+
+"Oh, 'ow I 'ate 'im!  'Ow I 'ate 'im!" he gritted out.
+
+"Whom?" I asked; but the poor wretch was weeping again over his
+misfortunes.  Less difficult it was to guess whom he hated than
+whom he did not hate.  For I had come to see a malignant devil in
+him which impelled him to hate all the world.  I sometimes thought
+that he hated even himself, so grotesquely had life dealt with him,
+and so monstrously.  At such moments a great sympathy welled up
+within me, and I felt shame that I had ever joyed in his
+discomfiture or pain.  Life had been unfair to him.  It had played
+him a scurvy trick when it fashioned him into the thing he was, and
+it had played him scurvy tricks ever since.  What chance had he to
+be anything else than he was?  And as though answering my unspoken
+thought, he wailed:
+
+"I never 'ad no chance, not 'arf a chance!  'Oo was there to send
+me to school, or put tommy in my 'ungry belly, or wipe my bloody
+nose for me, w'en I was a kiddy?  'Oo ever did anything for me,
+heh?  'Oo, I s'y?"
+
+"Never mind, Tommy," I said, placing a soothing hand on his
+shoulder.  "Cheer up.  It'll all come right in the end.  You've
+long years before you, and you can make anything you please of
+yourself."
+
+"It's a lie! a bloody lie!" he shouted in my face, flinging off the
+hand.  "It's a lie, and you know it.  I'm already myde, an' myde
+out of leavin's an' scraps.  It's all right for you, 'Ump.  You was
+born a gentleman.  You never knew wot it was to go 'ungry, to cry
+yerself asleep with yer little belly gnawin' an' gnawin', like a
+rat inside yer.  It carn't come right.  If I was President of the
+United Stytes to-morrer, 'ow would it fill my belly for one time
+w'en I was a kiddy and it went empty?
+
+"'Ow could it, I s'y?  I was born to sufferin' and sorrer.  I've
+had more cruel sufferin' than any ten men, I 'ave.  I've been in
+orspital arf my bleedin' life.  I've 'ad the fever in Aspinwall, in
+'Avana, in New Orleans.  I near died of the scurvy and was rotten
+with it six months in Barbadoes.  Smallpox in 'Onolulu, two broken
+legs in Shanghai, pnuemonia in Unalaska, three busted ribs an' my
+insides all twisted in 'Frisco.  An' 'ere I am now.  Look at me!
+Look at me!  My ribs kicked loose from my back again.  I'll be
+coughin' blood before eyght bells.  'Ow can it be myde up to me, I
+arsk?  'Oo's goin' to do it?  Gawd?  'Ow Gawd must 'ave 'ated me
+w'en 'e signed me on for a voyage in this bloomin' world of 'is!"
+
+This tirade against destiny went on for an hour or more, and then
+he buckled to his work, limping and groaning, and in his eyes a
+great hatred for all created things.  His diagnosis was correct,
+however, for he was seized with occasional sicknesses, during which
+he vomited blood and suffered great pain.  And as he said, it
+seemed God hated him too much to let him die, for he ultimately
+grew better and waxed more malignant than ever.
+
+Several days more passed before Johnson crawled on deck and went
+about his work in a half-hearted way.  He was still a sick man, and
+I more than once observed him creeping painfully aloft to a
+topsail, or drooping wearily as he stood at the wheel.  But, still
+worse, it seemed that his spirit was broken.  He was abject before
+Wolf Larsen and almost grovelled to Johansen.  Not so was the
+conduct of Leach.  He went about the deck like a tiger cub, glaring
+his hatred openly at Wolf Larsen and Johansen.
+
+"I'll do for you yet, you slab-footed Swede," I heard him say to
+Johansen one night on deck.
+
+The mate cursed him in the darkness, and the next moment some
+missile struck the galley a sharp rap.  There was more cursing, and
+a mocking laugh, and when all was quiet I stole outside and found a
+heavy knife imbedded over an inch in the solid wood.  A few minutes
+later the mate came fumbling about in search of it, but I returned
+it privily to Leach next day.  He grinned when I handed it over,
+yet it was a grin that contained more sincere thanks than a
+multitude of the verbosities of speech common to the members of my
+own class.
+
+Unlike any one else in the ship's company, I now found myself with
+no quarrels on my hands and in the good graces of all.  The hunters
+possibly no more than tolerated me, though none of them disliked
+me; while Smoke and Henderson, convalescent under a deck awning and
+swinging day and night in their hammocks, assured me that I was
+better than any hospital nurse, and that they would not forget me
+at the end of the voyage when they were paid off.  (As though I
+stood in need of their money!  I, who could have bought them out,
+bag and baggage, and the schooner and its equipment, a score of
+times over!)  But upon me had devolved the task of tending their
+wounds, and pulling them through, and I did my best by them.
+
+Wolf Larsen underwent another bad attack of headache which lasted
+two days.  He must have suffered severely, for he called me in and
+obeyed my commands like a sick child.  But nothing I could do
+seemed to relieve him.  At my suggestion, however, he gave up
+smoking and drinking; though why such a magnificent animal as he
+should have headaches at all puzzles me.
+
+"'Tis the hand of God, I'm tellin' you," is the way Louis sees it.
+"'Tis a visitation for his black-hearted deeds, and there's more
+behind and comin', or else--"
+
+"Or else," I prompted.
+
+"God is noddin' and not doin' his duty, though it's me as shouldn't
+say it."
+
+I was mistaken when I said that I was in the good graces of all.
+Not only does Thomas Mugridge continue to hate me, but he has
+discovered a new reason for hating me.  It took me no little while
+to puzzle it out, but I finally discovered that it was because I
+was more luckily born than he--"gentleman born," he put it.
+
+"And still no more dead men," I twitted Louis, when Smoke and
+Henderson, side by side, in friendly conversation, took their first
+exercise on deck.
+
+Louis surveyed me with his shrewd grey eyes, and shook his head
+portentously.  "She's a-comin', I tell you, and it'll be sheets and
+halyards, stand by all hands, when she begins to howl.  I've had
+the feel iv it this long time, and I can feel it now as plainly as
+I feel the rigging iv a dark night.  She's close, she's close."
+
+"Who goes first?" I queried.
+
+"Not fat old Louis, I promise you," he laughed.  "For 'tis in the
+bones iv me I know that come this time next year I'll be gazin' in
+the old mother's eyes, weary with watchin' iv the sea for the five
+sons she gave to it."
+
+"Wot's 'e been s'yin' to yer?" Thomas Mugridge demanded a moment
+later.
+
+"That he's going home some day to see his mother," I answered
+diplomatically.
+
+"I never 'ad none," was the Cockney's comment, as he gazed with
+lustreless, hopeless eyes into mine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+
+It has dawned upon me that I have never placed a proper valuation
+upon womankind.  For that matter, though not amative to any
+considerable degree so far as I have discovered, I was never
+outside the atmosphere of women until now.  My mother and sisters
+were always about me, and I was always trying to escape them; for
+they worried me to distraction with their solicitude for my health
+and with their periodic inroads on my den, when my orderly
+confusion, upon which I prided myself, was turned into worse
+confusion and less order, though it looked neat enough to the eye.
+I never could find anything when they had departed.  But now, alas,
+how welcome would have been the feel of their presence, the frou-
+frou and swish-swish of their skirts which I had so cordially
+detested!  I am sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be
+irritable with them again.  They may dose me and doctor me morning,
+noon, and night, and dust and sweep and put my den to rights every
+minute of the day, and I shall only lean back and survey it all and
+be thankful in that I am possessed of a mother and some several
+sisters.
+
+All of which has set me wondering.  Where are the mothers of these
+twenty and odd men on the Ghost?  It strikes me as unnatural and
+unhealthful that men should be totally separated from women and
+herd through the world by themselves.  Coarseness and savagery are
+the inevitable results.  These men about me should have wives, and
+sisters, and daughters; then would they be capable of softness, and
+tenderness, and sympathy.  As it is, not one of them is married.
+In years and years not one of them has been in contact with a good
+woman, or within the influence, or redemption, which irresistibly
+radiates from such a creature.  There is no balance in their lives.
+Their masculinity, which in itself is of the brute, has been over-
+developed.  The other and spiritual side of their natures has been
+dwarfed--atrophied, in fact.
+
+They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one
+another and growing daily more calloused from the grinding.  It
+seems to me impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers.  It
+would appear that they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race
+apart, wherein there is no such thing as sex; that they are hatched
+out by the sun like turtle eggs, or receive life in some similar
+and sordid fashion; and that all their days they fester in
+brutality and viciousness, and in the end die as unlovely as they
+have lived.
+
+Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with
+Johansen last night--the first superfluous words with which he has
+favoured me since the voyage began.  He left Sweden when he was
+eighteen, is now thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has
+not been home once.  He had met a townsman, a couple of years
+before, in some sailor boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his
+mother to be still alive.
+
+"She must be a pretty old woman now," he said, staring meditatively
+into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who
+was steering a point off the course.
+
+"When did you last write to her?"
+
+He performed his mental arithmetic aloud.  "Eighty-one; no--eighty-
+two, eh? no--eighty-three?  Yes, eighty-three.  Ten years ago.
+From some little port in Madagascar.  I was trading.
+
+"You see," he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother
+across half the girth of the earth, "each year I was going home.
+So what was the good to write?  It was only a year.  And each year
+something happened, and I did not go.  But I am mate, now, and when
+I pay off at 'Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship
+myself on a windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give
+me more money; and then I will pay my passage from there home.
+Then she will not do any more work."
+
+"But does she work? now?  How old is she?"
+
+"About seventy," he answered.  And then, boastingly, "We work from
+the time we are born until we die, in my country.  That's why we
+live so long.  I will live to a hundred."
+
+I shall never forget this conversation.  The words were the last I
+ever heard him utter.  Perhaps they were the last he did utter,
+too.  For, going down into the cabin to turn in, I decided that it
+was too stuffy to sleep below.  It was a calm night.  We were out
+of the Trades, and the Ghost was forging ahead barely a knot an
+hour.  So I tucked a blanket and pillow under my arm and went up on
+deck.
+
+As I passed between Harrison and the binnacle, which was built into
+the top of the cabin, I noticed that he was this time fully three
+points off.  Thinking that he was asleep, and wishing him to escape
+reprimand or worse, I spoke to him.  But he was not asleep.  His
+eyes were wide and staring.  He seemed greatly perturbed, unable to
+reply to me.
+
+"What's the matter?" I asked.  "Are you sick?"
+
+He shook his head, and with a deep sign as of awakening, caught his
+breath.
+
+"You'd better get on your course, then," I chided.
+
+He put a few spokes over, and I watched the compass-card swing
+slowly to N.N.W. and steady itself with slight oscillations.
+
+I took a fresh hold on my bedclothes and was preparing to start on,
+when some movement caught my eye and I looked astern to the rail.
+A sinewy hand, dripping with water, was clutching the rail.  A
+second hand took form in the darkness beside it.  I watched,
+fascinated.  What visitant from the gloom of the deep was I to
+behold?  Whatever it was, I knew that it was climbing aboard by the
+log-line.  I saw a head, the hair wet and straight, shape itself,
+and then the unmistakable eyes and face of Wolf Larsen.  His right
+cheek was red with blood, which flowed from some wound in the head.
+
+He drew himself inboard with a quick effort, and arose to his feet,
+glancing swiftly, as he did so, at the man at the wheel, as though
+to assure himself of his identity and that there was nothing to
+fear from him.  The sea-water was streaming from him.  It made
+little audible gurgles which distracted me.  As he stepped toward
+me I shrank back instinctively, for I saw that in his eyes which
+spelled death.
+
+"All right, Hump," he said in a low voice.  "Where's the mate?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Johansen!" he called softly.  "Johansen!"
+
+"Where is he?" he demanded of Harrison.
+
+The young fellow seemed to have recovered his composure, for he
+answered steadily enough, "I don't know, sir.  I saw him go for'ard
+a little while ago."
+
+"So did I go for'ard.  But you will observe that I didn't come back
+the way I went.  Can you explain it?"
+
+"You must have been overboard, sir."
+
+"Shall I look for him in the steerage, sir?" I asked.
+
+Wolf Larsen shook his head.  "You wouldn't find him, Hump.  But
+you'll do.  Come on.  Never mind your bedding.  Leave it where it
+is."
+
+I followed at his heels.  There was nothing stirring amidships.
+
+"Those cursed hunters," was his comment.  "Too damned fat and lazy
+to stand a four-hour watch."
+
+But on the forecastle-head we found three sailors asleep.  He
+turned them over and looked at their faces.  They composed the
+watch on deck, and it was the ship's custom, in good weather, to
+let the watch sleep with the exception of the officer, the
+helmsman, and the look-out.
+
+"Who's look-out?" he demanded.
+
+"Me, sir," answered Holyoak, one of the deep-water sailors, a
+slight tremor in his voice.  "I winked off just this very minute,
+sir.  I'm sorry, sir.  It won't happen again."
+
+"Did you hear or see anything on deck?"
+
+"No, sir, I--"
+
+But Wolf Larsen had turned away with a snort of disgust, leaving
+the sailor rubbing his eyes with surprise at having been let of so
+easily.
+
+"Softly, now," Wolf Larsen warned me in a whisper, as he doubled
+his body into the forecastle scuttle and prepared to descend.
+
+I followed with a quaking heart.  What was to happen I knew no more
+than did I know what had happened.  But blood had been shed, and it
+was through no whim of Wolf Larsen that he had gone over the side
+with his scalp laid open.  Besides, Johansen was missing.
+
+It was my first descent into the forecastle, and I shall not soon
+forget my impression of it, caught as I stood on my feet at the
+bottom of the ladder.  Built directly in the eyes of the schooner,
+it was of the shape of a triangle, along the three sides of which
+stood the bunks, in double-tier, twelve of them.  It was no larger
+than a hall bedroom in Grub Street, and yet twelve men were herded
+into it to eat and sleep and carry on all the functions of living.
+My bedroom at home was not large, yet it could have contained a
+dozen similar forecastles, and taking into consideration the height
+of the ceiling, a score at least.
+
+It smelled sour and musty, and by the dim light of the swinging
+sea-lamp I saw every bit of available wall-space hung deep with
+sea-boots, oilskins, and garments, clean and dirty, of various
+sorts.  These swung back and forth with every roll of the vessel,
+giving rise to a brushing sound, as of trees against a roof or
+wall.  Somewhere a boot thumped loudly and at irregular intervals
+against the wall; and, though it was a mild night on the sea, there
+was a continual chorus of the creaking timbers and bulkheads and of
+abysmal noises beneath the flooring.
+
+The sleepers did not mind.  There were eight of them,--the two
+watches below,--and the air was thick with the warmth and odour of
+their breathing, and the ear was filled with the noise of their
+snoring and of their sighs and half-groans, tokens plain of the
+rest of the animal-man.  But were they sleeping? all of them?  Or
+had they been sleeping?  This was evidently Wolf Larsen's quest--to
+find the men who appeared to be asleep and who were not asleep or
+who had not been asleep very recently.  And he went about it in a
+way that reminded me of a story out of Boccaccio.
+
+He took the sea-lamp from its swinging frame and handed it to me.
+He began at the first bunks forward on the star-board side.  In the
+top one lay Oofty-Oofty, a Kanaka and splendid seaman, so named by
+his mates.  He was asleep on his back and breathing as placidly as
+a woman.  One arm was under his head, the other lay on top of the
+blankets.  Wolf Larsen put thumb and forefinger to the wrist and
+counted the pulse.  In the midst of it the Kanaka roused.  He awoke
+as gently as he slept.  There was no movement of the body whatever.
+The eyes, only, moved.  They flashed wide open, big and black, and
+stared, unblinking, into our faces.  Wolf Larsen put his finger to
+his lips as a sign for silence, and the eyes closed again.
+
+In the lower bunk lay Louis, grossly fat and warm and sweaty,
+asleep unfeignedly and sleeping laboriously.  While Wolf Larsen
+held his wrist he stirred uneasily, bowing his body so that for a
+moment it rested on shoulders and heels.  His lips moved, and he
+gave voice to this enigmatic utterance:
+
+"A shilling's worth a quarter; but keep your lamps out for
+thruppenny-bits, or the publicans 'll shove 'em on you for
+sixpence."
+
+Then he rolled over on his side with a heavy, sobbing sigh, saying:
+
+"A sixpence is a tanner, and a shilling a bob; but what a pony is I
+don't know."
+
+Satisfied with the honesty of his and the Kanaka's sleep, Wolf
+Larsen passed on to the next two bunks on the starboard side,
+occupied top and bottom, as we saw in the light of the sea-lamp, by
+Leach and Johnson.
+
+As Wolf Larsen bent down to the lower bunk to take Johnson's pulse,
+I, standing erect and holding the lamp, saw Leach's head rise
+stealthily as he peered over the side of his bunk to see what was
+going on.  He must have divined Wolf Larsen's trick and the
+sureness of detection, for the light was at once dashed from my
+hand and the forecastle was left in darkness.  He must have leaped,
+also, at the same instant, straight down on Wolf Larsen.
+
+The first sounds were those of a conflict between a bull and a
+wolf.  I heard a great infuriated bellow go up from Wolf Larsen,
+and from Leach a snarling that was desperate and blood-curdling.
+Johnson must have joined him immediately, so that his abject and
+grovelling conduct on deck for the past few days had been no more
+than planned deception.
+
+I was so terror-stricken by this fight in the dark that I leaned
+against the ladder, trembling and unable to ascend.  And upon me
+was that old sickness at the pit of the stomach, caused always by
+the spectacle of physical violence.  In this instance I could not
+see, but I could hear the impact of the blows--the soft crushing
+sound made by flesh striking forcibly against flesh.  Then there
+was the crashing about of the entwined bodies, the laboured
+breathing, the short quick gasps of sudden pain.
+
+There must have been more men in the conspiracy to murder the
+captain and mate, for by the sounds I knew that Leach and Johnson
+had been quickly reinforced by some of their mates.
+
+"Get a knife somebody!" Leach was shouting.
+
+"Pound him on the head!  Mash his brains out!" was Johnson's cry.
+
+But after his first bellow, Wolf Larsen made no noise.  He was
+fighting grimly and silently for life.  He was sore beset.  Down at
+the very first, he had been unable to gain his feet, and for all of
+his tremendous strength I felt that there was no hope for him.
+
+The force with which they struggled was vividly impressed on me;
+for I was knocked down by their surging bodies and badly bruised.
+But in the confusion I managed to crawl into an empty lower bunk
+out of the way.
+
+"All hands!  We've got him!  We've got him!" I could hear Leach
+crying.
+
+"Who?" demanded those who had been really asleep, and who had
+wakened to they knew not what.
+
+"It's the bloody mate!" was Leach's crafty answer, strained from
+him in a smothered sort of way.
+
+This was greeted with whoops of joy, and from then on Wolf Larsen
+had seven strong men on top of him, Louis, I believe, taking no
+part in it.  The forecastle was like an angry hive of bees aroused
+by some marauder.
+
+"What ho! below there!" I heard Latimer shout down the scuttle, too
+cautious to descend into the inferno of passion he could hear
+raging beneath him in the darkness.
+
+"Won't somebody get a knife?  Oh, won't somebody get a knife?"
+Leach pleaded in the first interval of comparative silence.
+
+The number of the assailants was a cause of confusion.  They
+blocked their own efforts, while Wolf Larsen, with but a single
+purpose, achieved his.  This was to fight his way across the floor
+to the ladder.  Though in total darkness, I followed his progress
+by its sound.  No man less than a giant could have done what he
+did, once he had gained the foot of the ladder.  Step by step, by
+the might of his arms, the whole pack of men striving to drag him
+back and down, he drew his body up from the floor till he stood
+erect.  And then, step by step, hand and foot, he slowly struggled
+up the ladder.
+
+The very last of all, I saw.  For Latimer, having finally gone for
+a lantern, held it so that its light shone down the scuttle.  Wolf
+Larsen was nearly to the top, though I could not see him.  All that
+was visible was the mass of men fastened upon him.  It squirmed
+about, like some huge many-legged spider, and swayed back and forth
+to the regular roll of the vessel.  And still, step by step with
+long intervals between, the mass ascended.  Once it tottered, about
+to fall back, but the broken hold was regained and it still went
+up.
+
+"Who is it?" Latimer cried.
+
+In the rays of the lantern I could see his perplexed face peering
+down.
+
+"Larsen," I heard a muffled voice from within the mass.
+
+Latimer reached down with his free hand.  I saw a hand shoot up to
+clasp his.  Latimer pulled, and the next couple of steps were made
+with a rush.  Then Wolf Larsen's other hand reached up and clutched
+the edge of the scuttle.  The mass swung clear of the ladder, the
+men still clinging to their escaping foe.  They began to drop of,
+to be brushed off against the sharp edge of the scuttle, to be
+knocked off by the legs which were now kicking powerfully.  Leach
+was the last to go, falling sheer back from the top of the scuttle
+and striking on head and shoulders upon his sprawling mates
+beneath.  Wolf Larsen and the lantern disappeared, and we were left
+in darkness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+
+There was a deal of cursing and groaning as the men at the bottom
+of the ladder crawled to their feet.
+
+"Somebody strike a light, my thumb's out of joint," said one of the
+men, Parsons, a swarthy, saturnine man, boat-steerer in Standish's
+boat, in which Harrison was puller.
+
+"You'll find it knockin' about by the bitts," Leach said, sitting
+down on the edge of the bunk in which I was concealed.
+
+There was a fumbling and a scratching of matches, and the sea-lamp
+flared up, dim and smoky, and in its weird light bare-legged men
+moved about nursing their bruises and caring for their hurts.
+Oofty-Oofty laid hold of Parsons's thumb, pulling it out stoutly
+and snapping it back into place.  I noticed at the same time that
+the Kanaka's knuckles were laid open clear across and to the bone.
+He exhibited them, exposing beautiful white teeth in a grin as he
+did so, and explaining that the wounds had come from striking Wolf
+Larsen in the mouth.
+
+"So it was you, was it, you black beggar?" belligerently demanded
+one Kelly, an Irish-American and a longshoreman, making his first
+trip to sea, and boat-puller for Kerfoot.
+
+As he made the demand he spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth and
+shoved his pugnacious face close to Oofty-Oofty.  The Kanaka leaped
+backward to his bunk, to return with a second leap, flourishing a
+long knife.
+
+"Aw, go lay down, you make me tired," Leach interfered.  He was
+evidently, for all of his youth and inexperience, cock of the
+forecastle.  "G'wan, you Kelly.  You leave Oofty alone.  How in
+hell did he know it was you in the dark?"
+
+Kelly subsided with some muttering, and the Kanaka flashed his
+white teeth in a grateful smile.  He was a beautiful creature,
+almost feminine in the pleasing lines of his figure, and there was
+a softness and dreaminess in his large eyes which seemed to
+contradict his well-earned reputation for strife and action.
+
+"How did he get away?" Johnson asked.
+
+He was sitting on the side of his bunk, the whole pose of his
+figure indicating utter dejection and hopelessness.  He was still
+breathing heavily from the exertion he had made.  His shirt had
+been ripped entirely from him in the struggle, and blood from a
+gash in the cheek was flowing down his naked chest, marking a red
+path across his white thigh and dripping to the floor.
+
+"Because he is the devil, as I told you before," was Leach's
+answer; and thereat he was on his feet and raging his
+disappointment with tears in his eyes.
+
+"And not one of you to get a knife!" was his unceasing lament.
+
+But the rest of the hands had a lively fear of consequences to come
+and gave no heed to him.
+
+"How'll he know which was which?" Kelly asked, and as he went on he
+looked murderously about him--"unless one of us peaches."
+
+"He'll know as soon as ever he claps eyes on us," Parsons replied.
+"One look at you'd be enough."
+
+"Tell him the deck flopped up and gouged yer teeth out iv yer jaw,"
+Louis grinned.  He was the only man who was not out of his bunk,
+and he was jubilant in that he possessed no bruises to advertise
+that he had had a hand in the night's work.  "Just wait till he
+gets a glimpse iv yer mugs to-morrow, the gang iv ye," he chuckled.
+
+"We'll say we thought it was the mate," said one.  And another, "I
+know what I'll say--that I heered a row, jumped out of my bunk, got
+a jolly good crack on the jaw for my pains, and sailed in myself.
+Couldn't tell who or what it was in the dark and just hit out."
+
+"An' 'twas me you hit, of course," Kelly seconded, his face
+brightening for the moment.
+
+Leach and Johnson took no part in the discussion, and it was plain
+to see that their mates looked upon them as men for whom the worst
+was inevitable, who were beyond hope and already dead.  Leach stood
+their fears and reproaches for some time.  Then he broke out:
+
+"You make me tired!  A nice lot of gazabas you are!  If you talked
+less with yer mouth and did something with yer hands, he'd a-ben
+done with by now.  Why couldn't one of you, just one of you, get me
+a knife when I sung out?  You make me sick!  A-beefin' and
+bellerin' 'round, as though he'd kill you when he gets you!  You
+know damn well he wont.  Can't afford to.  No shipping masters or
+beach-combers over here, and he wants yer in his business, and he
+wants yer bad.  Who's to pull or steer or sail ship if he loses
+yer?  It's me and Johnson have to face the music.  Get into yer
+bunks, now, and shut yer faces; I want to get some sleep."
+
+"That's all right all right," Parsons spoke up.  "Mebbe he won't do
+for us, but mark my words, hell 'll be an ice-box to this ship from
+now on."
+
+All the while I had been apprehensive concerning my own
+predicament.  What would happen to me when these men discovered my
+presence?  I could never fight my way out as Wolf Larsen had done.
+And at this moment Latimer called down the scuttles:
+
+"Hump!  The old man wants you!"
+
+"He ain't down here!" Parsons called back.
+
+"Yes, he is," I said, sliding out of the bunk and striving my
+hardest to keep my voice steady and bold.
+
+The sailors looked at me in consternation.  Fear was strong in
+their faces, and the devilishness which comes of fear.
+
+"I'm coming!" I shouted up to Latimer.
+
+"No you don't!" Kelly cried, stepping between me and the ladder,
+his right hand shaped into a veritable strangler's clutch.  "You
+damn little sneak!  I'll shut yer mouth!"
+
+"Let him go," Leach commanded.
+
+"Not on yer life," was the angry retort.
+
+Leach never changed his position on the edge of the bunk.  "Let him
+go, I say," he repeated; but this time his voice was gritty and
+metallic.
+
+The Irishman wavered.  I made to step by him, and he stood aside.
+When I had gained the ladder, I turned to the circle of brutal and
+malignant faces peering at me through the semi-darkness.  A sudden
+and deep sympathy welled up in me.  I remembered the Cockney's way
+of putting it.  How God must have hated them that they should be
+tortured so!
+
+"I have seen and heard nothing, believe me," I said quietly.
+
+"I tell yer, he's all right," I could hear Leach saying as I went
+up the ladder.  "He don't like the old man no more nor you or me."
+
+I found Wolf Larsen in the cabin, stripped and bloody, waiting for
+me.  He greeted me with one of his whimsical smiles.
+
+"Come, get to work, Doctor.  The signs are favourable for an
+extensive practice this voyage.  I don't know what the Ghost would
+have been without you, and if I could only cherish such noble
+sentiments I would tell you her master is deeply grateful."
+
+I knew the run of the simple medicine-chest the Ghost carried, and
+while I was heating water on the cabin stove and getting the things
+ready for dressing his wounds, he moved about, laughing and
+chatting, and examining his hurts with a calculating eye.  I had
+never before seen him stripped, and the sight of his body quite
+took my breath away.  It has never been my weakness to exalt the
+flesh--far from it; but there is enough of the artist in me to
+appreciate its wonder.
+
+I must say that I was fascinated by the perfect lines of Wolf
+Larsen's figure, and by what I may term the terrible beauty of it.
+I had noted the men in the forecastle.  Powerfully muscled though
+some of them were, there had been something wrong with all of them,
+an insufficient development here, an undue development there, a
+twist or a crook that destroyed symmetry, legs too short or too
+long, or too much sinew or bone exposed, or too little.  Oofty-
+Oofty had been the only one whose lines were at all pleasing,
+while, in so far as they pleased, that far had they been what I
+should call feminine.
+
+But Wolf Larsen was the man-type, the masculine, and almost a god
+in his perfectness.  As he moved about or raised his arms the great
+muscles leapt and moved under the satiny skin.  I have forgotten to
+say that the bronze ended with his face.  His body, thanks to his
+Scandinavian stock, was fair as the fairest woman's.  I remember
+his putting his hand up to feel of the wound on his head, and my
+watching the biceps move like a living thing under its white
+sheath.  It was the biceps that had nearly crushed out my life
+once, that I had seen strike so many killing blows.  I could not
+take my eyes from him.  I stood motionless, a roll of antiseptic
+cotton in my hand unwinding and spilling itself down to the floor.
+
+He noticed me, and I became conscious that I was staring at him.
+
+"God made you well," I said.
+
+"Did he?" he answered.  "I have often thought so myself, and
+wondered why."
+
+"Purpose--" I began.
+
+"Utility," he interrupted.  "This body was made for use.  These
+muscles were made to grip, and tear, and destroy living things that
+get between me and life.  But have you thought of the other living
+things?  They, too, have muscles, of one kind and another, made to
+grip, and tear, and destroy; and when they come between me and
+life, I out-grip them, out-tear them, out-destroy them.  Purpose
+does not explain that.  Utility does."
+
+"It is not beautiful," I protested.
+
+"Life isn't, you mean," he smiled.  "Yet you say I was made well.
+Do you see this?"
+
+He braced his legs and feet, pressing the cabin floor with his toes
+in a clutching sort of way.  Knots and ridges and mounds of muscles
+writhed and bunched under the skin.
+
+"Feel them," he commanded.
+
+They were hard as iron.  And I observed, also, that his whole body
+had unconsciously drawn itself together, tense and alert; that
+muscles were softly crawling and shaping about the hips, along the
+back, and across the shoulders; that the arms were slightly lifted,
+their muscles contracting, the fingers crooking till the hands were
+like talons; and that even the eyes had changed expression and into
+them were coming watchfulness and measurement and a light none
+other than of battle.
+
+"Stability, equilibrium," he said, relaxing on the instant and
+sinking his body back into repose.  "Feet with which to clutch the
+ground, legs to stand on and to help withstand, while with arms and
+hands, teeth and nails, I struggle to kill and to be not killed.
+Purpose?  Utility is the better word."
+
+I did not argue.  I had seen the mechanism of the primitive
+fighting beast, and I was as strongly impressed as if I had seen
+the engines of a great battleship or Atlantic liner.
+
+I was surprised, considering the fierce struggle in the forecastle,
+at the superficiality of his hurts, and I pride myself that I
+dressed them dexterously.  With the exception of several bad
+wounds, the rest were merely severe bruises and lacerations.  The
+blow which he had received before going overboard had laid his
+scalp open several inches.  This, under his direction, I cleansed
+and sewed together, having first shaved the edges of the wound.
+Then the calf of his leg was badly lacerated and looked as though
+it had been mangled by a bulldog.  Some sailor, he told me, had
+laid hold of it by his teeth, at the beginning of the fight, and
+hung on and been dragged to the top of the forecastle ladder, when
+he was kicked loose.
+
+"By the way, Hump, as I have remarked, you are a handy man," Wolf
+Larsen began, when my work was done.  "As you know, we're short a
+mate.  Hereafter you shall stand watches, receive seventy-five
+dollars per month, and be addressed fore and aft as Mr. Van
+Weyden."
+
+"I--I don't understand navigation, you know," I gasped.
+
+"Not necessary at all."
+
+"I really do not care to sit in the high places," I objected.  "I
+find life precarious enough in my present humble situation.  I have
+no experience.  Mediocrity, you see, has its compensations."
+
+He smiled as though it were all settled.
+
+"I won't be mate on this hell-ship!" I cried defiantly.
+
+I saw his face grow hard and the merciless glitter come into his
+eyes.  He walked to the door of his room, saying:
+
+"And now, Mr. Van Weyden, good-night."
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Larsen," I answered weakly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+
+I cannot say that the position of mate carried with it anything
+more joyful than that there were no more dishes to wash.  I was
+ignorant of the simplest duties of mate, and would have fared badly
+indeed, had the sailors not sympathized with me.  I knew nothing of
+the minutiae of ropes and rigging, of the trimming and setting of
+sails; but the sailors took pains to put me to rights,--Louis
+proving an especially good teacher,--and I had little trouble with
+those under me.
+
+With the hunters it was otherwise.  Familiar in varying degree with
+the sea, they took me as a sort of joke.  In truth, it was a joke
+to me, that I, the veriest landsman, should be filling the office
+of mate; but to be taken as a joke by others was a different
+matter.  I made no complaint, but Wolf Larsen demanded the most
+punctilious sea etiquette in my case,--far more than poor Johansen
+had ever received; and at the expense of several rows, threats, and
+much grumbling, he brought the hunters to time.  I was "Mr. Van
+Weyden" fore and aft, and it was only unofficially that Wolf Larsen
+himself ever addressed me as "Hump."
+
+It was amusing.  Perhaps the wind would haul a few points while we
+were at dinner, and as I left the table he would say, "Mr. Van
+Weyden, will you kindly put about on the port tack."  And I would
+go on deck, beckon Louis to me, and learn from him what was to be
+done.  Then, a few minutes later, having digested his instructions
+and thoroughly mastered the manoeuvre, I would proceed to issue my
+orders.  I remember an early instance of this kind, when Wolf
+Larsen appeared on the scene just as I had begun to give orders.
+He smoked his cigar and looked on quietly till the thing was
+accomplished, and then paced aft by my side along the weather poop.
+
+"Hump," he said, "I beg pardon, Mr. Van Weyden, I congratulate you.
+I think you can now fire your father's legs back into the grave to
+him.  You've discovered your own and learned to stand on them.  A
+little rope-work, sail-making, and experience with storms and such
+things, and by the end of the voyage you could ship on any coasting
+schooner."
+
+It was during this period, between the death of Johansen and the
+arrival on the sealing grounds, that I passed my pleasantest hours
+on the Ghost.  Wolf Larsen was quite considerate, the sailors
+helped me, and I was no longer in irritating contact with Thomas
+Mugridge.  And I make free to say, as the days went by, that I
+found I was taking a certain secret pride in myself.  Fantastic as
+the situation was,--a land-lubber second in command,--I was,
+nevertheless, carrying it off well; and during that brief time I
+was proud of myself, and I grew to love the heave and roll of the
+Ghost under my feet as she wallowed north and west through the
+tropic sea to the islet where we filled our water-casks.
+
+But my happiness was not unalloyed.  It was comparative, a period
+of less misery slipped in between a past of great miseries and a
+future of great miseries.  For the Ghost, so far as the seamen were
+concerned, was a hell-ship of the worst description.  They never
+had a moment's rest or peace.  Wolf Larsen treasured against them
+the attempt on his life and the drubbing he had received in the
+forecastle; and morning, noon, and night, and all night as well, he
+devoted himself to making life unlivable for them.
+
+He knew well the psychology of the little thing, and it was the
+little things by which he kept the crew worked up to the verge of
+madness.  I have seen Harrison called from his bunk to put properly
+away a misplaced paintbrush, and the two watches below haled from
+their tired sleep to accompany him and see him do it.  A little
+thing, truly, but when multiplied by the thousand ingenious devices
+of such a mind, the mental state of the men in the forecastle may
+be slightly comprehended.
+
+Of course much grumbling went on, and little outbursts were
+continually occurring.  Blows were struck, and there were always
+two or three men nursing injuries at the hands of the human beast
+who was their master.  Concerted action was impossible in face of
+the heavy arsenal of weapons carried in the steerage and cabin.
+Leach and Johnson were the two particular victims of Wolf Larsen's
+diabolic temper, and the look of profound melancholy which had
+settled on Johnson's face and in his eyes made my heart bleed.
+
+With Leach it was different.  There was too much of the fighting
+beast in him.  He seemed possessed by an insatiable fury which gave
+no time for grief.  His lips had become distorted into a permanent
+snarl, which at mere sight of Wolf Larsen broke out in sound,
+horrible and menacing and, I do believe, unconsciously.  I have
+seen him follow Wolf Larsen about with his eyes, like an animal its
+keeper, the while the animal-like snarl sounded deep in his throat
+and vibrated forth between his teeth.
+
+I remember once, on deck, in bright day, touching him on the
+shoulder as preliminary to giving an order.  His back was toward
+me, and at the first feel of my hand he leaped upright in the air
+and away from me, snarling and turning his head as he leaped.  He
+had for the moment mistaken me for the man he hated.
+
+Both he and Johnson would have killed Wolf Larsen at the slightest
+opportunity, but the opportunity never came.  Wolf Larsen was too
+wise for that, and, besides, they had no adequate weapons.  With
+their fists alone they had no chance whatever.  Time and again he
+fought it out with Leach who fought back always, like a wildcat,
+tooth and nail and fist, until stretched, exhausted or unconscious,
+on the deck.  And he was never averse to another encounter.  All
+the devil that was in him challenged the devil in Wolf Larsen.
+They had but to appear on deck at the same time, when they would be
+at it, cursing, snarling, striking; and I have seen Leach fling
+himself upon Wolf Larsen without warning or provocation.  Once he
+threw his heavy sheath-knife, missing Wolf Larsen's throat by an
+inch.  Another time he dropped a steel marlinspike from the mizzen
+crosstree.  It was a difficult cast to make on a rolling ship, but
+the sharp point of the spike, whistling seventy-five feet through
+the air, barely missed Wolf Larsen's head as he emerged from the
+cabin companion-way and drove its length two inches and over into
+the solid deck-planking.  Still another time, he stole into the
+steerage, possessed himself of a loaded shot-gun, and was making a
+rush for the deck with it when caught by Kerfoot and disarmed.
+
+I often wondered why Wolf Larsen did not kill him and make an end
+of it.  But he only laughed and seemed to enjoy it.  There seemed a
+certain spice about it, such as men must feel who take delight in
+making pets of ferocious animals.
+
+"It gives a thrill to life," he explained to me, "when life is
+carried in one's hand.  Man is a natural gambler, and life is the
+biggest stake he can lay.  The greater the odds, the greater the
+thrill.  Why should I deny myself the joy of exciting Leach's soul
+to fever-pitch?  For that matter, I do him a kindness.  The
+greatness of sensation is mutual.  He is living more royally than
+any man for'ard, though he does not know it.  For he has what they
+have not--purpose, something to do and be done, an all-absorbing
+end to strive to attain, the desire to kill me, the hope that he
+may kill me.  Really, Hump, he is living deep and high.  I doubt
+that he has ever lived so swiftly and keenly before, and I honestly
+envy him, sometimes, when I see him raging at the summit of passion
+and sensibility."
+
+"Ah, but it is cowardly, cowardly!" I cried.  "You have all the
+advantage."
+
+"Of the two of us, you and I, who is the greater coward?" he asked
+seriously.  "If the situation is unpleasing, you compromise with
+your conscience when you make yourself a party to it.  If you were
+really great, really true to yourself, you would join forces with
+Leach and Johnson.  But you are afraid, you are afraid.  You want
+to live.  The life that is in you cries out that it must live, no
+matter what the cost; so you live ignominiously, untrue to the best
+you dream of, sinning against your whole pitiful little code, and,
+if there were a hell, heading your soul straight for it.  Bah!  I
+play the braver part.  I do no sin, for I am true to the promptings
+of the life that is in me.  I am sincere with my soul at least, and
+that is what you are not."
+
+There was a sting in what he said.  Perhaps, after all, I was
+playing a cowardly part.  And the more I thought about it the more
+it appeared that my duty to myself lay in doing what he had
+advised, lay in joining forces with Johnson and Leach and working
+for his death.  Right here, I think, entered the austere conscience
+of my Puritan ancestry, impelling me toward lurid deeds and
+sanctioning even murder as right conduct.  I dwelt upon the idea.
+It would be a most moral act to rid the world of such a monster.
+Humanity would be better and happier for it, life fairer and
+sweeter.
+
+I pondered it long, lying sleepless in my bunk and reviewing in
+endless procession the facts of the situation.  I talked with
+Johnson and Leach, during the night watches when Wolf Larsen was
+below.  Both men had lost hope--Johnson, because of temperamental
+despondency; Leach, because he had beaten himself out in the vain
+struggle and was exhausted.  But he caught my hand in a passionate
+grip one night, saying:
+
+"I think yer square, Mr. Van Weyden.  But stay where you are and
+keep yer mouth shut.  Say nothin' but saw wood.  We're dead men, I
+know it; but all the same you might be able to do us a favour some
+time when we need it damn bad."
+
+It was only next day, when Wainwright Island loomed to windward,
+close abeam, that Wolf Larsen opened his mouth in prophecy.  He had
+attacked Johnson, been attacked by Leach, and had just finished
+whipping the pair of them.
+
+"Leach," he said, "you know I'm going to kill you some time or
+other, don't you?"
+
+A snarl was the answer.
+
+"And as for you, Johnson, you'll get so tired of life before I'm
+through with you that you'll fling yourself over the side.  See if
+you don't."
+
+"That's a suggestion," he added, in an aside to me.  "I'll bet you
+a month's pay he acts upon it."
+
+I had cherished a hope that his victims would find an opportunity
+to escape while filling our water-barrels, but Wolf Larsen had
+selected his spot well.  The Ghost lay half-a-mile beyond the surf-
+line of a lonely beach.  Here debauched a deep gorge, with
+precipitous, volcanic walls which no man could scale.  And here,
+under his direct supervision--for he went ashore himself--Leach and
+Johnson filled the small casks and rolled them down to the beach.
+They had no chance to make a break for liberty in one of the boats.
+
+Harrison and Kelly, however, made such an attempt.  They composed
+one of the boats' crews, and their task was to ply between the
+schooner and the shore, carrying a single cask each trip.  Just
+before dinner, starting for the beach with an empty barrel, they
+altered their course and bore away to the left to round the
+promontory which jutted into the sea between them and liberty.
+Beyond its foaming base lay the pretty villages of the Japanese
+colonists and smiling valleys which penetrated deep into the
+interior.  Once in the fastnesses they promised, and the two men
+could defy Wolf Larsen.
+
+I had observed Henderson and Smoke loitering about the deck all
+morning, and I now learned why they were there.  Procuring their
+rifles, they opened fire in a leisurely manner, upon the deserters.
+It was a cold-blooded exhibition of marksmanship.  At first their
+bullets zipped harmlessly along the surface of the water on either
+side the boat; but, as the men continued to pull lustily, they
+struck closer and closer.
+
+"Now, watch me take Kelly's right oar," Smoke said, drawing a more
+careful aim.
+
+I was looking through the glasses, and I saw the oar-blade shatter
+as he shot.  Henderson duplicated it, selecting Harrison's right
+oar.  The boat slewed around.  The two remaining oars were quickly
+broken.  The men tried to row with the splinters, and had them shot
+out of their hands.  Kelly ripped up a bottom board and began
+paddling, but dropped it with a cry of pain as its splinters drove
+into his hands.  Then they gave up, letting the boat drift till a
+second boat, sent from the shore by Wolf Larsen, took them in tow
+and brought them aboard.
+
+Late that afternoon we hove up anchor and got away.  Nothing was
+before us but the three or four months' hunting on the sealing
+grounds.  The outlook was black indeed, and I went about my work
+with a heavy heart.  An almost funereal gloom seemed to have
+descended upon the Ghost.  Wolf Larsen had taken to his bunk with
+one of his strange, splitting headaches.  Harrison stood listlessly
+at the wheel, half supporting himself by it, as though wearied by
+the weight of his flesh.  The rest of the men were morose and
+silent.  I came upon Kelly crouching to the lee of the forecastle
+scuttle, his head on his knees, his arms about his head, in an
+attitude of unutterable despondency.
+
+Johnson I found lying full length on the forecastle head, staring
+at the troubled churn of the forefoot, and I remembered with horror
+the suggestion Wolf Larsen had made.  It seemed likely to bear
+fruit.  I tried to break in on the man's morbid thoughts by calling
+him away, but he smiled sadly at me and refused to obey.
+
+Leach approached me as I returned aft.
+
+"I want to ask a favour, Mr. Van Weyden," he said.  "If it's yer
+luck to ever make 'Frisco once more, will you hunt up Matt
+McCarthy?  He's my old man.  He lives on the Hill, back of the
+Mayfair bakery, runnin' a cobbler's shop that everybody knows, and
+you'll have no trouble.  Tell him I lived to be sorry for the
+trouble I brought him and the things I done, and--and just tell him
+'God bless him,' for me."
+
+I nodded my head, but said, "We'll all win back to San Francisco,
+Leach, and you'll be with me when I go to see Matt McCarthy."
+
+"I'd like to believe you," he answered, shaking my hand, "but I
+can't.  Wolf Larsen 'll do for me, I know it; and all I can hope
+is, he'll do it quick."
+
+And as he left me I was aware of the same desire at my heart.
+Since it was to be done, let it be done with despatch.  The general
+gloom had gathered me into its folds.  The worst appeared
+inevitable; and as I paced the deck, hour after hour, I found
+myself afflicted with Wolf Larsen's repulsive ideas.  What was it
+all about?  Where was the grandeur of life that it should permit
+such wanton destruction of human souls?  It was a cheap and sordid
+thing after all, this life, and the sooner over the better.  Over
+and done with!  I, too, leaned upon the rail and gazed longingly
+into the sea, with the certainty that sooner or later I should be
+sinking down, down, through the cool green depths of its oblivion.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+
+Strange to say, in spite of the general foreboding, nothing of
+especial moment happened on the Ghost.  We ran on to the north and
+west till we raised the coast of Japan and picked up with the great
+seal herd.  Coming from no man knew where in the illimitable
+Pacific, it was travelling north on its annual migration to the
+rookeries of Bering Sea.  And north we travelled with it, ravaging
+and destroying, flinging the naked carcasses to the shark and
+salting down the skins so that they might later adorn the fair
+shoulders of the women of the cities.
+
+It was wanton slaughter, and all for woman's sake.  No man ate of
+the seal meat or the oil.  After a good day's killing I have seen
+our decks covered with hides and bodies, slippery with fat and
+blood, the scuppers running red; masts, ropes, and rails spattered
+with the sanguinary colour; and the men, like butchers plying their
+trade, naked and red of arm and hand, hard at work with ripping and
+flensing-knives, removing the skins from the pretty sea-creatures
+they had killed.
+
+It was my task to tally the pelts as they came aboard from the
+boats, to oversee the skinning and afterward the cleansing of the
+decks and bringing things ship-shape again.  It was not pleasant
+work.  My soul and my stomach revolted at it; and yet, in a way,
+this handling and directing of many men was good for me.  It
+developed what little executive ability I possessed, and I was
+aware of a toughening or hardening which I was undergoing and which
+could not be anything but wholesome for "Sissy" Van Weyden.
+
+One thing I was beginning to feel, and that was that I could never
+again be quite the same man I had been.  While my hope and faith in
+human life still survived Wolf Larsen's destructive criticism, he
+had nevertheless been a cause of change in minor matters.  He had
+opened up for me the world of the real, of which I had known
+practically nothing and from which I had always shrunk.  I had
+learned to look more closely at life as it was lived, to recognize
+that there were such things as facts in the world, to emerge from
+the realm of mind and idea and to place certain values on the
+concrete and objective phases of existence.
+
+I saw more of Wolf Larsen than ever when we had gained the grounds.
+For when the weather was fair and we were in the midst of the herd,
+all hands were away in the boats, and left on board were only he
+and I, and Thomas Mugridge, who did not count.  But there was no
+play about it.  The six boats, spreading out fan-wise from the
+schooner until the first weather boat and the last lee boat were
+anywhere from ten to twenty miles apart, cruised along a straight
+course over the sea till nightfall or bad weather drove them in.
+It was our duty to sail the Ghost well to leeward of the last lee
+boat, so that all the boats should have fair wind to run for us in
+case of squalls or threatening weather.
+
+It is no slight matter for two men, particularly when a stiff wind
+has sprung up, to handle a vessel like the Ghost, steering, keeping
+look-out for the boats, and setting or taking in sail; so it
+devolved upon me to learn, and learn quickly.  Steering I picked up
+easily, but running aloft to the crosstrees and swinging my whole
+weight by my arms when I left the ratlines and climbed still
+higher, was more difficult.  This, too, I learned, and quickly, for
+I felt somehow a wild desire to vindicate myself in Wolf Larsen's
+eyes, to prove my right to live in ways other than of the mind.
+Nay, the time came when I took joy in the run of the masthead and
+in the clinging on by my legs at that precarious height while I
+swept the sea with glasses in search of the boats.
+
+I remember one beautiful day, when the boats left early and the
+reports of the hunters' guns grew dim and distant and died away as
+they scattered far and wide over the sea.  There was just the
+faintest wind from the westward; but it breathed its last by the
+time we managed to get to leeward of the last lee boat.  One by
+one--I was at the masthead and saw--the six boats disappeared over
+the bulge of the earth as they followed the seal into the west.  We
+lay, scarcely rolling on the placid sea, unable to follow.  Wolf
+Larsen was apprehensive.  The barometer was down, and the sky to
+the east did not please him.  He studied it with unceasing
+vigilance.
+
+"If she comes out of there," he said, "hard and snappy, putting us
+to windward of the boats, it's likely there'll be empty bunks in
+steerage and fo'c'sle."
+
+By eleven o'clock the sea had become glass.  By midday, though we
+were well up in the northerly latitudes, the heat was sickening.
+There was no freshness in the air.  It was sultry and oppressive,
+reminding me of what the old Californians term "earthquake
+weather."  There was something ominous about it, and in intangible
+ways one was made to feel that the worst was about to come.  Slowly
+the whole eastern sky filled with clouds that over-towered us like
+some black sierra of the infernal regions.  So clearly could one
+see canon, gorge, and precipice, and the shadows that lie therein,
+that one looked unconsciously for the white surf-line and bellowing
+caverns where the sea charges on the land.  And still we rocked
+gently, and there was no wind.
+
+"It's no square" Wolf Larsen said.  "Old Mother Nature's going to
+get up on her hind legs and howl for all that's in her, and it'll
+keep us jumping, Hump, to pull through with half our boats.  You'd
+better run up and loosen the topsails."
+
+"But if it is going to howl, and there are only two of us?" I
+asked, a note of protest in my voice.
+
+"Why we've got to make the best of the first of it and run down to
+our boats before our canvas is ripped out of us.  After that I
+don't give a rap what happens.  The sticks 'll stand it, and you
+and I will have to, though we've plenty cut out for us."
+
+Still the calm continued.  We ate dinner, a hurried and anxious
+meal for me with eighteen men abroad on the sea and beyond the
+bulge of the earth, and with that heaven-rolling mountain range of
+clouds moving slowly down upon us.  Wolf Larsen did not seem
+affected, however; though I noticed, when we returned to the deck,
+a slight twitching of the nostrils, a perceptible quickness of
+movement.  His face was stern, the lines of it had grown hard, and
+yet in his eyes--blue, clear blue this day--there was a strange
+brilliancy, a bright scintillating light.  It struck me that he was
+joyous, in a ferocious sort of way; that he was glad there was an
+impending struggle; that he was thrilled and upborne with knowledge
+that one of the great moments of living, when the tide of life
+surges up in flood, was upon him.
+
+Once, and unwitting that he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud,
+mockingly and defiantly, at the advancing storm.  I see him yet
+standing there like a pigmy out of the Arabian Nights before the
+huge front of some malignant genie.  He was daring destiny, and he
+was unafraid.
+
+He walked to the galley.  "Cooky, by the time you've finished pots
+and pans you'll be wanted on deck.  Stand ready for a call."
+
+"Hump," he said, becoming cognizant of the fascinated gaze I bent
+upon him, "this beats whisky and is where your Omar misses.  I
+think he only half lived after all."
+
+The western half of the sky had by now grown murky.  The sun had
+dimmed and faded out of sight.  It was two in the afternoon, and a
+ghostly twilight, shot through by wandering purplish lights, had
+descended upon us.  In this purplish light Wolf Larsen's face
+glowed and glowed, and to my excited fancy he appeared encircled by
+a halo.  We lay in the midst of an unearthly quiet, while all about
+us were signs and omens of oncoming sound and movement.  The sultry
+heat had become unendurable.  The sweat was standing on my
+forehead, and I could feel it trickling down my nose.  I felt as
+though I should faint, and reached out to the rail for support.
+
+And then, just then, the faintest possible whisper of air passed
+by.  It was from the east, and like a whisper it came and went.
+The drooping canvas was not stirred, and yet my face had felt the
+air and been cooled.
+
+"Cooky," Wolf Larsen called in a low voice.  Thomas Mugridge turned
+a pitiable scared face.  "Let go that foreboom tackle and pass it
+across, and when she's willing let go the sheet and come in snug
+with the tackle.  And if you make a mess of it, it will be the last
+you ever make.  Understand?"
+
+"Mr. Van Weyden, stand by to pass the head-sails over.  Then jump
+for the topsails and spread them quick as God'll let you--the
+quicker you do it the easier you'll find it.  As for Cooky, if he
+isn't lively bat him between the eyes."
+
+I was aware of the compliment and pleased, in that no threat had
+accompanied my instructions.  We were lying head to north-west, and
+it was his intention to jibe over all with the first puff.
+
+"We'll have the breeze on our quarter," he explained to me.  "By
+the last guns the boats were bearing away slightly to the
+south'ard."
+
+He turned and walked aft to the wheel.  I went forward and took my
+station at the jibs.  Another whisper of wind, and another, passed
+by.  The canvas flapped lazily.
+
+"Thank Gawd she's not comin' all of a bunch, Mr. Van Weyden," was
+the Cockney's fervent ejaculation.
+
+And I was indeed thankful, for I had by this time learned enough to
+know, with all our canvas spread, what disaster in such event
+awaited us.  The whispers of wind became puffs, the sails filled,
+the Ghost moved.  Wolf Larsen put the wheel hard up, to port, and
+we began to pay off.  The wind was now dead astern, muttering and
+puffing stronger and stronger, and my head-sails were pounding
+lustily.  I did not see what went on elsewhere, though I felt the
+sudden surge and heel of the schooner as the wind-pressures changed
+to the jibing of the fore- and main-sails.  My hands were full with
+the flying-jib, jib, and staysail; and by the time this part of my
+task was accomplished the Ghost was leaping into the south-west,
+the wind on her quarter and all her sheets to starboard.  Without
+pausing for breath, though my heart was beating like a trip-hammer
+from my exertions, I sprang to the topsails, and before the wind
+had become too strong we had them fairly set and were coiling down.
+Then I went aft for orders.
+
+Wolf Larsen nodded approval and relinquished the wheel to me.  The
+wind was strengthening steadily and the sea rising.  For an hour I
+steered, each moment becoming more difficult.  I had not the
+experience to steer at the gait we were going on a quartering
+course.
+
+"Now take a run up with the glasses and raise some of the boats.
+We've made at least ten knots, and we're going twelve or thirteen
+now.  The old girl knows how to walk."
+
+I contested myself with the fore crosstrees, some seventy feet
+above the deck.  As I searched the vacant stretch of water before
+me, I comprehended thoroughly the need for haste if we were to
+recover any of our men.  Indeed, as I gazed at the heavy sea
+through which we were running, I doubted that there was a boat
+afloat.  It did not seem possible that such frail craft could
+survive such stress of wind and water.
+
+I could not feel the full force of the wind, for we were running
+with it; but from my lofty perch I looked down as though outside
+the Ghost and apart from her, and saw the shape of her outlined
+sharply against the foaming sea as she tore along instinct with
+life.  Sometimes she would lift and send across some great wave,
+burying her starboard-rail from view, and covering her deck to the
+hatches with the boiling ocean.  At such moments, starting from a
+windward roll, I would go flying through the air with dizzying
+swiftness, as though I clung to the end of a huge, inverted
+pendulum, the arc of which, between the greater rolls, must have
+been seventy feet or more.  Once, the terror of this giddy sweep
+overpowered me, and for a while I clung on, hand and foot, weak and
+trembling, unable to search the sea for the missing boats or to
+behold aught of the sea but that which roared beneath and strove to
+overwhelm the Ghost.
+
+But the thought of the men in the midst of it steadied me, and in
+my quest for them I forgot myself.  For an hour I saw nothing but
+the naked, desolate sea.  And then, where a vagrant shaft of
+sunlight struck the ocean and turned its surface to wrathful
+silver, I caught a small black speck thrust skyward for an instant
+and swallowed up.  I waited patiently.  Again the tiny point of
+black projected itself through the wrathful blaze a couple of
+points off our port-bow.  I did not attempt to shout, but
+communicated the news to Wolf Larsen by waving my arm.  He changed
+the course, and I signalled affirmation when the speck showed dead
+ahead.
+
+It grew larger, and so swiftly that for the first time I fully
+appreciated the speed of our flight.  Wolf Larsen motioned for me
+to come down, and when I stood beside him at the wheel gave me
+instructions for heaving to.
+
+"Expect all hell to break loose," he cautioned me, "but don't mind
+it.  Yours is to do your own work and to have Cooky stand by the
+fore-sheet."
+
+I managed to make my way forward, but there was little choice of
+sides, for the weather-rail seemed buried as often as the lee.
+Having instructed Thomas Mugridge as to what he was to do, I
+clambered into the fore-rigging a few feet.  The boat was now very
+close, and I could make out plainly that it was lying head to wind
+and sea and dragging on its mast and sail, which had been thrown
+overboard and made to serve as a sea-anchor.  The three men were
+bailing.  Each rolling mountain whelmed them from view, and I would
+wait with sickening anxiety, fearing that they would never appear
+again.  Then, and with black suddenness, the boat would shoot clear
+through the foaming crest, bow pointed to the sky, and the whole
+length of her bottom showing, wet and dark, till she seemed on end.
+There would be a fleeting glimpse of the three men flinging water
+in frantic haste, when she would topple over and fall into the
+yawning valley, bow down and showing her full inside length to the
+stern upreared almost directly above the bow.  Each time that she
+reappeared was a miracle.
+
+The Ghost suddenly changed her course, keeping away, and it came to
+me with a shock that Wolf Larsen was giving up the rescue as
+impossible.  Then I realized that he was preparing to heave to, and
+dropped to the deck to be in readiness.  We were now dead before
+the wind, the boat far away and abreast of us.  I felt an abrupt
+easing of the schooner, a loss for the moment of all strain and
+pressure, coupled with a swift acceleration of speed.  She was
+rushing around on her heel into the wind.
+
+As she arrived at right angles to the sea, the full force of the
+wind (from which we had hitherto run away) caught us.  I was
+unfortunately and ignorantly facing it.  It stood up against me
+like a wall, filling my lungs with air which I could not expel.
+And as I choked and strangled, and as the Ghost wallowed for an
+instant, broadside on and rolling straight over and far into the
+wind, I beheld a huge sea rise far above my head.  I turned aside,
+caught my breath, and looked again.  The wave over-topped the
+Ghost, and I gazed sheer up and into it.  A shaft of sunlight smote
+the over-curl, and I caught a glimpse of translucent, rushing
+green, backed by a milky smother of foam.
+
+Then it descended, pandemonium broke loose, everything happened at
+once.  I was struck a crushing, stunning blow, nowhere in
+particular and yet everywhere.  My hold had been broken loose, I
+was under water, and the thought passed through my mind that this
+was the terrible thing of which I had heard, the being swept in the
+trough of the sea.  My body struck and pounded as it was dashed
+helplessly along and turned over and over, and when I could hold my
+breath no longer, I breathed the stinging salt water into my lungs.
+But through it all I clung to the one idea--I MUST GET THE JIB
+BACKED OVER TO WINDWARD.  I had no fear of death.  I had no doubt
+but that I should come through somehow.  And as this idea of
+fulfilling Wolf Larsen's order persisted in my dazed consciousness,
+I seemed to see him standing at the wheel in the midst of the wild
+welter, pitting his will against the will of the storm and defying
+it.
+
+I brought up violently against what I took to be the rail,
+breathed, and breathed the sweet air again.  I tried to rise, but
+struck my head and was knocked back on hands and knees.  By some
+freak of the waters I had been swept clear under the forecastle-
+head and into the eyes.  As I scrambled out on all fours, I passed
+over the body of Thomas Mugridge, who lay in a groaning heap.
+There was no time to investigate.  I must get the jib backed over.
+
+When I emerged on deck it seemed that the end of everything had
+come.  On all sides there was a rending and crashing of wood and
+steel and canvas.  The Ghost was being wrenched and torn to
+fragments.  The foresail and fore-topsail, emptied of the wind by
+the manoeuvre, and with no one to bring in the sheet in time, were
+thundering into ribbons, the heavy boom threshing and splintering
+from rail to rail.  The air was thick with flying wreckage,
+detached ropes and stays were hissing and coiling like snakes, and
+down through it all crashed the gaff of the foresail.
+
+The spar could not have missed me by many inches, while it spurred
+me to action.  Perhaps the situation was not hopeless.  I
+remembered Wolf Larsen's caution.  He had expected all hell to
+break loose, and here it was.  And where was he?  I caught sight of
+him toiling at the main-sheet, heaving it in and flat with his
+tremendous muscles, the stern of the schooner lifted high in the
+air and his body outlined against a white surge of sea sweeping
+past.  All this, and more,--a whole world of chaos and wreck,--in
+possibly fifteen seconds I had seen and heard and grasped.
+
+I did not stop to see what had become of the small boat, but sprang
+to the jib-sheet.  The jib itself was beginning to slap, partially
+filling and emptying with sharp reports; but with a turn of the
+sheet and the application of my whole strength each time it
+slapped, I slowly backed it.  This I know:  I did my best.  I
+pulled till I burst open the ends of all my fingers; and while I
+pulled, the flying-jib and staysail split their cloths apart and
+thundered into nothingness.
+
+Still I pulled, holding what I gained each time with a double turn
+until the next slap gave me more.  Then the sheet gave with greater
+ease, and Wolf Larsen was beside me, heaving in alone while I was
+busied taking up the slack.
+
+"Make fast!" he shouted.  "And come on!"
+
+As I followed him, I noted that in spite of rack and ruin a rough
+order obtained.  The Ghost was hove to.  She was still in working
+order, and she was still working.  Though the rest of her sails
+were gone, the jib, backed to windward, and the mainsail hauled
+down flat, were themselves holding, and holding her bow to the
+furious sea as well.
+
+I looked for the boat, and, while Wolf Larsen cleared the boat-
+tackles, saw it lift to leeward on a big sea an not a score of feet
+away.  And, so nicely had he made his calculation, we drifted
+fairly down upon it, so that nothing remained to do but hook the
+tackles to either end and hoist it aboard.  But this was not done
+so easily as it is written.
+
+In the bow was Kerfoot, Oofty-Oofty in the stern, and Kelly
+amidships.  As we drifted closer the boat would rise on a wave
+while we sank in the trough, till almost straight above me I could
+see the heads of the three men craned overside and looking down.
+Then, the next moment, we would lift and soar upward while they
+sank far down beneath us.  It seemed incredible that the next surge
+should not crush the Ghost down upon the tiny eggshell.
+
+But, at the right moment, I passed the tackle to the Kanaka, while
+Wolf Larsen did the same thing forward to Kerfoot.  Both tackles
+were hooked in a trice, and the three men, deftly timing the roll,
+made a simultaneous leap aboard the schooner.  As the Ghost rolled
+her side out of water, the boat was lifted snugly against her, and
+before the return roll came, we had heaved it in over the side and
+turned it bottom up on the deck.  I noticed blood spouting from
+Kerfoot's left hand.  In some way the third finger had been crushed
+to a pulp.  But he gave no sign of pain, and with his single right
+hand helped us lash the boat in its place.
+
+"Stand by to let that jib over, you Oofty!" Wolf Larsen commanded,
+the very second we had finished with the boat.  "Kelly, come aft
+and slack off the main-sheet!  You, Kerfoot, go for'ard and see
+what's become of Cooky!  Mr. Van Weyden, run aloft again, and cut
+away any stray stuff on your way!"
+
+And having commanded, he went aft with his peculiar tigerish leaps
+to the wheel.  While I toiled up the fore-shrouds the Ghost slowly
+paid off.  This time, as we went into the trough of the sea and
+were swept, there were no sails to carry away.  And, halfway to the
+crosstrees and flattened against the rigging by the full force of
+the wind so that it would have been impossible for me to have
+fallen, the Ghost almost on her beam-ends and the masts parallel
+with the water, I looked, not down, but at almost right angles from
+the perpendicular, to the deck of the Ghost.  But I saw, not the
+deck, but where the deck should have been, for it was buried
+beneath a wild tumbling of water.  Out of this water I could see
+the two masts rising, and that was all.  The Ghost, for the moment,
+was buried beneath the sea.  As she squared off more and more,
+escaping from the side pressure, she righted herself and broke her
+deck, like a whale's back, through the ocean surface.
+
+Then we raced, and wildly, across the wild sea, the while I hung
+like a fly in the crosstrees and searched for the other boats.  In
+half-an-hour I sighted the second one, swamped and bottom up, to
+which were desperately clinging Jock Horner, fat Louis, and
+Johnson.  This time I remained aloft, and Wolf Larsen succeeded in
+heaving to without being swept.  As before, we drifted down upon
+it.  Tackles were made fast and lines flung to the men, who
+scrambled aboard like monkeys.  The boat itself was crushed and
+splintered against the schooner's side as it came inboard; but the
+wreck was securely lashed, for it could be patched and made whole
+again.
+
+Once more the Ghost bore away before the storm, this time so
+submerging herself that for some seconds I thought she would never
+reappear.  Even the wheel, quite a deal higher than the waist, was
+covered and swept again and again.  At such moments I felt
+strangely alone with God, alone with him and watching the chaos of
+his wrath.  And then the wheel would reappear, and Wolf Larsen's
+broad shoulders, his hands gripping the spokes and holding the
+schooner to the course of his will, himself an earth-god,
+dominating the storm, flinging its descending waters from him and
+riding it to his own ends.  And oh, the marvel of it! the marvel of
+it!  That tiny men should live and breathe and work, and drive so
+frail a contrivance of wood and cloth through so tremendous an
+elemental strife.
+
+As before, the Ghost swung out of the trough, lifting her deck
+again out of the sea, and dashed before the howling blast.  It was
+now half-past five, and half-an-hour later, when the last of the
+day lost itself in a dim and furious twilight, I sighted a third
+boat.  It was bottom up, and there was no sign of its crew.  Wolf
+Larsen repeated his manoeuvre, holding off and then rounding up to
+windward and drifting down upon it.  But this time he missed by
+forty feet, the boat passing astern.
+
+"Number four boat!" Oofty-Oofty cried, his keen eyes reading its
+number in the one second when it lifted clear of the foam, and
+upside down.
+
+It was Henderson's boat and with him had been lost Holyoak and
+Williams, another of the deep-water crowd.  Lost they indubitably
+were; but the boat remained, and Wolf Larsen made one more reckless
+effort to recover it.  I had come down to the deck, and I saw
+Horner and Kerfoot vainly protest against the attempt.
+
+"By God, I'll not be robbed of my boat by any storm that ever blew
+out of hell!" he shouted, and though we four stood with our heads
+together that we might hear, his voice seemed faint and far, as
+though removed from us an immense distance.
+
+"Mr. Van Weyden!" he cried, and I heard through the tumult as one
+might hear a whisper.  "Stand by that jib with Johnson and Oofty!
+The rest of you tail aft to the mainsheet!  Lively now! or I'll
+sail you all into Kingdom Come!  Understand?"
+
+And when he put the wheel hard over and the Ghost's bow swung off,
+there was nothing for the hunters to do but obey and make the best
+of a risky chance.  How great the risk I realized when I was once
+more buried beneath the pounding seas and clinging for life to the
+pinrail at the foot of the foremast.  My fingers were torn loose,
+and I swept across to the side and over the side into the sea.  I
+could not swim, but before I could sink I was swept back again.  A
+strong hand gripped me, and when the Ghost finally emerged, I found
+that I owed my life to Johnson.  I saw him looking anxiously about
+him, and noted that Kelly, who had come forward at the last moment,
+was missing.
+
+This time, having missed the boat, and not being in the same
+position as in the previous instances, Wolf Larsen was compelled to
+resort to a different manoeuvre.  Running off before the wind with
+everything to starboard, he came about, and returned close-hauled
+on the port tack.
+
+"Grand!" Johnson shouted in my ear, as we successfully came through
+the attendant deluge, and I knew he referred, not to Wolf Larsen's
+seamanship, but to the performance of the Ghost herself.
+
+It was now so dark that there was no sign of the boat; but Wolf
+Larsen held back through the frightful turmoil as if guided by
+unerring instinct.  This time, though we were continually half-
+buried, there was no trough in which to be swept, and we drifted
+squarely down upon the upturned boat, badly smashing it as it was
+heaved inboard.
+
+Two hours of terrible work followed, in which all hands of us--two
+hunters, three sailors, Wolf Larsen and I--reefed, first one and
+then the other, the jib and mainsail.  Hove to under this short
+canvas, our decks were comparatively free of water, while the Ghost
+bobbed and ducked amongst the combers like a cork.
+
+I had burst open the ends of my fingers at the very first, and
+during the reefing I had worked with tears of pain running down my
+cheeks.  And when all was done, I gave up like a woman and rolled
+upon the deck in the agony of exhaustion.
+
+In the meantime Thomas Mugridge, like a drowned rat, was being
+dragged out from under the forecastle head where he had cravenly
+ensconced himself.  I saw him pulled aft to the cabin, and noted
+with a shock of surprise that the galley had disappeared.  A clean
+space of deck showed where it had stood.
+
+In the cabin I found all hands assembled, sailors as well, and
+while coffee was being cooked over the small stove we drank whisky
+and crunched hard-tack.  Never in my life had food been so welcome.
+And never had hot coffee tasted so good.  So violently did the
+Ghost, pitch and toss and tumble that it was impossible for even
+the sailors to move about without holding on, and several times,
+after a cry of "Now she takes it!" we were heaped upon the wall of
+the port cabins as though it had been the deck.
+
+"To hell with a look-out," I heard Wolf Larsen say when we had
+eaten and drunk our fill.  "There's nothing can be done on deck.
+If anything's going to run us down we couldn't get out of its way.
+Turn in, all hands, and get some sleep."
+
+The sailors slipped forward, setting the side-lights as they went,
+while the two hunters remained to sleep in the cabin, it not being
+deemed advisable to open the slide to the steerage companion-way.
+Wolf Larsen and I, between us, cut off Kerfoot's crushed finger and
+sewed up the stump.  Mugridge, who, during all the time he had been
+compelled to cook and serve coffee and keep the fire going, had
+complained of internal pains, now swore that he had a broken rib or
+two.  On examination we found that he had three.  But his case was
+deferred to next day, principally for the reason that I did not
+know anything about broken ribs and would first have to read it up.
+
+"I don't think it was worth it," I said to Wolf Larsen, "a broken
+boat for Kelly's life."
+
+"But Kelly didn't amount to much," was the reply.  "Good-night."
+
+After all that had passed, suffering intolerable anguish in my
+finger-ends, and with three boats missing, to say nothing of the
+wild capers the Ghost was cutting, I should have thought it
+impossible to sleep.  But my eyes must have closed the instant my
+head touched the pillow, and in utter exhaustion I slept throughout
+the night, the while the Ghost, lonely and undirected, fought her
+way through the storm.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+
+The next day, while the storm was blowing itself out, Wolf Larsen
+and I crammed anatomy and surgery and set Mugridge's ribs.  Then,
+when the storm broke, Wolf Larsen cruised back and forth over that
+portion of the ocean where we had encountered it, and somewhat more
+to the westward, while the boats were being repaired and new sails
+made and bent.  Sealing schooner after sealing schooner we sighted
+and boarded, most of which were in search of lost boats, and most
+of which were carrying boats and crews they had picked up and which
+did not belong to them.  For the thick of the fleet had been to the
+westward of us, and the boats, scattered far and wide, had headed
+in mad flight for the nearest refuge.
+
+Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the Cisco, and, to
+Wolf Larsen's huge delight and my own grief, he culled Smoke, with
+Nilson and Leach, from the San Diego.  So that, at the end of five
+days, we found ourselves short but four men--Henderson, Holyoak,
+Williams, and Kelly,--and were once more hunting on the flanks of
+the herd.
+
+As we followed it north we began to encounter the dreaded sea-fogs.
+Day after day the boats lowered and were swallowed up almost ere
+they touched the water, while we on board pumped the horn at
+regular intervals and every fifteen minutes fired the bomb gun.
+Boats were continually being lost and found, it being the custom
+for a boat to hunt, on lay, with whatever schooner picked it up,
+until such time it was recovered by its own schooner.  But Wolf
+Larsen, as was to be expected, being a boat short, took possession
+of the first stray one and compelled its men to hunt with the
+Ghost, not permitting them to return to their own schooner when we
+sighted it.  I remember how he forced the hunter and his two men
+below, a riffle at their breasts, when their captain passed by at
+biscuit-toss and hailed us for information.
+
+Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life,
+was soon limping about again and performing his double duties of
+cook and cabin-boy.  Johnson and Leach were bullied and beaten as
+much as ever, and they looked for their lives to end with the end
+of the hunting season; while the rest of the crew lived the lives
+of dogs and were worked like dogs by their pitiless master.  As for
+Wolf Larsen and myself, we got along fairly well; though I could
+not quite rid myself of the idea that right conduct, for me, lay in
+killing him.  He fascinated me immeasurably, and I feared him
+immeasurably.  And yet, I could not imagine him lying prone in
+death.  There was an endurance, as of perpetual youth, about him,
+which rose up and forbade the picture.  I could see him only as
+living always, and dominating always, fighting and destroying,
+himself surviving.
+
+One diversion of his, when we were in the midst of the herd and the
+sea was too rough to lower the boats, was to lower with two boat-
+pullers and a steerer and go out himself.  He was a good shot, too,
+and brought many a skin aboard under what the hunters termed
+impossible hunting conditions.  It seemed the breath of his
+nostrils, this carrying his life in his hands and struggling for it
+against tremendous odds.
+
+I was learning more and more seamanship; and one clear day--a thing
+we rarely encountered now--I had the satisfaction of running and
+handling the Ghost and picking up the boats myself.  Wolf Larsen
+had been smitten with one of his headaches, and I stood at the
+wheel from morning until evening, sailing across the ocean after
+the last lee boat, and heaving to and picking it and the other five
+up without command or suggestion from him.
+
+Gales we encountered now and again, for it was a raw and stormy
+region, and, in the middle of June, a typhoon most memorable to me
+and most important because of the changes wrought through it upon
+my future.  We must have been caught nearly at the centre of this
+circular storm, and Wolf Larsen ran out of it and to the southward,
+first under a double-reefed jib, and finally under bare poles.
+Never had I imagined so great a sea.  The seas previously
+encountered were as ripples compared with these, which ran a half-
+mile from crest to crest and which upreared, I am confident, above
+our masthead.  So great was it that Wolf Larsen himself did not
+dare heave to, though he was being driven far to the southward and
+out of the seal herd.
+
+We must have been well in the path of the trans-Pacific steamships
+when the typhoon moderated, and here, to the surprise of the
+hunters, we found ourselves in the midst of seals--a second herd,
+or sort of rear-guard, they declared, and a most unusual thing.
+But it was "Boats over!" the boom-boom of guns, and the pitiful
+slaughter through the long day.
+
+It was at this time that I was approached by Leach.  I had just
+finished tallying the skins of the last boat aboard, when he came
+to my side, in the darkness, and said in a low tone:
+
+"Can you tell me, Mr. Van Weyden, how far we are off the coast, and
+what the bearings of Yokohama are?"
+
+My heart leaped with gladness, for I knew what he had in mind, and
+I gave him the bearings--west-north-west, and five hundred miles
+away.
+
+"Thank you, sir," was all he said as he slipped back into the
+darkness.
+
+Next morning No. 3 boat and Johnson and Leach were missing.  The
+water-breakers and grub-boxes from all the other boats were
+likewise missing, as were the beds and sea bags of the two men.
+Wolf Larsen was furious.  He set sail and bore away into the west-
+north-west, two hunters constantly at the mastheads and sweeping
+the sea with glasses, himself pacing the deck like an angry lion.
+He knew too well my sympathy for the runaways to send me aloft as
+look-out.
+
+The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle
+in a haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity.
+But he put the Ghost through her best paces so as to get between
+the deserters and the land.  This accomplished, he cruised back and
+forth across what he knew must be their course.
+
+On the morning of the third day, shortly after eight bells, a cry
+that the boat was sighted came down from Smoke at the masthead.
+All hands lined the rail.  A snappy breeze was blowing from the
+west with the promise of more wind behind it; and there, to
+leeward, in the troubled silver of the rising sun, appeared and
+disappeared a black speck.
+
+We squared away and ran for it.  My heart was as lead.  I felt
+myself turning sick in anticipation; and as I looked at the gleam
+of triumph in Wolf Larsen's eyes, his form swam before me, and I
+felt almost irresistibly impelled to fling myself upon him.  So
+unnerved was I by the thought of impending violence to Leach and
+Johnson that my reason must have left me.  I know that I slipped
+down into the steerage in a daze, and that I was just beginning the
+ascent to the deck, a loaded shot-gun in my hands, when I heard the
+startled cry:
+
+"There's five men in that boat!"
+
+I supported myself in the companion-way, weak and trembling, while
+the observation was being verified by the remarks of the rest of
+the men.  Then my knees gave from under me and I sank down, myself
+again, but overcome by shock at knowledge of what I had so nearly
+done.  Also, I was very thankful as I put the gun away and slipped
+back on deck.
+
+No one had remarked my absence.  The boat was near enough for us to
+make out that it was larger than any sealing boat and built on
+different lines.  As we drew closer, the sail was taken in and the
+mast unstepped.  Oars were shipped, and its occupants waited for us
+to heave to and take them aboard.
+
+Smoke, who had descended to the deck and was now standing by my
+side, began to chuckle in a significant way.  I looked at him
+inquiringly.
+
+"Talk of a mess!" he giggled.
+
+"What's wrong?" I demanded.
+
+Again he chuckled.  "Don't you see there, in the stern-sheets, on
+the bottom?  May I never shoot a seal again if that ain't a woman!"
+
+I looked closely, but was not sure until exclamations broke out on
+all sides.  The boat contained four men, and its fifth occupant was
+certainly a woman.  We were agog with excitement, all except Wolf
+Larsen, who was too evidently disappointed in that it was not his
+own boat with the two victims of his malice.
+
+We ran down the flying jib, hauled the jib-sheets to wind-ward and
+the main-sheet flat, and came up into the wind.  The oars struck
+the water, and with a few strokes the boat was alongside.  I now
+caught my first fair glimpse of the woman.  She was wrapped in a
+long ulster, for the morning was raw; and I could see nothing but
+her face and a mass of light brown hair escaping from under the
+seaman's cap on her head.  The eyes were large and brown and
+lustrous, the mouth sweet and sensitive, and the face itself a
+delicate oval, though sun and exposure to briny wind had burnt the
+face scarlet.
+
+She seemed to me like a being from another world.  I was aware of a
+hungry out-reaching for her, as of a starving man for bread.  But
+then, I had not seen a woman for a very long time.  I know that I
+was lost in a great wonder, almost a stupor,--this, then, was a
+woman?--so that I forgot myself and my mate's duties, and took no
+part in helping the new-comers aboard.  For when one of the sailors
+lifted her into Wolf Larsen's downstretched arms, she looked up
+into our curious faces and smiled amusedly and sweetly, as only a
+woman can smile, and as I had seen no one smile for so long that I
+had forgotten such smiles existed.
+
+"Mr. Van Weyden!"
+
+Wolf Larsen's voice brought me sharply back to myself.
+
+"Will you take the lady below and see to her comfort?  Make up that
+spare port cabin.  Put Cooky to work on it.  And see what you can
+do for that face.  It's burned badly."
+
+He turned brusquely away from us and began to question the new men.
+The boat was cast adrift, though one of them called it a "bloody
+shame" with Yokohama so near.
+
+I found myself strangely afraid of this woman I was escorting aft.
+Also I was awkward.  It seemed to me that I was realizing for the
+first time what a delicate, fragile creature a woman is; and as I
+caught her arm to help her down the companion stairs, I was
+startled by its smallness and softness.  Indeed, she was a slender,
+delicate woman as women go, but to me she was so ethereally slender
+and delicate that I was quite prepared for her arm to crumble in my
+grasp.  All this, in frankness, to show my first impression, after
+long denial of women in general and of Maud Brewster in particular.
+
+"No need to go to any great trouble for me," she protested, when I
+had seated her in Wolf Larsen's arm-chair, which I had dragged
+hastily from his cabin.  "The men were looking for land at any
+moment this morning, and the vessel should be in by night; don't
+you think so?"
+
+Her simple faith in the immediate future took me aback.  How could
+I explain to her the situation, the strange man who stalked the sea
+like Destiny, all that it had taken me months to learn?  But I
+answered honestly:
+
+"If it were any other captain except ours, I should say you would
+be ashore in Yokohama to-morrow.  But our captain is a strange man,
+and I beg of you to be prepared for anything--understand?--for
+anything."
+
+"I--I confess I hardly do understand," she hesitated, a perturbed
+but not frightened expression in her eyes.  "Or is it a
+misconception of mine that shipwrecked people are always shown
+every consideration?  This is such a little thing, you know.  We
+are so close to land."
+
+"Candidly, I do not know," I strove to reassure her.  "I wished
+merely to prepare you for the worst, if the worst is to come.  This
+man, this captain, is a brute, a demon, and one can never tell what
+will be his next fantastic act."
+
+I was growing excited, but she interrupted me with an "Oh, I see,"
+and her voice sounded weary.  To think was patently an effort.  She
+was clearly on the verge of physical collapse.
+
+She asked no further questions, and I vouchsafed no remark,
+devoting myself to Wolf Larsen's command, which was to make her
+comfortable.  I bustled about in quite housewifely fashion,
+procuring soothing lotions for her sunburn, raiding Wolf Larsen's
+private stores for a bottle of port I knew to be there, and
+directing Thomas Mugridge in the preparation of the spare state-
+room.
+
+The wind was freshening rapidly, the Ghost heeling over more and
+more, and by the time the state-room was ready she was dashing
+through the water at a lively clip.  I had quite forgotten the
+existence of Leach and Johnson, when suddenly, like a thunderclap,
+"Boat ho!" came down the open companion-way.  It was Smoke's
+unmistakable voice, crying from the masthead.  I shot a glance at
+the woman, but she was leaning back in the arm-chair, her eyes
+closed, unutterably tired.  I doubted that she had heard, and I
+resolved to prevent her seeing the brutality I knew would follow
+the capture of the deserters.  She was tired.  Very good.  She
+should sleep.
+
+There were swift commands on deck, a stamping of feet and a
+slapping of reef-points as the Ghost shot into the wind and about
+on the other tack.  As she filled away and heeled, the arm-chair
+began to slide across the cabin floor, and I sprang for it just in
+time to prevent the rescued woman from being spilled out.
+
+Her eyes were too heavy to suggest more than a hint of the sleepy
+surprise that perplexed her as she looked up at me, and she half
+stumbled, half tottered, as I led her to her cabin.  Mugridge
+grinned insinuatingly in my face as I shoved him out and ordered
+him back to his galley work; and he won his revenge by spreading
+glowing reports among the hunters as to what an excellent "lydy's-
+myde" I was proving myself to be.
+
+She leaned heavily against me, and I do believe that she had fallen
+asleep again between the arm-chair and the state-room.  This I
+discovered when she nearly fell into the bunk during a sudden lurch
+of the schooner.  She aroused, smiled drowsily, and was off to
+sleep again; and asleep I left her, under a heavy pair of sailor's
+blankets, her head resting on a pillow I had appropriated from Wolf
+Larsen's bunk.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+
+I came on deck to find the Ghost heading up close on the port tack
+and cutting in to windward of a familiar spritsail close-hauled on
+the same tack ahead of us.  All hands were on deck, for they knew
+that something was to happen when Leach and Johnson were dragged
+aboard.
+
+It was four bells.  Louis came aft to relieve the wheel.  There was
+a dampness in the air, and I noticed he had on his oilskins.
+
+"What are we going to have?" I asked him.
+
+"A healthy young slip of a gale from the breath iv it, sir," he
+answered, "with a splatter iv rain just to wet our gills an' no
+more."
+
+"Too bad we sighted them," I said, as the Ghost's bow was flung off
+a point by a large sea and the boat leaped for a moment past the
+jibs and into our line of vision.
+
+Louis gave a spoke and temporized.  "They'd never iv made the land,
+sir, I'm thinkin'."
+
+"Think not?" I queried.
+
+"No, sir.  Did you feel that?"  (A puff had caught the schooner,
+and he was forced to put the wheel up rapidly to keep her out of
+the wind.)  "'Tis no egg-shell'll float on this sea an hour come,
+an' it's a stroke iv luck for them we're here to pick 'em up."
+
+Wolf Larsen strode aft from amidships, where he had been talking
+with the rescued men.  The cat-like springiness in his tread was a
+little more pronounced than usual, and his eyes were bright and
+snappy.
+
+"Three oilers and a fourth engineer," was his greeting.  "But we'll
+make sailors out of them, or boat-pullers at any rate.  Now, what
+of the lady?"
+
+I know not why, but I was aware of a twinge or pang like the cut of
+a knife when he mentioned her.  I thought it a certain silly
+fastidiousness on my part, but it persisted in spite of me, and I
+merely shrugged my shoulders in answer.
+
+Wolf Larsen pursed his lips in a long, quizzical whistle.
+
+"What's her name, then?" he demanded.
+
+"I don't know," I replied.  "She is asleep.  She was very tired.
+In fact, I am waiting to hear the news from you.  What vessel was
+it?"
+
+"Mail steamer," he answered shortly.  "The City of Tokio, from
+'Frisco, bound for Yokohama.  Disabled in that typhoon.  Old tub.
+Opened up top and bottom like a sieve.  They were adrift four days.
+And you don't know who or what she is, eh?--maid, wife, or widow?
+Well, well."
+
+He shook his head in a bantering way, and regarded me with laughing
+eyes.
+
+"Are you--" I began.  It was on the verge of my tongue to ask if he
+were going to take the castaways into Yokohama.
+
+"Am I what?" he asked.
+
+"What do you intend doing with Leach and Johnson?"
+
+He shook his head.  "Really, Hump, I don't know.  You see, with
+these additions I've about all the crew I want."
+
+"And they've about all the escaping they want," I said.  "Why not
+give them a change of treatment?  Take them aboard, and deal gently
+with them.  Whatever they have done they have been hounded into
+doing."
+
+"By me?"
+
+"By you," I answered steadily.  "And I give you warning, Wolf
+Larsen, that I may forget love of my own life in the desire to kill
+you if you go too far in maltreating those poor wretches."
+
+"Bravo!" he cried.  "You do me proud, Hump!  You've found your legs
+with a vengeance.  You're quite an individual.  You were
+unfortunate in having your life cast in easy places, but you're
+developing, and I like you the better for it."
+
+His voice and expression changed.  His face was serious.  "Do you
+believe in promises?" he asked.  "Are they sacred things?"
+
+"Of course," I answered.
+
+"Then here's a compact," he went on, consummate actor.  "If I
+promise not to lay my hands upon Leach will you promise, in turn,
+not to attempt to kill me?"
+
+"Oh, not that I'm afraid of you, not that I'm afraid of you," he
+hastened to add.
+
+I could hardly believe my ears.  What was coming over the man?
+
+"Is it a go?" he asked impatiently.
+
+"A go," I answered.
+
+His hand went out to mine, and as I shook it heartily I could have
+sworn I saw the mocking devil shine up for a moment in his eyes.
+
+We strolled across the poop to the lee side.  The boat was close at
+hand now, and in desperate plight.  Johnson was steering, Leach
+bailing.  We overhauled them about two feet to their one.  Wolf
+Larsen motioned Louis to keep off slightly, and we dashed abreast
+of the boat, not a score of feet to windward.  The Ghost blanketed
+it.  The spritsail flapped emptily and the boat righted to an even
+keel, causing the two men swiftly to change position.  The boat
+lost headway, and, as we lifted on a huge surge, toppled and fell
+into the trough.
+
+It was at this moment that Leach and Johnson looked up into the
+faces of their shipmates, who lined the rail amidships.  There was
+no greeting.  They were as dead men in their comrades' eyes, and
+between them was the gulf that parts the living and the dead.
+
+The next instant they were opposite the poop, where stood Wolf
+Larsen and I.  We were falling in the trough, they were rising on
+the surge.  Johnson looked at me, and I could see that his face was
+worn and haggard.  I waved my hand to him, and he answered the
+greeting, but with a wave that was hopeless and despairing.  It was
+as if he were saying farewell.  I did not see into the eyes of
+Leach, for he was looking at Wolf Larsen, the old and implacable
+snarl of hatred strong as ever on his face.
+
+Then they were gone astern.  The spritsail filled with the wind,
+suddenly, careening the frail open craft till it seemed it would
+surely capsize.  A whitecap foamed above it and broke across in a
+snow-white smother.  Then the boat emerged, half swamped, Leach
+flinging the water out and Johnson clinging to the steering-oar,
+his face white and anxious.
+
+Wolf Larsen barked a short laugh in my ear and strode away to the
+weather side of the poop.  I expected him to give orders for the
+Ghost to heave to, but she kept on her course and he made no sign.
+Louis stood imperturbably at the wheel, but I noticed the grouped
+sailors forward turning troubled faces in our direction.  Still the
+Ghost tore along, till the boat dwindled to a speck, when Wolf
+Larsen's voice rang out in command and he went about on the
+starboard tack.
+
+Back we held, two miles and more to windward of the struggling
+cockle-shell, when the flying jib was run down and the schooner
+hove to.  The sealing boats are not made for windward work.  Their
+hope lies in keeping a weather position so that they may run before
+the wind for the schooner when it breezes up.  But in all that wild
+waste there was no refuge for Leach and Johnson save on the Ghost,
+and they resolutely began the windward beat.  It was slow work in
+the heavy sea that was running.  At any moment they were liable to
+be overwhelmed by the hissing combers.  Time and again and
+countless times we watched the boat luff into the big whitecaps,
+lose headway, and be flung back like a cork.
+
+Johnson was a splendid seaman, and he knew as much about small
+boats as he did about ships.  At the end of an hour and a half he
+was nearly alongside, standing past our stern on the last leg out,
+aiming to fetch us on the next leg back.
+
+"So you've changed your mind?" I heard Wolf Larsen mutter, half to
+himself, half to them as though they could hear.  "You want to come
+aboard, eh?  Well, then, just keep a-coming."
+
+"Hard up with that helm!" he commanded Oofty-Oofty, the Kanaka, who
+had in the meantime relieved Louis at the wheel.
+
+Command followed command.  As the schooner paid off, the fore- and
+main-sheets were slacked away for fair wind.  And before the wind
+we were, and leaping, when Johnson, easing his sheet at imminent
+peril, cut across our wake a hundred feet away.  Again Wolf Larsen
+laughed, at the same time beckoning them with his arm to follow.
+It was evidently his intention to play with them,--a lesson, I took
+it, in lieu of a beating, though a dangerous lesson, for the frail
+craft stood in momentary danger of being overwhelmed.
+
+Johnson squared away promptly and ran after us.  There was nothing
+else for him to do.  Death stalked everywhere, and it was only a
+matter of time when some one of those many huge seas would fall
+upon the boat, roll over it, and pass on.
+
+"'Tis the fear iv death at the hearts iv them," Louis muttered in
+my ear, as I passed forward to see to taking in the flying jib and
+staysail.
+
+"Oh, he'll heave to in a little while and pick them up," I answered
+cheerfully.  "He's bent upon giving them a lesson, that's all."
+
+Louis looked at me shrewdly.  "Think so?" he asked.
+
+"Surely," I answered.  "Don't you?"
+
+"I think nothing but iv my own skin, these days," was his answer.
+"An' 'tis with wonder I'm filled as to the workin' out iv things.
+A pretty mess that 'Frisco whisky got me into, an' a prettier mess
+that woman's got you into aft there.  Ah, it's myself that knows ye
+for a blitherin' fool."
+
+"What do you mean?" I demanded; for, having sped his shaft, he was
+turning away.
+
+"What do I mean?" he cried.  "And it's you that asks me!  'Tis not
+what I mean, but what the Wolf 'll mean.  The Wolf, I said, the
+Wolf!"
+
+"If trouble comes, will you stand by?" I asked impulsively, for he
+had voiced my own fear.
+
+"Stand by?  'Tis old fat Louis I stand by, an' trouble enough it'll
+be.  We're at the beginnin' iv things, I'm tellin' ye, the bare
+beginnin' iv things."
+
+"I had not thought you so great a coward," I sneered.
+
+He favoured me with a contemptuous stare.  "If I raised never a
+hand for that poor fool,"--pointing astern to the tiny sail,--"d'ye
+think I'm hungerin' for a broken head for a woman I never laid me
+eyes upon before this day?"
+
+I turned scornfully away and went aft.
+
+"Better get in those topsails, Mr. Van Weyden," Wolf Larsen said,
+as I came on the poop.
+
+I felt relief, at least as far as the two men were concerned.  It
+was clear he did not wish to run too far away from them.  I picked
+up hope at the thought and put the order swiftly into execution.  I
+had scarcely opened my mouth to issue the necessary commands, when
+eager men were springing to halyards and downhauls, and others were
+racing aloft.  This eagerness on their part was noted by Wolf
+Larsen with a grim smile.
+
+Still we increased our lead, and when the boat had dropped astern
+several miles we hove to and waited.  All eyes watched it coming,
+even Wolf Larsen's; but he was the only unperturbed man aboard.
+Louis, gazing fixedly, betrayed a trouble in his face he was not
+quite able to hide.
+
+The boat drew closer and closer, hurling along through the seething
+green like a thing alive, lifting and sending and uptossing across
+the huge-backed breakers, or disappearing behind them only to rush
+into sight again and shoot skyward.  It seemed impossible that it
+could continue to live, yet with each dizzying sweep it did achieve
+the impossible.  A rain-squall drove past, and out of the flying
+wet the boat emerged, almost upon us.
+
+"Hard up, there!" Wolf Larsen shouted, himself springing to the
+wheel and whirling it over.
+
+Again the Ghost sprang away and raced before the wind, and for two
+hours Johnson and Leach pursued us.  We hove to and ran away, hove
+to and ran away, and ever astern the struggling patch of sail
+tossed skyward and fell into the rushing valleys.  It was a quarter
+of a mile away when a thick squall of rain veiled it from view.  It
+never emerged.  The wind blew the air clear again, but no patch of
+sail broke the troubled surface.  I thought I saw, for an instant,
+the boat's bottom show black in a breaking crest.  At the best,
+that was all.  For Johnson and Leach the travail of existence had
+ceased.
+
+The men remained grouped amidships.  No one had gone below, and no
+one was speaking.  Nor were any looks being exchanged.  Each man
+seemed stunned--deeply contemplative, as it were, and, not quite
+sure, trying to realize just what had taken place.  Wolf Larsen
+gave them little time for thought.  He at once put the Ghost upon
+her course--a course which meant the seal herd and not Yokohama
+harbour.  But the men were no longer eager as they pulled and
+hauled, and I heard curses amongst them, which left their lips
+smothered and as heavy and lifeless as were they.  Not so was it
+with the hunters.  Smoke the irrepressible related a story, and
+they descended into the steerage, bellowing with laughter.
+
+As I passed to leeward of the galley on my way aft I was approached
+by the engineer we had rescued.  His face was white, his lips were
+trembling.
+
+"Good God! sir, what kind of a craft is this?" he cried.
+
+"You have eyes, you have seen," I answered, almost brutally, what
+of the pain and fear at my own heart.
+
+"Your promise?" I said to Wolf Larsen.
+
+"I was not thinking of taking them aboard when I made that
+promise," he answered.  "And anyway, you'll agree I've not laid my
+hands upon them."
+
+"Far from it, far from it," he laughed a moment later.
+
+I made no reply.  I was incapable of speaking, my mind was too
+confused.  I must have time to think, I knew.  This woman, sleeping
+even now in the spare cabin, was a responsibility, which I must
+consider, and the only rational thought that flickered through my
+mind was that I must do nothing hastily if I were to be any help to
+her at all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+
+The remainder of the day passed uneventfully.  The young slip of a
+gale, having wetted our gills, proceeded to moderate.  The fourth
+engineer and the three oilers, after a warm interview with Wolf
+Larsen, were furnished with outfits from the slop-chests, assigned
+places under the hunters in the various boats and watches on the
+vessel, and bundled forward into the forecastle.  They went
+protestingly, but their voices were not loud.  They were awed by
+what they had already seen of Wolf Larsen's character, while the
+tale of woe they speedily heard in the forecastle took the last bit
+of rebellion out of them.
+
+Miss Brewster--we had learned her name from the engineer--slept on
+and on.  At supper I requested the hunters to lower their voices,
+so she was not disturbed; and it was not till next morning that she
+made her appearance.  It had been my intention to have her meals
+served apart, but Wolf Larsen put down his foot.  Who was she that
+she should be too good for cabin table and cabin society? had been
+his demand.
+
+But her coming to the table had something amusing in it.  The
+hunters fell silent as clams.  Jock Horner and Smoke alone were
+unabashed, stealing stealthy glances at her now and again, and even
+taking part in the conversation.  The other four men glued their
+eyes on their plates and chewed steadily and with thoughtful
+precision, their ears moving and wobbling, in time with their jaws,
+like the ears of so many animals.
+
+Wolf Larsen had little to say at first, doing no more than reply
+when he was addressed.  Not that he was abashed.  Far from it.
+This woman was a new type to him, a different breed from any he had
+ever known, and he was curious.  He studied her, his eyes rarely
+leaving her face unless to follow the movements of her hands or
+shoulders.  I studied her myself, and though it was I who
+maintained the conversation, I know that I was a bit shy, not quite
+self-possessed.  His was the perfect poise, the supreme confidence
+in self, which nothing could shake; and he was no more timid of a
+woman than he was of storm and battle.
+
+"And when shall we arrive at Yokohama?" she asked, turning to him
+and looking him squarely in the eyes.
+
+There it was, the question flat.  The jaws stopped working, the
+ears ceased wobbling, and though eyes remained glued on plates,
+each man listened greedily for the answer.
+
+"In four months, possibly three if the season closes early," Wolf
+Larsen said.
+
+She caught her breath and stammered, "I--I thought--I was given to
+understand that Yokohama was only a day's sail away.  It--"  Here
+she paused and looked about the table at the circle of
+unsympathetic faces staring hard at the plates.  "It is not right,"
+she concluded.
+
+"That is a question you must settle with Mr. Van Weyden there," he
+replied, nodding to me with a mischievous twinkle.  "Mr. Van Weyden
+is what you may call an authority on such things as rights.  Now I,
+who am only a sailor, would look upon the situation somewhat
+differently.  It may possibly be your misfortune that you have to
+remain with us, but it is certainly our good fortune."
+
+He regarded her smilingly.  Her eyes fell before his gaze, but she
+lifted them again, and defiantly, to mine.  I read the unspoken
+question there:  was it right?  But I had decided that the part I
+was to play must be a neutral one, so I did not answer.
+
+"What do you think?" she demanded.
+
+"That it is unfortunate, especially if you have any engagements
+falling due in the course of the next several months.  But, since
+you say that you were voyaging to Japan for your health, I can
+assure you that it will improve no better anywhere than aboard the
+Ghost."
+
+I saw her eyes flash with indignation, and this time it was I who
+dropped mine, while I felt my face flushing under her gaze.  It was
+cowardly, but what else could I do?
+
+"Mr. Van Weyden speaks with the voice of authority," Wolf Larsen
+laughed.
+
+I nodded my head, and she, having recovered herself, waited
+expectantly.
+
+"Not that he is much to speak of now," Wolf Larsen went on, "but he
+has improved wonderfully.  You should have seen him when he came on
+board.  A more scrawny, pitiful specimen of humanity one could
+hardly conceive.  Isn't that so, Kerfoot?"
+
+Kerfoot, thus directly addressed, was startled into dropping his
+knife on the floor, though he managed to grunt affirmation.
+
+"Developed himself by peeling potatoes and washing dishes.  Eh,
+Kerfoot?"
+
+Again that worthy grunted.
+
+"Look at him now.  True, he is not what you would term muscular,
+but still he has muscles, which is more than he had when he came
+aboard.  Also, he has legs to stand on.  You would not think so to
+look at him, but he was quite unable to stand alone at first."
+
+The hunters were snickering, but she looked at me with a sympathy
+in her eyes which more than compensated for Wolf Larsen's
+nastiness.  In truth, it had been so long since I had received
+sympathy that I was softened, and I became then, and gladly, her
+willing slave.  But I was angry with Wolf Larsen.  He was
+challenging my manhood with his slurs, challenging the very legs he
+claimed to be instrumental in getting for me.
+
+"I may have learned to stand on my own legs," I retorted.  "But I
+have yet to stamp upon others with them."
+
+He looked at me insolently.  "Your education is only half
+completed, then," he said dryly, and turned to her.
+
+"We are very hospitable upon the Ghost.  Mr. Van Weyden has
+discovered that.  We do everything to make our guests feel at home,
+eh, Mr. Van Weyden?"
+
+"Even to the peeling of potatoes and the washing of dishes," I
+answered, "to say nothing to wringing their necks out of very
+fellowship."
+
+"I beg of you not to receive false impressions of us from Mr. Van
+Weyden," he interposed with mock anxiety.  "You will observe, Miss
+Brewster, that he carries a dirk in his belt, a--ahem--a most
+unusual thing for a ship's officer to do.  While really very
+estimable, Mr. Van Weyden is sometimes--how shall I say?--er--
+quarrelsome, and harsh measures are necessary.  He is quite
+reasonable and fair in his calm moments, and as he is calm now he
+will not deny that only yesterday he threatened my life."
+
+I was well-nigh choking, and my eyes were certainly fiery.  He drew
+attention to me.
+
+"Look at him now.  He can scarcely control himself in your
+presence.  He is not accustomed to the presence of ladies anyway.
+I shall have to arm myself before I dare go on deck with him."
+
+He shook his head sadly, murmuring, "Too bad, too bad," while the
+hunters burst into guffaws of laughter.
+
+The deep-sea voices of these men, rumbling and bellowing in the
+confined space, produced a wild effect.  The whole setting was
+wild, and for the first time, regarding this strange woman and
+realizing how incongruous she was in it, I was aware of how much a
+part of it I was myself.  I knew these men and their mental
+processes, was one of them myself, living the seal-hunting life,
+eating the seal-hunting fare, thinking, largely, the seal-hunting
+thoughts.  There was for me no strangeness to it, to the rough
+clothes, the coarse faces, the wild laughter, and the lurching
+cabin walls and swaying sea-lamps.
+
+As I buttered a piece of bread my eyes chanced to rest upon my
+hand.  The knuckles were skinned and inflamed clear across, the
+fingers swollen, the nails rimmed with black.  I felt the mattress-
+like growth of beard on my neck, knew that the sleeve of my coat
+was ripped, that a button was missing from the throat of the blue
+shirt I wore.  The dirk mentioned by Wolf Larsen rested in its
+sheath on my hip.  It was very natural that it should be there,--
+how natural I had not imagined until now, when I looked upon it
+with her eyes and knew how strange it and all that went with it
+must appear to her.
+
+But she divined the mockery in Wolf Larsen's words, and again
+favoured me with a sympathetic glance.  But there was a look of
+bewilderment also in her eyes.  That it was mockery made the
+situation more puzzling to her.
+
+"I may be taken off by some passing vessel, perhaps," she
+suggested.
+
+"There will be no passing vessels, except other sealing-schooners,"
+Wolf Larsen made answer.
+
+"I have no clothes, nothing," she objected.  "You hardly realize,
+sir, that I am not a man, or that I am unaccustomed to the vagrant,
+careless life which you and your men seem to lead."
+
+"The sooner you get accustomed to it, the better," he said.
+
+"I'll furnish you with cloth, needles, and thread," he added.  "I
+hope it will not be too dreadful a hardship for you to make
+yourself a dress or two."
+
+She made a wry pucker with her mouth, as though to advertise her
+ignorance of dressmaking.  That she was frightened and bewildered,
+and that she was bravely striving to hide it, was quite plain to
+me.
+
+"I suppose you're like Mr. Van Weyden there, accustomed to having
+things done for you.  Well, I think doing a few things for yourself
+will hardly dislocate any joints.  By the way, what do you do for a
+living?"
+
+She regarded him with amazement unconcealed.
+
+"I mean no offence, believe me.  People eat, therefore they must
+procure the wherewithal.  These men here shoot seals in order to
+live; for the same reason I sail this schooner; and Mr. Van Weyden,
+for the present at any rate, earns his salty grub by assisting me.
+Now what do you do?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Do you feed yourself?  Or does some one else feed you?"
+
+"I'm afraid some one else has fed me most of my life," she laughed,
+trying bravely to enter into the spirit of his quizzing, though I
+could see a terror dawning and growing in her eyes as she watched
+Wolf Larsen.
+
+"And I suppose some one else makes your bed for you?"
+
+"I HAVE made beds," she replied.
+
+"Very often?"
+
+She shook her head with mock ruefulness.
+
+"Do you know what they do to poor men in the States, who, like you,
+do not work for their living?"
+
+"I am very ignorant," she pleaded.  "What do they do to the poor
+men who are like me?"
+
+"They send them to jail.  The crime of not earning a living, in
+their case, is called vagrancy.  If I were Mr. Van Weyden, who
+harps eternally on questions of right and wrong, I'd ask, by what
+right do you live when you do nothing to deserve living?"
+
+"But as you are not Mr. Van Weyden, I don't have to answer, do I?"
+
+She beamed upon him through her terror-filled eyes, and the pathos
+of it cut me to the heart.  I must in some way break in and lead
+the conversation into other channels.
+
+"Have you ever earned a dollar by your own labour?" he demanded,
+certain of her answer, a triumphant vindictiveness in his voice.
+
+"Yes, I have," she answered slowly, and I could have laughed aloud
+at his crestfallen visage.  "I remember my father giving me a
+dollar once, when I was a little girl, for remaining absolutely
+quiet for five minutes."
+
+He smiled indulgently.
+
+"But that was long ago," she continued.  "And you would scarcely
+demand a little girl of nine to earn her own living."
+
+"At present, however," she said, after another slight pause, "I
+earn about eighteen hundred dollars a year."
+
+With one accord, all eyes left the plates and settled on her.  A
+woman who earned eighteen hundred dollars a year was worth looking
+at.  Wolf Larsen was undisguised in his admiration.
+
+"Salary, or piece-work?" he asked.
+
+"Piece-work," she answered promptly.
+
+"Eighteen hundred," he calculated.  "That's a hundred and fifty
+dollars a month.  Well, Miss Brewster, there is nothing small about
+the Ghost.  Consider yourself on salary during the time you remain
+with us."
+
+She made no acknowledgment.  She was too unused as yet to the whims
+of the man to accept them with equanimity.
+
+"I forgot to inquire," he went on suavely, "as to the nature of
+your occupation.  What commodities do you turn out?  What tools and
+materials do you require?"
+
+"Paper and ink," she laughed.  "And, oh! also a typewriter."
+
+"You are Maud Brewster," I said slowly and with certainty, almost
+as though I were charging her with a crime.
+
+Her eyes lifted curiously to mine.  "How do you know?"
+
+"Aren't you?" I demanded.
+
+She acknowledged her identity with a nod.  It was Wolf Larsen's
+turn to be puzzled.  The name and its magic signified nothing to
+him.  I was proud that it did mean something to me, and for the
+first time in a weary while I was convincingly conscious of a
+superiority over him.
+
+"I remember writing a review of a thin little volume--" I had begun
+carelessly, when she interrupted me.
+
+"You!" she cried.  "You are--"
+
+She was now staring at me in wide-eyed wonder.
+
+I nodded my identity, in turn.
+
+"Humphrey Van Weyden," she concluded; then added with a sigh of
+relief, and unaware that she had glanced that relief at Wolf
+Larsen, "I am so glad."
+
+"I remember the review," she went on hastily, becoming aware of the
+awkwardness of her remark; "that too, too flattering review."
+
+"Not at all," I denied valiantly.  "You impeach my sober judgment
+and make my canons of little worth.  Besides, all my brother
+critics were with me.  Didn't Lang include your 'Kiss Endured'
+among the four supreme sonnets by women in the English language?"
+
+"But you called me the American Mrs. Meynell!"
+
+"Was it not true?" I demanded.
+
+"No, not that," she answered.  "I was hurt."
+
+"We can measure the unknown only by the known," I replied, in my
+finest academic manner.  "As a critic I was compelled to place you.
+You have now become a yardstick yourself.  Seven of your thin
+little volumes are on my shelves; and there are two thicker
+volumes, the essays, which, you will pardon my saying, and I know
+not which is flattered more, fully equal your verse.  The time is
+not far distant when some unknown will arise in England and the
+critics will name her the English Maud Brewster."
+
+"You are very kind, I am sure," she murmured; and the very
+conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of
+associations it aroused of the old life on the other side of the
+world, gave me a quick thrill--rich with remembrance but stinging
+sharp with home-sickness.
+
+"And you are Maud Brewster," I said solemnly, gazing across at her.
+
+"And you are Humphrey Van Weyden," she said, gazing back at me with
+equal solemnity and awe.  "How unusual!  I don't understand.  We
+surely are not to expect some wildly romantic sea-story from your
+sober pen."
+
+"No, I am not gathering material, I assure you," was my answer.  "I
+have neither aptitude nor inclination for fiction."
+
+"Tell me, why have you always buried yourself in California?" she
+next asked.  "It has not been kind of you.  We of the East have
+seen to very little of you--too little, indeed, of the Dean of
+American Letters, the Second."
+
+I bowed to, and disclaimed, the compliment.  "I nearly met you,
+once, in Philadelphia, some Browning affair or other--you were to
+lecture, you know.  My train was four hours late."
+
+And then we quite forgot where we were, leaving Wolf Larsen
+stranded and silent in the midst of our flood of gossip.  The
+hunters left the table and went on deck, and still we talked.  Wolf
+Larsen alone remained.  Suddenly I became aware of him, leaning
+back from the table and listening curiously to our alien speech of
+a world he did not know.
+
+I broke short off in the middle of a sentence.  The present, with
+all its perils and anxieties, rushed upon me with stunning force.
+It smote Miss Brewster likewise, a vague and nameless terror
+rushing into her eyes as she regarded Wolf Larsen.
+
+He rose to his feet and laughed awkwardly.  The sound of it was
+metallic.
+
+"Oh, don't mind me," he said, with a self-depreciatory wave of his
+hand.  "I don't count.  Go on, go on, I pray you."
+
+But the gates of speech were closed, and we, too, rose from the
+table and laughed awkwardly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+
+The chagrin Wolf Larsen felt from being ignored by Maud Brewster
+and me in the conversation at table had to express itself in some
+fashion, and it fell to Thomas Mugridge to be the victim.  He had
+not mended his ways nor his shirt, though the latter he contended
+he had changed.  The garment itself did not bear out the assertion,
+nor did the accumulations of grease on stove and pot and pan attest
+a general cleanliness.
+
+"I've given you warning, Cooky," Wolf Larsen said, "and now you've
+got to take your medicine."
+
+Mugridge's face turned white under its sooty veneer, and when Wolf
+Larsen called for a rope and a couple of men, the miserable Cockney
+fled wildly out of the galley and dodged and ducked about the deck
+with the grinning crew in pursuit.  Few things could have been more
+to their liking than to give him a tow over the side, for to the
+forecastle he had sent messes and concoctions of the vilest order.
+Conditions favoured the undertaking.  The Ghost was slipping
+through the water at no more than three miles an hour, and the sea
+was fairly calm.  But Mugridge had little stomach for a dip in it.
+Possibly he had seen men towed before.  Besides, the water was
+frightfully cold, and his was anything but a rugged constitution.
+
+As usual, the watches below and the hunters turned out for what
+promised sport.  Mugridge seemed to be in rabid fear of the water,
+and he exhibited a nimbleness and speed we did not dream he
+possessed.  Cornered in the right-angle of the poop and galley, he
+sprang like a cat to the top of the cabin and ran aft.  But his
+pursuers forestalling him, he doubled back across the cabin, passed
+over the galley, and gained the deck by means of the steerage-
+scuttle.  Straight forward he raced, the boat-puller Harrison at
+his heels and gaining on him.  But Mugridge, leaping suddenly,
+caught the jib-boom-lift.  It happened in an instant.  Holding his
+weight by his arms, and in mid-air doubling his body at the hips,
+he let fly with both feet.  The oncoming Harrison caught the kick
+squarely in the pit of the stomach, groaned involuntarily, and
+doubled up and sank backward to the deck.
+
+Hand-clapping and roars of laughter from the hunters greeted the
+exploit, while Mugridge, eluding half of his pursuers at the
+foremast, ran aft and through the remainder like a runner on the
+football field.  Straight aft he held, to the poop and along the
+poop to the stern.  So great was his speed that as he curved past
+the corner of the cabin he slipped and fell.  Nilson was standing
+at the wheel, and the Cockney's hurtling body struck his legs.
+Both went down together, but Mugridge alone arose.  By some freak
+of pressures, his frail body had snapped the strong man's leg like
+a pipe-stem.
+
+Parsons took the wheel, and the pursuit continued.  Round and round
+the decks they went, Mugridge sick with fear, the sailors hallooing
+and shouting directions to one another, and the hunters bellowing
+encouragement and laughter.  Mugridge went down on the fore-hatch
+under three men; but he emerged from the mass like an eel, bleeding
+at the mouth, the offending shirt ripped into tatters, and sprang
+for the main-rigging.  Up he went, clear up, beyond the ratlines,
+to the very masthead.
+
+Half-a-dozen sailors swarmed to the crosstrees after him, where
+they clustered and waited while two of their number, Oofty-Oofty
+and Black (who was Latimer's boat-steerer), continued up the thin
+steel stays, lifting their bodies higher and higher by means of
+their arms.
+
+It was a perilous undertaking, for, at a height of over a hundred
+feet from the deck, holding on by their hands, they were not in the
+best of positions to protect themselves from Mugridge's feet.  And
+Mugridge kicked savagely, till the Kanaka, hanging on with one
+hand, seized the Cockney's foot with the other.  Black duplicated
+the performance a moment later with the other foot.  Then the three
+writhed together in a swaying tangle, struggling, sliding, and
+falling into the arms of their mates on the crosstrees.
+
+The aerial battle was over, and Thomas Mugridge, whining and
+gibbering, his mouth flecked with bloody foam, was brought down to
+deck.  Wolf Larsen rove a bowline in a piece of rope and slipped it
+under his shoulders.  Then he was carried aft and flung into the
+sea.  Forty,--fifty,--sixty feet of line ran out, when Wolf Larsen
+cried "Belay!"  Oofty-Oofty took a turn on a bitt, the rope
+tautened, and the Ghost, lunging onward, jerked the cook to the
+surface.
+
+It was a pitiful spectacle.  Though he could not drown, and was
+nine-lived in addition, he was suffering all the agonies of half-
+drowning.  The Ghost was going very slowly, and when her stern
+lifted on a wave and she slipped forward she pulled the wretch to
+the surface and gave him a moment in which to breathe; but between
+each lift the stern fell, and while the bow lazily climbed the next
+wave the line slacked and he sank beneath.
+
+I had forgotten the existence of Maud Brewster, and I remembered
+her with a start as she stepped lightly beside me.  It was her
+first time on deck since she had come aboard.  A dead silence
+greeted her appearance.
+
+"What is the cause of the merriment?" she asked.
+
+"Ask Captain Larsen," I answered composedly and coldly, though
+inwardly my blood was boiling at the thought that she should be
+witness to such brutality.
+
+She took my advice and was turning to put it into execution, when
+her eyes lighted on Oofty-Oofty, immediately before her, his body
+instinct with alertness and grace as he held the turn of the rope.
+
+"Are you fishing?" she asked him.
+
+He made no reply.  His eyes, fixed intently on the sea astern,
+suddenly flashed.
+
+"Shark ho, sir!" he cried.
+
+"Heave in!  Lively!  All hands tail on!" Wolf Larsen shouted,
+springing himself to the rope in advance of the quickest.
+
+Mugridge had heard the Kanaka's warning cry and was screaming
+madly.  I could see a black fin cutting the water and making for
+him with greater swiftness than he was being pulled aboard.  It was
+an even toss whether the shark or we would get him, and it was a
+matter of moments.  When Mugridge was directly beneath us, the
+stern descended the slope of a passing wave, thus giving the
+advantage to the shark.  The fin disappeared.  The belly flashed
+white in swift upward rush.  Almost equally swift, but not quite,
+was Wolf Larsen.  He threw his strength into one tremendous jerk.
+The Cockney's body left the water; so did part of the shark's.  He
+drew up his legs, and the man-eater seemed no more than barely to
+touch one foot, sinking back into the water with a splash.  But at
+the moment of contact Thomas Mugridge cried out.  Then he came in
+like a fresh-caught fish on a line, clearing the rail generously
+and striking the deck in a heap, on hands and knees, and rolling
+over.
+
+But a fountain of blood was gushing forth.  The right foot was
+missing, amputated neatly at the ankle.  I looked instantly to Maud
+Brewster.  Her face was white, her eyes dilated with horror.  She
+was gazing, not at Thomas Mugridge, but at Wolf Larsen.  And he was
+aware of it, for he said, with one of his short laughs:
+
+"Man-play, Miss Brewster.  Somewhat rougher, I warrant, than what
+you have been used to, but still-man-play.  The shark was not in
+the reckoning.  It--"
+
+But at this juncture, Mugridge, who had lifted his head and
+ascertained the extent of his loss, floundered over on the deck and
+buried his teeth in Wolf Larsen's leg.  Wolf Larsen stooped,
+coolly, to the Cockney, and pressed with thumb and finger at the
+rear of the jaws and below the ears.  The jaws opened with
+reluctance, and Wolf Larsen stepped free.
+
+"As I was saying," he went on, as though nothing unwonted had
+happened, "the shark was not in the reckoning.  It was--ahem--shall
+we say Providence?"
+
+She gave no sign that she had heard, though the expression of her
+eyes changed to one of inexpressible loathing as she started to
+turn away.  She no more than started, for she swayed and tottered,
+and reached her hand weakly out to mine.  I caught her in time to
+save her from falling, and helped her to a seat on the cabin.  I
+thought she might faint outright, but she controlled herself.
+
+"Will you get a tourniquet, Mr. Van Weyden," Wolf Larsen called to
+me.
+
+I hesitated.  Her lips moved, and though they formed no words, she
+commanded me with her eyes, plainly as speech, to go to the help of
+the unfortunate man.  "Please," she managed to whisper, and I could
+but obey.
+
+By now I had developed such skill at surgery that Wolf Larsen, with
+a few words of advice, left me to my task with a couple of sailors
+for assistants.  For his task he elected a vengeance on the shark.
+A heavy swivel-hook, baited with fat salt-pork, was dropped
+overside; and by the time I had compressed the severed veins and
+arteries, the sailors were singing and heaving in the offending
+monster.  I did not see it myself, but my assistants, first one and
+then the other, deserted me for a few moments to run amidships and
+look at what was going on.  The shark, a sixteen-footer, was
+hoisted up against the main-rigging.  Its jaws were pried apart to
+their greatest extension, and a stout stake, sharpened at both
+ends, was so inserted that when the pries were removed the spread
+jaws were fixed upon it.  This accomplished, the hook was cut out.
+The shark dropped back into the sea, helpless, yet with its full
+strength, doomed--to lingering starvation--a living death less meet
+for it than for the man who devised the punishment.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+
+I knew what it was as she came toward me.  For ten minutes I had
+watched her talking earnestly with the engineer, and now, with a
+sign for silence, I drew her out of earshot of the helmsman.  Her
+face was white and set; her large eyes, larger than usual what of
+the purpose in them, looked penetratingly into mine.  I felt rather
+timid and apprehensive, for she had come to search Humphrey Van
+Weyden's soul, and Humphrey Van Weyden had nothing of which to be
+particularly proud since his advent on the Ghost.
+
+We walked to the break of the poop, where she turned and faced me.
+I glanced around to see that no one was within hearing distance.
+
+"What is it?" I asked gently; but the expression of determination
+on her face did not relax.
+
+"I can readily understand," she began, "that this morning's affair
+was largely an accident; but I have been talking with Mr. Haskins.
+He tells me that the day we were rescued, even while I was in the
+cabin, two men were drowned, deliberately drowned--murdered."
+
+There was a query in her voice, and she faced me accusingly, as
+though I were guilty of the deed, or at least a party to it.
+
+"The information is quite correct," I answered.  "The two men were
+murdered."
+
+"And you permitted it!" she cried.
+
+"I was unable to prevent it, is a better way of phrasing it," I
+replied, still gently.
+
+"But you tried to prevent it?"  There was an emphasis on the
+"tried," and a pleading little note in her voice.
+
+"Oh, but you didn't," she hurried on, divining my answer.  "But why
+didn't you?"
+
+I shrugged my shoulders.  "You must remember, Miss Brewster, that
+you are a new inhabitant of this little world, and that you do not
+yet understand the laws which operate within it.  You bring with
+you certain fine conceptions of humanity, manhood, conduct, and
+such things; but here you will find them misconceptions.  I have
+found it so," I added, with an involuntary sigh.
+
+She shook her head incredulously.
+
+"What would you advise, then?" I asked.  "That I should take a
+knife, or a gun, or an axe, and kill this man?"
+
+She half started back.
+
+"No, not that!"
+
+"Then what should I do?  Kill myself?"
+
+"You speak in purely materialistic terms," she objected.  "There is
+such a thing as moral courage, and moral courage is never without
+effect."
+
+"Ah," I smiled, "you advise me to kill neither him nor myself, but
+to let him kill me."  I held up my hand as she was about to speak.
+"For moral courage is a worthless asset on this little floating
+world.  Leach, one of the men who were murdered, had moral courage
+to an unusual degree.  So had the other man, Johnson.  Not only did
+it not stand them in good stead, but it destroyed them.  And so
+with me if I should exercise what little moral courage I may
+possess.
+
+"You must understand, Miss Brewster, and understand clearly, that
+this man is a monster.  He is without conscience.  Nothing is
+sacred to him, nothing is too terrible for him to do.  It was due
+to his whim that I was detained aboard in the first place.  It is
+due to his whim that I am still alive.  I do nothing, can do
+nothing, because I am a slave to this monster, as you are now a
+slave to him; because I desire to live, as you will desire to live;
+because I cannot fight and overcome him, just as you will not be
+able to fight and overcome him."
+
+She waited for me to go on.
+
+"What remains?  Mine is the role of the weak.  I remain silent and
+suffer ignominy, as you will remain silent and suffer ignominy.
+And it is well.  It is the best we can do if we wish to live.  The
+battle is not always to the strong.  We have not the strength with
+which to fight this man; we must dissimulate, and win, if win we
+can, by craft.  If you will be advised by me, this is what you will
+do.  I know my position is perilous, and I may say frankly that
+yours is even more perilous.  We must stand together, without
+appearing to do so, in secret alliance.  I shall not be able to
+side with you openly, and, no matter what indignities may be put
+upon me, you are to remain likewise silent.  We must provoke no
+scenes with this man, nor cross his will.  And we must keep smiling
+faces and be friendly with him no matter how repulsive it may be."
+
+She brushed her hand across her forehead in a puzzled way, saying,
+"Still I do not understand."
+
+"You must do as I say," I interrupted authoritatively, for I saw
+Wolf Larsen's gaze wandering toward us from where he paced up and
+down with Latimer amidships.  "Do as I say, and ere long you will
+find I am right."
+
+"What shall I do, then?" she asked, detecting the anxious glance I
+had shot at the object of our conversation, and impressed, I
+flatter myself, with the earnestness of my manner.
+
+"Dispense with all the moral courage you can," I said briskly.
+"Don't arouse this man's animosity.  Be quite friendly with him,
+talk with him, discuss literature and art with him--he is fond of
+such things.  You will find him an interested listener and no fool.
+And for your own sake try to avoid witnessing, as much as you can,
+the brutalities of the ship.  It will make it easier for you to act
+your part."
+
+"I am to lie," she said in steady, rebellious tones, "by speech and
+action to lie."
+
+Wolf Larsen had separated from Latimer and was coming toward us.  I
+was desperate.
+
+"Please, please understand me," I said hurriedly, lowering my
+voice.  "All your experience of men and things is worthless here.
+You must begin over again.  I know,--I can see it--you have, among
+other ways, been used to managing people with your eyes, letting
+your moral courage speak out through them, as it were.  You have
+already managed me with your eyes, commanded me with them.  But
+don't try it on Wolf Larsen.  You could as easily control a lion,
+while he would make a mock of you.  He would--I have always been
+proud of the fact that I discovered him," I said, turning the
+conversation as Wolf Larsen stepped on the poop and joined us.
+"The editors were afraid of him and the publishers would have none
+of him.  But I knew, and his genius and my judgment were vindicated
+when he made that magnificent hit with his 'Forge.'"
+
+"And it was a newspaper poem," she said glibly.
+
+"It did happen to see the light in a newspaper," I replied, "but
+not because the magazine editors had been denied a glimpse at it."
+
+"We were talking of Harris," I said to Wolf Larsen.
+
+"Oh, yes," he acknowledged.  "I remember the 'Forge.'  Filled with
+pretty sentiments and an almighty faith in human illusions.  By the
+way, Mr. Van Weyden, you'd better look in on Cooky.  He's
+complaining and restless."
+
+Thus was I bluntly dismissed from the poop, only to find Mugridge
+sleeping soundly from the morphine I had given him.  I made no
+haste to return on deck, and when I did I was gratified to see Miss
+Brewster in animated conversation with Wolf Larsen.  As I say, the
+sight gratified me.  She was following my advice.  And yet I was
+conscious of a slight shock or hurt in that she was able to do the
+thing I had begged her to do and which she had notably disliked.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+
+Brave winds, blowing fair, swiftly drove the Ghost northward into
+the seal herd.  We encountered it well up to the forty-fourth
+parallel, in a raw and stormy sea across which the wind harried the
+fog-banks in eternal flight.  For days at a time we could never see
+the sun nor take an observation; then the wind would sweep the face
+of the ocean clean, the waves would ripple and flash, and we would
+learn where we were.  A day of clear weather might follow, or three
+days or four, and then the fog would settle down upon us, seemingly
+thicker than ever.
+
+The hunting was perilous; yet the boats, lowered day after day,
+were swallowed up in the grey obscurity, and were seen no more till
+nightfall, and often not till long after, when they would creep in
+like sea-wraiths, one by one, out of the grey.  Wainwright--the
+hunter whom Wolf Larsen had stolen with boat and men--took
+advantage of the veiled sea and escaped.  He disappeared one
+morning in the encircling fog with his two men, and we never saw
+them again, though it was not many days when we learned that they
+had passed from schooner to schooner until they finally regained
+their own.
+
+This was the thing I had set my mind upon doing, but the
+opportunity never offered.  It was not in the mate's province to go
+out in the boats, and though I manoeuvred cunningly for it, Wolf
+Larsen never granted me the privilege.  Had he done so, I should
+have managed somehow to carry Miss Brewster away with me.  As it
+was, the situation was approaching a stage which I was afraid to
+consider.  I involuntarily shunned the thought of it, and yet the
+thought continually arose in my mind like a haunting spectre.
+
+I had read sea-romances in my time, wherein figured, as a matter of
+course, the lone woman in the midst of a shipload of men; but I
+learned, now, that I had never comprehended the deeper significance
+of such a situation--the thing the writers harped upon and
+exploited so thoroughly.  And here it was, now, and I was face to
+face with it.  That it should be as vital as possible, it required
+no more than that the woman should be Maud Brewster, who now
+charmed me in person as she had long charmed me through her work.
+
+No one more out of environment could be imagined.  She was a
+delicate, ethereal creature, swaying and willowy, light and
+graceful of movement.  It never seemed to me that she walked, or,
+at least, walked after the ordinary manner of mortals.  Hers was an
+extreme lithesomeness, and she moved with a certain indefinable
+airiness, approaching one as down might float or as a bird on
+noiseless wings.
+
+She was like a bit of Dresden china, and I was continually
+impressed with what I may call her fragility.  As at the time I
+caught her arm when helping her below, so at any time I was quite
+prepared, should stress or rough handling befall her, to see her
+crumble away.  I have never seen body and spirit in such perfect
+accord.  Describe her verse, as the critics have described it, as
+sublimated and spiritual, and you have described her body.  It
+seemed to partake of her soul, to have analogous attributes, and to
+link it to life with the slenderest of chains.  Indeed, she trod
+the earth lightly, and in her constitution there was little of the
+robust clay.
+
+She was in striking contrast to Wolf Larsen.  Each was nothing that
+the other was, everything that the other was not.  I noted them
+walking the deck together one morning, and I likened them to the
+extreme ends of the human ladder of evolution--the one the
+culmination of all savagery, the other the finished product of the
+finest civilization.  True, Wolf Larsen possessed intellect to an
+unusual degree, but it was directed solely to the exercise of his
+savage instincts and made him but the more formidable a savage.  He
+was splendidly muscled, a heavy man, and though he strode with the
+certitude and directness of the physical man, there was nothing
+heavy about his stride.  The jungle and the wilderness lurked in
+the uplift and downput of his feet.  He was cat-footed, and lithe,
+and strong, always strong.  I likened him to some great tiger, a
+beast of prowess and prey.  He looked it, and the piercing glitter
+that arose at times in his eyes was the same piercing glitter I had
+observed in the eyes of caged leopards and other preying creatures
+of the wild.
+
+But this day, as I noted them pacing up and down, I saw that it was
+she who terminated the walk.  They came up to where I was standing
+by the entrance to the companion-way.  Though she betrayed it by no
+outward sign, I felt, somehow, that she was greatly perturbed.  She
+made some idle remark, looking at me, and laughed lightly enough;
+but I saw her eyes return to his, involuntarily, as though
+fascinated; then they fell, but not swiftly enough to veil the rush
+of terror that filled them.
+
+It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation.
+Ordinarily grey and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and
+golden, and all a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or
+welled up till the full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance.
+Perhaps it was to this that the golden colour was due; but golden
+his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and
+compelling, and speaking a demand and clamour of the blood which no
+woman, much less Maud Brewster, could misunderstand.
+
+Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear--the most
+terrible fear a man can experience--I knew that in inexpressible
+ways she was dear to me.  The knowledge that I loved her rushed
+upon me with the terror, and with both emotions gripping at my
+heart and causing my blood at the same time to chill and to leap
+riotously, I felt myself drawn by a power without me and beyond me,
+and found my eyes returning against my will to gaze into the eyes
+of Wolf Larsen.  But he had recovered himself.  The golden colour
+and the dancing lights were gone.  Cold and grey and glittering
+they were as he bowed brusquely and turned away.
+
+"I am afraid," she whispered, with a shiver.  "I am so afraid."
+
+I, too, was afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant
+to me my mind was in a turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite
+calmly:
+
+"All will come right, Miss Brewster.  Trust me, it will come
+right."
+
+She answered with a grateful little smile that sent my heart
+pounding, and started to descend the companion-stairs.
+
+For a long while I remained standing where she had left me.  There
+was imperative need to adjust myself, to consider the significance
+of the changed aspect of things.  It had come, at last, love had
+come, when I least expected it and under the most forbidding
+conditions.  Of course, my philosophy had always recognized the
+inevitableness of the love-call sooner or later; but long years of
+bookish silence had made me inattentive and unprepared.
+
+And now it had come!  Maud Brewster!  My memory flashed back to
+that first thin little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as
+though in the concrete, the row of thin little volumes on my
+library shelf.  How I had welcomed each of them!  Each year one had
+come from the press, and to me each was the advent of the year.
+They had voiced a kindred intellect and spirit, and as such I had
+received them into a camaraderie of the mind; but now their place
+was in my heart.
+
+My heart?  A revulsion of feeling came over me.  I seemed to stand
+outside myself and to look at myself incredulously.  Maud Brewster!
+Humphrey Van Weyden, "the cold-blooded fish," the "emotionless
+monster," the "analytical demon," of Charley Furuseth's
+christening, in love!  And then, without rhyme or reason, all
+sceptical, my mind flew back to a small biographical note in the
+red-bound Who's Who, and I said to myself, "She was born in
+Cambridge, and she is twenty-seven years old."  And then I said,
+"Twenty-seven years old and still free and fancy free?"  But how
+did I know she was fancy free?  And the pang of new-born jealousy
+put all incredulity to flight.  There was no doubt about it.  I was
+jealous; therefore I loved.  And the woman I loved was Maud
+Brewster.
+
+I, Humphrey Van Weyden, was in love!  And again the doubt assailed
+me.  Not that I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet it.
+On the contrary, idealist that I was to the most pronounced degree,
+my philosophy had always recognized and guerdoned love as the
+greatest thing in the world, the aim and the summit of being, the
+most exquisite pitch of joy and happiness to which life could
+thrill, the thing of all things to be hailed and welcomed and taken
+into the heart.  But now that it had come I could not believe.  I
+could not be so fortunate.  It was too good, too good to be true.
+Symons's lines came into my head:
+
+
+"I wandered all these years among
+A world of women, seeking you."
+
+
+And then I had ceased seeking.  It was not for me, this greatest
+thing in the world, I had decided.  Furuseth was right; I was
+abnormal, an "emotionless monster," a strange bookish creature,
+capable of pleasuring in sensations only of the mind.  And though I
+had been surrounded by women all my days, my appreciation of them
+had been aesthetic and nothing more.  I had actually, at times,
+considered myself outside the pale, a monkish fellow denied the
+eternal or the passing passions I saw and understood so well in
+others.  And now it had come!  Undreamed of and unheralded, it had
+come.  In what could have been no less than an ecstasy, I left my
+post at the head of the companion-way and started along the deck,
+murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs. Browning:
+
+
+"I lived with visions for my company
+Instead of men and women years ago,
+And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
+A sweeter music than they played to me."
+
+
+But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and
+oblivious to all about me.  The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused
+me.
+
+"What the hell are you up to?" he was demanding.
+
+I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came
+to myself to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a
+paint-pot.
+
+"Sleep-walking, sunstroke,--what?" he barked.
+
+"No; indigestion," I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing
+untoward had occurred.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+
+Among the most vivid memories of my life are those of the events on
+the Ghost which occurred during the forty hours succeeding the
+discovery of my love for Maud Brewster.  I, who had lived my life
+in quiet places, only to enter at the age of thirty-five upon a
+course of the most irrational adventure I could have imagined,
+never had more incident and excitement crammed into any forty hours
+of my experience.  Nor can I quite close my ears to a small voice
+of pride which tells me I did not do so badly, all things
+considered.
+
+To begin with, at the midday dinner, Wolf Larsen informed the
+hunters that they were to eat thenceforth in the steerage.  It was
+an unprecedented thing on sealing-schooners, where it is the custom
+for the hunters to rank, unofficially as officers.  He gave no
+reason, but his motive was obvious enough.  Horner and Smoke had
+been displaying a gallantry toward Maud Brewster, ludicrous in
+itself and inoffensive to her, but to him evidently distasteful.
+
+The announcement was received with black silence, though the other
+four hunters glanced significantly at the two who had been the
+cause of their banishment.  Jock Horner, quiet as was his way, gave
+no sign; but the blood surged darkly across Smoke's forehead, and
+he half opened his mouth to speak.  Wolf Larsen was watching him,
+waiting for him, the steely glitter in his eyes; but Smoke closed
+his mouth again without having said anything.
+
+"Anything to say?" the other demanded aggressively.
+
+It was a challenge, but Smoke refused to accept it.
+
+"About what?" he asked, so innocently that Wolf Larsen was
+disconcerted, while the others smiled.
+
+"Oh, nothing," Wolf Larsen said lamely.  "I just thought you might
+want to register a kick."
+
+"About what?" asked the imperturbable Smoke.
+
+Smoke's mates were now smiling broadly.  His captain could have
+killed him, and I doubt not that blood would have flowed had not
+Maud Brewster been present.  For that matter, it was her presence
+which enabled.  Smoke to act as he did.  He was too discreet and
+cautious a man to incur Wolf Larsen's anger at a time when that
+anger could be expressed in terms stronger than words.  I was in
+fear that a struggle might take place, but a cry from the helmsman
+made it easy for the situation to save itself.
+
+"Smoke ho!" the cry came down the open companion-way.
+
+"How's it bear?" Wolf Larsen called up.
+
+"Dead astern, sir."
+
+"Maybe it's a Russian," suggested Latimer.
+
+His words brought anxiety into the faces of the other hunters.  A
+Russian could mean but one thing--a cruiser.  The hunters, never
+more than roughly aware of the position of the ship, nevertheless
+knew that we were close to the boundaries of the forbidden sea,
+while Wolf Larsen's record as a poacher was notorious.  All eyes
+centred upon him.
+
+"We're dead safe," he assured them with a laugh.  "No salt mines
+this time, Smoke.  But I'll tell you what--I'll lay odds of five to
+one it's the Macedonia."
+
+No one accepted his offer, and he went on:  "In which event, I'll
+lay ten to one there's trouble breezing up."
+
+"No, thank you," Latimer spoke up.  "I don't object to losing my
+money, but I like to get a run for it anyway.  There never was a
+time when there wasn't trouble when you and that brother of yours
+got together, and I'll lay twenty to one on that."
+
+A general smile followed, in which Wolf Larsen joined, and the
+dinner went on smoothly, thanks to me, for he treated me abominably
+the rest of the meal, sneering at me and patronizing me till I was
+all a-tremble with suppressed rage.  Yet I knew I must control
+myself for Maud Brewster's sake, and I received my reward when her
+eyes caught mine for a fleeting second, and they said, as
+distinctly as if she spoke, "Be brave, be brave."
+
+We left the table to go on deck, for a steamer was a welcome break
+in the monotony of the sea on which we floated, while the
+conviction that it was Death Larsen and the Macedonia added to the
+excitement.  The stiff breeze and heavy sea which had sprung up the
+previous afternoon had been moderating all morning, so that it was
+now possible to lower the boats for an afternoon's hunt.  The
+hunting promised to be profitable.  We had sailed since daylight
+across a sea barren of seals, and were now running into the herd.
+
+The smoke was still miles astern, but overhauling us rapidly, when
+we lowered our boats.  They spread out and struck a northerly
+course across the ocean.  Now and again we saw a sail lower, heard
+the reports of the shot-guns, and saw the sail go up again.  The
+seals were thick, the wind was dying away; everything favoured a
+big catch.  As we ran off to get our leeward position of the last
+lee boat, we found the ocean fairly carpeted with sleeping seals.
+They were all about us, thicker than I had ever seen them before,
+in twos and threes and bunches, stretched full length on the
+surface and sleeping for all the world like so many lazy young
+dogs.
+
+Under the approaching smoke the hull and upper-works of a steamer
+were growing larger.  It was the Macedonia.  I read her name
+through the glasses as she passed by scarcely a mile to starboard.
+Wolf Larsen looked savagely at the vessel, while Maud Brewster was
+curious.
+
+"Where is the trouble you were so sure was breezing up, Captain
+Larsen?" she asked gaily.
+
+He glanced at her, a moment's amusement softening his features.
+
+"What did you expect?  That they'd come aboard and cut our
+throats?"
+
+"Something like that," she confessed.  "You understand, seal-
+hunters are so new and strange to me that I am quite ready to
+expect anything."
+
+He nodded his head.  "Quite right, quite right.  Your error is that
+you failed to expect the worst."
+
+"Why, what can be worse than cutting our throats?" she asked, with
+pretty naive surprise.
+
+"Cutting our purses," he answered.  "Man is so made these days that
+his capacity for living is determined by the money he possesses."
+
+"'Who steals my purse steals trash,'" she quoted.
+
+"Who steals my purse steals my right to live," was the reply, "old
+saws to the contrary.  For he steals my bread and meat and bed, and
+in so doing imperils my life.  There are not enough soup-kitchens
+and bread-lines to go around, you know, and when men have nothing
+in their purses they usually die, and die miserably--unless they
+are able to fill their purses pretty speedily."
+
+"But I fail to see that this steamer has any designs on your
+purse."
+
+"Wait and you will see," he answered grimly.
+
+We did not have long to wait.  Having passed several miles beyond
+our line of boats, the Macedonia proceeded to lower her own.  We
+knew she carried fourteen boats to our five (we were one short
+through the desertion of Wainwright), and she began dropping them
+far to leeward of our last boat, continued dropping them athwart
+our course, and finished dropping them far to windward of our first
+weather boat.  The hunting, for us, was spoiled.  There were no
+seals behind us, and ahead of us the line of fourteen boats, like a
+huge broom, swept the herd before it.
+
+Our boats hunted across the two or three miles of water between
+them and the point where the Macedonia's had been dropped, and then
+headed for home.  The wind had fallen to a whisper, the ocean was
+growing calmer and calmer, and this, coupled with the presence of
+the great herd, made a perfect hunting day--one of the two or three
+days to be encountered in the whole of a lucky season.  An angry
+lot of men, boat-pullers and steerers as well as hunters, swarmed
+over our side.  Each man felt that he had been robbed; and the
+boats were hoisted in amid curses, which, if curses had power,
+would have settled Death Larsen for all eternity--"Dead and damned
+for a dozen iv eternities," commented Louis, his eyes twinkling up
+at me as he rested from hauling taut the lashings of his boat.
+
+"Listen to them, and find if it is hard to discover the most vital
+thing in their souls," said Wolf Larsen.  "Faith? and love? and
+high ideals?  The good? the beautiful? the true?"
+
+"Their innate sense of right has been violated," Maud Brewster
+said, joining the conversation.
+
+She was standing a dozen feet away, one hand resting on the main-
+shrouds and her body swaying gently to the slight roll of the ship.
+She had not raised her voice, and yet I was struck by its clear and
+bell-like tone.  Ah, it was sweet in my ears!  I scarcely dared
+look at her just then, for the fear of betraying myself.  A boy's
+cap was perched on her head, and her hair, light brown and arranged
+in a loose and fluffy order that caught the sun, seemed an aureole
+about the delicate oval of her face.  She was positively
+bewitching, and, withal, sweetly spirituelle, if not saintly.  All
+my old-time marvel at life returned to me at sight of this splendid
+incarnation of it, and Wolf Larsen's cold explanation of life and
+its meaning was truly ridiculous and laughable.
+
+"A sentimentalist," he sneered, "like Mr. Van Weyden.  Those men
+are cursing because their desires have been outraged.  That is all.
+What desires?  The desires for the good grub and soft beds ashore
+which a handsome pay-day brings them--the women and the drink, the
+gorging and the beastliness which so truly expresses them, the best
+that is in them, their highest aspirations, their ideals, if you
+please.  The exhibition they make of their feelings is not a
+touching sight, yet it shows how deeply they have been touched, how
+deeply their purses have been touched, for to lay hands on their
+purses is to lay hands on their souls."
+
+"'You hardly behave as if your purse had been touched," she said,
+smilingly.
+
+"Then it so happens that I am behaving differently, for my purse
+and my soul have both been touched.  At the current price of skins
+in the London market, and based on a fair estimate of what the
+afternoon's catch would have been had not the Macedonia hogged it,
+the Ghost has lost about fifteen hundred dollars' worth of skins."
+
+"You speak so calmly--" she began.
+
+"But I do not feel calm; I could kill the man who robbed me," he
+interrupted.  "Yes, yes, I know, and that man my brother--more
+sentiment!  Bah!"
+
+His face underwent a sudden change.  His voice was less harsh and
+wholly sincere as he said:
+
+"You must be happy, you sentimentalists, really and truly happy at
+dreaming and finding things good, and, because you find some of
+them good, feeling good yourself.  Now, tell me, you two, do you
+find me good?"
+
+"You are good to look upon--in a way," I qualified.
+
+"There are in you all powers for good," was Maud Brewster's answer.
+
+"There you are!" he cried at her, half angrily.  "Your words are
+empty to me.  There is nothing clear and sharp and definite about
+the thought you have expressed.  You cannot pick it up in your two
+hands and look at it.  In point of fact, it is not a thought.  It
+is a feeling, a sentiment, a something based upon illusion and not
+a product of the intellect at all."
+
+As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came
+into it.  "Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I,
+too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and
+illusions.  They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to
+reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most
+wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight.  And
+after all, delight is the wage for living.  Without delight, living
+is a worthless act.  To labour at living and be unpaid is worse
+than to be dead.  He who delights the most lives the most, and your
+dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more
+gratifying than are my facts to me."
+
+He shook his head slowly, pondering.
+
+"I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason.
+Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying.  Emotional delight
+is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and,
+besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having
+the blues.  Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded
+senses which speedily recuperate.  I envy you, I envy you."
+
+He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange
+quizzical smiles, as he added:
+
+"It's from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart.
+My reason dictates it.  The envy is an intellectual product.  I am
+like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary,
+wishing he, too, were drunk."
+
+"Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a
+fool," I laughed.
+
+"Quite so," he said.  "You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools.
+You have no facts in your pocketbook."
+
+"Yet we spend as freely as you," was Maud Brewster's contribution.
+
+"More freely, because it costs you nothing."
+
+"And because we draw upon eternity," she retorted.
+
+"Whether you do or think you do, it's the same thing.  You spend
+what you haven't got, and in return you get greater value from
+spending what you haven't got than I get from spending what I have
+got, and what I have sweated to get."
+
+"Why don't you change the basis of your coinage, then?" she queried
+teasingly.
+
+He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all
+regretfully:  "Too late.  I'd like to, perhaps, but I can't.  My
+pocketbook is stuffed with the old coinage, and it's a stubborn
+thing.  I can never bring myself to recognize anything else as
+valid."
+
+He ceased speaking, and his gaze wandered absently past her and
+became lost in the placid sea.  The old primal melancholy was
+strong upon him.  He was quivering to it.  He had reasoned himself
+into a spell of the blues, and within few hours one could look for
+the devil within him to be up and stirring.  I remembered Charley
+Furuseth, and knew this man's sadness as the penalty which the
+materialist ever pays for his materialism.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+
+"You've been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden," Wolf Larsen said, the
+following morning at the breakfast-table, "How do things look?"
+
+"Clear enough," I answered, glancing at the sunshine which streamed
+down the open companion-way.  "Fair westerly breeze, with a promise
+of stiffening, if Louis predicts correctly."
+
+He nodded his head in a pleased way.  "Any signs of fog?"
+
+"Thick banks in the north and north-west."
+
+He nodded his head again, evincing even greater satisfaction than
+before.
+
+"What of the Macedonia?"
+
+"Not sighted," I answered.
+
+I could have sworn his face fell at the intelligence, but why he
+should be disappointed I could not conceive.
+
+I was soon to learn.  "Smoke ho!" came the hail from on deck, and
+his face brightened.
+
+"Good!" he exclaimed, and left the table at once to go on deck and
+into the steerage, where the hunters were taking the first
+breakfast of their exile.
+
+Maud Brewster and I scarcely touched the food before us, gazing,
+instead, in silent anxiety at each other, and listening to Wolf
+Larsen's voice, which easily penetrated the cabin through the
+intervening bulkhead.  He spoke at length, and his conclusion was
+greeted with a wild roar of cheers.  The bulkhead was too thick for
+us to hear what he said; but whatever it was it affected the
+hunters strongly, for the cheering was followed by loud
+exclamations and shouts of joy.
+
+From the sounds on deck I knew that the sailors had been routed out
+and were preparing to lower the boats.  Maud Brewster accompanied
+me on deck, but I left her at the break of the poop, where she
+might watch the scene and not be in it.  The sailors must have
+learned whatever project was on hand, and the vim and snap they put
+into their work attested their enthusiasm.  The hunters came
+trooping on deck with shot-guns and ammunition-boxes, and, most
+unusual, their rifles.  The latter were rarely taken in the boats,
+for a seal shot at long range with a rifle invariably sank before a
+boat could reach it.  But each hunter this day had his rifle and a
+large supply of cartridges.  I noticed they grinned with
+satisfaction whenever they looked at the Macedonia's smoke, which
+was rising higher and higher as she approached from the west.
+
+The five boats went over the side with a rush, spread out like the
+ribs of a fan, and set a northerly course, as on the preceding
+afternoon, for us to follow.  I watched for some time, curiously,
+but there seemed nothing extraordinary about their behaviour.  They
+lowered sails, shot seals, and hoisted sails again, and continued
+on their way as I had always seen them do.  The Macedonia repeated
+her performance of yesterday, "hogging" the sea by dropping her
+line of boats in advance of ours and across our course.  Fourteen
+boats require a considerable spread of ocean for comfortable
+hunting, and when she had completely lapped our line she continued
+steaming into the north-east, dropping more boats as she went.
+
+"What's up?" I asked Wolf Larsen, unable longer to keep my
+curiosity in check.
+
+"Never mind what's up," he answered gruffly.  "You won't be a
+thousand years in finding out, and in the meantime just pray for
+plenty of wind."
+
+"Oh, well, I don't mind telling you," he said the next moment.
+"I'm going to give that brother of mine a taste of his own
+medicine.  In short, I'm going to play the hog myself, and not for
+one day, but for the rest of the season,--if we're in luck."
+
+"And if we're not?" I queried.
+
+"Not to be considered," he laughed.  "We simply must be in luck, or
+it's all up with us."
+
+He had the wheel at the time, and I went forward to my hospital in
+the forecastle, where lay the two crippled men, Nilson and Thomas
+Mugridge.  Nilson was as cheerful as could be expected, for his
+broken leg was knitting nicely; but the Cockney was desperately
+melancholy, and I was aware of a great sympathy for the unfortunate
+creature.  And the marvel of it was that still he lived and clung
+to life.  The brutal years had reduced his meagre body to
+splintered wreckage, and yet the spark of life within burned
+brightly as ever.
+
+"With an artificial foot--and they make excellent ones--you will be
+stumping ships' galleys to the end of time," I assured him
+jovially.
+
+But his answer was serious, nay, solemn.  "I don't know about wot
+you s'y, Mr. Van W'yden, but I do know I'll never rest 'appy till I
+see that 'ell-'ound bloody well dead.  'E cawn't live as long as
+me.  'E's got no right to live, an' as the Good Word puts it, ''E
+shall shorely die,' an' I s'y, 'Amen, an' damn soon at that.'"
+
+When I returned on deck I found Wolf Larsen steering mainly with
+one hand, while with the other hand he held the marine glasses and
+studied the situation of the boats, paying particular attention to
+the position of the Macedonia.  The only change noticeable in our
+boats was that they had hauled close on the wind and were heading
+several points west of north.  Still, I could not see the
+expediency of the manoeuvre, for the free sea was still intercepted
+by the Macedonia's five weather boats, which, in turn, had hauled
+close on the wind.  Thus they slowly diverged toward the west,
+drawing farther away from the remainder of the boats in their line.
+Our boats were rowing as well as sailing.  Even the hunters were
+pulling, and with three pairs of oars in the water they rapidly
+overhauled what I may appropriately term the enemy.
+
+The smoke of the Macedonia had dwindled to a dim blot on the north-
+eastern horizon.  Of the steamer herself nothing was to be seen.
+We had been loafing along, till now, our sails shaking half the
+time and spilling the wind; and twice, for short periods, we had
+been hove to.  But there was no more loafing.  Sheets were trimmed,
+and Wolf Larsen proceeded to put the Ghost through her paces.  We
+ran past our line of boats and bore down upon the first weather
+boat of the other line.
+
+"Down that flying jib, Mr. Van Weyden," Wolf Larsen commanded.
+"And stand by to back over the jibs."
+
+I ran forward and had the downhaul of the flying jib all in and
+fast as we slipped by the boat a hundred feet to leeward.  The
+three men in it gazed at us suspiciously.  They had been hogging
+the sea, and they knew Wolf Larsen, by reputation at any rate.  I
+noted that the hunter, a huge Scandinavian sitting in the bow, held
+his rifle, ready to hand, across his knees.  It should have been in
+its proper place in the rack.  When they came opposite our stern,
+Wolf Larsen greeted them with a wave of the hand, and cried:
+
+"Come on board and have a 'gam'!"
+
+"To gam," among the sealing-schooners, is a substitute for the
+verbs "to visit," "to gossip."  It expresses the garrulity of the
+sea, and is a pleasant break in the monotony of the life.
+
+The Ghost swung around into the wind, and I finished my work
+forward in time to run aft and lend a hand with the mainsheet.
+
+"You will please stay on deck, Miss Brewster," Wolf Larsen said, as
+he started forward to meet his guest.  "And you too, Mr. Van
+Weyden."
+
+The boat had lowered its sail and run alongside.  The hunter,
+golden bearded like a sea-king, came over the rail and dropped on
+deck.  But his hugeness could not quite overcome his
+apprehensiveness.  Doubt and distrust showed strongly in his face.
+It was a transparent face, for all of its hairy shield, and
+advertised instant relief when he glanced from Wolf Larsen to me,
+noted that there was only the pair of us, and then glanced over his
+own two men who had joined him.  Surely he had little reason to be
+afraid.  He towered like a Goliath above Wolf Larsen.  He must have
+measured six feet eight or nine inches in stature, and I
+subsequently learned his weight--240 pounds.  And there was no fat
+about him.  It was all bone and muscle.
+
+A return of apprehension was apparent when, at the top of the
+companion-way, Wolf Larsen invited him below.  But he reassured
+himself with a glance down at his host--a big man himself but
+dwarfed by the propinquity of the giant.  So all hesitancy
+vanished, and the pair descended into the cabin.  In the meantime,
+his two men, as was the wont of visiting sailors, had gone forward
+into the forecastle to do some visiting themselves.
+
+Suddenly, from the cabin came a great, choking bellow, followed by
+all the sounds of a furious struggle.  It was the leopard and the
+lion, and the lion made all the noise.  Wolf Larsen was the
+leopard.
+
+"You see the sacredness of our hospitality," I said bitterly to
+Maud Brewster.
+
+She nodded her head that she heard, and I noted in her face the
+signs of the same sickness at sight or sound of violent struggle
+from which I had suffered so severely during my first weeks on the
+Ghost.
+
+"Wouldn't it be better if you went forward, say by the steerage
+companion-way, until it is over?" I suggested.
+
+She shook her head and gazed at me pitifully.  She was not
+frightened, but appalled, rather, at the human animality of it.
+
+"You will understand," I took advantage of the opportunity to say,
+"whatever part I take in what is going on and what is to come, that
+I am compelled to take it--if you and I are ever to get out of this
+scrape with our lives."
+
+"It is not nice--for me," I added.
+
+"I understand," she said, in a weak, far-away voice, and her eyes
+showed me that she did understand.
+
+The sounds from below soon died away.  Then Wolf Larsen came alone
+on deck.  There was a slight flush under his bronze, but otherwise
+he bore no signs of the battle.
+
+"Send those two men aft, Mr. Van Weyden," he said.
+
+I obeyed, and a minute or two later they stood before him.  "Hoist
+in your boat," he said to them.  "Your hunter's decided to stay
+aboard awhile and doesn't want it pounding alongside."
+
+"Hoist in your boat, I said," he repeated, this time in sharper
+tones as they hesitated to do his bidding.
+
+"Who knows? you may have to sail with me for a time," he said,
+quite softly, with a silken threat that belied the softness, as
+they moved slowly to comply, "and we might as well start with a
+friendly understanding.  Lively now!  Death Larsen makes you jump
+better than that, and you know it!"
+
+Their movements perceptibly quickened under his coaching, and as
+the boat swung inboard I was sent forward to let go the jibs.  Wolf
+Larsen, at the wheel, directed the Ghost after the Macedonia's
+second weather boat.
+
+Under way, and with nothing for the time being to do, I turned my
+attention to the situation of the boats.  The Macedonia's third
+weather boat was being attacked by two of ours, the fourth by our
+remaining three; and the fifth, turn about, was taking a hand in
+the defence of its nearest mate.  The fight had opened at long
+distance, and the rifles were cracking steadily.  A quick, snappy
+sea was being kicked up by the wind, a condition which prevented
+fine shooting; and now and again, as we drew closer, we could see
+the bullets zip-zipping from wave to wave.
+
+The boat we were pursuing had squared away and was running before
+the wind to escape us, and, in the course of its flight, to take
+part in repulsing our general boat attack.
+
+Attending to sheets and tacks now left me little time to see what
+was taking place, but I happened to be on the poop when Wolf Larsen
+ordered the two strange sailors forward and into the forecastle.
+They went sullenly, but they went.  He next ordered Miss Brewster
+below, and smiled at the instant horror that leapt into her eyes.
+
+"You'll find nothing gruesome down there," he said, "only an unhurt
+man securely made fast to the ring-bolts.  Bullets are liable to
+come aboard, and I don't want you killed, you know."
+
+Even as he spoke, a bullet was deflected by a brass-capped spoke of
+the wheel between his hands and screeched off through the air to
+windward.
+
+"You see," he said to her; and then to me, "Mr. Van Weyden, will
+you take the wheel?"
+
+Maud Brewster had stepped inside the companion-way so that only her
+head was exposed.  Wolf Larsen had procured a rifle and was
+throwing a cartridge into the barrel.  I begged her with my eyes to
+go below, but she smiled and said:
+
+"We may be feeble land-creatures without legs, but we can show
+Captain Larsen that we are at least as brave as he."
+
+He gave her a quick look of admiration.
+
+"I like you a hundred per cent. better for that," he said.  "Books,
+and brains, and bravery.  You are well-rounded, a blue-stocking fit
+to be the wife of a pirate chief.  Ahem, we'll discuss that later,"
+he smiled, as a bullet struck solidly into the cabin wall.
+
+I saw his eyes flash golden as he spoke, and I saw the terror mount
+in her own.
+
+"We are braver," I hastened to say.  "At least, speaking for
+myself, I know I am braver than Captain Larsen."
+
+It was I who was now favoured by a quick look.  He was wondering if
+I were making fun of him.  I put three or four spokes over to
+counteract a sheer toward the wind on the part of the Ghost, and
+then steadied her.  Wolf Larsen was still waiting an explanation,
+and I pointed down to my knees.
+
+"You will observe there," I said, "a slight trembling.  It is
+because I am afraid, the flesh is afraid; and I am afraid in my
+mind because I do not wish to die.  But my spirit masters the
+trembling flesh and the qualms of the mind.  I am more than brave.
+I am courageous.  Your flesh is not afraid.  You are not afraid.
+On the one hand, it costs you nothing to encounter danger; on the
+other hand, it even gives you delight.  You enjoy it.  You may be
+unafraid, Mr. Larsen, but you must grant that the bravery is mine."
+
+"You're right," he acknowledged at once.  "I never thought of it in
+that way before.  But is the opposite true?  If you are braver than
+I, am I more cowardly than you?"
+
+We both laughed at the absurdity, and he dropped down to the deck
+and rested his rifle across the rail.  The bullets we had received
+had travelled nearly a mile, but by now we had cut that distance in
+half.  He fired three careful shots.  The first struck fifty feet
+to windward of the boat, the second alongside; and at the third the
+boat-steerer let loose his steering-oar and crumpled up in the
+bottom of the boat.
+
+"I guess that'll fix them," Wolf Larsen said, rising to his feet.
+"I couldn't afford to let the hunter have it, and there is a chance
+the boat-puller doesn't know how to steer.  In which case, the
+hunter cannot steer and shoot at the same time"
+
+His reasoning was justified, for the boat rushed at once into the
+wind and the hunter sprang aft to take the boat-steerer's place.
+There was no more shooting, though the rifles were still cracking
+merrily from the other boats.
+
+The hunter had managed to get the boat before the wind again, but
+we ran down upon it, going at least two feet to its one.  A hundred
+yards away, I saw the boat-puller pass a rifle to the hunter.  Wolf
+Larsen went amidships and took the coil of the throat-halyards from
+its pin.  Then he peered over the rail with levelled rifle.  Twice
+I saw the hunter let go the steering-oar with one hand, reach for
+his rifle, and hesitate.  We were now alongside and foaming past.
+
+"Here, you!" Wolf Larsen cried suddenly to the boat-puller.  "Take
+a turn!"
+
+At the same time he flung the coil of rope.  It struck fairly,
+nearly knocking the man over, but he did not obey.  Instead, he
+looked to his hunter for orders.  The hunter, in turn, was in a
+quandary.  His rifle was between his knees, but if he let go the
+steering-oar in order to shoot, the boat would sweep around and
+collide with the schooner.  Also he saw Wolf Larsen's rifle bearing
+upon him and knew he would be shot ere he could get his rifle into
+play.
+
+"Take a turn," he said quietly to the man.
+
+The boat-puller obeyed, taking a turn around the little forward
+thwart and paying the line as it jerked taut.  The boat sheered out
+with a rush, and the hunter steadied it to a parallel course some
+twenty feet from the side of the Ghost.
+
+"Now, get that sail down and come alongside!" Wolf Larsen ordered.
+
+He never let go his rifle, even passing down the tackles with one
+hand.  When they were fast, bow and stern, and the two uninjured
+men prepared to come aboard, the hunter picked up his rifle as if
+to place it in a secure position.
+
+"Drop it!" Wolf Larsen cried, and the hunter dropped it as though
+it were hot and had burned him.
+
+Once aboard, the two prisoners hoisted in the boat and under Wolf
+Larsen's direction carried the wounded boat-steerer down into the
+forecastle.
+
+"If our five boats do as well as you and I have done, we'll have a
+pretty full crew," Wolf Larsen said to me.
+
+"The man you shot--he is--I hope?" Maud Brewster quavered.
+
+"In the shoulder," he answered.  "Nothing serious, Mr. Van Weyden
+will pull him around as good as ever in three or four weeks."
+
+"But he won't pull those chaps around, from the look of it," he
+added, pointing at the Macedonia's third boat, for which I had been
+steering and which was now nearly abreast of us.  "That's Horner's
+and Smoke's work.  I told them we wanted live men, not carcasses.
+But the joy of shooting to hit is a most compelling thing, when
+once you've learned how to shoot.  Ever experienced it, Mr. Van
+Weyden?"
+
+I shook my head and regarded their work.  It had indeed been
+bloody, for they had drawn off and joined our other three boats in
+the attack on the remaining two of the enemy.  The deserted boat
+was in the trough of the sea, rolling drunkenly across each comber,
+its loose spritsail out at right angles to it and fluttering and
+flapping in the wind.  The hunter and boat-puller were both lying
+awkwardly in the bottom, but the boat-steerer lay across the
+gunwale, half in and half out, his arms trailing in the water and
+his head rolling from side to side.
+
+"Don't look, Miss Brewster, please don't look," I had begged of
+her, and I was glad that she had minded me and been spared the
+sight.
+
+"Head right into the bunch, Mr. Van Weyden," was Wolf Larsen's
+command.
+
+As we drew nearer, the firing ceased, and we saw that the fight was
+over.  The remaining two boats had been captured by our five, and
+the seven were grouped together, waiting to be picked up.
+
+"Look at that!" I cried involuntarily, pointing to the north-east.
+
+The blot of smoke which indicated the Macedonia's position had
+reappeared.
+
+"Yes, I've been watching it," was Wolf Larsen's calm reply.  He
+measured the distance away to the fog-bank, and for an instant
+paused to feel the weight of the wind on his cheek.  "We'll make
+it, I think; but you can depend upon it that blessed brother of
+mine has twigged our little game and is just a-humping for us.  Ah,
+look at that!"
+
+The blot of smoke had suddenly grown larger, and it was very black.
+
+"I'll beat you out, though, brother mine," he chuckled.  "I'll beat
+you out, and I hope you no worse than that you rack your old
+engines into scrap."
+
+When we hove to, a hasty though orderly confusion reigned.  The
+boats came aboard from every side at once.  As fast as the
+prisoners came over the rail they were marshalled forward to the
+forecastle by our hunters, while our sailors hoisted in the boats,
+pell-mell, dropping them anywhere upon the deck and not stopping to
+lash them.  We were already under way, all sails set and drawing,
+and the sheets being slacked off for a wind abeam, as the last boat
+lifted clear of the water and swung in the tackles.
+
+There was need for haste.  The Macedonia, belching the blackest of
+smoke from her funnel, was charging down upon us from out of the
+north-east.  Neglecting the boats that remained to her, she had
+altered her course so as to anticipate ours.  She was not running
+straight for us, but ahead of us.  Our courses were converging like
+the sides of an angle, the vertex of which was at the edge of the
+fog-bank.  It was there, or not at all, that the Macedonia could
+hope to catch us.  The hope for the Ghost lay in that she should
+pass that point before the Macedonia arrived at it.
+
+Wolf Larsen was steering, his eyes glistening and snapping as they
+dwelt upon and leaped from detail to detail of the chase.  Now he
+studied the sea to windward for signs of the wind slackening or
+freshening, now the Macedonia; and again, his eyes roved over every
+sail, and he gave commands to slack a sheet here a trifle, to come
+in on one there a trifle, till he was drawing out of the Ghost the
+last bit of speed she possessed.  All feuds and grudges were
+forgotten, and I was surprised at the alacrity with which the men
+who had so long endured his brutality sprang to execute his orders.
+Strange to say, the unfortunate Johnson came into my mind as we
+lifted and surged and heeled along, and I was aware of a regret
+that he was not alive and present; he had so loved the Ghost and
+delighted in her sailing powers.
+
+"Better get your rifles, you fellows," Wolf Larsen called to our
+hunters; and the five men lined the lee rail, guns in hand, and
+waited.
+
+The Macedonia was now but a mile away, the black smoke pouring from
+her funnel at a right angle, so madly she raced, pounding through
+the sea at a seventeen-knot gait--"'Sky-hooting through the brine,"
+as Wolf Larsen quoted while gazing at her.  We were not making more
+than nine knots, but the fog-bank was very near.
+
+A puff of smoke broke from the Macedonia's deck, we heard a heavy
+report, and a round hole took form in the stretched canvas of our
+mainsail.  They were shooting at us with one of the small cannon
+which rumour had said they carried on board.  Our men, clustering
+amidships, waved their hats and raised a derisive cheer.  Again
+there was a puff of smoke and a loud report, this time the cannon-
+ball striking not more than twenty feet astern and glancing twice
+from sea to sea to windward ere it sank.
+
+But there was no rifle-firing for the reason that all their hunters
+were out in the boats or our prisoners.  When the two vessels were
+half-a-mile apart, a third shot made another hole in our mainsail.
+Then we entered the fog.  It was about us, veiling and hiding us in
+its dense wet gauze.
+
+The sudden transition was startling.  The moment before we had been
+leaping through the sunshine, the clear sky above us, the sea
+breaking and rolling wide to the horizon, and a ship, vomiting
+smoke and fire and iron missiles, rushing madly upon us.  And at
+once, as in an instant's leap, the sun was blotted out, there was
+no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was
+such as tear-blinded eyes may see.  The grey mist drove by us like
+a rain.  Every woollen filament of our garments, every hair of our
+heads and faces, was jewelled with a crystal globule.  The shrouds
+were wet with moisture; it dripped from our rigging overhead; and
+on the underside of our booms drops of water took shape in long
+swaying lines, which were detached and flung to the deck in mimic
+showers at each surge of the schooner.  I was aware of a pent,
+stifled feeling.  As the sounds of the ship thrusting herself
+through the waves were hurled back upon us by the fog, so were
+one's thoughts.  The mind recoiled from contemplation of a world
+beyond this wet veil which wrapped us around.  This was the world,
+the universe itself, its bounds so near one felt impelled to reach
+out both arms and push them back.  It was impossible, that the rest
+could be beyond these walls of grey.  The rest was a dream, no more
+than the memory of a dream.
+
+It was weird, strangely weird.  I looked at Maud Brewster and knew
+that she was similarly affected.  Then I looked at Wolf Larsen, but
+there was nothing subjective about his state of consciousness.  His
+whole concern was with the immediate, objective present.  He still
+held the wheel, and I felt that he was timing Time, reckoning the
+passage of the minutes with each forward lunge and leeward roll of
+the Ghost.
+
+"Go for'ard and hard alee without any noise," he said to me in a
+low voice.  "Clew up the topsails first.  Set men at all the
+sheets.  Let there be no rattling of blocks, no sound of voices.
+No noise, understand, no noise."
+
+When all was ready, the word "hard-a-lee" was passed forward to me
+from man to man; and the Ghost heeled about on the port tack with
+practically no noise at all.  And what little there was,--the
+slapping of a few reef-points and the creaking of a sheave in a
+block or two,--was ghostly under the hollow echoing pall in which
+we were swathed.
+
+We had scarcely filled away, it seemed, when the fog thinned
+abruptly and we were again in the sunshine, the wide-stretching sea
+breaking before us to the sky-line.  But the ocean was bare.  No
+wrathful Macedonia broke its surface nor blackened the sky with her
+smoke.
+
+Wolf Larsen at once squared away and ran down along the rim of the
+fog-bank.  His trick was obvious.  He had entered the fog to
+windward of the steamer, and while the steamer had blindly driven
+on into the fog in the chance of catching him, he had come about
+and out of his shelter and was now running down to re-enter to
+leeward.  Successful in this, the old simile of the needle in the
+haystack would be mild indeed compared with his brother's chance of
+finding him.  He did not run long.  Jibing the fore- and main-sails
+and setting the topsails again, we headed back into the bank.  As
+we entered I could have sworn I saw a vague bulk emerging to
+windward.  I looked quickly at Wolf Larsen.  Already we were
+ourselves buried in the fog, but he nodded his head.  He, too, had
+seen it--the Macedonia, guessing his manoeuvre and failing by a
+moment in anticipating it.  There was no doubt that we had escaped
+unseen.
+
+"He can't keep this up," Wolf Larsen said.  "He'll have to go back
+for the rest of his boats.  Send a man to the wheel, Mr. Van
+Weyden, keep this course for the present, and you might as well set
+the watches, for we won't do any lingering to-night."
+
+"I'd give five hundred dollars, though," he added, "just to be
+aboard the Macedonia for five minutes, listening to my brother
+curse."
+
+"And now, Mr. Van Weyden," he said to me when he had been relieved
+from the wheel, "we must make these new-comers welcome.  Serve out
+plenty of whisky to the hunters and see that a few bottles slip
+for'ard.  I'll wager every man Jack of them is over the side to-
+morrow, hunting for Wolf Larsen as contentedly as ever they hunted
+for Death Larsen."
+
+"But won't they escape as Wainwright did?" I asked.
+
+He laughed shrewdly.  "Not as long as our old hunters have anything
+to say about it.  I'm dividing amongst them a dollar a skin for all
+the skins shot by our new hunters.  At least half of their
+enthusiasm to-day was due to that.  Oh, no, there won't be any
+escaping if they have anything to say about it.  And now you'd
+better get for'ard to your hospital duties.  There must be a full
+ward waiting for you."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+
+Wolf Larsen took the distribution of the whisky off my hands, and
+the bottles began to make their appearance while I worked over the
+fresh batch of wounded men in the forecastle.  I had seen whisky
+drunk, such as whisky-and-soda by the men of the clubs, but never
+as these men drank it, from pannikins and mugs, and from the
+bottles--great brimming drinks, each one of which was in itself a
+debauch.  But they did not stop at one or two.  They drank and
+drank, and ever the bottles slipped forward and they drank more.
+
+Everybody drank; the wounded drank; Oofty-Oofty, who helped me,
+drank.  Only Louis refrained, no more than cautiously wetting his
+lips with the liquor, though he joined in the revels with an
+abandon equal to that of most of them.  It was a saturnalia.  In
+loud voices they shouted over the day's fighting, wrangled about
+details, or waxed affectionate and made friends with the men whom
+they had fought.  Prisoners and captors hiccoughed on one another's
+shoulders, and swore mighty oaths of respect and esteem.  They wept
+over the miseries of the past and over the miseries yet to come
+under the iron rule of Wolf Larsen.  And all cursed him and told
+terrible tales of his brutality.
+
+It was a strange and frightful spectacle--the small, bunk-lined
+space, the floor and walls leaping and lurching, the dim light, the
+swaying shadows lengthening and fore-shortening monstrously, the
+thick air heavy with smoke and the smell of bodies and iodoform,
+and the inflamed faces of the men--half-men, I should call them.  I
+noted Oofty-Oofty, holding the end of a bandage and looking upon
+the scene, his velvety and luminous eyes glistening in the light
+like a deer's eyes, and yet I knew the barbaric devil that lurked
+in his breast and belied all the softness and tenderness, almost
+womanly, of his face and form.  And I noticed the boyish face of
+Harrison,--a good face once, but now a demon's,--convulsed with
+passion as he told the new-comers of the hell-ship they were in and
+shrieked curses upon the head of Wolf Larsen.
+
+Wolf Larsen it was, always Wolf Larsen, enslaver and tormentor of
+men, a male Circe and these his swine, suffering brutes that
+grovelled before him and revolted only in drunkenness and in
+secrecy.  And was I, too, one of his swine? I thought.  And Maud
+Brewster?  No!  I ground my teeth in my anger and determination
+till the man I was attending winced under my hand and Oofty-Oofty
+looked at me with curiosity.  I felt endowed with a sudden
+strength.  What of my new-found love, I was a giant.  I feared
+nothing.  I would work my will through it all, in spite of Wolf
+Larsen and of my own thirty-five bookish years.  All would be well.
+I would make it well.  And so, exalted, upborne by a sense of
+power, I turned my back on the howling inferno and climbed to the
+deck, where the fog drifted ghostly through the night and the air
+was sweet and pure and quiet.
+
+The steerage, where were two wounded hunters, was a repetition of
+the forecastle, except that Wolf Larsen was not being cursed; and
+it was with a great relief that I again emerged on deck and went
+aft to the cabin.  Supper was ready, and Wolf Larsen and Maud were
+waiting for me.
+
+While all his ship was getting drunk as fast as it could, he
+remained sober.  Not a drop of liquor passed his lips.  He did not
+dare it under the circumstances, for he had only Louis and me to
+depend upon, and Louis was even now at the wheel.  We were sailing
+on through the fog without a look-out and without lights.  That
+Wolf Larsen had turned the liquor loose among his men surprised me,
+but he evidently knew their psychology and the best method of
+cementing in cordiality, what had begun in bloodshed.
+
+His victory over Death Larsen seemed to have had a remarkable
+effect upon him.  The previous evening he had reasoned himself into
+the blues, and I had been waiting momentarily for one of his
+characteristic outbursts.  Yet nothing had occurred, and he was now
+in splendid trim.  Possibly his success in capturing so many
+hunters and boats had counteracted the customary reaction.  At any
+rate, the blues were gone, and the blue devils had not put in an
+appearance.  So I thought at the time; but, ah me, little I knew
+him or knew that even then, perhaps, he was meditating an outbreak
+more terrible than any I had seen.
+
+As I say, he discovered himself in splendid trim when I entered the
+cabin.  He had had no headaches for weeks, his eyes were clear blue
+as the sky, his bronze was beautiful with perfect health; life
+swelled through his veins in full and magnificent flood.  While
+waiting for me he had engaged Maud in animated discussion.
+Temptation was the topic they had hit upon, and from the few words
+I heard I made out that he was contending that temptation was
+temptation only when a man was seduced by it and fell.
+
+"For look you," he was saying, "as I see it, a man does things
+because of desire.  He has many desires.  He may desire to escape
+pain, or to enjoy pleasure.  But whatever he does, he does because
+he desires to do it."
+
+"But suppose he desires to do two opposite things, neither of which
+will permit him to do the other?" Maud interrupted.
+
+"The very thing I was coming to," he said.
+
+"And between these two desires is just where the soul of the man is
+manifest," she went on.  "If it is a good soul, it will desire and
+do the good action, and the contrary if it is a bad soul.  It is
+the soul that decides."
+
+"Bosh and nonsense!" he exclaimed impatiently.  "It is the desire
+that decides.  Here is a man who wants to, say, get drunk.  Also,
+he doesn't want to get drunk.  What does he do?  How does he do it?
+He is a puppet.  He is the creature of his desires, and of the two
+desires he obeys the strongest one, that is all.  His soul hasn't
+anything to do with it.  How can he be tempted to get drunk and
+refuse to get drunk?  If the desire to remain sober prevails, it is
+because it is the strongest desire.  Temptation plays no part,
+unless--" he paused while grasping the new thought which had come
+into his mind--"unless he is tempted to remain sober.
+
+"Ha! ha!" he laughed.  "What do you think of that, Mr. Van Weyden?"
+
+"That both of you are hair-splitting," I said.  "The man's soul is
+his desires.  Or, if you will, the sum of his desires is his soul.
+Therein you are both wrong.  You lay the stress upon the desire
+apart from the soul, Miss Brewster lays the stress on the soul
+apart from the desire, and in point of fact soul and desire are the
+same thing.
+
+"However," I continued, "Miss Brewster is right in contending that
+temptation is temptation whether the man yield or overcome.  Fire
+is fanned by the wind until it leaps up fiercely.  So is desire
+like fire.  It is fanned, as by a wind, by sight of the thing
+desired, or by a new and luring description or comprehension of the
+thing desired.  There lies the temptation.  It is the wind that
+fans the desire until it leaps up to mastery.  That's temptation.
+It may not fan sufficiently to make the desire overmastering, but
+in so far as it fans at all, that far is it temptation.  And, as
+you say, it may tempt for good as well as for evil."
+
+I felt proud of myself as we sat down to the table.  My words had
+been decisive.  At least they had put an end to the discussion.
+
+But Wolf Larsen seemed voluble, prone to speech as I had never seen
+him before.  It was as though he were bursting with pent energy
+which must find an outlet somehow.  Almost immediately he launched
+into a discussion on love.  As usual, his was the sheer
+materialistic side, and Maud's was the idealistic.  For myself,
+beyond a word or so of suggestion or correction now and again, I
+took no part.
+
+He was brilliant, but so was Maud, and for some time I lost the
+thread of the conversation through studying her face as she talked.
+It was a face that rarely displayed colour, but to-night it was
+flushed and vivacious.  Her wit was playing keenly, and she was
+enjoying the tilt as much as Wolf Larsen, and he was enjoying it
+hugely.  For some reason, though I know not why in the argument, so
+utterly had I lost it in the contemplation of one stray brown lock
+of Maud's hair, he quoted from Iseult at Tintagel, where she says:
+
+
+"Blessed am I beyond women even herein,
+That beyond all born women is my sin,
+And perfect my transgression."
+
+
+As he had read pessimism into Omar, so now he read triumph,
+stinging triumph and exultation, into Swinburne's lines.  And he
+read rightly, and he read well.  He had hardly ceased reading when
+Louis put his head into the companion-way and whispered down:
+
+"Be easy, will ye?  The fog's lifted, an' 'tis the port light iv a
+steamer that's crossin' our bow this blessed minute."
+
+Wolf Larsen sprang on deck, and so swiftly that by the time we
+followed him he had pulled the steerage-slide over the drunken
+clamour and was on his way forward to close the forecastle-scuttle.
+The fog, though it remained, had lifted high, where it obscured the
+stars and made the night quite black.  Directly ahead of us I could
+see a bright red light and a white light, and I could hear the
+pulsing of a steamer's engines.  Beyond a doubt it was the
+Macedonia.
+
+Wolf Larsen had returned to the poop, and we stood in a silent
+group, watching the lights rapidly cross our bow.
+
+"Lucky for me he doesn't carry a searchlight," Wolf Larsen said.
+
+"What if I should cry out loudly?" I queried in a whisper.
+
+"It would be all up," he answered.  "But have you thought upon what
+would immediately happen?"
+
+Before I had time to express any desire to know, he had me by the
+throat with his gorilla grip, and by a faint quiver of the muscles-
+-a hint, as it were--he suggested to me the twist that would surely
+have broken my neck.  The next moment he had released me and we
+were gazing at the Macedonia's lights.
+
+"What if I should cry out?" Maud asked.
+
+"I like you too well to hurt you," he said softly--nay, there was a
+tenderness and a caress in his voice that made me wince.
+
+"But don't do it, just the same, for I'd promptly break Mr. Van
+Weyden's neck."
+
+"Then she has my permission to cry out," I said defiantly.
+
+"I hardly think you'll care to sacrifice the Dean of American
+Letters the Second," he sneered.
+
+We spoke no more, though we had become too used to one another for
+the silence to be awkward; and when the red light and the white had
+disappeared we returned to the cabin to finish the interrupted
+supper.
+
+Again they fell to quoting, and Maud gave Dowson's "Impenitentia
+Ultima."  She rendered it beautifully, but I watched not her, but
+Wolf Larsen.  I was fascinated by the fascinated look he bent upon
+Maud.  He was quite out of himself, and I noticed the unconscious
+movement of his lips as he shaped word for word as fast as she
+uttered them.  He interrupted her when she gave the lines:
+
+
+"And her eyes should be my light while the sun went out behind me,
+And the viols in her voice be the last sound in my ear."
+
+
+"There are viols in your voice," he said bluntly, and his eyes
+flashed their golden light.
+
+I could have shouted with joy at her control.  She finished the
+concluding stanza without faltering and then slowly guided the
+conversation into less perilous channels.  And all the while I sat
+in a half-daze, the drunken riot of the steerage breaking through
+the bulkhead, the man I feared and the woman I loved talking on and
+on.  The table was not cleared.  The man who had taken Mugridge's
+place had evidently joined his comrades in the forecastle.
+
+If ever Wolf Larsen attained the summit of living, he attained it
+then.  From time to time I forsook my own thoughts to follow him,
+and I followed in amaze, mastered for the moment by his remarkable
+intellect, under the spell of his passion, for he was preaching the
+passion of revolt.  It was inevitable that Milton's Lucifer should
+be instanced, and the keenness with which Wolf Larsen analysed and
+depicted the character was a revelation of his stifled genius.  It
+reminded me of Taine, yet I knew the man had never heard of that
+brilliant though dangerous thinker.
+
+"He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God's thunderbolts,"
+Wolf Larsen was saying.  "Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten.  A
+third of God's angels he had led with him, and straightway he
+incited man to rebel against God, and gained for himself and hell
+the major portion of all the generations of man.  Why was he beaten
+out of heaven?  Because he was less brave than God? less proud?
+less aspiring?  No!  A thousand times no!  God was more powerful,
+as he said, Whom thunder hath made greater.  But Lucifer was a free
+spirit.  To serve was to suffocate.  He preferred suffering in
+freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable servility.  He did
+not care to serve God.  He cared to serve nothing.  He was no
+figure-head.  He stood on his own legs.  He was an individual."
+
+"The first Anarchist," Maud laughed, rising and preparing to
+withdraw to her state-room.
+
+"Then it is good to be an anarchist!" he cried.  He, too, had
+risen, and he stood facing her, where she had paused at the door of
+her room, as he went on:
+
+
+"'Here at least
+We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
+Here for his envy; will not drive us hence;
+Here we may reign secure; and in my choice
+To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
+Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
+
+
+It was the defiant cry of a mighty spirit.  The cabin still rang
+with his voice, as he stood there, swaying, his bronzed face
+shining, his head up and dominant, and his eyes, golden and
+masculine, intensely masculine and insistently soft, flashing upon
+Maud at the door.
+
+Again that unnamable and unmistakable terror was in her eyes, and
+she said, almost in a whisper, "You are Lucifer."
+
+The door closed and she was gone.  He stood staring after her for a
+minute, then returned to himself and to me.
+
+"I'll relieve Louis at the wheel," he said shortly, "and call upon
+you to relieve at midnight.  Better turn in now and get some
+sleep."
+
+He pulled on a pair of mittens, put on his cap, and ascended the
+companion-stairs, while I followed his suggestion by going to bed.
+For some unknown reason, prompted mysteriously, I did not undress,
+but lay down fully clothed.  For a time I listened to the clamour
+in the steerage and marvelled upon the love which had come to me;
+but my sleep on the Ghost had become most healthful and natural,
+and soon the songs and cries died away, my eyes closed, and my
+consciousness sank down into the half-death of slumber.
+
+
+I knew not what had aroused me, but I found myself out of my bunk,
+on my feet, wide awake, my soul vibrating to the warning of danger
+as it might have thrilled to a trumpet call.  I threw open the
+door.  The cabin light was burning low.  I saw Maud, my Maud,
+straining and struggling and crushed in the embrace of Wolf
+Larsen's arms.  I could see the vain beat and flutter of her as she
+strove, pressing her face against his breast, to escape from him.
+All this I saw on the very instant of seeing and as I sprang
+forward.
+
+I struck him with my fist, on the face, as he raised his head, but
+it was a puny blow.  He roared in a ferocious, animal-like way, and
+gave me a shove with his hand.  It was only a shove, a flirt of the
+wrist, yet so tremendous was his strength that I was hurled
+backward as from a catapult.  I struck the door of the state-room
+which had formerly been Mugridge's, splintering and smashing the
+panels with the impact of my body.  I struggled to my feet, with
+difficulty dragging myself clear of the wrecked door, unaware of
+any hurt whatever.  I was conscious only of an overmastering rage.
+I think I, too, cried aloud, as I drew the knife at my hip and
+sprang forward a second time.
+
+But something had happened.  They were reeling apart.  I was close
+upon him, my knife uplifted, but I withheld the blow.  I was
+puzzled by the strangeness of it.  Maud was leaning against the
+wall, one hand out for support; but he was staggering, his left
+hand pressed against his forehead and covering his eyes, and with
+the right he was groping about him in a dazed sort of way.  It
+struck against the wall, and his body seemed to express a muscular
+and physical relief at the contact, as though he had found his
+bearings, his location in space as well as something against which
+to lean.
+
+Then I saw red again.  All my wrongs and humiliations flashed upon
+me with a dazzling brightness, all that I had suffered and others
+had suffered at his hands, all the enormity of the man's very
+existence.  I sprang upon him, blindly, insanely, and drove the
+knife into his shoulder.  I knew, then, that it was no more than a
+flesh wound,--I had felt the steel grate on his shoulder-blade,--
+and I raised the knife to strike at a more vital part.
+
+But Maud had seen my first blow, and she cried, "Don't!  Please
+don't!"
+
+I dropped my arm for a moment, and a moment only.  Again the knife
+was raised, and Wolf Larsen would have surely died had she not
+stepped between.  Her arms were around me, her hair was brushing my
+face.  My pulse rushed up in an unwonted manner, yet my rage
+mounted with it.  She looked me bravely in the eyes.
+
+"For my sake," she begged.
+
+"I would kill him for your sake!" I cried, trying to free my arm
+without hurting her.
+
+"Hush!" she said, and laid her fingers lightly on my lips.  I could
+have kissed them, had I dared, even then, in my rage, the touch of
+them was so sweet, so very sweet.  "Please, please," she pleaded,
+and she disarmed me by the words, as I was to discover they would
+ever disarm me.
+
+I stepped back, separating from her, and replaced the knife in its
+sheath.  I looked at Wolf Larsen.  He still pressed his left hand
+against his forehead.  It covered his eyes.  His head was bowed.
+He seemed to have grown limp.  His body was sagging at the hips,
+his great shoulders were drooping and shrinking forward.
+
+"Van, Weyden!" he called hoarsely, and with a note of fright in his
+voice.  "Oh, Van Weyden! where are you?"
+
+I looked at Maud.  She did not speak, but nodded her head.
+
+"Here I am," I answered, stepping to his side.  "What is the
+matter?"
+
+"Help me to a seat," he said, in the same hoarse, frightened voice.
+
+"I am a sick man; a very sick man, Hump," he said, as he left my
+sustaining grip and sank into a chair.
+
+His head dropped forward on the table and was buried in his hands.
+From time to time it rocked back and forward as with pain.  Once,
+when he half raised it, I saw the sweat standing in heavy drops on
+his forehead about the roots of his hair.
+
+"I am a sick man, a very sick man," he repeated again, and yet once
+again.
+
+"What is the matter?" I asked, resting my hand on his shoulder.
+"What can I do for you?"
+
+But he shook my hand off with an irritated movement, and for a long
+time I stood by his side in silence.  Maud was looking on, her face
+awed and frightened.  What had happened to him we could not
+imagine.
+
+"Hump," he said at last, "I must get into my bunk.  Lend me a hand.
+I'll be all right in a little while.  It's those damn headaches, I
+believe.  I was afraid of them.  I had a feeling--no, I don't know
+what I'm talking about.  Help me into my bunk."
+
+But when I got him into his bunk he again buried his face in his
+hands, covering his eyes, and as I turned to go I could hear him
+murmuring, "I am a sick man, a very sick man."
+
+Maud looked at me inquiringly as I emerged.  I shook my head,
+saying:
+
+"Something has happened to him.  What, I don't know.  He is
+helpless, and frightened, I imagine, for the first time in his
+life.  It must have occurred before he received the knife-thrust,
+which made only a superficial wound.  You must have seen what
+happened."
+
+She shook her head.  "I saw nothing.  It is just as mysterious to
+me.  He suddenly released me and staggered away.  But what shall we
+do?  What shall I do?"
+
+"If you will wait, please, until I come back," I answered.
+
+I went on deck.  Louis was at the wheel.
+
+"You may go for'ard and turn in," I said, taking it from him.
+
+He was quick to obey, and I found myself alone on the deck of the
+Ghost.  As quietly as was possible, I clewed up the topsails,
+lowered the flying jib and staysail, backed the jib over, and
+flattened the mainsail.  Then I went below to Maud.  I placed my
+finger on my lips for silence, and entered Wolf Larsen's room.  He
+was in the same position in which I had left him, and his head was
+rocking--almost writhing--from side to side.
+
+"Anything I can do for you?" I asked.
+
+He made no reply at first, but on my repeating the question he
+answered, "No, no; I'm all right.  Leave me alone till morning."
+
+But as I turned to go I noted that his head had resumed its rocking
+motion.  Maud was waiting patiently for me, and I took notice, with
+a thrill of joy, of the queenly poise of her head and her glorious,
+calm eyes.  Calm and sure they were as her spirit itself.
+
+"Will you trust yourself to me for a journey of six hundred miles
+or so?" I asked.
+
+"You mean--?" she asked, and I knew she had guessed aright.
+
+"Yes, I mean just that," I replied.  "There is nothing left for us
+but the open boat."
+
+"For me, you mean," she said.  "You are certainly as safe here as
+you have been."
+
+"No, there is nothing left for us but the open boat," I iterated
+stoutly.  "Will you please dress as warmly as you can, at once, and
+make into a bundle whatever you wish to bring with you."
+
+"And make all haste," I added, as she turned toward her state-room.
+
+The lazarette was directly beneath the cabin, and, opening the
+trap-door in the floor and carrying a candle with me, I dropped
+down and began overhauling the ship's stores.  I selected mainly
+from the canned goods, and by the time I was ready, willing hands
+were extended from above to receive what I passed up.
+
+We worked in silence.  I helped myself also to blankets, mittens,
+oilskins, caps, and such things, from the slop-chest.  It was no
+light adventure, this trusting ourselves in a small boat to so raw
+and stormy a sea, and it was imperative that we should guard
+ourselves against the cold and wet.
+
+We worked feverishly at carrying our plunder on deck and depositing
+it amidships, so feverishly that Maud, whose strength was hardly a
+positive quantity, had to give over, exhausted, and sit on the
+steps at the break of the poop.  This did not serve to recover her,
+and she lay on her back, on the hard deck, arms stretched out, and
+whole body relaxed.  It was a trick I remembered of my sister, and
+I knew she would soon be herself again.  I knew, also, that weapons
+would not come in amiss, and I re-entered Wolf Larsen's state-room
+to get his rifle and shot-gun.  I spoke to him, but he made no
+answer, though his head was still rocking from side to side and he
+was not asleep.
+
+"Good-bye, Lucifer," I whispered to myself as I softly closed the
+door.
+
+Next to obtain was a stock of ammunition,--an easy matter, though I
+had to enter the steerage companion-way to do it.  Here the hunters
+stored the ammunition-boxes they carried in the boats, and here,
+but a few feet from their noisy revels, I took possession of two
+boxes.
+
+Next, to lower a boat.  Not so simple a task for one man.  Having
+cast off the lashings, I hoisted first on the forward tackle, then
+on the aft, till the boat cleared the rail, when I lowered away,
+one tackle and then the other, for a couple of feet, till it hung
+snugly, above the water, against the schooner's side.  I made
+certain that it contained the proper equipment of oars, rowlocks,
+and sail.  Water was a consideration, and I robbed every boat
+aboard of its breaker.  As there were nine boats all told, it meant
+that we should have plenty of water, and ballast as well, though
+there was the chance that the boat would be overloaded, what of the
+generous supply of other things I was taking.
+
+While Maud was passing me the provisions and I was storing them in
+the boat, a sailor came on deck from the forecastle.  He stood by
+the weather rail for a time (we were lowering over the lee rail),
+and then sauntered slowly amidships, where he again paused and
+stood facing the wind, with his back toward us.  I could hear my
+heart beating as I crouched low in the boat.  Maud had sunk down
+upon the deck and was, I knew, lying motionless, her body in the
+shadow of the bulwark.  But the man never turned, and, after
+stretching his arms above his head and yawning audibly, he retraced
+his steps to the forecastle scuttle and disappeared.
+
+A few minutes sufficed to finish the loading, and I lowered the
+boat into the water.  As I helped Maud over the rail and felt her
+form close to mine, it was all I could do to keep from crying out,
+"I love you!  I love you!"  Truly Humphrey Van Weyden was at last
+in love, I thought, as her fingers clung to mine while I lowered
+her down to the boat.  I held on to the rail with one hand and
+supported her weight with the other, and I was proud at the moment
+of the feat.  It was a strength I had not possessed a few months
+before, on the day I said good-bye to Charley Furuseth and started
+for San Francisco on the ill-fated Martinez.
+
+As the boat ascended on a sea, her feet touched and I released her
+hands.  I cast off the tackles and leaped after her.  I had never
+rowed in my life, but I put out the oars and at the expense of much
+effort got the boat clear of the Ghost.  Then I experimented with
+the sail.  I had seen the boat-steerers and hunters set their
+spritsails many times, yet this was my first attempt.  What took
+them possibly two minutes took me twenty, but in the end I
+succeeded in setting and trimming it, and with the steering-oar in
+my hands hauled on the wind.
+
+"There lies Japan," I remarked, "straight before us."
+
+"Humphrey Van Weyden," she said, "you are a brave man."
+
+"Nay," I answered, "it is you who are a brave woman."
+
+We turned our heads, swayed by a common impulse to see the last of
+the Ghost.  Her low hull lifted and rolled to windward on a sea;
+her canvas loomed darkly in the night; her lashed wheel creaked as
+the rudder kicked; then sight and sound of her faded away, and we
+were alone on the dark sea.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+
+Day broke, grey and chill.  The boat was close-hauled on a fresh
+breeze and the compass indicated that we were just making the
+course which would bring us to Japan.  Though stoutly mittened, my
+fingers were cold, and they pained from the grip on the steering-
+oar.  My feet were stinging from the bite of the frost, and I hoped
+fervently that the sun would shine.
+
+Before me, in the bottom of the boat, lay Maud.  She, at least, was
+warm, for under her and over her were thick blankets.  The top one
+I had drawn over her face to shelter it from the night, so I could
+see nothing but the vague shape of her, and her light-brown hair,
+escaped from the covering and jewelled with moisture from the air.
+
+Long I looked at her, dwelling upon that one visible bit of her as
+only a man would who deemed it the most precious thing in the
+world.  So insistent was my gaze that at last she stirred under the
+blankets, the top fold was thrown back and she smiled out on me,
+her eyes yet heavy with sleep.
+
+"Good-morning, Mr. Van Weyden," she said.  "Have you sighted land
+yet?"
+
+"No," I answered, "but we are approaching it at a rate of six miles
+an hour."
+
+She made a moue of disappointment.
+
+"But that is equivalent to one hundred and forty-four miles in
+twenty-four hours," I added reassuringly.
+
+Her face brightened.  "And how far have we to go?"
+
+"Siberia lies off there," I said, pointing to the west.  "But to
+the south-west, some six hundred miles, is Japan.  If this wind
+should hold, we'll make it in five days."
+
+"And if it storms?  The boat could not live?"
+
+She had a way of looking one in the eyes and demanding the truth,
+and thus she looked at me as she asked the question.
+
+"It would have to storm very hard," I temporized.
+
+"And if it storms very hard?"
+
+I nodded my head.  "But we may be picked up any moment by a
+sealing-schooner.  They are plentifully distributed over this part
+of the ocean."
+
+"Why, you are chilled through!" she cried.  "Look!  You are
+shivering.  Don't deny it; you are.  And here I have been lying
+warm as toast."
+
+"I don't see that it would help matters if you, too, sat up and
+were chilled," I laughed.
+
+"It will, though, when I learn to steer, which I certainly shall."
+
+She sat up and began making her simple toilet.  She shook down her
+hair, and it fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and
+shoulders.  Dear, damp brown hair!  I wanted to kiss it, to ripple
+it through my fingers, to bury my face in it.  I gazed entranced,
+till the boat ran into the wind and the flapping sail warned me I
+was not attending to my duties.  Idealist and romanticist that I
+was and always had been in spite of my analytical nature, yet I had
+failed till now in grasping much of the physical characteristics of
+love.  The love of man and woman, I had always held, was a
+sublimated something related to spirit, a spiritual bond that
+linked and drew their souls together.  The bonds of the flesh had
+little part in my cosmos of love.  But I was learning the sweet
+lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed
+itself, through the flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of
+the loved one's hair was as much breath and voice and essence of
+the spirit as the light that shone from the eyes and the thoughts
+that fell from the lips.  After all, pure spirit was unknowable, a
+thing to be sensed and divined only; nor could it express itself in
+terms of itself.  Jehovah was anthropomorphic because he could
+address himself to the Jews only in terms of their understanding;
+so he was conceived as in their own image, as a cloud, a pillar of
+fire, a tangible, physical something which the mind of the
+Israelites could grasp.
+
+And so I gazed upon Maud's light-brown hair, and loved it, and
+learned more of love than all the poets and singers had taught me
+with all their songs and sonnets.  She flung it back with a sudden
+adroit movement, and her face emerged, smiling.
+
+"Why don't women wear their hair down always?" I asked.  "It is so
+much more beautiful."
+
+"If it didn't tangle so dreadfully," she laughed.  "There!  I've
+lost one of my precious hair-pins!"
+
+I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and
+again, such was my delight in following her every movement as she
+searched through the blankets for the pin.  I was surprised, and
+joyfully, that she was so much the woman, and the display of each
+trait and mannerism that was characteristically feminine gave me
+keener joy.  For I had been elevating her too highly in my concepts
+of her, removing her too far from the plane of the human, and too
+far from me.  I had been making of her a creature goddess-like and
+unapproachable.  So I hailed with delight the little traits that
+proclaimed her only woman after all, such as the toss of the head
+which flung back the cloud of hair, and the search for the pin.
+She was woman, my kind, on my plane, and the delightful intimacy of
+kind, of man and woman, was possible, as well as the reverence and
+awe in which I knew I should always hold her.
+
+She found the pin with an adorable little cry, and I turned my
+attention more fully to my steering.  I proceeded to experiment,
+lashing and wedging the steering-oar until the boat held on fairly
+well by the wind without my assistance.  Occasionally it came up
+too close, or fell off too freely; but it always recovered itself
+and in the main behaved satisfactorily.
+
+"And now we shall have breakfast," I said.  "But first you must be
+more warmly clad."
+
+I got out a heavy shirt, new from the slop-chest and made from
+blanket goods.  I knew the kind, so thick and so close of texture
+that it could resist the rain and not be soaked through after hours
+of wetting.  When she had slipped this on over her head, I
+exchanged the boy's cap she wore for a man's cap, large enough to
+cover her hair, and, when the flap was turned down, to completely
+cover her neck and ears.  The effect was charming.  Her face was of
+the sort that cannot but look well under all circumstances.
+Nothing could destroy its exquisite oval, its well-nigh classic
+lines, its delicately stencilled brows, its large brown eyes,
+clear-seeing and calm, gloriously calm.
+
+A puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us just then.  The
+boat was caught as it obliquely crossed the crest of a wave.  It
+went over suddenly, burying its gunwale level with the sea and
+shipping a bucketful or so of water.  I was opening a can of tongue
+at the moment, and I sprang to the sheet and cast it off just in
+time.  The sail flapped and fluttered, and the boat paid off.  A
+few minutes of regulating sufficed to put it on its course again,
+when I returned to the preparation of breakfast.
+
+"It does very well, it seems, though I am not versed in things
+nautical," she said, nodding her head with grave approval at my
+steering contrivance.
+
+"But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind," I
+explained.  "When running more freely, with the wind astern abeam,
+or on the quarter, it will be necessary for me to steer."
+
+"I must say I don't understand your technicalities," she said, "but
+I do your conclusion, and I don't like it.  You cannot steer night
+and day and for ever.  So I shall expect, after breakfast, to
+receive my first lesson.  And then you shall lie down and sleep.
+We'll stand watches just as they do on ships."
+
+"I don't see how I am to teach you," I made protest.  "I am just
+learning for myself.  You little thought when you trusted yourself
+to me that I had had no experience whatever with small boats.  This
+is the first time I have ever been in one."
+
+"Then we'll learn together, sir.  And since you've had a night's
+start you shall teach me what you have learned.  And now,
+breakfast.  My! this air does give one an appetite!"
+
+"No coffee," I said regretfully, passing her buttered sea-biscuits
+and a slice of canned tongue.  "And there will be no tea, no soups,
+nothing hot, till we have made land somewhere, somehow."
+
+After the simple breakfast, capped with a cup of cold water, Maud
+took her lesson in steering.  In teaching her I learned quite a
+deal myself, though I was applying the knowledge already acquired
+by sailing the Ghost and by watching the boat-steerers sail the
+small boats.  She was an apt pupil, and soon learned to keep the
+course, to luff in the puffs and to cast off the sheet in an
+emergency.
+
+Having grown tired, apparently, of the task, she relinquished the
+oar to me.  I had folded up the blankets, but she now proceeded to
+spread them out on the bottom.  When all was arranged snugly, she
+said:
+
+"Now, sir, to bed.  And you shall sleep until luncheon.  Till
+dinner-time," she corrected, remembering the arrangement on the
+Ghost.
+
+What could I do?  She insisted, and said, "Please, please,"
+whereupon I turned the oar over to her and obeyed.  I experienced a
+positive sensuous delight as I crawled into the bed she had made
+with her hands.  The calm and control which were so much a part of
+her seemed to have been communicated to the blankets, so that I was
+aware of a soft dreaminess and content, and of an oval face and
+brown eyes framed in a fisherman's cap and tossing against a
+background now of grey cloud, now of grey sea, and then I was aware
+that I had been asleep.
+
+I looked at my watch.  It was one o'clock.  I had slept seven
+hours!  And she had been steering seven hours!  When I took the
+steering-oar I had first to unbend her cramped fingers.  Her
+modicum of strength had been exhausted, and she was unable even to
+move from her position.  I was compelled to let go the sheet while
+I helped her to the nest of blankets and chafed her hands and arms.
+
+"I am so tired," she said, with a quick intake of the breath and a
+sigh, drooping her head wearily.
+
+But she straightened it the next moment.  "Now don't scold, don't
+you dare scold," she cried with mock defiance.
+
+"I hope my face does not appear angry," I answered seriously; "for
+I assure you I am not in the least angry."
+
+"N-no," she considered.  "It looks only reproachful."
+
+"Then it is an honest face, for it looks what I feel.  You were not
+fair to yourself, nor to me.  How can I ever trust you again?"
+
+She looked penitent.  "I'll be good," she said, as a naughty child
+might say it.  "I promise--"
+
+"To obey as a sailor would obey his captain?"
+
+"Yes," she answered.  "It was stupid of me, I know."
+
+"Then you must promise something else," I ventured.
+
+"Readily."
+
+"That you will not say, 'Please, please,' too often; for when you
+do you are sure to override my authority."
+
+She laughed with amused appreciation.  She, too, had noticed the
+power of the repeated "please."
+
+"It is a good word--" I began.
+
+"But I must not overwork it," she broke in.
+
+But she laughed weakly, and her head drooped again.  I left the oar
+long enough to tuck the blankets about her feet and to pull a
+single fold across her face.  Alas! she was not strong.  I looked
+with misgiving toward the south-west and thought of the six hundred
+miles of hardship before us--ay, if it were no worse than hardship.
+On this sea a storm might blow up at any moment and destroy us.
+And yet I was unafraid.  I was without confidence in the future,
+extremely doubtful, and yet I felt no underlying fear.  It must
+come right, it must come right, I repeated to myself, over and over
+again.
+
+The wind freshened in the afternoon, raising a stiffer sea and
+trying the boat and me severely.  But the supply of food and the
+nine breakers of water enabled the boat to stand up to the sea and
+wind, and I held on as long as I dared.  Then I removed the sprit,
+tightly hauling down the peak of the sail, and we raced along under
+what sailors call a leg-of-mutton.
+
+Late in the afternoon I sighted a steamer's smoke on the horizon to
+leeward, and I knew it either for a Russian cruiser, or, more
+likely, the Macedonia still seeking the Ghost.  The sun had not
+shone all day, and it had been bitter cold.  As night drew on, the
+clouds darkened and the wind freshened, so that when Maud and I ate
+supper it was with our mittens on and with me still steering and
+eating morsels between puffs.
+
+By the time it was dark, wind and sea had become too strong for the
+boat, and I reluctantly took in the sail and set about making a
+drag or sea-anchor.  I had learned of the device from the talk of
+the hunters, and it was a simple thing to manufacture.  Furling the
+sail and lashing it securely about the mast, boom, sprit, and two
+pairs of spare oars, I threw it overboard.  A line connected it
+with the bow, and as it floated low in the water, practically
+unexposed to the wind, it drifted less rapidly than the boat.  In
+consequence it held the boat bow on to the sea and wind--the safest
+position in which to escape being swamped when the sea is breaking
+into whitecaps.
+
+"And now?" Maud asked cheerfully, when the task was accomplished
+and I pulled on my mittens.
+
+"And now we are no longer travelling toward Japan," I answered.
+"Our drift is to the south-east, or south-south-east, at the rate
+of at least two miles an hour."
+
+"That will be only twenty-four miles," she urged, "if the wind
+remains high all night."
+
+"Yes, and only one hundred and forty miles if it continues for
+three days and nights."
+
+"But it won't continue," she said with easy confidence.  "It will
+turn around and blow fair."
+
+"The sea is the great faithless one."
+
+"But the wind!" she retorted.  "I have heard you grow eloquent over
+the brave trade-wind."
+
+"I wish I had thought to bring Wolf Larsen's chronometer and
+sextant," I said, still gloomily.  "Sailing one direction, drifting
+another direction, to say nothing of the set of the current in some
+third direction, makes a resultant which dead reckoning can never
+calculate.  Before long we won't know where we are by five hundred
+miles."
+
+Then I begged her pardon and promised I should not be disheartened
+any more.  At her solicitation I let her take the watch till
+midnight,--it was then nine o'clock, but I wrapped her in blankets
+and put an oilskin about her before I lay down.  I slept only cat-
+naps.  The boat was leaping and pounding as it fell over the
+crests, I could hear the seas rushing past, and spray was
+continually being thrown aboard.  And still, it was not a bad
+night, I mused--nothing to the nights I had been through on the
+Ghost; nothing, perhaps, to the nights we should go through in this
+cockle-shell.  Its planking was three-quarters of an inch thick.
+Between us and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood.
+
+And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid.  The death
+which Wolf Larsen and even Thomas Mugridge had made me fear, I no
+longer feared.  The coming of Maud Brewster into my life seemed to
+have transformed me.  After all, I thought, it is better and finer
+to love than to be loved, if it makes something in life so worth
+while that one is not loath to die for it.  I forget my own life in
+the love of another life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never
+wanted so much to live as right now when I place the least value
+upon my own life.  I never had so much reason for living, was my
+concluding thought; and after that, until I dozed, I contented
+myself with trying to pierce the darkness to where I knew Maud
+crouched low in the stern-sheets, watchful of the foaming sea and
+ready to call me on an instant's notice.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+
+There is no need of going into an extended recital of our suffering
+in the small boat during the many days we were driven and drifted,
+here and there, willy-nilly, across the ocean.  The high wind blew
+from the north-west for twenty-four hours, when it fell calm, and
+in the night sprang up from the south-west.  This was dead in our
+teeth, but I took in the sea-anchor and set sail, hauling a course
+on the wind which took us in a south-south-easterly direction.  It
+was an even choice between this and the west-north-westerly course
+which the wind permitted; but the warm airs of the south fanned my
+desire for a warmer sea and swayed my decision.
+
+In three hours--it was midnight, I well remember, and as dark as I
+had ever seen it on the sea--the wind, still blowing out of the
+south-west, rose furiously, and once again I was compelled to set
+the sea-anchor.
+
+Day broke and found me wan-eyed and the ocean lashed white, the
+boat pitching, almost on end, to its drag.  We were in imminent
+danger of being swamped by the whitecaps.  As it was, spray and
+spume came aboard in such quantities that I bailed without
+cessation.  The blankets were soaking.  Everything was wet except
+Maud, and she, in oilskins, rubber boots, and sou'wester, was dry,
+all but her face and hands and a stray wisp of hair.  She relieved
+me at the bailing-hole from time to time, and bravely she threw out
+the water and faced the storm.  All things are relative.  It was no
+more than a stiff blow, but to us, fighting for life in our frail
+craft, it was indeed a storm.
+
+Cold and cheerless, the wind beating on our faces, the white seas
+roaring by, we struggled through the day.  Night came, but neither
+of us slept.  Day came, and still the wind beat on our faces and
+the white seas roared past.  By the second night Maud was falling
+asleep from exhaustion.  I covered her with oilskins and a
+tarpaulin.  She was comparatively dry, but she was numb with the
+cold.  I feared greatly that she might die in the night; but day
+broke, cold and cheerless, with the same clouded sky and beating
+wind and roaring seas.
+
+I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours.  I was wet and chilled to
+the marrow, till I felt more dead than alive.  My body was stiff
+from exertion as well as from cold, and my aching muscles gave me
+the severest torture whenever I used them, and I used them
+continually.  And all the time we were being driven off into the
+north-east, directly away from Japan and toward bleak Bering Sea.
+
+And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated.
+In fact, toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle
+and something more.  The boat's bow plunged under a crest, and we
+came through quarter-full of water.  I bailed like a madman.  The
+liability of shipping another such sea was enormously increased by
+the water that weighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy.
+And another such sea meant the end.  When I had the boat empty
+again I was forced to take away the tarpaulin which covered Maud,
+in order that I might lash it down across the bow.  It was well I
+did, for it covered the boat fully a third of the way aft, and
+three times, in the next several hours, it flung off the bulk of
+the down-rushing water when the bow shoved under the seas.
+
+Maud's condition was pitiable.  She sat crouched in the bottom of
+the boat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing the pain
+she suffered.  But ever her eyes looked bravely at me, and ever her
+lips uttered brave words.
+
+The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little I
+noticed it.  I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-
+sheets.  The morning of the fourth day found the wind diminished to
+a gentle whisper, the sea dying down and the sun shining upon us.
+Oh, the blessed sun!  How we bathed our poor bodies in its
+delicious warmth, reviving like bugs and crawling things after a
+storm.  We smiled again, said amusing things, and waxed optimistic
+over our situation.  Yet it was, if anything, worse than ever.  We
+were farther from Japan than the night we left the Ghost.  Nor
+could I more than roughly guess our latitude and longitude.  At a
+calculation of a two-mile drift per hour, during the seventy and
+odd hours of the storm, we had been driven at least one hundred and
+fifty miles to the north-east.  But was such calculated drift
+correct?  For all I knew, it might have been four miles per hour
+instead of two.  In which case we were another hundred and fifty
+miles to the bad.
+
+Where we were I did not know, though there was quite a likelihood
+that we were in the vicinity of the Ghost.  There were seals about
+us, and I was prepared to sight a sealing-schooner at any time.  We
+did sight one, in the afternoon, when the north-west breeze had
+sprung up freshly once more.  But the strange schooner lost itself
+on the sky-line and we alone occupied the circle of the sea.
+
+Came days of fog, when even Maud's spirit drooped and there were no
+merry words upon her lips; days of calm, when we floated on the
+lonely immensity of sea, oppressed by its greatness and yet
+marvelling at the miracle of tiny life, for we still lived and
+struggled to live; days of sleet and wind and snow-squalls, when
+nothing could keep us warm; or days of drizzling rain, when we
+filled our water-breakers from the drip of the wet sail.
+
+And ever I loved Maud with an increasing love.  She was so many-
+sided, so many-mooded--"protean-mooded" I called her.  But I called
+her this, and other and dearer things, in my thoughts only.  Though
+the declaration of my love urged and trembled on my tongue a
+thousand times, I knew that it was no time for such a declaration.
+If for no other reason, it was no time, when one was protecting and
+trying to save a woman, to ask that woman for her love.  Delicate
+as was the situation, not alone in this but in other ways, I
+flattered myself that I was able to deal delicately with it; and
+also I flattered myself that by look or sign I gave no
+advertisement of the love I felt for her.  We were like good
+comrades, and we grew better comrades as the days went by.
+
+One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and
+fear.  The terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering,
+the strangeness and isolation of the situation,--all that should
+have frightened a robust woman,--seemed to make no impression upon
+her who had known life only in its most sheltered and consummately
+artificial aspects, and who was herself all fire and dew and mist,
+sublimated spirit, all that was soft and tender and clinging in
+woman.  And yet I am wrong.  She WAS timid and afraid, but she
+possessed courage.  The flesh and the qualms of the flesh she was
+heir to, but the flesh bore heavily only on the flesh.  And she was
+spirit, first and always spirit, etherealized essence of life, calm
+as her calm eyes, and sure of permanence in the changing order of
+the universe.
+
+Came days of storm, days and nights of storm, when the ocean
+menaced us with its roaring whiteness, and the wind smote our
+struggling boat with a Titan's buffets.  And ever we were flung
+off, farther and farther, to the north-east.  It was in such a
+storm, and the worst that we had experienced, that I cast a weary
+glance to leeward, not in quest of anything, but more from the
+weariness of facing the elemental strife, and in mute appeal,
+almost, to the wrathful powers to cease and let us be.  What I saw
+I could not at first believe.  Days and nights of sleeplessness and
+anxiety had doubtless turned my head.  I looked back at Maud, to
+identify myself, as it were, in time and space.  The sight of her
+dear wet cheeks, her flying hair, and her brave brown eyes
+convinced me that my vision was still healthy.  Again I turned my
+face to leeward, and again I saw the jutting promontory, black and
+high and naked, the raging surf that broke about its base and beat
+its front high up with spouting fountains, the black and forbidden
+coast-line running toward the south-east and fringed with a
+tremendous scarf of white.
+
+"Maud," I said.  "Maud."
+
+She turned her head and beheld the sight.
+
+"It cannot be Alaska!" she cried.
+
+"Alas, no," I answered, and asked, "Can you swim?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Neither can I," I said.  "So we must get ashore without swimming,
+in some opening between the rocks through which we can drive the
+boat and clamber out.  But we must be quick, most quick--and sure."
+
+I spoke with a confidence she knew I did not feel, for she looked
+at me with that unfaltering gaze of hers and said:
+
+"I have not thanked you yet for all you have done for me but--"
+
+She hesitated, as if in doubt how best to word her gratitude.
+
+"Well?" I said, brutally, for I was not quite pleased with her
+thanking me.
+
+"You might help me," she smiled.
+
+"To acknowledge your obligations before you die?  Not at all.  We
+are not going to die.  We shall land on that island, and we shall
+be snug and sheltered before the day is done."
+
+I spoke stoutly, but I did not believe a word.  Nor was I prompted
+to lie through fear.  I felt no fear, though I was sure of death in
+that boiling surge amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing
+nearer.  It was impossible to hoist sail and claw off that shore.
+The wind would instantly capsize the boat; the seas would swamp it
+the moment it fell into the trough; and, besides, the sail, lashed
+to the spare oars, dragged in the sea ahead of us.
+
+As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few
+hundred yards to leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that
+Maud must die.  My cursed imagination saw her beaten and mangled
+against the rocks, and it was too terrible.  I strove to compel
+myself to think we would make the landing safely, and so I spoke,
+not what I believed, but what I preferred to believe.
+
+I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a
+moment I entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and
+leaping overboard.  Then I resolved to wait, and at the last
+moment, when we entered on the final stretch, to take her in my
+arms and proclaim my love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the
+desperate struggle and die.
+
+Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat.  I
+felt her mittened hand come out to mine.  And thus, without speech,
+we waited the end.  We were not far off the line the wind made with
+the western edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that
+some set of the current or send of the sea would drift us past
+before we reached the surf.
+
+"We shall go clear," I said, with a confidence which I knew
+deceived neither of us.
+
+"By God, we WILL go clear!" I cried, five minutes later.
+
+The oath left my lips in my excitement--the first, I do believe, in
+my life, unless "trouble it," an expletive of my youth, be
+accounted an oath.
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said.
+
+"You have convinced me of your sincerity," she said, with a faint
+smile.  "I do know, now, that we shall go clear."
+
+I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the
+promontory, and as we looked we could see grow the intervening
+coastline of what was evidently a deep cove.  At the same time
+there broke upon our ears a continuous and mighty bellowing.  It
+partook of the magnitude and volume of distant thunder, and it came
+to us directly from leeward, rising above the crash of the surf and
+travelling directly in the teeth of the storm.  As we passed the
+point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of white
+sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf, and which was covered
+with myriads of seals.  It was from them that the great bellowing
+went up.
+
+"A rookery!" I cried.  "Now are we indeed saved.  There must be men
+and cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters.  Possibly there
+is a station ashore."
+
+But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, "Still
+bad, but not so bad.  And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall
+drift by that next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered
+beach, where we may land without wetting our feet."
+
+And the gods were kind.  The first and second headlands were
+directly in line with the south-west wind; but once around the
+second,--and we went perilously near,--we picked up the third
+headland, still in line with the wind and with the other two.  But
+the cove that intervened!  It penetrated deep into the land, and
+the tide, setting in, drifted us under the shelter of the point.
+Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy but smooth ground-swell,
+and I took in the sea-anchor and began to row.  From the point the
+shore curved away, more and more to the south and west, until at
+last it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-locked
+harbour, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples
+where vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over
+the frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet
+inshore.
+
+Here were no seals whatever.  The boat's stern touched the hard
+shingle.  I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud.  The next moment
+she was beside me.  As my fingers released hers, she clutched for
+my arm hastily.  At the same moment I swayed, as about to fall to
+the sand.  This was the startling effect of the cessation of
+motion.  We had been so long upon the moving, rocking sea that the
+stable land was a shock to us.  We expected the beach to lift up
+this way and that, and the rocky walls to swing back and forth like
+the sides of a ship; and when we braced ourselves, automatically,
+for these various expected movements, their non-occurrence quite
+overcame our equilibrium.
+
+"I really must sit down," Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a
+dizzy gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.
+
+I attended to making the boat secure and joined her.  Thus we
+landed on Endeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long
+custom of the sea.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+
+"Fool!" I cried aloud in my vexation.
+
+I had unloaded the boat and carried its contents high up on the
+beach, where I had set about making a camp.  There was driftwood,
+though not much, on the beach, and the sight of a coffee tin I had
+taken from the Ghost's larder had given me the idea of a fire.
+
+"Blithering idiot!" I was continuing.
+
+But Maud said, "Tut, tut," in gentle reproval, and then asked why I
+was a blithering idiot.
+
+"No matches," I groaned.  "Not a match did I bring.  And now we
+shall have no hot coffee, soup, tea, or anything!"
+
+"Wasn't it--er--Crusoe who rubbed sticks together?" she drawled.
+
+"But I have read the personal narratives of a score of shipwrecked
+men who tried, and tried in vain," I answered.  "I remember
+Winters, a newspaper fellow with an Alaskan and Siberian
+reputation.  Met him at the Bibelot once, and he was telling us how
+he attempted to make a fire with a couple of sticks.  It was most
+amusing.  He told it inimitably, but it was the story of a failure.
+I remember his conclusion, his black eyes flashing as he said,
+'Gentlemen, the South Sea Islander may do it, the Malay may do it,
+but take my word it's beyond the white man.'"
+
+"Oh, well, we've managed so far without it," she said cheerfully.
+"And there's no reason why we cannot still manage without it."
+
+"But think of the coffee!" I cried.  "It's good coffee, too, I
+know.  I took it from Larsen's private stores.  And look at that
+good wood."
+
+I confess, I wanted the coffee badly; and I learned, not long
+afterward, that the berry was likewise a little weakness of Maud's.
+Besides, we had been so long on a cold diet that we were numb
+inside as well as out.  Anything warm would have been most
+gratifying.  But I complained no more and set about making a tent
+of the sail for Maud.
+
+I had looked upon it as a simple task, what of the oars, mast,
+boom, and sprit, to say nothing of plenty of lines.  But as I was
+without experience, and as every detail was an experiment and every
+successful detail an invention, the day was well gone before her
+shelter was an accomplished fact.  And then, that night, it rained,
+and she was flooded out and driven back into the boat.
+
+The next morning I dug a shallow ditch around the tent, and, an
+hour later, a sudden gust of wind, whipping over the rocky wall
+behind us, picked up the tent and smashed it down on the sand
+thirty yards away.
+
+Maud laughed at my crestfallen expression, and I said, "As soon as
+the wind abates I intend going in the boat to explore the island.
+There must be a station somewhere, and men.  And ships must visit
+the station.  Some Government must protect all these seals.  But I
+wish to have you comfortable before I start."
+
+"I should like to go with you," was all she said.
+
+"It would be better if you remained.  You have had enough of
+hardship.  It is a miracle that you have survived.  And it won't be
+comfortable in the boat rowing and sailing in this rainy weather.
+What you need is rest, and I should like you to remain and get it."
+
+Something suspiciously akin to moistness dimmed her beautiful eyes
+before she dropped them and partly turned away her head.
+
+"I should prefer going with you," she said in a low voice, in which
+there was just a hint of appeal.
+
+"I might be able to help you a--" her voice broke,--"a little.  And
+if anything should happen to you, think of me left here alone."
+
+"Oh, I intend being very careful," I answered.  "And I shall not go
+so far but what I can get back before night.  Yes, all said and
+done, I think it vastly better for you to remain, and sleep, and
+rest and do nothing."
+
+She turned and looked me in the eyes.  Her gaze was unfaltering,
+but soft.
+
+"Please, please," she said, oh, so softly.
+
+I stiffened myself to refuse, and shook my head.  Still she waited
+and looked at me.  I tried to word my refusal, but wavered.  I saw
+the glad light spring into her eyes and knew that I had lost.  It
+was impossible to say no after that.
+
+The wind died down in the afternoon, and we were prepared to start
+the following morning.  There was no way of penetrating the island
+from our cove, for the walls rose perpendicularly from the beach,
+and, on either side of the cove, rose from the deep water.
+
+Morning broke dull and grey, but calm, and I was awake early and
+had the boat in readiness.
+
+"Fool!  Imbecile!  Yahoo!" I shouted, when I thought it was meet to
+arouse Maud; but this time I shouted in merriment as I danced about
+the beach, bareheaded, in mock despair.
+
+Her head appeared under the flap of the sail.
+
+"What now?" she asked sleepily, and, withal, curiously.
+
+"Coffee!" I cried.  "What do you say to a cup of coffee? hot
+coffee? piping hot?"
+
+"My!" she murmured, "you startled me, and you are cruel.  Here I
+have been composing my soul to do without it, and here you are
+vexing me with your vain suggestions."
+
+"Watch me," I said.
+
+From under clefts among the rocks I gathered a few dry sticks and
+chips.  These I whittled into shavings or split into kindling.
+From my note-book I tore out a page, and from the ammunition box
+took a shot-gun shell.  Removing the wads from the latter with my
+knife, I emptied the powder on a flat rock.  Next I pried the
+primer, or cap, from the shell, and laid it on the rock, in the
+midst of the scattered powder.  All was ready.  Maud still watched
+from the tent.  Holding the paper in my lelf hand, I smashed down
+upon the cap with a rock held in my right.  There was a puff of
+white smoke, a burst of flame, and the rough edge of the paper was
+alight.
+
+Maud clapped her hands gleefully.  "Prometheus!" she cried.
+
+But I was too occupied to acknowledge her delight.  The feeble
+flame must be cherished tenderly if it were to gather strength and
+live.  I fed it, shaving by shaving, and sliver by sliver, till at
+last it was snapping and crackling as it laid hold of the smaller
+chips and sticks.  To be cast away on an island had not entered
+into my calculations, so we were without a kettle or cooking
+utensils of any sort; but I made shift with the tin used for
+bailing the boat, and later, as we consumed our supply of canned
+goods, we accumulated quite an imposing array of cooking vessels.
+
+I boiled the water, but it was Maud who made the coffee.  And how
+good it was!  My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled
+sea-biscuit and water.  The breakfast was a success, and we sat
+about the fire much longer than enterprising explorers should have
+done, sipping the hot black coffee and talking over our situation.
+
+I was confident that we should find a station in some one of the
+coves, for I knew that the rookeries of Bering Sea were thus
+guarded; but Maud advanced the theory--to prepare me for
+disappointment, I do believe, if disappointment were to come--that
+we had discovered an unknown rookery.  She was in very good
+spirits, however, and made quite merry in accepting our plight as a
+grave one.
+
+"If you are right," I said, "then we must prepare to winter here.
+Our food will not last, but there are the seals.  They go away in
+the fall, so I must soon begin to lay in a supply of meat.  Then
+there will be huts to build and driftwood to gather.  Also we shall
+try out seal fat for lighting purposes.  Altogether, we'll have our
+hands full if we find the island uninhabited.  Which we shall not,
+I know."
+
+But she was right.  We sailed with a beam wind along the shore,
+searching the coves with our glasses and landing occasionally,
+without finding a sign of human life.  Yet we learned that we were
+not the first who had landed on Endeavour Island.  High up on the
+beach of the second cove from ours, we discovered the splintered
+wreck of a boat--a sealer's boat, for the rowlocks were bound in
+sennit, a gun-rack was on the starboard side of the bow, and in
+white letters was faintly visible Gazelle No. 2.  The boat had lain
+there for a long time, for it was half filled with sand, and the
+splintered wood had that weather-worn appearance due to long
+exposure to the elements.  In the stern-sheets I found a rusty ten-
+gauge shot-gun and a sailor's sheath-knife broken short across and
+so rusted as to be almost unrecognizable.
+
+"They got away," I said cheerfully; but I felt a sinking at the
+heart and seemed to divine the presence of bleached bones somewhere
+on that beach.
+
+I did not wish Maud's spirits to be dampened by such a find, so I
+turned seaward again with our boat and skirted the north-eastern
+point of the island.  There were no beaches on the southern shore,
+and by early afternoon we rounded the black promontory and
+completed the circumnavigation of the island.  I estimated its
+circumference at twenty-five miles, its width as varying from two
+to five miles; while my most conservative calculation placed on its
+beaches two hundred thousand seals.  The island was highest at its
+extreme south-western point, the headlands and backbone diminishing
+regularly until the north-eastern portion was only a few feet above
+the sea.  With the exception of our little cove, the other beaches
+sloped gently back for a distance of half-a-mile or so, into what I
+might call rocky meadows, with here and there patches of moss and
+tundra grass.  Here the seals hauled out, and the old bulls guarded
+their harems, while the young bulls hauled out by themselves.
+
+This brief description is all that Endeavour Island merits.  Damp
+and soggy where it was not sharp and rocky, buffeted by storm winds
+and lashed by the sea, with the air continually a-tremble with the
+bellowing of two hundred thousand amphibians, it was a melancholy
+and miserable sojourning-place.  Maud, who had prepared me for
+disappointment, and who had been sprightly and vivacious all day,
+broke down as we landed in our own little cove.  She strove bravely
+to hide it from me, but while I was kindling another fire I knew
+she was stifling her sobs in the blankets under the sail-tent.
+
+It was my turn to be cheerful, and I played the part to the best of
+my ability, and with such success that I brought the laughter back
+into her dear eyes and song on her lips; for she sang to me before
+she went to an early bed.  It was the first time I had heard her
+sing, and I lay by the fire, listening and transported, for she was
+nothing if not an artist in everything she did, and her voice,
+though not strong, was wonderfully sweet and expressive.
+
+I still slept in the boat, and I lay awake long that night, gazing
+up at the first stars I had seen in many nights and pondering the
+situation.  Responsibility of this sort was a new thing to me.
+Wolf Larsen had been quite right.  I had stood on my father's legs.
+My lawyers and agents had taken care of my money for me.  I had had
+no responsibilities at all.  Then, on the Ghost I had learned to be
+responsible for myself.  And now, for the first time in my life, I
+found myself responsible for some one else.  And it was required of
+me that this should be the gravest of responsibilities, for she was
+the one woman in the world--the one small woman, as I loved to
+think of her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+
+No wonder we called it Endeavour Island.  For two weeks we toiled
+at building a hut.  Maud insisted on helping, and I could have wept
+over her bruised and bleeding hands.  And still, I was proud of her
+because of it.  There was something heroic about this gently-bred
+woman enduring our terrible hardship and with her pittance of
+strength bending to the tasks of a peasant woman.  She gathered
+many of the stones which I built into the walls of the hut; also,
+she turned a deaf ear to my entreaties when I begged her to desist.
+She compromised, however, by taking upon herself the lighter
+labours of cooking and gathering driftwood and moss for our
+winter's supply.
+
+The hut's walls rose without difficulty, and everything went
+smoothly until the problem of the roof confronted me.  Of what use
+the four walls without a roof?  And of what could a roof be made?
+There were the spare oars, very true.  They would serve as roof-
+beams; but with what was I to cover them?  Moss would never do.
+Tundra grass was impracticable.  We needed the sail for the boat,
+and the tarpaulin had begun to leak.
+
+"Winters used walrus skins on his hut," I said.
+
+"There are the seals," she suggested.
+
+So next day the hunting began.  I did not know how to shoot, but I
+proceeded to learn.  And when I had expended some thirty shells for
+three seals, I decided that the ammunition would be exhausted
+before I acquired the necessary knowledge.  I had used eight shells
+for lighting fires before I hit upon the device of banking the
+embers with wet moss, and there remained not over a hundred shells
+in the box.
+
+"We must club the seals," I announced, when convinced of my poor
+marksmanship.  "I have heard the sealers talk about clubbing them."
+
+"They are so pretty," she objected.  "I cannot bear to think of it
+being done.  It is so directly brutal, you know; so different from
+shooting them."
+
+"That roof must go on," I answered grimly.  "Winter is almost here.
+It is our lives against theirs.  It is unfortunate we haven't
+plenty of ammunition, but I think, anyway, that they suffer less
+from being clubbed than from being all shot up.  Besides, I shall
+do the clubbing."
+
+"That's just it," she began eagerly, and broke off in sudden
+confusion.
+
+"Of course," I began, "if you prefer--"
+
+"But what shall I be doing?" she interrupted, with that softness I
+knew full well to be insistence.
+
+"Gathering firewood and cooking dinner," I answered lightly.
+
+She shook her head.  "It is too dangerous for you to attempt
+alone."
+
+"I know, I know," she waived my protest.  "I am only a weak woman,
+but just my small assistance may enable you to escape disaster."
+
+"But the clubbing?" I suggested.
+
+"Of course, you will do that.  I shall probably scream.  I'll look
+away when--"
+
+"The danger is most serious," I laughed.
+
+"I shall use my judgment when to look and when not to look," she
+replied with a grand air.
+
+The upshot of the affair was that she accompanied me next morning.
+I rowed into the adjoining cove and up to the edge of the beach.
+There were seals all about us in the water, and the bellowing
+thousands on the beach compelled us to shout at each other to make
+ourselves heard.
+
+"I know men club them," I said, trying to reassure myself, and
+gazing doubtfully at a large bull, not thirty feet away, upreared
+on his fore-flippers and regarding me intently.  "But the question
+is, How do they club them?"
+
+"Let us gather tundra grass and thatch the roof," Maud said.
+
+She was as frightened as I at the prospect, and we had reason to be
+gazing at close range at the gleaming teeth and dog-like mouths.
+
+"I always thought they were afraid of men," I said.
+
+"How do I know they are not afraid?" I queried a moment later,
+after having rowed a few more strokes along the beach.  "Perhaps,
+if I were to step boldly ashore, they would cut for it, and I could
+not catch up with one."  And still I hesitated.
+
+"I heard of a man, once, who invaded the nesting grounds of wild
+geese," Maud said.  "They killed him."
+
+"The geese?"
+
+"Yes, the geese.  My brother told me about it when I was a little
+girl."
+
+"But I know men club them," I persisted.
+
+"I think the tundra grass will make just as good a roof," she said.
+
+Far from her intention, her words were maddening me, driving me on.
+I could not play the coward before her eyes.  "Here goes," I said,
+backing water with one oar and running the bow ashore.
+
+I stepped out and advanced valiantly upon a long-maned bull in the
+midst of his wives.  I was armed with the regular club with which
+the boat-pullers killed the wounded seals gaffed aboard by the
+hunters.  It was only a foot and a half long, and in my superb
+ignorance I never dreamed that the club used ashore when raiding
+the rookeries measured four to five feet.  The cows lumbered out of
+my way, and the distance between me and the bull decreased.  He
+raised himself on his flippers with an angry movement.  We were a
+dozen feet apart.  Still I advanced steadily, looking for him to
+turn tail at any moment and run.
+
+At six feet the panicky thought rushed into my mind, What if he
+will not run?  Why, then I shall club him, came the answer.  In my
+fear I had forgotten that I was there to get the bull instead of to
+make him run.  And just then he gave a snort and a snarl and rushed
+at me.  His eyes were blazing, his mouth was wide open; the teeth
+gleamed cruelly white.  Without shame, I confess that it was I who
+turned and footed it.  He ran awkwardly, but he ran well.  He was
+but two paces behind when I tumbled into the boat, and as I shoved
+off with an oar his teeth crunched down upon the blade.  The stout
+wood was crushed like an egg-shell.  Maud and I were astounded.  A
+moment later he had dived under the boat, seized the keel in his
+mouth, and was shaking the boat violently.
+
+"My!" said Maud.  "Let's go back."
+
+I shook my head.  "I can do what other men have done, and I know
+that other men have clubbed seals.  But I think I'll leave the
+bulls alone next time."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't," she said.
+
+"Now don't say, 'Please, please,'" I cried, half angrily, I do
+believe.
+
+She made no reply, and I knew my tone must have hurt her.
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said, or shouted, rather, in order to make
+myself heard above the roar of the rookery.  "If you say so, I'll
+turn and go back; but honestly, I'd rather stay."
+
+"Now don't say that this is what you get for bringing a woman
+along," she said.  She smiled at me whimsically, gloriously, and I
+knew there was no need for forgiveness.
+
+I rowed a couple of hundred feet along the beach so as to recover
+my nerves, and then stepped ashore again.
+
+"Do be cautious," she called after me.
+
+I nodded my head and proceeded to make a flank attack on the
+nearest harem.  All went well until I aimed a blow at an outlying
+cowls head and fell short.  She snorted and tried to scramble away.
+I ran in close and struck another blow, hitting the shoulder
+instead of the head.
+
+"Watch out!" I heard Maud scream.
+
+In my excitement I had not been taking notice of other things, and
+I looked up to see the lord of the harem charging down upon me.
+Again I fled to the boat, hotly pursued; but this time Maud made no
+suggestion of turning back.
+
+"It would be better, I imagine, if you let harems alone and devoted
+your attention to lonely and inoffensive-looking seals," was what
+she said.  "I think I have read something about them.  Dr. Jordan's
+book, I believe.  They are the young bulls, not old enough to have
+harems of their own.  He called them the holluschickie, or
+something like that.  It seems to me if we find where they haul
+out--"
+
+"It seems to me that your fighting instinct is aroused," I laughed.
+
+She flushed quickly and prettily.  "I'll admit I don't like defeat
+any more than you do, or any more than I like the idea of killing
+such pretty, inoffensive creatures."
+
+"Pretty!" I sniffed.  "I failed to mark anything pre-eminently
+pretty about those foamy-mouthed beasts that raced me."
+
+"Your point of view," she laughed.  "You lacked perspective.  Now
+if you did not have to get so close to the subject--"
+
+"The very thing!" I cried.  "What I need is a longer club.  And
+there's that broken oar ready to hand."
+
+"It just comes to me," she said, "that Captain Larsen was telling
+me how the men raided the rookeries.  They drive the seals, in
+small herds, a short distance inland before they kill them."
+
+"I don't care to undertake the herding of one of those harems," I
+objected.
+
+"But there are the holluschickie," she said.  "The holluschickie
+haul out by themselves, and Dr. Jordan says that paths are left
+between the harems, and that as long as the holluschickie keep
+strictly to the path they are unmolested by the masters of the
+harem."
+
+"There's one now," I said, pointing to a young bull in the water.
+"Let's watch him, and follow him if he hauls out."
+
+He swam directly to the beach and clambered out into a small
+opening between two harems, the masters of which made warning
+noises but did not attack him.  We watched him travel slowly
+inward, threading about among the harems along what must have been
+the path.
+
+"Here goes," I said, stepping out; but I confess my heart was in my
+mouth as I thought of going through the heart of that monstrous
+herd.
+
+"It would be wise to make the boat fast," Maud said.
+
+She had stepped out beside me, and I regarded her with wonderment.
+
+She nodded her head determinedly.  "Yes, I'm going with you, so you
+may as well secure the boat and arm me with a club."
+
+"Let's go back," I said dejectedly.  "I think tundra grass, will
+do, after all."
+
+"You know it won't," was her reply.  "Shall I lead?"
+
+With a shrug of the shoulders, but with the warmest admiration and
+pride at heart for this woman, I equipped her with the broken oar
+and took another for myself.  It was with nervous trepidation that
+we made the first few rods of the journey.  Once Maud screamed in
+terror as a cow thrust an inquisitive nose toward her foot, and
+several times I quickened my pace for the same reason.  But, beyond
+warning coughs from either side, there were no signs of hostility.
+It was a rookery which had never been raided by the hunters, and in
+consequence the seals were mild-tempered and at the same time
+unafraid.
+
+In the very heart of the herd the din was terrific.  It was almost
+dizzying in its effect.  I paused and smiled reassuringly at Maud,
+for I had recovered my equanimity sooner than she.  I could see
+that she was still badly frightened.  She came close to me and
+shouted:
+
+"I'm dreadfully afraid!"
+
+And I was not.  Though the novelty had not yet worn off, the
+peaceful comportment of the seals had quieted my alarm.  Maud was
+trembling.
+
+"I'm afraid, and I'm not afraid," she chattered with shaking jaws.
+"It's my miserable body, not I."
+
+"It's all right, it's all right," I reassured her, my arm passing
+instinctively and protectingly around her.
+
+I shall never forget, in that moment, how instantly conscious I
+became of my manhood.  The primitive deeps of my nature stirred.  I
+felt myself masculine, the protector of the weak, the fighting
+male.  And, best of all, I felt myself the protector of my loved
+one.  She leaned against me, so light and lily-frail, and as her
+trembling eased away it seemed as though I became aware of
+prodigious strength.  I felt myself a match for the most ferocious
+bull in the herd, and I know, had such a bull charged upon me, that
+I should have met it unflinchingly and quite coolly, and I know
+that I should have killed it.
+
+"I am all right now," she said, looking up at me gratefully.  "Let
+us go on."
+
+And that the strength in me had quieted her and given her
+confidence, filled me with an exultant joy.  The youth of the race
+seemed burgeoning in me, over-civilized man that I was, and I lived
+for myself the old hunting days and forest nights of my remote and
+forgotten ancestry.  I had much for which to thank Wolf Larsen, was
+my thought as we went along the path between the jostling harems.
+
+A quarter of a mile inland we came upon the holluschickie--sleek
+young bulls, living out the loneliness of their bachelorhood and
+gathering strength against the day when they would fight their way
+into the ranks of the Benedicts.
+
+Everything now went smoothly.  I seemed to know just what to do and
+how to do it.  Shouting, making threatening gestures with my club,
+and even prodding the lazy ones, I quickly cut out a score of the
+young bachelors from their companions.  Whenever one made an
+attempt to break back toward the water, I headed it off.  Maud took
+an active part in the drive, and with her cries and flourishings of
+the broken oar was of considerable assistance.  I noticed, though,
+that whenever one looked tired and lagged, she let it slip past.
+But I noticed, also, whenever one, with a show of fight, tried to
+break past, that her eyes glinted and showed bright, and she rapped
+it smartly with her club.
+
+"My, it's exciting!" she cried, pausing from sheer weakness.  "I
+think I'll sit down."
+
+I drove the little herd (a dozen strong, now, what of the escapes
+she had permitted) a hundred yards farther on; and by the time she
+joined me I had finished the slaughter and was beginning to skin.
+An hour later we went proudly back along the path between the
+harems.  And twice again we came down the path burdened with skins,
+till I thought we had enough to roof the hut.  I set the sail, laid
+one tack out of the cove, and on the other tack made our own little
+inner cove.
+
+"It's just like home-coming," Maud said, as I ran the boat ashore.
+
+I heard her words with a responsive thrill, it was all so dearly
+intimate and natural, and I said:
+
+"It seems as though I have lived this life always.  The world of
+books and bookish folk is very vague, more like a dream memory than
+an actuality.  I surely have hunted and forayed and fought all the
+days of my life.  And you, too, seem a part of it.  You are--"  I
+was on the verge of saying, "my woman, my mate," but glibly changed
+it to--"standing the hardship well."
+
+But her ear had caught the flaw.  She recognized a flight that
+midmost broke.  She gave me a quick look.
+
+"Not that.  You were saying--?"
+
+"That the American Mrs. Meynell was living the life of a savage and
+living it quite successfully," I said easily.
+
+"Oh," was all she replied; but I could have sworn there was a note
+of disappointment in her voice.
+
+But "my woman, my mate" kept ringing in my head for the rest of the
+day and for many days.  Yet never did it ring more loudly than that
+night, as I watched her draw back the blanket of moss from the
+coals, blow up the fire, and cook the evening meal.  It must have
+been latent savagery stirring in me, for the old words, so bound up
+with the roots of the race, to grip me and thrill me.  And grip and
+thrill they did, till I fell asleep, murmuring them to myself over
+and over again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+
+"It will smell," I said, "but it will keep in the heat and keep out
+the rain and snow."
+
+We were surveying the completed seal-skin roof.
+
+"It is clumsy, but it will serve the purpose, and that is the main
+thing," I went on, yearning for her praise.
+
+And she clapped her hands and declared that she was hugely pleased.
+
+"But it is dark in here," she said the next moment, her shoulders
+shrinking with a little involuntary shiver.
+
+"You might have suggested a window when the walls were going up," I
+said.  "It was for you, and you should have seen the need of a
+window."
+
+"But I never do see the obvious, you know," she laughed back.  "And
+besides, you can knock a hole in the wall at any time.'
+
+"Quite true; I had not thought of it," I replied, wagging my head
+sagely.  "But have you thought of ordering the window-glass?  Just
+call up the firm,--Red, 4451, I think it is,--and tell them what
+size and kind of glass you wish."
+
+"That means--" she began.
+
+"No window."
+
+It was a dark and evil-appearing thing, that hut, not fit for aught
+better than swine in a civilized land; but for us, who had known
+the misery of the open boat, it was a snug little habitation.
+Following the housewarming, which was accomplished by means of
+seal-oil and a wick made from cotton calking, came the hunting for
+our winter's meat and the building of the second hut.  It was a
+simple affair, now, to go forth in the morning and return by noon
+with a boatload of seals.  And then, while I worked at building the
+hut, Maud tried out the oil from the blubber and kept a slow fire
+under the frames of meat.  I had heard of jerking beef on the
+plains, and our seal-meat, cut in thin strips and hung in the
+smoke, cured excellently.
+
+The second hut was easier to erect, for I built it against the
+first, and only three walls were required.  But it was work, hard
+work, all of it.  Maud and I worked from dawn till dark, to the
+limit of our strength, so that when night came we crawled stiffly
+to bed and slept the animal-like sleep exhaustion.  And yet Maud
+declared that she had never felt better or stronger in her life.  I
+knew this was true of myself, but hers was such a lily strength
+that I feared she would break down.  Often and often, her last-
+reserve force gone, I have seen her stretched flat on her back on
+the sand in the way she had of resting and recuperating.  And then
+she would be up on her feet and toiling hard as ever.  Where she
+obtained this strength was the marvel to me.
+
+"Think of the long rest this winter," was her reply to my
+remonstrances.  "Why, we'll be clamorous for something to do."
+
+We held a housewarming in my hut the night it was roofed.  It was
+the end of the third day of a fierce storm which had swung around
+the compass from the south-east to the north-west, and which was
+then blowing directly in upon us.  The beaches of the outer cove
+were thundering with the surf, and even in our land-locked inner
+cove a respectable sea was breaking.  No high backbone of island
+sheltered us from the wind, and it whistled and bellowed about the
+hut till at times I feared for the strength of the walls.  The skin
+roof, stretched tightly as a drumhead, I had thought, sagged and
+bellied with every gust; and innumerable interstices in the walls,
+not so tightly stuffed with moss as Maud had supposed, disclosed
+themselves.  Yet the seal-oil burned brightly and we were warm and
+comfortable.
+
+It was a pleasant evening indeed, and we voted that as a social
+function on Endeavour Island it had not yet been eclipsed.  Our
+minds were at ease.  Not only had we resigned ourselves to the
+bitter winter, but we were prepared for it.  The seals could depart
+on their mysterious journey into the south at any time, now, for
+all we cared; and the storms held no terror for us.  Not only were
+we sure of being dry and warm and sheltered from the wind, but we
+had the softest and most luxurious mattresses that could be made
+from moss.  This had been Maud's idea, and she had herself
+jealously gathered all the moss.  This was to be my first night on
+the mattress, and I knew I should sleep the sweeter because she had
+made it.
+
+As she rose to go she turned to me with the whimsical way she had,
+and said:
+
+"Something is going to happen--is happening, for that matter.  I
+feel it.  Something is coming here, to us.  It is coming now.  I
+don't know what, but it is coming."
+
+"Good or bad?" I asked.
+
+She shook her head.  "I don't know, but it is there, somewhere."
+
+She pointed in the direction of the sea and wind.
+
+"It's a lee shore," I laughed, "and I am sure I'd rather be here
+than arriving, a night like this."
+
+"You are not frightened?" I asked, as I stepped to open the door
+for her.
+
+Her eyes looked bravely into mine.
+
+"And you feel well? perfectly well?"
+
+"Never better," was her answer.
+
+We talked a little longer before she went.
+
+"Good-night, Maud," I said.
+
+"Good-night, Humphrey," she said.
+
+This use of our given names had come about quite as a matter of
+course, and was as unpremeditated as it was natural.  In that
+moment I could have put my arms around her and drawn her to me.  I
+should certainly have done so out in that world to which we
+belonged.  As it was, the situation stopped there in the only way
+it could; but I was left alone in my little but, glowing warmly
+through and through with a pleasant satisfaction; and I knew that a
+tie, or a tacit something, existed between us which had not existed
+before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+
+I awoke, oppressed by a mysterious sensation.  There seemed
+something missing in my environment.  But the mystery and
+oppressiveness vanished after the first few seconds of waking, when
+I identified the missing something as the wind.  I had fallen
+asleep in that state of nerve tension with which one meets the
+continuous shock of sound or movement, and I had awakened, still
+tense, bracing myself to meet the pressure of something which no
+longer bore upon me.
+
+It was the first night I had spent under cover in several months,
+and I lay luxuriously for some minutes under my blankets (for once
+not wet with fog or spray), analysing, first, the effect produced
+upon me by the cessation of the wind, and next, the joy which was
+mine from resting on the mattress made by Maud's hands.  When I had
+dressed and opened the door, I heard the waves still lapping on the
+beach, garrulously attesting the fury of the night.  It was a clear
+day, and the sun was shining.  I had slept late, and I stepped
+outside with sudden energy, bent upon making up lost time as
+befitted a dweller on Endeavour Island.
+
+And when outside, I stopped short.  I believed my eyes without
+question, and yet I was for the moment stunned by what they
+disclosed to me.  There, on the beach, not fifty feet away, bow on,
+dismasted, was a black-hulled vessel.  Masts and booms, tangled
+with shrouds, sheets, and rent canvas, were rubbing gently
+alongside.  I could have rubbed my eyes as I looked.  There was the
+home-made galley we had built, the familiar break of the poop, the
+low yacht-cabin scarcely rising above the rail.  It was the Ghost.
+
+What freak of fortune had brought it here--here of all spots? what
+chance of chances?  I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall at my
+back and know the profundity of despair.  Escape was hopeless, out
+of the question.  I thought of Maud, asleep there in the hut we had
+reared; I remembered her "Good-night, Humphrey"; "my woman, my
+mate," went ringing through my brain, but now, alas, it was a knell
+that sounded.  Then everything went black before my eyes.
+
+Possibly it was the fraction of a second, but I had no knowledge of
+how long an interval had lapsed before I was myself again.  There
+lay the Ghost, bow on to the beach, her splintered bowsprit
+projecting over the sand, her tangled spars rubbing against her
+side to the lift of the crooning waves.  Something must be done,
+must be done.
+
+It came upon me suddenly, as strange, that nothing moved aboard.
+Wearied from the night of struggle and wreck, all hands were yet
+asleep, I thought.  My next thought was that Maud and I might yet
+escape.  If we could take to the boat and make round the point
+before any one awoke?  I would call her and start.  My hand was
+lifted at her door to knock, when I recollected the smallness of
+the island.  We could never hide ourselves upon it.  There was
+nothing for us but the wide raw ocean.  I thought of our snug
+little huts, our supplies of meat and oil and moss and firewood,
+and I knew that we could never survive the wintry sea and the great
+storms which were to come.
+
+So I stood, with hesitant knuckle, without her door.  It was
+impossible, impossible.  A wild thought of rushing in and killing
+her as she slept rose in my mind.  And then, in a flash, the better
+solution came to me.  All hands were asleep.  Why not creep aboard
+the Ghost,--well I knew the way to Wolf Larsen's bunk,--and kill
+him in his sleep?  After that--well, we would see.  But with him
+dead there was time and space in which to prepare to do other
+things; and besides, whatever new situation arose, it could not
+possibly be worse than the present one.
+
+My knife was at my hip.  I returned to my hut for the shot-gun,
+made sure it was loaded, and went down to the Ghost.  With some
+difficulty, and at the expense of a wetting to the waist, I climbed
+aboard.  The forecastle scuttle was open.  I paused to listen for
+the breathing of the men, but there was no breathing.  I almost
+gasped as the thought came to me:  What if the Ghost is deserted?
+I listened more closely.  There was no sound.  I cautiously
+descended the ladder.  The place had the empty and musty feel and
+smell usual to a dwelling no longer inhabited.  Everywhere was a
+thick litter of discarded and ragged garments, old sea-boots, leaky
+oilskins--all the worthless forecastle dunnage of a long voyage.
+
+Abandoned hastily, was my conclusion, as I ascended to the deck.
+Hope was alive again in my breast, and I looked about me with
+greater coolness.  I noted that the boats were missing.  The
+steerage told the same tale as the forecastle.  The hunters had
+packed their belongings with similar haste.  The Ghost was
+deserted.  It was Maud's and mine.  I thought of the ship's stores
+and the lazarette beneath the cabin, and the idea came to me of
+surprising Maud with something nice for breakfast.
+
+The reaction from my fear, and the knowledge that the terrible deed
+I had come to do was no longer necessary, made me boyish and eager.
+I went up the steerage companion-way two steps at a time, with
+nothing distinct in my mind except joy and the hope that Maud would
+sleep on until the surprise breakfast was quite ready for her.  As
+I rounded the galley, a new satisfaction was mine at thought of all
+the splendid cooking utensils inside.  I sprang up the break of the
+poop, and saw--Wolf Larsen.  What of my impetus and the stunning
+surprise, I clattered three or four steps along the deck before I
+could stop myself.  He was standing in the companion-way, only his
+head and shoulders visible, staring straight at me.  His arms were
+resting on the half-open slide.  He made no movement whatever--
+simply stood there, staring at me.
+
+I began to tremble.  The old stomach sickness clutched me.  I put
+one hand on the edge of the house to steady myself.  My lips seemed
+suddenly dry and I moistened them against the need of speech.  Nor
+did I for an instant take my eyes off him.  Neither of us spoke.
+There was something ominous in his silence, his immobility.  All my
+old fear of him returned and by new fear was increased an hundred-
+fold.  And still we stood, the pair of us, staring at each other.
+
+I was aware of the demand for action, and, my old helplessness
+strong upon me, I was waiting for him to take the initiative.
+Then, as the moments went by, it came to me that the situation was
+analogous to the one in which I had approached the long-maned bull,
+my intention of clubbing obscured by fear until it became a desire
+to make him run.  So it was at last impressed upon me that I was
+there, not to have Wolf Larsen take the initiative, but to take it
+myself.
+
+I cocked both barrels and levelled the shot-gun at him.  Had he
+moved, attempted to drop down the companion-way, I know I would
+have shot him.  But he stood motionless and staring as before.  And
+as I faced him, with levelled gun shaking in my hands, I had time
+to note the worn and haggard appearance of his face.  It was as if
+some strong anxiety had wasted it.  The cheeks were sunken, and
+there was a wearied, puckered expression on the brow.  And it
+seemed to me that his eyes were strange, not only the expression,
+but the physical seeming, as though the optic nerves and supporting
+muscles had suffered strain and slightly twisted the eyeballs.
+
+All this I saw, and my brain now working rapidly, I thought a
+thousand thoughts; and yet I could not pull the triggers.  I
+lowered the gun and stepped to the corner of the cabin, primarily
+to relieve the tension on my nerves and to make a new start, and
+incidentally to be closer.  Again I raised the gun.  He was almost
+at arm's length.  There was no hope for him.  I was resolved.
+There was no possible chance of missing him, no matter how poor my
+marksmanship.  And yet I wrestled with myself and could not pull
+the triggers.
+
+"Well?" he demanded impatiently.
+
+I strove vainly to force my fingers down on the triggers, and
+vainly I strove to say something.
+
+"Why don't you shoot?" he asked.
+
+I cleared my throat of a huskiness which prevented speech.  "Hump,"
+he said slowly, "you can't do it.  You are not exactly afraid.  You
+are impotent.  Your conventional morality is stronger than you.
+You are the slave to the opinions which have credence among the
+people you have known and have read about.  Their code has been
+drummed into your head from the time you lisped, and in spite of
+your philosophy, and of what I have taught you, it won't let you
+kill an unarmed, unresisting man."
+
+"I know it," I said hoarsely.
+
+"And you know that I would kill an unarmed man as readily as I
+would smoke a cigar," he went on.  "You know me for what I am,--my
+worth in the world by your standard.  You have called me snake,
+tiger, shark, monster, and Caliban.  And yet, you little rag
+puppet, you little echoing mechanism, you are unable to kill me as
+you would a snake or a shark, because I have hands, feet, and a
+body shaped somewhat like yours.  Bah! I had hoped better things of
+you, Hump."
+
+He stepped out of the companion-way and came up to me.
+
+"Put down that gun.  I want to ask you some questions.  I haven't
+had a chance to look around yet.  What place is this?  How is the
+Ghost lying?  How did you get wet?  Where's Maud?--I beg your
+pardon, Miss Brewster--or should I say, 'Mrs. Van Weyden'?"
+
+I had backed away from him, almost weeping at my inability to shoot
+him, but not fool enough to put down the gun.  I hoped,
+desperately, that he might commit some hostile act, attempt to
+strike me or choke me; for in such way only I knew I could be
+stirred to shoot.
+
+"This is Endeavour Island," I said.
+
+"Never heard of it," he broke in.
+
+"At least, that's our name for it," I amended.
+
+"Our?" he queried.  "Who's our?"
+
+"Miss Brewster and myself.  And the Ghost is lying, as you can see
+for yourself, bow on to the beach."
+
+"There are seals here," he said.  "They woke me up with their
+barking, or I'd be sleeping yet.  I heard them when I drove in last
+night.  They were the first warning that I was on a lee shore.
+It's a rookery, the kind of a thing I've hunted for years.  Thanks
+to my brother Death, I've lighted on a fortune.  It's a mint.
+What's its bearings?"
+
+"Haven't the least idea," I said.  "But you ought to know quite
+closely.  What were your last observations?"
+
+He smiled inscrutably, but did not answer.
+
+"Well, where's all hands?" I asked.  "How does it come that you are
+alone?"
+
+I was prepared for him again to set aside my question, and was
+surprised at the readiness of his reply.
+
+"My brother got me inside forty-eight hours, and through no fault
+of mine.  Boarded me in the night with only the watch on deck.
+Hunters went back on me.  He gave them a bigger lay.  Heard him
+offering it.  Did it right before me.  Of course the crew gave me
+the go-by.  That was to be expected.  All hands went over the side,
+and there I was, marooned on my own vessel.  It was Death's turn,
+and it's all in the family anyway."
+
+"But how did you lose the masts?" I asked.
+
+"Walk over and examine those lanyards," he said, pointing to where
+the mizzen-rigging should have been.
+
+"They have been cut with a knife!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Not quite," he laughed.  "It was a neater job.  Look again."
+
+I looked.  The lanyards had been almost severed, with just enough
+left to hold the shrouds till some severe strain should be put upon
+them
+
+"Cooky did that," he laughed again.  "I know, though I didn't spot
+him at it.  Kind of evened up the score a bit."
+
+"Good for Mugridge!" I cried.
+
+"Yes, that's what I thought when everything went over the side.
+Only I said it on the other side of my mouth."
+
+"But what were you doing while all this was going on?" I asked.
+
+"My best, you may be sure, which wasn't much under the
+circumstances."
+
+I turned to re-examine Thomas Mugridge's work.
+
+"I guess I'll sit down and take the sunshine," I heard Wolf Larsen
+saying.
+
+There was a hint, just a slight hint, of physical feebleness in his
+voice, and it was so strange that I looked quickly at him.  His
+hand was sweeping nervously across his face, as though he were
+brushing away cobwebs.  I was puzzled.  The whole thing was so
+unlike the Wolf Larsen I had known.
+
+"How are your headaches?" I asked.
+
+"They still trouble me," was his answer.  "I think I have one
+coming on now."
+
+He slipped down from his sitting posture till he lay on the deck.
+Then he rolled over on his side, his head resting on the biceps of
+the under arm, the forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.  I
+stood regarding him wonderingly.
+
+"Now's your chance, Hump," he said.
+
+"I don't understand," I lied, for I thoroughly understood.
+
+"Oh, nothing," he added softly, as if he were drowsing; "only
+you've got me where you want me."
+
+"No, I haven't," I retorted; "for I want you a few thousand miles
+away from here."
+
+He chuckled, and thereafter spoke no more.  He did not stir as I
+passed by him and went down into the cabin.  I lifted the trap in
+the floor, but for some moments gazed dubiously into the darkness
+of the lazarette beneath.  I hesitated to descend.  What if his
+lying down were a ruse?  Pretty, indeed, to be caught there like a
+rat.  I crept softly up the companion-way and peeped at him.  He
+was lying as I had left him.  Again I went below; but before I
+dropped into the lazarette I took the precaution of casting down
+the door in advance.  At least there would be no lid to the trap.
+But it was all needless.  I regained the cabin with a store of
+jams, sea-biscuits, canned meats, and such things,--all I could
+carry,--and replaced the trap-door.
+
+A peep at Wolf Larsen showed me that he had not moved.  A bright
+thought struck me.  I stole into his state-room and possessed
+myself of his revolvers.  There were no other weapons, though I
+thoroughly ransacked the three remaining state-rooms.  To make
+sure, I returned and went through the steerage and forecastle, and
+in the galley gathered up all the sharp meat and vegetable knives.
+Then I bethought me of the great yachtsman's knife he always
+carried, and I came to him and spoke to him, first softly, then
+loudly.  He did not move.  I bent over and took it from his pocket.
+I breathed more freely.  He had no arms with which to attack me
+from a distance; while I, armed, could always forestall him should
+he attempt to grapple me with his terrible gorilla arms.
+
+Filling a coffee-pot and frying-pan with part of my plunder, and
+taking some chinaware from the cabin pantry, I left Wolf Larsen
+lying in the sun and went ashore.
+
+Maud was still asleep.  I blew up the embers (we had not yet
+arranged a winter kitchen), and quite feverishly cooked the
+breakfast.  Toward the end, I heard her moving about within the
+hut, making her toilet.  Just as all was ready and the coffee
+poured, the door opened and she came forth.
+
+"It's not fair of you," was her greeting.  "You are usurping one of
+my prerogatives.  You know you I agreed that the cooking should be
+mine, and--"
+
+"But just this once," I pleaded.
+
+"If you promise not to do it again," she smiled.  "Unless, of
+course, you have grown tired of my poor efforts."
+
+To my delight she never once looked toward the beach, and I
+maintained the banter with such success all unconsciously she
+sipped coffee from the china cup, ate fried evaporated potatoes,
+and spread marmalade on her biscuit.  But it could not last.  I saw
+the surprise that came over her.  She had discovered the china
+plate from which she was eating.  She looked over the breakfast,
+noting detail after detail.  Then she looked at me, and her face
+turned slowly toward the beach.
+
+"Humphrey!" she said.
+
+The old unnamable terror mounted into her eyes.
+
+"Is--he?" she quavered.
+
+I nodded my head.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIIII
+
+
+
+We waited all day for Wolf Larsen to come ashore.  It was an
+intolerable period of anxiety.  Each moment one or the other of us
+cast expectant glances toward the Ghost.  But he did not come.  He
+did not even appear on deck.
+
+"Perhaps it is his headache," I said.  "I left him lying on the
+poop.  He may lie there all night.  I think I'll go and see."
+
+Maud looked entreaty at me.
+
+"It is all right," I assured her.  "I shall take the revolvers.
+You know I collected every weapon on board."
+
+"But there are his arms, his hands, his terrible, terrible hands!"
+she objected.  And then she cried, "Oh, Humphrey, I am afraid of
+him!  Don't go--please don't go!"
+
+She rested her hand appealingly on mine, and sent my pulse
+fluttering.  My heart was surely in my eyes for a moment.  The dear
+and lovely woman!  And she was so much the woman, clinging and
+appealing, sunshine and dew to my manhood, rooting it deeper and
+sending through it the sap of a new strength.  I was for putting my
+arm around her, as when in the midst of the seal herd; but I
+considered, and refrained.
+
+"I shall not take any risks," I said.  "I'll merely peep over the
+bow and see."
+
+She pressed my hand earnestly and let me go.  But the space on deck
+where I had left him lying was vacant.  He had evidently gone
+below.  That night we stood alternate watches, one of us sleeping
+at a time; for there was no telling what Wolf Larsen might do.  He
+was certainly capable of anything.
+
+The next day we waited, and the next, and still he made no sign.
+
+"These headaches of his, these attacks," Maud said, on the
+afternoon of the fourth day; "Perhaps he is ill, very ill.  He may
+be dead."
+
+"Or dying," was her afterthought when she had waited some time for
+me to speak.
+
+"Better so," I answered.
+
+"But think, Humphrey, a fellow-creature in his last lonely hour."
+
+"Perhaps," I suggested.
+
+"Yes, even perhaps," she acknowledged.  "But we do not know.  It
+would be terrible if he were.  I could never forgive myself.  We
+must do something."
+
+"Perhaps," I suggested again.
+
+I waited, smiling inwardly at the woman of her which compelled a
+solicitude for Wolf Larsen, of all creatures.  Where was her
+solicitude for me, I thought,--for me whom she had been afraid to
+have merely peep aboard?
+
+She was too subtle not to follow the trend of my silence.  And she
+was as direct as she was subtle.
+
+"You must go aboard, Humphrey, and find out," she said.  "And if
+you want to laugh at me, you have my consent and forgiveness."
+
+I arose obediently and went down the beach.
+
+"Do be careful," she called after me.
+
+I waved my arm from the forecastle head and dropped down to the
+deck.  Aft I walked to the cabin companion, where I contented
+myself with hailing below.  Wolf Larsen answered, and as he started
+to ascend the stairs I cocked my revolver.  I displayed it openly
+during our conversation, but he took no notice of it.  He appeared
+the same, physically, as when last I saw him, but he was gloomy and
+silent.  In fact, the few words we spoke could hardly be called a
+conversation.  I did not inquire why he had not been ashore, nor
+did he ask why I had not come aboard.  His head was all right
+again, he said, and so, without further parley, I left him.
+
+Maud received my report with obvious relief, and the sight of smoke
+which later rose in the galley put her in a more cheerful mood.
+The next day, and the next, we saw the galley smoke rising, and
+sometimes we caught glimpses of him on the poop.  But that was all.
+He made no attempt to come ashore.  This we knew, for we still
+maintained our night-watches.  We were waiting for him to do
+something, to show his hand, so to say, and his inaction puzzled
+and worried us.
+
+A week of this passed by.  We had no other interest than Wolf
+Larsen, and his presence weighed us down with an apprehension which
+prevented us from doing any of the little things we had planned.
+
+But at the end of the week the smoke ceased rising from the galley,
+and he no longer showed himself on the poop.  I could see Maud's
+solicitude again growing, though she timidly--and even proudly, I
+think--forbore a repetition of her request.  After all, what
+censure could be put upon her?  She was divinely altruistic, and
+she was a woman.  Besides, I was myself aware of hurt at thought of
+this man whom I had tried to kill, dying alone with his fellow-
+creatures so near.  He was right.  The code of my group was
+stronger than I.  The fact that he had hands, feet, and a body
+shaped somewhat like mine, constituted a claim which I could not
+ignore.
+
+So I did not wait a second time for Maud to send me.  I discovered
+that we stood in need of condensed milk and marmalade, and
+announced that I was going aboard.  I could see that she wavered.
+She even went so far as to murmur that they were non-essentials and
+that my trip after them might be inexpedient.  And as she had
+followed the trend of my silence, she now followed the trend of my
+speech, and she knew that I was going aboard, not because of
+condensed milk and marmalade, but because of her and of her
+anxiety, which she knew she had failed to hide.
+
+I took off my shoes when I gained the forecastle head, and went
+noiselessly aft in my stocking feet.  Nor did I call this time from
+the top of the companion-way.  Cautiously descending, I found the
+cabin deserted.  The door to his state-room was closed.  At first I
+thought of knocking, then I remembered my ostensible errand and
+resolved to carry it out.  Carefully avoiding noise, I lifted the
+trap-door in the floor and set it to one side.  The slop-chest, as
+well as the provisions, was stored in the lazarette, and I took
+advantage of the opportunity to lay in a stock of underclothing.
+
+As I emerged from the lazarette I heard sounds in Wolf Larsen's
+state-room.  I crouched and listened.  The door-knob rattled.
+Furtively, instinctively, I slunk back behind the table and drew
+and cocked my revolver.  The door swung open and he came forth.
+Never had I seen so profound a despair as that which I saw on his
+face,--the face of Wolf Larsen the fighter, the strong man, the
+indomitable one.  For all the world like a woman wringing her
+hands, he raised his clenched fists and groaned.  One fist
+unclosed, and the open palm swept across his eyes as though
+brushing away cobwebs.
+
+"God!  God!" he groaned, and the clenched fists were raised again
+to the infinite despair with which his throat vibrated.
+
+It was horrible.  I was trembling all over, and I could feel the
+shivers running up and down my spine and the sweat standing out on
+my forehead.  Surely there can be little in this world more awful
+than the spectacle of a strong man in the moment when he is utterly
+weak and broken.
+
+But Wolf Larsen regained control of himself by an exertion of his
+remarkable will.  And it was exertion.  His whole frame shook with
+the struggle.  He resembled a man on the verge of a fit.  His face
+strove to compose itself, writhing and twisting in the effort till
+he broke down again.  Once more the clenched fists went upward and
+he groaned.  He caught his breath once or twice and sobbed.  Then
+he was successful.  I could have thought him the old Wolf Larsen,
+and yet there was in his movements a vague suggestion of weakness
+and indecision.  He started for the companion-way, and stepped
+forward quite as I had been accustomed to see him do; and yet
+again, in his very walk, there seemed that suggestion of weakness
+and indecision.
+
+I was now concerned with fear for myself.  The open trap lay
+directly in his path, and his discovery of it would lead instantly
+to his discovery of me.  I was angry with myself for being caught
+in so cowardly a position, crouching on the floor.  There was yet
+time.  I rose swiftly to my feet, and, I know, quite unconsciously
+assumed a defiant attitude.  He took no notice of me.  Nor did he
+notice the open trap.  Before I could grasp the situation, or act,
+he had walked right into the trap.  One foot was descending into
+the opening, while the other foot was just on the verge of
+beginning the uplift.  But when the descending foot missed the
+solid flooring and felt vacancy beneath, it was the old Wolf Larsen
+and the tiger muscles that made the falling body spring across the
+opening, even as it fell, so that he struck on his chest and
+stomach, with arms outstretched, on the floor of the opposite side.
+The next instant he had drawn up his legs and rolled clear.  But he
+rolled into my marmalade and underclothes and against the trap-
+door.
+
+The expression on his face was one of complete comprehension.  But
+before I could guess what he had comprehended, he had dropped the
+trap-door into place, closing the lazarette.  Then I understood.
+He thought he had me inside.  Also, he was blind, blind as a bat.
+I watched him, breathing carefully so that he should not hear me.
+He stepped quickly to his state-room.  I saw his hand miss the
+door-knob by an inch, quickly fumble for it, and find it.  This was
+my chance.  I tiptoed across the cabin and to the top of the
+stairs.  He came back, dragging a heavy sea-chest, which he
+deposited on top of the trap.  Not content with this he fetched a
+second chest and placed it on top of the first.  Then he gathered
+up the marmalade and underclothes and put them on the table.  When
+he started up the companion-way, I retreated, silently rolling over
+on top of the cabin.
+
+He shoved the slide part way back and rested his arms on it, his
+body still in the companion-way.  His attitude was of one looking
+forward the length of the schooner, or staring, rather, for his
+eyes were fixed and unblinking.  I was only five feet away and
+directly in what should have been his line of vision.  It was
+uncanny.  I felt myself a ghost, what of my invisibility.  I waved
+my hand back and forth, of course without effect; but when the
+moving shadow fell across his face I saw at once that he was
+susceptible to the impression.  His face became more expectant and
+tense as he tried to analyze and identify the impression.  He knew
+that he had responded to something from without, that his
+sensibility had been touched by a changing something in his
+environment; but what it was he could not discover.  I ceased
+waving my hand, so that the shadow remained stationary.  He slowly
+moved his head back and forth under it and turned from side to
+side, now in the sunshine, now in the shade, feeling the shadow, as
+it were, testing it by sensation.
+
+I, too, was busy, trying to reason out how he was aware of the
+existence of so intangible a thing as a shadow.  If it were his
+eyeballs only that were affected, or if his optic nerve were not
+wholly destroyed, the explanation was simple.  If otherwise, then
+the only conclusion I could reach was that the sensitive skin
+recognized the difference of temperature between shade and
+sunshine.  Or, perhaps,--who can tell?--it was that fabled sixth
+sense which conveyed to him the loom and feel of an object close at
+hand.
+
+Giving over his attempt to determine the shadow, he stepped on deck
+and started forward, walking with a swiftness and confidence which
+surprised me.  And still there was that hint of the feebleness of
+the blind in his walk.  I knew it now for what it was.
+
+To my amused chagrin, he discovered my shoes on the forecastle head
+and brought them back with him into the galley.  I watched him
+build the fire and set about cooking food for himself; then I stole
+into the cabin for my marmalade and underclothes, slipped back past
+the galley, and climbed down to the beach to deliver my barefoot
+report.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+
+"It's too bad the Ghost has lost her masts.  Why we could sail away
+in her.  Don't you think we could, Humphrey?"
+
+I sprang excitedly to my feet.
+
+"I wonder, I wonder," I repeated, pacing up and down.
+
+Maud's eyes were shining with anticipation as they followed me.
+She had such faith in me!  And the thought of it was so much added
+power.  I remembered Michelet's "To man, woman is as the earth was
+to her legendary son; he has but to fall down and kiss her breast
+and he is strong again."  For the first time I knew the wonderful
+truth of his words.  Why, I was living them.  Maud was all this to
+me, an unfailing, source of strength and courage.  I had but to
+look at her, or think of her, and be strong again.
+
+"It can be done, it can be done," I was thinking and asserting
+aloud.  "What men have done, I can do; and if they have never done
+this before, still I can do it."
+
+"What? for goodness' sake," Maud demanded.  "Do be merciful.  What
+is it you can do?"
+
+"We can do it," I amended.  "Why, nothing else than put the masts
+back into the Ghost and sail away."
+
+"Humphrey!" she exclaimed.
+
+And I felt as proud of my conception as if it were already a fact
+accomplished.
+
+"But how is it possible to be done?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know," was my answer.  "I know only that I am capable of
+doing anything these days."
+
+I smiled proudly at her--too proudly, for she dropped her eyes and
+was for the moment silent.
+
+"But there is Captain Larsen," she objected.
+
+"Blind and helpless," I answered promptly, waving him aside as a
+straw.
+
+"But those terrible hands of his!  You know how he leaped across
+the opening of the lazarette."
+
+"And you know also how I crept about and avoided him," I contended
+gaily.
+
+"And lost your shoes."
+
+"You'd hardly expect them to avoid Wolf Larsen without my feet
+inside of them."
+
+We both laughed, and then went seriously to work constructing the
+plan whereby we were to step the masts of the Ghost and return to
+the world.  I remembered hazily the physics of my school days,
+while the last few months had given me practical experience with
+mechanical purchases.  I must say, though, when we walked down to
+the Ghost to inspect more closely the task before us, that the
+sight of the great masts lying in the water almost disheartened me.
+Where were we to begin?  If there had been one mast standing,
+something high up to which to fasten blocks and tackles!  But there
+was nothing.  It reminded me of the problem of lifting oneself by
+one's boot-straps.  I understood the mechanics of levers; but where
+was I to get a fulcrum?
+
+There was the mainmast, fifteen inches in diameter at what was now
+the butt, still sixty-five feet in length, and weighing, I roughly
+calculated, at least three thousand pounds.  And then came the
+foremast, larger in diameter, and weighing surely thirty-five
+hundred pounds.  Where was I to begin?  Maud stood silently by my
+side, while I evolved in my mind the contrivance known among
+sailors as "shears."  But, though known to sailors, I invented it
+there on Endeavour Island.  By crossing and lashing the ends of two
+spars, and then elevating them in the air like an inverted "V," I
+could get a point above the deck to which to make fast my hoisting
+tackle.  To this hoisting tackle I could, if necessary, attach a
+second hoisting tackle.  And then there was the windlass!
+
+Maud saw that I had achieved a solution, and her eyes warmed
+sympathetically.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"Clear that raffle," I answered, pointing to the tangled wreckage
+overside.
+
+Ah, the decisiveness, the very sound of the words, was good in my
+ears.  "Clear that raffle!"  Imagine so salty a phrase on the lips
+of the Humphrey Van Weyden of a few months gone!
+
+There must have been a touch of the melodramatic in my pose and
+voice, for Maud smiled.  Her appreciation of the ridiculous was
+keen, and in all things she unerringly saw and felt, where it
+existed, the touch of sham, the overshading, the overtone.  It was
+this which had given poise and penetration to her own work and made
+her of worth to the world.  The serious critic, with the sense of
+humour and the power of expression, must inevitably command the
+world's ear.  And so it was that she had commanded.  Her sense of
+humour was really the artist's instinct for proportion.
+
+"I'm sure I've heard it before, somewhere, in books," she murmured
+gleefully.
+
+I had an instinct for proportion myself, and I collapsed forthwith,
+descending from the dominant pose of a master of matter to a state
+of humble confusion which was, to say the least, very miserable.
+
+Her hand leapt out at once to mine.
+
+"I'm so sorry," she said.
+
+"No need to be," I gulped.  "It does me good.  There's too much of
+the schoolboy in me.  All of which is neither here nor there.  What
+we've got to do is actually and literally to clear that raffle.  If
+you'll come with me in the boat, we'll get to work and straighten
+things out."
+
+"'When the topmen clear the raffle with their clasp-knives in their
+teeth,'" she quoted at me; and for the rest of the afternoon we
+made merry over our labour.
+
+Her task was to hold the boat in position while I worked at the
+tangle.  And such a tangle--halyards, sheets, guys, down-hauls,
+shrouds, stays, all washed about and back and forth and through,
+and twined and knotted by the sea.  I cut no more than was
+necessary, and what with passing the long ropes under and around
+the booms and masts, of unreeving the halyards and sheets, of
+coiling down in the boat and uncoiling in order to pass through
+another knot in the bight, I was soon wet to the skin.
+
+The sails did require some cutting, and the canvas, heavy with
+water, tried my strength severely; but I succeeded before nightfall
+in getting it all spread out on the beach to dry.  We were both
+very tired when we knocked off for supper, and we had done good
+work, too, though to the eye it appeared insignificant.
+
+Next morning, with Maud as able assistant, I went into the hold of
+the Ghost to clear the steps of the mast-butts.  We had no more
+than begun work when the sound of my knocking and hammering brought
+Wolf Larsen.
+
+"Hello below!" he cried down the open hatch.
+
+The sound of his voice made Maud quickly draw close to me, as for
+protection, and she rested one hand on my arm while we parleyed.
+
+"Hello on deck," I replied.  "Good-morning to you."
+
+"What are you doing down there?" he demanded.  "Trying to scuttle
+my ship for me?"
+
+"Quite the opposite; I'm repairing her," was my answer.
+
+"But what in thunder are you repairing?"  There was puzzlement in
+his voice.
+
+"Why, I'm getting everything ready for re-stepping the masts," I
+replied easily, as though it were the simplest project imaginable.
+
+"It seems as though you're standing on your own legs at last,
+Hump," we heard him say; and then for some time he was silent.
+
+"But I say, Hump," he called down.  "You can't do it."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can," I retorted.  "I'm doing it now."
+
+"But this is my vessel, my particular property.  What if I forbid
+you?"
+
+"You forget," I replied.  "You are no longer the biggest bit of the
+ferment.  You were, once, and able to eat me, as you were pleased
+to phrase it; but there has been a diminishing, and I am now able
+to eat you.  The yeast has grown stale."
+
+He gave a short, disagreeable laugh.  "I see you're working my
+philosophy back on me for all it is worth.  But don't make the
+mistake of under-estimating me.  For your own good I warn you."
+
+"Since when have you become a philanthropist?" I queried.
+"Confess, now, in warning me for my own good, that you are very
+consistent."
+
+He ignored my sarcasm, saying, "Suppose I clap the hatch on, now?
+You won't fool me as you did in the lazarette."
+
+"Wolf Larsen," I said sternly, for the first time addressing him by
+this his most familiar name, "I am unable to shoot a helpless,
+unresisting man.  You have proved that to my satisfaction as well
+as yours.  But I warn you now, and not so much for your own good as
+for mine, that I shall shoot you the moment you attempt a hostile
+act.  I can shoot you now, as I stand here; and if you are so
+minded, just go ahead and try to clap on the hatch."
+
+"Nevertheless, I forbid you, I distinctly forbid your tampering
+with my ship."
+
+"But, man!" I expostulated, "you advance the fact that it is your
+ship as though it were a moral right.  You have never considered
+moral rights in your dealings with others.  You surely do not dream
+that I'll consider them in dealing with you?"
+
+I had stepped underneath the open hatchway so that I could see him.
+The lack of expression on his face, so different from when I had
+watched him unseen, was enhanced by the unblinking, staring eyes.
+It was not a pleasant face to look upon.
+
+"And none so poor, not even Hump, to do him reverence," he sneered.
+
+The sneer was wholly in his voice.  His face remained
+expressionless as ever.
+
+"How do you do, Miss Brewster," he said suddenly, after a pause.
+
+I started.  She had made no noise whatever, had not even moved.
+Could it be that some glimmer of vision remained to him? or that
+his vision was coming back?
+
+"How do you do, Captain Larsen," she answered.  "Pray, how did you
+know I was here?"
+
+"Heard you breathing, of course.  I say, Hump's improving, don't
+you think so?"
+
+"I don't know," she answered, smiling at me.  "I have never seen
+him otherwise."
+
+"You should have seen him before, then."
+
+"Wolf Larsen, in large doses," I murmured, "before and after
+taking."
+
+"I want to tell you again, Hump," he said threateningly, "that
+you'd better leave things alone."
+
+"But don't you care to escape as well as we?" I asked
+incredulously.
+
+"No," was his answer.  "I intend dying here."
+
+"Well, we don't," I concluded defiantly, beginning again my
+knocking and hammering.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+
+Next day, the mast-steps clear and everything in readiness, we
+started to get the two topmasts aboard.  The maintopmast was over
+thirty feet in length, the foretopmast nearly thirty, and it was of
+these that I intended making the shears.  It was puzzling work.
+Fastening one end of a heavy tackle to the windlass, and with the
+other end fast to the butt of the foretopmast, I began to heave.
+Maud held the turn on the windlass and coiled down the slack.
+
+We were astonished at the ease with which the spar was lifted.  It
+was an improved crank windlass, and the purchase it gave was
+enormous.  Of course, what it gave us in power we paid for in
+distance; as many times as it doubled my strength, that many times
+was doubled the length of rope I heaved in.  The tackle dragged
+heavily across the rail, increasing its drag as the spar arose more
+and more out of the water, and the exertion on the windlass grew
+severe.
+
+But when the butt of the topmast was level with the rail,
+everything came to a standstill.
+
+"I might have known it," I said impatiently.  "Now we have to do it
+all over again."
+
+"Why not fasten the tackle part way down the mast?" Maud suggested.
+
+"It's what I should have done at first," I answered, hugely
+disgusted with myself.
+
+Slipping off a turn, I lowered the mast back into the water and
+fastened the tackle a third of the way down from the butt.  In an
+hour, what of this and of rests between the heaving, I had hoisted
+it to the point where I could hoist no more.  Eight feet of the
+butt was above the rail, and I was as far away as ever from getting
+the spar on board.  I sat down and pondered the problem.  It did
+not take long.  I sprang jubilantly to my feet.
+
+"Now I have it!" I cried.  "I ought to make the tackle fast at the
+point of balance.  And what we learn of this will serve us with
+everything else we have to hoist aboard."
+
+Once again I undid all my work by lowering the mast into the water.
+But I miscalculated the point of balance, so that when I heaved the
+top of the mast came up instead of the butt.  Maud looked despair,
+but I laughed and said it would do just as well.
+
+Instructing her how to hold the turn and be ready to slack away at
+command, I laid hold of the mast with my hands and tried to balance
+it inboard across the rail.  When I thought I had it I cried to her
+to slack away; but the spar righted, despite my efforts, and
+dropped back toward the water.  Again I heaved it up to its old
+position, for I had now another idea.  I remembered the watch-
+tackle--a small double and single block affair--and fetched it.
+
+While I was rigging it between the top of the spar and the opposite
+rail, Wolf Larsen came on the scene.  We exchanged nothing more
+than good-mornings, and, though he could not see, he sat on the
+rail out of the way and followed by the sound all that I did.
+
+Again instructing Maud to slack away at the windlass when I gave
+the word, I proceeded to heave on the watch-tackle.  Slowly the
+mast swung in until it balanced at right angles across the rail;
+and then I discovered to my amazement that there was no need for
+Maud to slack away.  In fact, the very opposite was necessary.
+Making the watch-tackle fast, I hove on the windlass and brought in
+the mast, inch by inch, till its top tilted down to the deck and
+finally its whole length lay on the deck.
+
+I looked at my watch.  It was twelve o'clock.  My back was aching
+sorely, and I felt extremely tired and hungry.  And there on the
+deck was a single stick of timber to show for a whole morning's
+work.  For the first time I thoroughly realized the extent of the
+task before us.  But I was learning, I was learning.  The afternoon
+would show far more accomplished.  And it did; for we returned at
+one o'clock, rested and strengthened by a hearty dinner.
+
+In less than an hour I had the maintopmast on deck and was
+constructing the shears.  Lashing the two topmasts together, and
+making allowance for their unequal length, at the point of
+intersection I attached the double block of the main throat-
+halyards.  This, with the single block and the throat-halyards
+themselves, gave me a hoisting tackle.  To prevent the butts of the
+masts from slipping on the deck, I nailed down thick cleats.
+Everything in readiness, I made a line fast to the apex of the
+shears and carried it directly to the windlass.  I was growing to
+have faith in that windlass, for it gave me power beyond all
+expectation.  As usual, Maud held the turn while I heaved.  The
+shears rose in the air.
+
+Then I discovered I had forgotten guy-ropes.  This necessitated my
+climbing the shears, which I did twice, before I finished guying it
+fore and aft and to either side.  Twilight had set in by the time
+this was accomplished.  Wolf Larsen, who had sat about and listened
+all afternoon and never opened his mouth, had taken himself off to
+the galley and started his supper.  I felt quite stiff across the
+small of the back, so much so that I straightened up with an effort
+and with pain.  I looked proudly at my work.  It was beginning to
+show.  I was wild with desire, like a child with a new toy, to
+hoist something with my shears.
+
+"I wish it weren't so late," I said.  "I'd like to see how it
+works."
+
+"Don't be a glutton, Humphrey," Maud chided me.  "Remember, to-
+morrow is coming, and you're so tired now that you can hardly
+stand."
+
+"And you?" I said, with sudden solicitude.  "You must be very
+tired.  You have worked hard and nobly.  I am proud of you, Maud."
+
+"Not half so proud as I am of you, nor with half the reason," she
+answered, looking me straight in the eyes for a moment with an
+expression in her own and a dancing, tremulous light which I had
+not seen before and which gave me a pang of quick delight, I know
+not why, for I did not understand it.  Then she dropped her eyes,
+to lift them again, laughing.
+
+"If our friends could see us now," she said.  "Look at us.  Have
+you ever paused for a moment to consider our appearance?"
+
+"Yes, I have considered yours, frequently," I answered, puzzling
+over what I had seen in her eyes and puzzled by her sudden change
+of subject.
+
+"Mercy!" she cried.  "And what do I look like, pray?"
+
+"A scarecrow, I'm afraid," I replied.  "Just glance at your
+draggled skirts, for instance.  Look at those three-cornered tears.
+And such a waist!  It would not require a Sherlock Holmes to deduce
+that you have been cooking over a camp-fire, to say nothing of
+trying out seal-blubber.  And to cap it all, that cap!  And all
+that is the woman who wrote 'A Kiss Endured.'"
+
+She made me an elaborate and stately courtesy, and said, "As for
+you, sir--"
+
+And yet, through the five minutes of banter which followed, there
+was a serious something underneath the fun which I could not but
+relate to the strange and fleeting expression I had caught in her
+eyes.  What was it?  Could it be that our eyes were speaking beyond
+the will of our speech?  My eyes had spoken, I knew, until I had
+found the culprits out and silenced them.  This had occurred
+several times.  But had she seen the clamour in them and
+understood?  And had her eyes so spoken to me?  What else could
+that expression have meant--that dancing, tremulous light, and a
+something more which words could not describe.  And yet it could
+not be.  It was impossible.  Besides, I was not skilled in the
+speech of eyes.  I was only Humphrey Van Weyden, a bookish fellow
+who loved.  And to love, and to wait and win love, that surely was
+glorious enough for me.  And thus I thought, even as we chaffed
+each other's appearance, until we arrived ashore and there were
+other things to think about.
+
+"It's a shame, after working hard all day, that we cannot have an
+uninterrupted night's sleep," I complained, after supper.
+
+"But there can be no danger now? from a blind man?" she queried.
+
+"I shall never be able to trust him," I averred, "and far less now
+that he is blind.  The liability is that his part helplessness will
+make him more malignant than ever.  I know what I shall do to-
+morrow, the first thing--run out a light anchor and kedge the
+schooner off the beach.  And each night when we come ashore in the
+boat, Mr. Wolf Larsen will be left a prisoner on board.  So this
+will be the last night we have to stand watch, and because of that
+it will go the easier."
+
+We were awake early and just finishing breakfast as daylight came.
+
+"Oh, Humphrey!" I heard Maud cry in dismay and suddenly stop.
+
+I looked at her.  She was gazing at the Ghost.  I followed her
+gaze, but could see nothing unusual.  She looked at me, and I
+looked inquiry back.
+
+"The shears," she said, and her voice trembled.
+
+I had forgotten their existence.  I looked again, but could not see
+them.
+
+"If he has--" I muttered savagely.
+
+She put her hand sympathetically on mine, and said, "You will have
+to begin over again."
+
+"Oh, believe me, my anger means nothing; I could not hurt a fly," I
+smiled back bitterly.  "And the worst of it is, he knows it.  You
+are right.  If he has destroyed the shears, I shall do nothing
+except begin over again."
+
+"But I'll stand my watch on board hereafter," I blurted out a
+moment later.  "And if he interferes--"
+
+"But I dare not stay ashore all night alone," Maud was saying when
+I came back to myself.  "It would be so much nicer if he would be
+friendly with us and help us.  We could all live comfortably
+aboard."
+
+"We will," I asserted, still savagely, for the destruction of my
+beloved shears had hit me hard.  "That is, you and I will live
+aboard, friendly or not with Wolf Larsen."
+
+"It's childish," I laughed later, "for him to do such things, and
+for me to grow angry over them, for that matter."
+
+But my heart smote me when we climbed aboard and looked at the
+havoc he had done.  The shears were gone altogether.  The guys had
+been slashed right and left.  The throat-halyards which I had
+rigged were cut across through every part.  And he knew I could not
+splice.  A thought struck me.  I ran to the windlass.  It would not
+work.  He had broken it.  We looked at each other in consternation.
+Then I ran to the side.  The masts, booms, and gaffs I had cleared
+were gone.  He had found the lines which held them, and cast them
+adrift.
+
+Tears were in Maud's eyes, and I do believe they were for me.  I
+could have wept myself.  Where now was our project of remasting the
+Ghost?  He had done his work well.  I sat down on the hatch-combing
+and rested my chin on my hands in black despair.
+
+"He deserves to die," I cried out; "and God forgive me, I am not
+man enough to be his executioner."
+
+But Maud was by my side, passing her hand soothingly through my
+hair as though I were a child, and saying, "There, there; it will
+all come right.  We are in the right, and it must come right."
+
+I remembered Michelet and leaned my head against her; and truly I
+became strong again.  The blessed woman was an unfailing fount of
+power to me.  What did it matter?  Only a set-back, a delay.  The
+tide could not have carried the masts far to seaward, and there had
+been no wind.  It meant merely more work to find them and tow them
+back.  And besides, it was a lesson.  I knew what to expect.  He
+might have waited and destroyed our work more effectually when we
+had more accomplished.
+
+"Here he comes now," she whispered.
+
+I glanced up.  He was strolling leisurely along the poop on the
+port side.
+
+"Take no notice of him," I whispered.  "He's coming to see how we
+take it.  Don't let him know that we know.  We can deny him that
+satisfaction.  Take off your shoes--that's right--and carry them in
+your hand."
+
+And then we played hide-and-seek with the blind man.  As he came up
+the port side we slipped past on the starboard; and from the poop
+we watched him turn and start aft on our track.
+
+He must have known, somehow, that we were on board, for he said
+"Good-morning" very confidently, and waited, for the greeting to be
+returned.  Then he strolled aft, and we slipped forward.
+
+"Oh, I know you're aboard," he called out, and I could see him
+listen intently after he had spoken.
+
+It reminded me of the great hoot-owl, listening, after its booming
+cry, for the stir of its frightened prey.  But we did not fir, and
+we moved only when he moved.  And so we dodged about the deck, hand
+in hand, like a couple of children chased by a wicked ogre, till
+Wolf Larsen, evidently in disgust, left the deck for the cabin.
+There was glee in our eyes, and suppressed titters in our mouths,
+as we put on our shoes and clambered over the side into the boat.
+And as I looked into Maud's clear brown eyes I forgot the evil he
+had done, and I knew only that I loved her, and that because of her
+the strength was mine to win our way back to the world.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+
+For two days Maud and I ranged the sea and explored the beaches in
+search of the missing masts.  But it was not till the third day
+that we found them, all of them, the shears included, and, of all
+perilous places, in the pounding surf of the grim south-western
+promontory.  And how we worked!  At the dark end of the first day
+we returned, exhausted, to our little cove, towing the mainmast
+behind us.  And we had been compelled to row, in a dead calm,
+practically every inch of the way.
+
+Another day of heart-breaking and dangerous toil saw us in camp
+with the two topmasts to the good.  The day following I was
+desperate, and I rafted together the foremast, the fore and main
+booms, and the fore and main gaffs.  The wind was favourable, and I
+had thought to tow them back under sail, but the wind baffled, then
+died away, and our progress with the oars was a snail's pace.  And
+it was such dispiriting effort.  To throw one's whole strength and
+weight on the oars and to feel the boat checked in its forward
+lunge by the heavy drag behind, was not exactly exhilarating.
+
+Night began to fall, and to make matters worse, the wind sprang up
+ahead.  Not only did all forward motion cease, but we began to
+drift back and out to sea.  I struggled at the oars till I was
+played out.  Poor Maud, whom I could never prevent from working to
+the limit of her strength, lay weakly back in the stern-sheets.  I
+could row no more.  My bruised and swollen hands could no longer
+close on the oar handles.  My wrists and arms ached intolerably,
+and though I had eaten heartily of a twelve-o'clock lunch, I had
+worked so hard that I was faint from hunger.
+
+I pulled in the oars and bent forward to the line which held the
+tow.  But Maud's hand leaped out restrainingly to mine.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked in a strained, tense voice.
+
+"Cast it off," I answered, slipping a turn of the rope.
+
+But her fingers closed on mine.
+
+"Please don't," she begged.
+
+"It is useless," I answered.  "Here is night and the wind blowing
+us off the land."
+
+"But think, Humphrey.  If we cannot sail away on the Ghost, we may
+remain for years on the island--for life even.  If it has never
+been discovered all these years, it may never be discovered."
+
+"You forget the boat we found on the beach," I reminded her.
+
+"It was a seal-hunting boat," she replied, "and you know perfectly
+well that if the men had escaped they would have been back to make
+their fortunes from the rookery.  You know they never escaped."
+
+I remained silent, undecided.
+
+"Besides," she added haltingly, "it's your idea, and I want to see
+you succeed."
+
+Now I could harden my heart.  As soon as she put it on a flattering
+personal basis, generosity compelled me to deny her.
+
+"Better years on the island than to die to-night, or to-morrow, or
+the next day, in the open boat.  We are not prepared to brave the
+sea.  We have no food, no water, no blankets, nothing.  Why, you'd
+not survive the night without blankets:  I know how strong you are.
+You are shivering now."
+
+"It is only nervousness," she answered.  "I am afraid you will cast
+off the masts in spite of me."
+
+"Oh, please, please, Humphrey, don't!" she burst out, a moment
+later.
+
+And so it ended, with the phrase she knew had all power over me.
+We shivered miserably throughout the night.  Now and again I
+fitfully slept, but the pain of the cold always aroused me.  How
+Maud could stand it was beyond me.  I was too tired to thrash my
+arms about and warm myself, but I found strength time and again to
+chafe her hands and feet to restore the circulation.  And still she
+pleaded with me not to cast off the masts.  About three in the
+morning she was caught by a cold cramp, and after I had rubbed her
+out of that she became quite numb.  I was frightened.  I got out
+the oars and made her row, though she was so weak I thought she
+would faint at every stroke.
+
+Morning broke, and we looked long in the growing light for our
+island.  At last it showed, small and black, on the horizon, fully
+fifteen miles away.  I scanned the sea with my glasses.  Far away
+in the south-west I could see a dark line on the water, which grew
+even as I looked at it.
+
+"Fair wind!" I cried in a husky voice I did not recognize as my
+own.
+
+Maud tried to reply, but could not speak.  Her lips were blue with
+cold, and she was hollow-eyed--but oh, how bravely her brown eyes
+looked at me!  How piteously brave!
+
+Again I fell to chafing her hands and to moving her arms up and
+down and about until she could thrash them herself.  Then I
+compelled her to stand up, and though she would have fallen had I
+not supported her, I forced her to walk back and forth the several
+steps between the thwart and the stern-sheets, and finally to
+spring up and down.
+
+"Oh, you brave, brave woman," I said, when I saw the life coming
+back into her face.  "Did you know that you were brave?"
+
+"I never used to be," she answered.  "I was never brave till I knew
+you.  It is you who have made me brave."
+
+"Nor I, until I knew you," I answered.
+
+She gave me a quick look, and again I caught that dancing,
+tremulous light and something more in her eyes.  But it was only
+for the moment.  Then she smiled.
+
+"It must have been the conditions," she said; but I knew she was
+wrong, and I wondered if she likewise knew.  Then the wind came,
+fair and fresh, and the boat was soon labouring through a heavy sea
+toward the island.  At half-past three in the afternoon we passed
+the south-western promontory.  Not only were we hungry, but we were
+now suffering from thirst.  Our lips were dry and cracked, nor
+could we longer moisten them with our tongues.  Then the wind
+slowly died down.  By night it was dead calm and I was toiling once
+more at the oars--but weakly, most weakly.  At two in the morning
+the boat's bow touched the beach of our own inner cove and I
+staggered out to make the painter fast.  Maud could not stand, nor
+had I strength to carry her.  I fell in the sand with her, and,
+when I had recovered, contented myself with putting my hands under
+her shoulders and dragging her up the beach to the hut.
+
+The next day we did no work.  In fact, we slept till three in the
+afternoon, or at least I did, for I awoke to find Maud cooking
+dinner.  Her power of recuperation was wonderful.  There was
+something tenacious about that lily-frail body of hers, a clutch on
+existence which one could not reconcile with its patent weakness.
+
+"You know I was travelling to Japan for my health," she said, as we
+lingered at the fire after dinner and delighted in the movelessness
+of loafing.  "I was not very strong.  I never was.  The doctors
+recommended a sea voyage, and I chose the longest."
+
+"You little knew what you were choosing," I laughed.
+
+"But I shall be a different women for the experience, as well as a
+stronger woman," she answered; "and, I hope a better woman.  At
+least I shall understand a great deal more life."
+
+Then, as the short day waned, we fell to discussing Wolf Larsen's
+blindness.  It was inexplicable.  And that it was grave, I
+instanced his statement that he intended to stay and die on
+Endeavour Island.  When he, strong man that he was, loving life as
+he did, accepted his death, it was plain that he was troubled by
+something more than mere blindness.  There had been his terrific
+headaches, and we were agreed that it was some sort of brain break-
+down, and that in his attacks he endured pain beyond our
+comprehension.
+
+I noticed as we talked over his condition, that Maud's sympathy
+went out to him more and more; yet I could not but love her for it,
+so sweetly womanly was it.  Besides, there was no false sentiment
+about her feeling.  She was agreed that the most rigorous treatment
+was necessary if we were to escape, though she recoiled at the
+suggestion that I might some time be compelled to take his life to
+save my own--"our own," she put it.
+
+In the morning we had breakfast and were at work by daylight.  I
+found a light kedge anchor in the fore-hold, where such things were
+kept; and with a deal of exertion got it on deck and into the boat.
+With a long running-line coiled down in the stem, I rowed well out
+into our little cove and dropped the anchor into the water.  There
+was no wind, the tide was high, and the schooner floated.  Casting
+off the shore-lines, I kedged her out by main strength (the
+windlass being broken), till she rode nearly up and down to the
+small anchor--too small to hold her in any breeze.  So I lowered
+the big starboard anchor, giving plenty of slack; and by afternoon
+I was at work on the windlass.
+
+Three days I worked on that windlass.  Least of all things was I a
+mechanic, and in that time I accomplished what an ordinary
+machinist would have done in as many hours.  I had to learn my
+tools to begin with, and every simple mechanical principle which
+such a man would have at his finger ends I had likewise to learn.
+And at the end of three days I had a windlass which worked
+clumsily.  It never gave the satisfaction the old windlass had
+given, but it worked and made my work possible.
+
+In half a day I got the two topmasts aboard and the shears rigged
+and guyed as before.  And that night I slept on board and on deck
+beside my work.  Maud, who refused to stay alone ashore, slept in
+the forecastle.  Wolf Larsen had sat about, listening to my
+repairing the windlass and talking with Maud and me upon
+indifferent subjects.  No reference was made on either side to the
+destruction of the shears; nor did he say anything further about my
+leaving his ship alone.  But still I had feared him, blind and
+helpless and listening, always listening, and I never let his
+strong arms get within reach of me while I worked.
+
+On this night, sleeping under my beloved shears, I was aroused by
+his footsteps on the deck.  It was a starlight night, and I could
+see the bulk of him dimly as he moved about.  I rolled out of my
+blankets and crept noiselessly after him in my stocking feet.  He
+had armed himself with a draw-knife from the tool-locker, and with
+this he prepared to cut across the throat-halyards I had again
+rigged to the shears.  He felt the halyards with his hands and
+discovered that I had not made them fast.  This would not do for a
+draw-knife, so he laid hold of the running part, hove taut, and
+made fast.  Then he prepared to saw across with the draw-knife.
+
+"I wouldn't, if I were you," I said quietly.
+
+He heard the click of my pistol and laughed.
+
+"Hello, Hump," he said.  "I knew you were here all the time.  You
+can't fool my ears."
+
+"That's a lie, Wolf Larsen," I said, just as quietly as before.
+"However, I am aching for a chance to kill you, so go ahead and
+cut."
+
+"You have the chance always," he sneered.
+
+"Go ahead and cut," I threatened ominously.
+
+"I'd rather disappoint you," he laughed, and turned on his heel and
+went aft.
+
+"Something must be done, Humphrey," Maud said, next morning, when I
+had told her of the night's occurrence.  "If he has liberty, he may
+do anything.  He may sink the vessel, or set fire to it.  There is
+no telling what he may do.  We must make him a prisoner."
+
+"But how?" I asked, with a helpless shrug.  "I dare not come within
+reach of his arms, and he knows that so long as his resistance is
+passive I cannot shoot him."
+
+"There must be some way," she contended.  "Let me think."
+
+"There is one way," I said grimly.
+
+She waited.
+
+I picked up a seal-club.
+
+"It won't kill him," I said.  "And before he could recover I'd have
+him bound hard and fast."
+
+She shook her head with a shudder.  "No, not that.  There must be
+some less brutal way.  Let us wait."
+
+But we did not have to wait long, and the problem solved itself.
+In the morning, after several trials, I found the point of balance
+in the foremast and attached my hoisting tackle a few feet above
+it.  Maud held the turn on the windlass and coiled down while I
+heaved.  Had the windlass been in order it would not have been so
+difficult; as it was, I was compelled to apply all my weight and
+strength to every inch of the heaving.  I had to rest frequently.
+In truth, my spells of resting were longer than those of working.
+Maud even contrived, at times when all my efforts could not budge
+the windlass, to hold the turn with one hand and with the other to
+throw the weight of her slim body to my assistance.
+
+At the end of an hour the single and double blocks came together at
+the top of the shears.  I could hoist no more.  And yet the mast
+was not swung entirely inboard.  The butt rested against the
+outside of the port rail, while the top of the mast overhung the
+water far beyond the starboard rail.  My shears were too short.
+All my work had been for nothing.  But I no longer despaired in the
+old way.  I was acquiring more confidence in myself and more
+confidence in the possibilities of windlasses, shears, and hoisting
+tackles.  There was a way in which it could be done, and it
+remained for me to find that way.
+
+While I was considering the problem, Wolf Larsen came on deck.  We
+noticed something strange about him at once.  The indecisiveness,
+or feebleness, of his movements was more pronounced.  His walk was
+actually tottery as he came down the port side of the cabin.  At
+the break of the poop he reeled, raised one hand to his eyes with
+the familiar brushing gesture, and fell down the steps--still on
+his feet--to the main deck, across which he staggered, falling and
+flinging out his arms for support.  He regained his balance by the
+steerage companion-way and stood there dizzily for a space, when he
+suddenly crumpled up and collapsed, his legs bending under him as
+he sank to the deck.
+
+"One of his attacks," I whispered to Maud.
+
+She nodded her head; and I could see sympathy warm in eyes.
+
+We went up to him, but he seemed unconscious, breathing
+spasmodically.  She took charge of him, lifting his head to keep
+the blood out of it and despatching me to the cabin for a pillow.
+I also brought blankets, and we made him comfortable.  I took his
+pulse.  It beat steadily and strong, and was quite normal.  This
+puzzled me.  I became suspicious.
+
+"What if he should be feigning this?" I asked, still holding his
+wrist.
+
+Maud shook her head, and there was reproof in her eyes.  But just
+then the wrist I held leaped from my hand, and the hand clasped
+like a steel trap about my wrist.  I cried aloud in awful fear, a
+wild inarticulate cry; and I caught one glimpse of his face,
+malignant and triumphant, as his other hand compassed my body and I
+was drawn down to him in a terrible grip.
+
+My wrist was released, but his other arm, passed around my back,
+held both my arms so that I could not move.  His free hand went to
+my throat, and in that moment I knew the bitterest foretaste of
+death earned by one's own idiocy.  Why had I trusted myself within
+reach of those terrible arms?  I could feel other hands at my
+throat.  They were Maud's hands, striving vainly to tear loose the
+hand that was throttling me.  She gave it up, and I heard her
+scream in a way that cut me to the soul, for it was a woman's
+scream of fear and heart-breaking despair.  I had heard it before,
+during the sinking of the Martinez.
+
+My face was against his chest and I could not see, but I heard Maud
+turn and run swiftly away along the deck.  Everything was happening
+quickly.  I had not yet had a glimmering of unconsciousness, and it
+seemed that an interminable period of time was lapsing before I
+heard her feet flying back.  And just then I felt the whole man
+sink under me.  The breath was leaving his lungs and his chest was
+collapsing under my weight.  Whether it was merely the expelled
+breath, or his consciousness of his growing impotence, I know not,
+but his throat vibrated with a deep groan.  The hand at my throat
+relaxed.  I breathed.  It fluttered and tightened again.  But even
+his tremendous will could not overcome the dissolution that
+assailed it.  That will of his was breaking down.  He was fainting.
+
+Maud's footsteps were very near as his hand fluttered for the last
+time and my throat was released.  I rolled off and over to the deck
+on my back, gasping and blinking in the sunshine.  Maud was pale
+but composed,--my eyes had gone instantly to her face,--and she was
+looking at me with mingled alarm and relief.  A heavy seal-club in
+her hand caught my eyes, and at that moment she followed my gaze
+down to it.  The club dropped from her hand as though it had
+suddenly stung her, and at the same moment my heart surged with a
+great joy.  Truly she was my woman, my mate-woman, fighting with me
+and for me as the mate of a caveman would have fought, all the
+primitive in her aroused, forgetful of her culture, hard under the
+softening civilization of the only life she had ever known.
+
+"Dear woman!" I cried, scrambling to my feet.
+
+The next moment she was in my arms, weeping convulsively on my
+shoulder while I clasped her close.  I looked down at the brown
+glory of her hair, glinting gems in the sunshine far more precious
+to me than those in the treasure-chests of kings.  And I bent my
+head and kissed her hair softly, so softly that she did not know.
+
+Then sober thought came to me.  After all, she was only a woman,
+crying her relief, now that the danger was past, in the arms of her
+protector or of the one who had been endangered.  Had I been father
+or brother, the situation would have been in nowise different.
+Besides, time and place were not meet, and I wished to earn a
+better right to declare my love.  So once again I softly kissed her
+hair as I felt her receding from my clasp.
+
+"It was a real attack this time," I said:  "another shock like the
+one that made him blind.  He feigned at first, and in doing so
+brought it on."
+
+Maud was already rearranging his pillow.
+
+"No," I said, "not yet.  Now that I have him helpless, helpless he
+shall remain.  From this day we live in the cabin.  Wolf Larsen
+shall live in the steerage."
+
+I caught him under the shoulders and dragged him to the companion-
+way.  At my direction Maud fetched a rope.  Placing this under his
+shoulders, I balanced him across the threshold and lowered him down
+the steps to the floor.  I could not lift him directly into a bunk,
+but with Maud's help I lifted first his shoulders and head, then
+his body, balanced him across the edge, and rolled him into a lower
+bunk.
+
+But this was not to be all.  I recollected the handcuffs in his
+state-room, which he preferred to use on sailors instead of the
+ancient and clumsy ship irons.  So, when we left him, he lay
+handcuffed hand and foot.  For the first time in many days I
+breathed freely.  I felt strangely light as I came on deck, as
+though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.  I felt, also,
+that Maud and I had drawn more closely together.  And I wondered if
+she, too, felt it, as we walked along the deck side by side to
+where the stalled foremast hung in the shears.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+
+At once we moved aboard the Ghost, occupying our old state-rooms
+and cooking in the galley.  The imprisonment of Wolf Larsen had
+happened most opportunely, for what must have been the Indian
+summer of this high latitude was gone and drizzling stormy weather
+had set in.  We were very comfortable, and the inadequate shears,
+with the foremast suspended from them, gave a business-like air to
+the schooner and a promise of departure.
+
+And now that we had Wolf Larsen in irons, how little did we need
+it!  Like his first attack, his second had been accompanied by
+serious disablement.  Maud made the discovery in the afternoon
+while trying to give him nourishment.  He had shown signs of
+consciousness, and she had spoken to him, eliciting no response.
+He was lying on his left side at the time, and in evident pain.
+With a restless movement he rolled his head around, clearing his
+left ear from the pillow against which it had been pressed.  At
+once he heard and answered her, and at once she came to me.
+
+Pressing the pillow against his left ear, I asked him if he heard
+me, but he gave no sign.  Removing the pillow and, repeating the
+question he answered promptly that he did.
+
+"Do you know you are deaf in the right ear?" I asked.
+
+"Yes," he answered in a low, strong voice, "and worse than that.
+My whole right side is affected.  It seems asleep.  I cannot move
+arm or leg."
+
+"Feigning again?" I demanded angrily.
+
+He shook his head, his stern mouth shaping the strangest, twisted
+smile.  It was indeed a twisted smile, for it was on the left side
+only, the facial muscles of the right side moving not at all.
+
+"That was the last play of the Wolf," he said.  "I am paralysed.  I
+shall never walk again.  Oh, only on the other side," he added, as
+though divining the suspicious glance I flung at his left leg, the
+knee of which had just then drawn up, and elevated the blankets.
+
+"It's unfortunate," he continued.  "I'd liked to have done for you
+first, Hump.  And I thought I had that much left in me."
+
+"But why?" I asked; partly in horror, partly out of curiosity.
+
+Again his stern mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:
+
+"Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest
+bit of the ferment to the end, to eat you.  But to die this way."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, or attempted to shrug them, rather, for
+the left shoulder alone moved.  Like the smile, the shrug was
+twisted.
+
+"But how can you account for it?" I asked.  "Where is the seat of
+your trouble?"
+
+"The brain," he said at once.  "It was those cursed headaches
+brought it on."
+
+"Symptoms," I said.
+
+He nodded his head.  "There is no accounting for it.  I was never
+sick in my life.  Something's gone wrong with my brain.  A cancer,
+a tumour, or something of that nature,--a thing that devours and
+destroys.  It's attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by
+bit, cell by cell--from the pain."
+
+"The motor-centres, too," I suggested.
+
+"So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here,
+conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going
+down, breaking bit by bit communication with the world.  I cannot
+see, hearing and feeling are leaving me, at this rate I shall soon
+cease to speak; yet all the time I shall be here, alive, active,
+and powerless."
+
+"When you say YOU are here, I'd suggest the likelihood of the
+soul," I said.
+
+"Bosh!" was his retort.  "It simply means that in the attack on my
+brain the higher psychical centres are untouched.  I can remember,
+I can think and reason.  When that goes, I go.  I am not.  The
+soul?"
+
+He broke out in mocking laughter, then turned his left ear to the
+pillow as a sign that he wished no further conversation.
+
+Maud and I went about our work oppressed by the fearful fate which
+had overtaken him,--how fearful we were yet fully to realize.
+There was the awfulness of retribution about it.  Our thoughts were
+deep and solemn, and we spoke to each other scarcely above
+whispers.
+
+"You might remove the handcuffs," he said that night, as we stood
+in consultation over him.  "It's dead safe.  I'm a paralytic now.
+The next thing to watch out for is bed sores."
+
+He smiled his twisted smile, and Maud, her eyes wide with horror,
+was compelled to turn away her head.
+
+"Do you know that your smile is crooked?" I asked him; for I knew
+that she must attend him, and I wished to save her as much as
+possible.
+
+"Then I shall smile no more," he said calmly.  "I thought something
+was wrong.  My right cheek has been numb all day.  Yes, and I've
+had warnings of this for the last three days; by spells, my right
+side seemed going to sleep, sometimes arm or hand, sometimes leg or
+foot."
+
+"So my smile is crooked?" he queried a short while after.  "Well,
+consider henceforth that I smile internally, with my soul, if you
+please, my soul.  Consider that I am smiling now."
+
+And for the space of several minutes he lay there, quiet, indulging
+his grotesque fancy.
+
+The man of him was not changed.  It was the old, indomitable,
+terrible Wolf Larsen, imprisoned somewhere within that flesh which
+had once been so invincible and splendid.  Now it bound him with
+insentient fetters, walling his soul in darkness and silence,
+blocking it from the world which to him had been a riot of action.
+No more would he conjugate the verb "to do in every mood and
+tense."  "To be" was all that remained to him--to be, as he had
+defined death, without movement; to will, but not to execute; to
+think and reason and in the spirit of him to be as alive as ever,
+but in the flesh to be dead, quite dead.
+
+And yet, though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust
+ourselves to his condition.  Our minds revolted.  To us he was full
+of potentiality.  We knew not what to expect of him next, what
+fearful thing, rising above the flesh, he might break out and do.
+Our experience warranted this state of mind, and we went about our
+work with anxiety always upon us.
+
+I had solved the problem which had arisen through the shortness of
+the shears.  By means of the watch-tackle (I had made a new one), I
+heaved the butt of the foremast across the rail and then lowered it
+to the deck.  Next, by means of the shears, I hoisted the main boom
+on board.  Its forty feet of length would supply the height
+necessary properly to swing the mast.  By means of a secondary
+tackle I had attached to the shears, I swung the boom to a nearly
+perpendicular position, then lowered the butt to the deck, where,
+to prevent slipping, I spiked great cleats around it.  The single
+block of my original shears-tackle I had attached to the end of the
+boom.  Thus, by carrying this tackle to the windlass, I could raise
+and lower the end of the boom at will, the butt always remaining
+stationary, and, by means of guys, I could swing the boom from side
+to side.  To the end of the boom I had likewise rigged a hoisting
+tackle; and when the whole arrangement was completed I could not
+but be startled by the power and latitude it gave me.
+
+Of course, two days' work was required for the accomplishment of
+this part of my task, and it was not till the morning of the third
+day that I swung the foremast from the deck and proceeded to square
+its butt to fit the step.  Here I was especially awkward.  I sawed
+and chopped and chiselled the weathered wood till it had the
+appearance of having been gnawed by some gigantic mouse.  But it
+fitted.
+
+"It will work, I know it will work," I cried.
+
+"Do you know Dr. Jordan's final test of truth?" Maud asked.
+
+I shook my head and paused in the act of dislodging the shavings
+which had drifted down my neck.
+
+"Can we make it work?  Can we trust our lives to it? is the test."
+
+"He is a favourite of yours," I said.
+
+"When I dismantled my old Pantheon and cast out Napoleon and Caesar
+and their fellows, I straightway erected a new Pantheon," she
+answered gravely, "and the first I installed as Dr. Jordan."
+
+"A modern hero."
+
+"And a greater because modern," she added.  "How can the Old World
+heroes compare with ours?"
+
+I shook my head.  We were too much alike in many things for
+argument.  Our points of view and outlook on life at least were
+very alike.
+
+"For a pair of critics we agree famously," I laughed.
+
+"And as shipwright and able assistant," she laughed back.
+
+But there was little time for laughter in those days, what of our
+heavy work and of the awfulness of Wolf Larsen's living death.
+
+He had received another stroke.  He had lost his voice, or he was
+losing it.  He had only intermittent use of it.  As he phrased it,
+the wires were like the stock market, now up, now down.
+Occasionally the wires were up and he spoke as well as ever, though
+slowly and heavily.  Then speech would suddenly desert him, in the
+middle of a sentence perhaps, and for hours, sometimes, we would
+wait for the connection to be re-established.  He complained of
+great pain in his head, and it was during this period that he
+arranged a system of communication against the time when speech
+should leave him altogether--one pressure of the hand for "yes,"
+two for "no."  It was well that it was arranged, for by evening his
+voice had gone from him.  By hand pressures, after that, he
+answered our questions, and when he wished to speak he scrawled his
+thoughts with his left hand, quite legibly, on a sheet of paper.
+
+The fierce winter had now descended upon us.  Gale followed gale,
+with snow and sleet and rain.  The seals had started on their great
+southern migration, and the rookery was practically deserted.  I
+worked feverishly.  In spite of the bad weather, and of the wind
+which especially hindered me, I was on deck from daylight till dark
+and making substantial progress.
+
+I profited by my lesson learned through raising the shears and then
+climbing them to attach the guys.  To the top of the foremast,
+which was just lifted conveniently from the deck, I attached the
+rigging, stays and throat and peak halyards.  As usual, I had
+underrated the amount of work involved in this portion of the task,
+and two long days were necessary to complete it.  And there was so
+much yet to be done--the sails, for instance, which practically had
+to be made over.
+
+While I toiled at rigging the foremast, Maud sewed on canvas, ready
+always to drop everything and come to my assistance when more hands
+than two were required.  The canvas was heavy and hard, and she
+sewed with the regular sailor's palm and three-cornered sail-
+needle.  Her hands were soon sadly blistered, but she struggled
+bravely on, and in addition doing the cooking and taking care of
+the sick man.
+
+"A fig for superstition," I said on Friday morning.  "That mast
+goes in to-day.'
+
+Everything was ready for the attempt.  Carrying the boom-tackle to
+the windlass, I hoisted the mast nearly clear of the deck.  Making
+this tackle fast, I took to the windlass the shears-tackle (which
+was connected with the end of the boom), and with a few turns had
+the mast perpendicular and clear.
+
+Maud clapped her hands the instant she was relieved from holding
+the turn, crying:
+
+"It works!  It works!  We'll trust our lives to it!"
+
+Then she assumed a rueful expression.
+
+"It's not over the hole," she add.  "Will you have to begin all
+over?"
+
+I smiled in superior fashion, and, slacking off on one of the boom-
+guys and taking in on the other, swung the mast perfectly in the
+centre of the deck.  Still it was not over the hole.  Again the
+rueful expression came on her face, and again I smiled in a
+superior way.  Slacking away on the boom-tackle and hoisting an
+equivalent amount on the shears-tackle, I brought the butt of the
+mast into position directly over the hole in the deck.  Then I gave
+Maud careful instructions for lowering away and went into the hold
+to the step on the schooner's bottom.
+
+I called to her, and the mast moved easily and accurately.
+Straight toward the square hole of the step the square butt
+descended; but as it descended it slowly twisted so that square
+would not fit into square.  But I had not even a moment's
+indecision.  Calling to Maud to cease lowering, I went on deck and
+made the watch-tackle fast to the mast with a rolling hitch.  I
+left Maud to pull on it while I went below.  By the light of the
+lantern I saw the butt twist slowly around till its sides coincided
+with the sides of the step.  Maud made fast and returned to the
+windlass.  Slowly the butt descended the several intervening
+inches, at the same time slightly twisting again.  Again Maud
+rectified the twist with the watch-tackle, and again she lowered
+away from the windlass.  Square fitted into square.  The mast was
+stepped.
+
+I raised a shout, and she ran down to see.  In the yellow lantern
+light we peered at what we had accomplished.  We looked at each
+other, and our hands felt their way and clasped.  The eyes of both
+of us, I think, were moist with the joy of success.
+
+"It was done so easily after all," I remarked.  "All the work was
+in the preparation."
+
+"And all the wonder in the completion," Maud added.  "I can
+scarcely bring myself to realize that that great mast is really up
+and in; that you have lifted it from the water, swung it through
+the air, and deposited it here where it belongs.  It is a Titan's
+task."
+
+"And they made themselves many inventions," I began merrily, then
+paused to sniff the air.
+
+I looked hastily at the lantern.  It was not smoking.  Again I
+sniffed.
+
+"Something is burning," Maud said, with sudden conviction.
+
+We sprang together for the ladder, but I raced past her to the
+deck.  A dense volume of smoke was pouring out of the steerage
+companion-way.
+
+"The Wolf is not yet dead," I muttered to myself as I sprang down
+through the smoke.
+
+It was so thick in the confined space that I was compelled to feel
+my way; and so potent was the spell of Wolf Larsen on my
+imagination, I was quite prepared for the helpless giant to grip my
+neck in a strangle hold.  I hesitated, the desire to race back and
+up the steps to the deck almost overpowering me.  Then I
+recollected Maud.  The vision of her, as I had last seen her, in
+the lantern light of the schooner's hold, her brown eyes warm and
+moist with joy, flashed before me, and I knew that I could not go
+back.
+
+I was choking and suffocating by the time I reached Wolf Larsen's
+bunk.  I reached my hand and felt for his.  He was lying
+motionless, but moved slightly at the touch of my hand.  I felt
+over and under his blankets.  There was no warmth, no sign of fire.
+Yet that smoke which blinded me and made me cough and gasp must
+have a source.  I lost my head temporarily and dashed frantically
+about the steerage.  A collision with the table partially knocked
+the wind from my body and brought me to myself.  I reasoned that a
+helpless man could start a fire only near to where he lay.
+
+I returned to Wolf Larsen's bunk.  There I encountered Maud.  How
+long she had been there in that suffocating atmosphere I could not
+guess.
+
+"Go up on deck!" I commanded peremptorily.
+
+"But, Humphrey--" she began to protest in a queer, husky voice.
+
+"Please! please!" I shouted at her harshly.
+
+She drew away obediently, and then I thought, What if she cannot
+find the steps?  I started after her, to stop at the foot of the
+companion-way.  Perhaps she had gone up.  As I stood there,
+hesitant, I heard her cry softly:
+
+"Oh, Humphrey, I am lost."
+
+I found her fumbling at the wall of the after bulkhead, and, half
+leading her, half carrying her, I took her up the companion-way.
+The pure air was like nectar.  Maud was only faint and dizzy, and I
+left her lying on the deck when I took my second plunge below.
+
+The source of the smoke must be very close to Wolf Larsen--my mind
+was made up to this, and I went straight to his bunk.  As I felt
+about among his blankets, something hot fell on the back of my
+hand.  It burned me, and I jerked my hand away.  Then I understood.
+Through the cracks in the bottom of the upper bunk he had set fire
+to the mattress.  He still retained sufficient use of his left arm
+to do this.  The damp straw of the mattress, fired from beneath and
+denied air, had been smouldering all the while.
+
+As I dragged the mattress out of the bunk it seemed to disintegrate
+in mid-air, at the same time bursting into flames.  I beat out the
+burning remnants of straw in the bunk, then made a dash for the
+deck for fresh air.
+
+Several buckets of water sufficed to put out the burning mattress
+in the middle of the steerage floor; and ten minutes later, when
+the smoke had fairly cleared, I allowed Maud to come below.  Wolf
+Larsen was unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the
+fresh air to restore him.  We were working over him, however, when
+he signed for paper and pencil.
+
+"Pray do not interrupt me," he wrote.  "I am smiling."
+
+"I am still a bit of the ferment, you see," he wrote a little
+later.
+
+"I am glad you are as small a bit as you are," I said.
+
+"Thank you," he wrote.  "But just think of how much smaller I shall
+be before I die."
+
+"And yet I am all here, Hump," he wrote with a final flourish.  "I
+can think more clearly than ever in my life before.  Nothing to
+disturb me.  Concentration is perfect.  I am all here and more than
+here."
+
+It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man's
+body had become his mausoleum.  And there, in so strange sepulchre,
+his spirit fluttered and lived.  It would flutter and live till the
+last line of communication was broken, and after that who was to
+say how much longer it might continue to flutter and live?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+
+"I think my left side is going," Wolf Larsen wrote, the morning
+after his attempt to fire the ship.  "The numbness is growing.  I
+can hardly move my hand.  You will have to speak louder.  The last
+lines are going down."
+
+"Are you in pain?" I asked.
+
+I was compelled to repeat my question loudly before he answered:
+
+"Not all the time."
+
+The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and
+it was with extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl.  It
+was like a "spirit message," such as are delivered at seances of
+spiritualists for a dollar admission.
+
+"But I am still here, all here," the hand scrawled more slowly and
+painfully than ever.
+
+The pencil dropped, and we had to replace it in the hand.
+
+"When there is no pain I have perfect peace and quiet.  I have
+never thought so clearly.  I can ponder life and death like a
+Hindoo sage."
+
+"And immortality?" Maud queried loudly in the ear.
+
+Three times the hand essayed to write but fumbled hopelessly.  The
+pencil fell.  In vain we tried to replace it.  The fingers could
+not close on it.  Then Maud pressed and held the fingers about the
+pencil with her own hand and the hand wrote, in large letters, and
+so slowly that the minutes ticked off to each letter:
+
+"B-O-S-H."
+
+It was Wolf Larsen's last word, "bosh," sceptical and invincible to
+the end.  The arm and hand relaxed.  The trunk of the body moved
+slightly.  Then there was no movement.  Maud released the hand.
+The fingers spread slightly, falling apart of their own weight, and
+the pencil rolled away.
+
+"Do you still hear?" I shouted, holding the fingers and waiting for
+the single pressure which would signify "Yes."  There was no
+response.  The hand was dead.
+
+"I noticed the lips slightly move," Maud said.
+
+I repeated the question.  The lips moved.  She placed the tips of
+her fingers on them.  Again I repeated the question.  "Yes," Maud
+announced.  We looked at each other expectantly.
+
+"What good is it?" I asked.  "What can we say now?"
+
+"Oh, ask him--"
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"Ask him something that requires no for an answer," I suggested.
+"Then we will know for certainty."
+
+"Are you hungry?" she cried.
+
+The lips moved under her fingers, and she answered, "Yes."
+
+"Will you have some beef?" was her next query.
+
+"No," she announced.
+
+"Beef-tea?"
+
+"Yes, he will have some beef-tea," she said, quietly, looking up at
+me.  "Until his hearing goes we shall be able to communicate with
+him.  And after that--"
+
+She looked at me queerly.  I saw her lips trembling and the tears
+swimming up in her eyes.  She swayed toward me and I caught her in
+my arms.
+
+"Oh, Humphrey," she sobbed, "when will it all end?  I am so tired,
+so tired."
+
+She buried her head on my shoulder, her frail form shaken with a
+storm of weeping.  She was like a feather in my arms, so slender,
+so ethereal.  "She has broken down at last," I thought.  "What can
+I do without her help?"
+
+But I soothed and comforted her, till she pulled herself bravely
+together and recuperated mentally as quickly as she was wont to do
+physically.
+
+"I ought to be ashamed of myself," she said.  Then added, with the
+whimsical smile I adored, "but I am only one, small woman."
+
+That phrase, the "one small woman," startled me like an electric
+shock.  It was my own phrase, my pet, secret phrase, my love phrase
+for her.
+
+"Where did you get that phrase?" I demanded, with an abruptness
+that in turn startled her.
+
+"What phrase?" she asked.
+
+"One small woman."
+
+"Is it yours?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," I answered.  "Mine.  I made it."
+
+"Then you must have talked in your sleep," she smiled.
+
+The dancing, tremulous light was in her eyes.  Mine, I knew, were
+speaking beyond the will of my speech.  I leaned toward her.
+Without volition I leaned toward her, as a tree is swayed by the
+wind.  Ah, we were very close together in that moment.  But she
+shook her head, as one might shake off sleep or a dream, saying:
+
+"I have known it all my life.  It was my father's name for my
+mother."
+
+"It is my phrase too," I said stubbornly.
+
+"For your mother?"
+
+"No," I answered, and she questioned no further, though I could
+have sworn her eyes retained for some time a mocking, teasing
+expression.
+
+With the foremast in, the work now went on apace.  Almost before I
+knew it, and without one serious hitch, I had the mainmast stepped.
+A derrick-boom, rigged to the foremast, had accomplished this; and
+several days more found all stays and shrouds in place, and
+everything set up taut.  Topsails would be a nuisance and a danger
+for a crew of two, so I heaved the topmasts on deck and lashed them
+fast.
+
+Several more days were consumed in finishing the sails and putting
+them on.  There were only three--the jib, foresail, and mainsail;
+and, patched, shortened, and distorted, they were a ridiculously
+ill-fitting suit for so trim a craft as the Ghost.
+
+"But they'll work!" Maud cried jubilantly.  "We'll make them work,
+and trust our lives to them!"
+
+Certainly, among my many new trades, I shone least as a sail-maker.
+I could sail them better than make them, and I had no doubt of my
+power to bring the schooner to some northern port of Japan.  In
+fact, I had crammed navigation from text-books aboard; and besides,
+there was Wolf Larsen's star-scale, so simple a device that a child
+could work it.
+
+As for its inventor, beyond an increasing deafness and the movement
+of the lips growing fainter and fainter, there had been little
+change in his condition for a week.  But on the day we finished
+bending the schooner's sails, he heard his last, and the last
+movement of his lips died away--but not before I had asked him,
+"Are you all there?" and the lips had answered, "Yes."
+
+The last line was down.  Somewhere within that tomb of the flesh
+still dwelt the soul of the man.  Walled by the living clay, that
+fierce intelligence we had known burned on; but it burned on in
+silence and darkness.  And it was disembodied.  To that
+intelligence there could be no objective knowledge of a body.  It
+knew no body.  The very world was not.  It knew only itself and the
+vastness and profundity of the quiet and the dark.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+
+The day came for our departure.  There was no longer anything to
+detain us on Endeavour Island.  The Ghost's stumpy masts were in
+place, her crazy sails bent.  All my handiwork was strong, none of
+it beautiful; but I knew that it would work, and I felt myself a
+man of power as I looked at it.
+
+"I did it!  I did it!  With my own hands I did it!" I wanted to cry
+aloud.
+
+But Maud and I had a way of voicing each other's thoughts, and she
+said, as we prepared to hoist the mainsail:
+
+"To think, Humphrey, you did it all with your own hands?"
+
+"But there were two other hands," I answered.  "Two small hands,
+and don't say that was a phrase, also, of your father."
+
+She laughed and shook her head, and held her hands up for
+inspection.
+
+"I can never get them clean again," she wailed, "nor soften the
+weather-beat."
+
+"Then dirt and weather-beat shall be your guerdon of honour," I
+said, holding them in mine; and, spite of my resolutions, I would
+have kissed the two dear hands had she not swiftly withdrawn them.
+
+Our comradeship was becoming tremulous, I had mastered my love long
+and well, but now it was mastering me.  Wilfully had it disobeyed
+and won my eyes to speech, and now it was winning my tongue--ay,
+and my lips, for they were mad this moment to kiss the two small
+hands which had toiled so faithfully and hard.  And I, too, was
+mad.  There was a cry in my being like bugles calling me to her.
+And there was a wind blowing upon me which I could not resist,
+swaying the very body of me till I leaned toward her, all
+unconscious that I leaned.  And she knew it.  She could not but
+know it as she swiftly drew away her hands, and yet, could not
+forbear one quick searching look before she turned away her eyes.
+
+By means of deck-tackles I had arranged to carry the halyards
+forward to the windlass; and now I hoisted the mainsail, peak and
+throat, at the same time.  It was a clumsy way, but it did not take
+long, and soon the foresail as well was up and fluttering.
+
+"We can never get that anchor up in this narrow place, once it has
+left the bottom," I said.  "We should be on the rocks first."
+
+"What can you do?" she asked.
+
+"Slip it," was my answer.  "And when I do, you must do your first
+work on the windlass.  I shall have to run at once to the wheel,
+and at the same time you must be hoisting the jib."
+
+This manoeuvre of getting under way I had studied and worked out a
+score of times; and, with the jib-halyard to the windlass, I knew
+Maud was capable of hoisting that most necessary sail.  A brisk
+wind was blowing into the cove, and though the water was calm,
+rapid work was required to get us safely out.
+
+When I knocked the shackle-bolt loose, the chain roared out through
+the hawse-hole and into the sea.  I raced aft, putting the wheel
+up.  The Ghost seemed to start into life as she heeled to the first
+fill of her sails.  The jib was rising.  As it filled, the Ghost's
+bow swung off and I had to put the wheel down a few spokes and
+steady her.
+
+I had devised an automatic jib-sheet which passed the jib across of
+itself, so there was no need for Maud to attend to that; but she
+was still hoisting the jib when I put the wheel hard down.  It was
+a moment of anxiety, for the Ghost was rushing directly upon the
+beach, a stone's throw distant.  But she swung obediently on her
+heel into the wind.  There was a great fluttering and flapping of
+canvas and reef-points, most welcome to my ears, then she filled
+away on the other tack.
+
+Maud had finished her task and come aft, where she stood beside me,
+a small cap perched on her wind-blown hair, her cheeks flushed from
+exertion, her eyes wide and bright with the excitement, her
+nostrils quivering to the rush and bite of the fresh salt air.  Her
+brown eyes were like a startled deer's.  There was a wild, keen
+look in them I had never seen before, and her lips parted and her
+breath suspended as the Ghost, charging upon the wall of rock at
+the entrance to the inner cove, swept into the wind and filled away
+into safe water.
+
+My first mate's berth on the sealing grounds stood me in good
+stead, and I cleared the inner cove and laid a long tack along the
+shore of the outer cove.  Once again about, and the Ghost headed
+out to open sea.  She had now caught the bosom-breathing of the
+ocean, and was herself a-breath with the rhythm of it as she
+smoothly mounted and slipped down each broad-backed wave.  The day
+had been dull and overcast, but the sun now burst through the
+clouds, a welcome omen, and shone upon the curving beach where
+together we had dared the lords of the harem and slain the
+holluschickie.  All Endeavour Island brightened under the sun.
+Even the grim south-western promontory showed less grim, and here
+and there, where the sea-spray wet its surface, high lights flashed
+and dazzled in the sun.
+
+"I shall always think of it with pride," I said to Maud.
+
+She threw her head back in a queenly way but said, "Dear, dear
+Endeavour Island!  I shall always love it."
+
+"And I," I said quickly.
+
+It seemed our eyes must meet in a great understanding, and yet,
+loath, they struggled away and did not meet.
+
+There was a silence I might almost call awkward, till I broke it,
+saying:
+
+"See those black clouds to windward.  You remember, I told you last
+night the barometer was falling."
+
+"And the sun is gone," she said, her eyes still fixed upon our
+island, where we had proved our mastery over matter and attained to
+the truest comradeship that may fall to man and woman.
+
+"And it's slack off the sheets for Japan!" I cried gaily.  "A fair
+wind and a flowing sheet, you know, or however it goes."
+
+Lashing the wheel I ran forward, eased the fore and mainsheets,
+took in on the boom-tackles and trimmed everything for the
+quartering breeze which was ours.  It was a fresh breeze, very
+fresh, but I resolved to run as long as I dared.  Unfortunately,
+when running free, it is impossible to lash the wheel, so I faced
+an all-night watch.  Maud insisted on relieving me, but proved that
+she had not the strength to steer in a heavy sea, even if she could
+have gained the wisdom on such short notice.  She appeared quite
+heart-broken over the discovery, but recovered her spirits by
+coiling down tackles and halyards and all stray ropes.  Then there
+were meals to be cooked in the galley, beds to make, Wolf Larsen to
+be attended upon, and she finished the day with a grand house-
+cleaning attack upon the cabin and steerage.
+
+All night I steered, without relief, the wind slowly and steadily
+increasing and the sea rising.  At five in the morning Maud brought
+me hot coffee and biscuits she had baked, and at seven a
+substantial and piping hot breakfast put new lift into me.
+
+Throughout the day, and as slowly and steadily as ever, the wind
+increased.  It impressed one with its sullen determination to blow,
+and blow harder, and keep on blowing.  And still the Ghost foamed
+along, racing off the miles till I was certain she was making at
+least eleven knots.  It was too good to lose, but by nightfall I
+was exhausted.  Though in splendid physical trim, a thirty-six-hour
+trick at the wheel was the limit of my endurance.  Besides, Maud
+begged me to heave to, and I knew, if the wind and sea increased at
+the same rate during the night, that it would soon be impossible to
+heave to.  So, as twilight deepened, gladly and at the same time
+reluctantly, I brought the Ghost up on the wind.
+
+But I had not reckoned upon the colossal task the reefing of three
+sails meant for one man.  While running away from the wind I had
+not appreciated its force, but when we ceased to run I learned to
+my sorrow, and well-nigh to my despair, how fiercely it was really
+blowing.  The wind balked my every effort, ripping the canvas out
+of my hands and in an instant undoing what I had gained by ten
+minutes of severest struggle.  At eight o'clock I had succeeded
+only in putting the second reef into the foresail.  At eleven
+o'clock I was no farther along.  Blood dripped from every finger-
+end, while the nails were broken to the quick.  From pain and sheer
+exhaustion I wept in the darkness, secretly, so that Maud should
+not know.
+
+Then, in desperation, I abandoned the attempt to reef the mainsail
+and resolved to try the experiment of heaving to under the close-
+reefed foresail.  Three hours more were required to gasket the
+mainsail and jib, and at two in the morning, nearly dead, the life
+almost buffeted and worked out of me, I had barely sufficient
+consciousness to know the experiment was a success.  The close-
+reefed foresail worked.  The Ghost clung on close to the wind and
+betrayed no inclination to fall off broadside to the trough.
+
+I was famished, but Maud tried vainly to get me to eat.  I dozed
+with my mouth full of food.  I would fall asleep in the act of
+carrying food to my mouth and waken in torment to find the act yet
+uncompleted.  So sleepily helpless was I that she was compelled to
+hold me in my chair to prevent my being flung to the floor by the
+violent pitching of the schooner.
+
+Of the passage from the galley to the cabin I knew nothing.  It was
+a sleep-walker Maud guided and supported.  In fact, I was aware of
+nothing till I awoke, how long after I could not imagine, in my
+bunk with my boots off.  It was dark.  I was stiff and lame, and
+cried out with pain when the bed-clothes touched my poor finger-
+ends.
+
+Morning had evidently not come, so I closed my eyes and went to
+sleep again.  I did not know it, but I had slept the clock around
+and it was night again.
+
+Once more I woke, troubled because I could sleep no better.  I
+struck a match and looked at my watch.  It marked midnight.  And I
+had not left the deck until three!  I should have been puzzled had
+I not guessed the solution.  No wonder I was sleeping brokenly.  I
+had slept twenty-one hours.  I listened for a while to the
+behaviour of the Ghost, to the pounding of the seas and the muffled
+roar of the wind on deck, and then turned over on my ride and slept
+peacefully until morning.
+
+When I arose at seven I saw no sign of Maud and concluded she was
+in the galley preparing breakfast.  On deck I found the Ghost doing
+splendidly under her patch of canvas.  But in the galley, though a
+fire was burning and water boiling, I found no Maud.
+
+I discovered her in the steerage, by Wolf Larsen's bunk.  I looked
+at him, the man who had been hurled down from the topmost pitch of
+life to be buried alive and be worse than dead.  There seemed a
+relaxation of his expressionless face which was new.  Maud looked
+at me and I understood.
+
+"His life flickered out in the storm," I said.
+
+"But he still lives," she answered, infinite faith in her voice.
+
+"He had too great strength."
+
+"Yes," she said, "but now it no longer shackles him.  He is a free
+spirit."
+
+"He is a free spirit surely," I answered; and, taking her hand, I
+led her on deck.
+
+The storm broke that night, which is to say that it diminished as
+slowly as it had arisen.  After breakfast next morning, when I had
+hoisted Wolf Larsen's body on deck ready for burial, it was still
+blowing heavily and a large sea was running.  The deck was
+continually awash with the sea which came inboard over the rail and
+through the scuppers.  The wind smote the schooner with a sudden
+gust, and she heeled over till her lee rail was buried, the roar in
+her rigging rising in pitch to a shriek.  We stood in the water to
+our knees as I bared my head.
+
+"I remember only one part of the service," I said, "and that is,
+'And the body shall be cast into the sea.'"
+
+Maud looked at me, surprised and shocked; but the spirit of
+something I had seen before was strong upon me, impelling me to
+give service to Wolf Larsen as Wolf Larsen had once given service
+to another man.  I lifted the end of the hatch cover and the
+canvas-shrouded body slipped feet first into the sea.  The weight
+of iron dragged it down.  It was gone.
+
+"Good-bye, Lucifer, proud spirit," Maud whispered, so low that it
+was drowned by the shouting of the wind; but I saw the movement of
+her lips and knew.
+
+As we clung to the lee rail and worked our way aft, I happened to
+glance to leeward.  The Ghost, at the moment, was uptossed on a
+sea, and I caught a clear view of a small steamship two or three
+miles away, rolling and pitching, head on to the sea, as it steamed
+toward us.  It was painted black, and from the talk of the hunters
+of their poaching exploits I recognized it as a United States
+revenue cutter.  I pointed it out to Maud and hurriedly led her aft
+to the safety of the poop.
+
+I started to rush below to the flag-locker, then remembered that in
+rigging the Ghost.  I had forgotten to make provision for a flag-
+halyard.
+
+"We need no distress signal," Maud said.  "They have only to see
+us."
+
+"We are saved," I said, soberly and solemnly.  And then, in an
+exuberance of joy, "I hardly know whether to be glad or not."
+
+I looked at her.  Our eyes were not loath to meet.  We leaned
+toward each other, and before I knew it my arms were about her.
+
+"Need I?" I asked.
+
+And she answered, "There is no need, though the telling of it would
+be sweet, so sweet."
+
+Her lips met the press of mine, and, by what strange trick of the
+imagination I know not, the scene in the cabin of the Ghost flashed
+upon me, when she had pressed her fingers lightly on my lips and
+said, "Hush, hush."
+
+"My woman, my one small woman," I said, my free hand petting her
+shoulder in the way all lovers know though never learn in school.
+
+"My man," she said, looking at me for an instant with tremulous
+lids which fluttered down and veiled her eyes as she snuggled her
+head against my breast with a happy little sigh.
+
+I looked toward the cutter.  It was very close.  A boat was being
+lowered.
+
+"One kiss, dear love," I whispered.  "One kiss more before they
+come."
+
+"And rescue us from ourselves," she completed, with a most adorable
+smile, whimsical as I had never seen it, for it was whimsical with
+love.
+
+
+
+
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+<title>The Sea Wolf</title>
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+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">The Sea Wolf, by Jack London</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sea Wolf, by Jack London
+(#11 in our series by Jack London)
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
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+Title: The Sea Wolf
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: October, 1997  [EBook #1074]
+[This file was first posted on October 15, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: June 28, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+</pre>
+<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
+<p>Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h1>The Sea Wolf</h1>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place
+the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth&rsquo;s credit.&nbsp; He kept
+a summer cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais,
+and never occupied it except when he loafed through the winter mouths
+and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest his brain.&nbsp; When summer
+came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and dusty existence in the city
+and to toil incessantly.&nbsp; Had it not been my custom to run up to
+see him every Saturday afternoon and to stop over till Monday morning,
+this particular January Monday morning would not have found me afloat
+on San Francisco Bay.</p>
+<p>Not but that I was afloat in a safe craft, for the <i>Martinez</i>
+was a new ferry-steamer, making her fourth or fifth trip on the run
+between Sausalito and San Francisco.&nbsp; The danger lay in the heavy
+fog which blanketed the bay, and of which, as a landsman, I had little
+apprehension.&nbsp; In fact, I remember the placid exaltation with which
+I took up my position on the forward upper deck, directly beneath the
+pilot-house, and allowed the mystery of the fog to lay hold of my imagination.&nbsp;
+A fresh breeze was blowing, and for a time I was alone in the moist
+obscurity&mdash;yet not alone, for I was dimly conscious of the presence
+of the pilot, and of what I took to be the captain, in the glass house
+above my head.</p>
+<p>I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labour
+which made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation,
+in order to visit my friend who lived across an arm of the sea.&nbsp;
+It was good that men should be specialists, I mused.&nbsp; The peculiar
+knowledge of the pilot and captain sufficed for many thousands of people
+who knew no more of the sea and navigation than I knew.&nbsp; On the
+other hand, instead of having to devote my energy to the learning of
+a multitude of things, I concentrated it upon a few particular things,
+such as, for instance, the analysis of Poe&rsquo;s place in American
+literature&mdash;an essay of mine, by the way, in the current <i>Atlantic</i>.&nbsp;
+Coming aboard, as I passed through the cabin, I had noticed with greedy
+eyes a stout gentleman reading the <i>Atlantic</i>, which was open at
+my very essay.&nbsp; And there it was again, the division of labour,
+the special knowledge of the pilot and captain which permitted the stout
+gentleman to read my special knowledge on Poe while they carried him
+safely from Sausalito to San Francisco.</p>
+<p>A red-faced man, slamming the cabin door behind him and stumping
+out on the deck, interrupted my reflections, though I made a mental
+note of the topic for use in a projected essay which I had thought of
+calling &ldquo;The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The red-faced man shot a glance up at the pilot-house, gazed around
+at the fog, stumped across the deck and back (he evidently had artificial
+legs), and stood still by my side, legs wide apart, and with an expression
+of keen enjoyment on his face.&nbsp; I was not wrong when I decided
+that his days had been spent on the sea.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s nasty weather like this here that turns heads grey
+before their time,&rdquo; he said, with a nod toward the pilot-house.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had not thought there was any particular strain,&rdquo;
+I answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;It seems as simple as A, B, C.&nbsp; They know
+the direction by compass, the distance, and the speed.&nbsp; I should
+not call it anything more than mathematical certainty.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Strain!&rdquo; he snorted.&nbsp; &ldquo;Simple as A, B, C!&nbsp;
+Mathematical certainty!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He seemed to brace himself up and lean backward against the air as
+he stared at me.&nbsp; &ldquo;How about this here tide that&rsquo;s
+rushin&rsquo; out through the Golden Gate?&rdquo; he demanded, or bellowed,
+rather.&nbsp; &ldquo;How fast is she ebbin&rsquo;?&nbsp; What&rsquo;s
+the drift, eh?&nbsp; Listen to that, will you?&nbsp; A bell-buoy, and
+we&rsquo;re a-top of it!&nbsp; See &rsquo;em alterin&rsquo; the course!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>From out of the fog came the mournful tolling of a bell, and I could
+see the pilot turning the wheel with great rapidity.&nbsp; The bell,
+which had seemed straight ahead, was now sounding from the side.&nbsp;
+Our own whistle was blowing hoarsely, and from time to time the sound
+of other whistles came to us from out of the fog.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a ferry-boat of some sort,&rdquo; the new-comer
+said, indicating a whistle off to the right.&nbsp; &ldquo;And there!&nbsp;
+D&rsquo;ye hear that?&nbsp; Blown by mouth.&nbsp; Some scow schooner,
+most likely.&nbsp; Better watch out, Mr. Schooner-man.&nbsp; Ah, I thought
+so.&nbsp; Now hell&rsquo;s a poppin&rsquo; for somebody!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The unseen ferry-boat was blowing blast after blast, and the mouth-blown
+horn was tooting in terror-stricken fashion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now they&rsquo;re payin&rsquo; their respects to each
+other and tryin&rsquo; to get clear,&rdquo; the red-faced man went on,
+as the hurried whistling ceased.</p>
+<p>His face was shining, his eyes flashing with excitement as he translated
+into articulate language the speech of the horns and sirens.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
+a steam-siren a-goin&rsquo; it over there to the left.&nbsp; And you
+hear that fellow with a frog in his throat&mdash;a steam schooner as
+near as I can judge, crawlin&rsquo; in from the Heads against the tide.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A shrill little whistle, piping as if gone mad, came from directly
+ahead and from very near at hand.&nbsp; Gongs sounded on the <i>Martinez</i>.&nbsp;
+Our paddle-wheels stopped, their pulsing beat died away, and then they
+started again.&nbsp; The shrill little whistle, like the chirping of
+a cricket amid the cries of great beasts, shot through the fog from
+more to the side and swiftly grew faint and fainter.&nbsp; I looked
+to my companion for enlightenment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One of them dare-devil launches,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+almost wish we&rsquo;d sunk him, the little rip!&nbsp; They&rsquo;re
+the cause of more trouble.&nbsp; And what good are they?&nbsp; Any jackass
+gets aboard one and runs it from hell to breakfast, blowin&rsquo; his
+whistle to beat the band and tellin&rsquo; the rest of the world to
+look out for him, because he&rsquo;s comin&rsquo; and can&rsquo;t look
+out for himself!&nbsp; Because he&rsquo;s comin&rsquo;!&nbsp; And you&rsquo;ve
+got to look out, too!&nbsp; Right of way!&nbsp; Common decency!&nbsp;
+They don&rsquo;t know the meanin&rsquo; of it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I felt quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he stumped
+indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog.&nbsp;
+And romantic it certainly was&mdash;the fog, like the grey shadow of
+infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men,
+mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work,
+riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery,
+groping their way blindly through the Unseen, and clamouring and clanging
+in confident speech the while their hearts are heavy with incertitude
+and fear.</p>
+<p>The voice of my companion brought me back to myself with a laugh.&nbsp;
+I too had been groping and floundering, the while I thought I rode clear-eyed
+through the mystery.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hello! somebody comin&rsquo; our way,&rdquo; he was saying.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And d&rsquo;ye hear that?&nbsp; He&rsquo;s comin&rsquo; fast.&nbsp;
+Walking right along.&nbsp; Guess he don&rsquo;t hear us yet.&nbsp; Wind&rsquo;s
+in wrong direction.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The fresh breeze was blowing right down upon us, and I could hear
+the whistle plainly, off to one side and a little ahead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ferry-boat?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>He nodded, then added, &ldquo;Or he wouldn&rsquo;t be keepin&rsquo;
+up such a clip.&rdquo;&nbsp; He gave a short chuckle.&nbsp; &ldquo;They&rsquo;re
+gettin&rsquo; anxious up there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I glanced up.&nbsp; The captain had thrust his head and shoulders
+out of the pilot-house, and was staring intently into the fog as though
+by sheer force of will he could penetrate it.&nbsp; His face was anxious,
+as was the face of my companion, who had stumped over to the rail and
+was gazing with a like intentness in the direction of the invisible
+danger.</p>
+<p>Then everything happened, and with inconceivable rapidity.&nbsp;
+The fog seemed to break away as though split by a wedge, and the bow
+of a steamboat emerged, trailing fog-wreaths on either side like seaweed
+on the snout of Leviathan.&nbsp; I could see the pilot-house and a white-bearded
+man leaning partly out of it, on his elbows.&nbsp; He was clad in a
+blue uniform, and I remember noting how trim and quiet he was.&nbsp;
+His quietness, under the circumstances, was terrible.&nbsp; He accepted
+Destiny, marched hand in hand with it, and coolly measured the stroke.&nbsp;
+As he leaned there, he ran a calm and speculative eye over us, as though
+to determine the precise point of the collision, and took no notice
+whatever when our pilot, white with rage, shouted, &ldquo;Now you&rsquo;ve
+done it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>On looking back, I realize that the remark was too obvious to make
+rejoinder necessary.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Grab hold of something and hang on,&rdquo; the red-faced man
+said to me.&nbsp; All his bluster had gone, and he seemed to have caught
+the contagion of preternatural calm.&nbsp; &ldquo;And listen to the
+women scream,&rdquo; he said grimly&mdash;almost bitterly, I thought,
+as though he had been through the experience before.</p>
+<p>The vessels came together before I could follow his advice.&nbsp;
+We must have been struck squarely amidships, for I saw nothing, the
+strange steamboat having passed beyond my line of vision.&nbsp; The
+<i>Martinez</i> heeled over, sharply, and there was a crashing and rending
+of timber.&nbsp; I was thrown flat on the wet deck, and before I could
+scramble to my feet I heard the scream of the women.&nbsp; This it was,
+I am certain,&mdash;the most indescribable of blood-curdling sounds,&mdash;that
+threw me into a panic.&nbsp; I remembered the life-preservers stored
+in the cabin, but was met at the door and swept backward by a wild rush
+of men and women.&nbsp; What happened in the next few minutes I do not
+recollect, though I have a clear remembrance of pulling down life-preservers
+from the overhead racks, while the red-faced man fastened them about
+the bodies of an hysterical group of women.&nbsp; This memory is as
+distinct and sharp as that of any picture I have seen.&nbsp; It is a
+picture, and I can see it now,&mdash;the jagged edges of the hole in
+the side of the cabin, through which the grey fog swirled and eddied;
+the empty upholstered seats, littered with all the evidences of sudden
+flight, such as packages, hand satchels, umbrellas, and wraps; the stout
+gentleman who had been reading my essay, encased in cork and canvas,
+the magazine still in his hand, and asking me with monotonous insistence
+if I thought there was any danger; the red-faced man, stumping gallantly
+around on his artificial legs and buckling life-preservers on all corners;
+and finally, the screaming bedlam of women.</p>
+<p>This it was, the screaming of the women, that most tried my nerves.&nbsp;
+It must have tried, too, the nerves of the red-faced man, for I have
+another picture which will never fade from my mind.&nbsp; The stout
+gentleman is stuffing the magazine into his overcoat pocket and looking
+on curiously.&nbsp; A tangled mass of women, with drawn, white faces
+and open mouths, is shrieking like a chorus of lost souls; and the red-faced
+man, his face now purplish with wrath, and with arms extended overhead
+as in the act of hurling thunderbolts, is shouting, &ldquo;Shut up!&nbsp;
+Oh, shut up!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I remember the scene impelled me to sudden laughter, and in the next
+instant I realized I was becoming hysterical myself; for these were
+women of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, with the fear of death
+upon them and unwilling to die.&nbsp; And I remember that the sounds
+they made reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the knife of the
+butcher, and I was struck with horror at the vividness of the analogy.&nbsp;
+These women, capable of the most sublime emotions, of the tenderest
+sympathies, were open-mouthed and screaming.&nbsp; They wanted to live,
+they were helpless, like rats in a trap, and they screamed.</p>
+<p>The horror of it drove me out on deck.&nbsp; I was feeling sick and
+squeamish, and sat down on a bench.&nbsp; In a hazy way I saw and heard
+men rushing and shouting as they strove to lower the boats.&nbsp; It
+was just as I had read descriptions of such scenes in books.&nbsp; The
+tackles jammed.&nbsp; Nothing worked.&nbsp; One boat lowered away with
+the plugs out, filled with women and children and then with water, and
+capsized.&nbsp; Another boat had been lowered by one end, and still
+hung in the tackle by the other end, where it had been abandoned.&nbsp;
+Nothing was to be seen of the strange steamboat which had caused the
+disaster, though I heard men saying that she would undoubtedly send
+boats to our assistance.</p>
+<p>I descended to the lower deck.&nbsp; The <i>Martinez</i> was sinking
+fast, for the water was very near.&nbsp; Numbers of the passengers were
+leaping overboard.&nbsp; Others, in the water, were clamouring to be
+taken aboard again.&nbsp; No one heeded them.&nbsp; A cry arose that
+we were sinking.&nbsp; I was seized by the consequent panic, and went
+over the side in a surge of bodies.&nbsp; How I went over I do not know,
+though I did know, and instantly, why those in the water were so desirous
+of getting back on the steamer.&nbsp; The water was cold&mdash;so cold
+that it was painful.&nbsp; The pang, as I plunged into it, was as quick
+and sharp as that of fire.&nbsp; It bit to the marrow.&nbsp; It was
+like the grip of death.&nbsp; I gasped with the anguish and shock of
+it, filling my lungs before the life-preserver popped me to the surface.&nbsp;
+The taste of the salt was strong in my mouth, and I was strangling with
+the acrid stuff in my throat and lungs.</p>
+<p>But it was the cold that was most distressing.&nbsp; I felt that
+I could survive but a few minutes.&nbsp; People were struggling and
+floundering in the water about me.&nbsp; I could hear them crying out
+to one another.&nbsp; And I heard, also, the sound of oars.&nbsp; Evidently
+the strange steamboat had lowered its boats.&nbsp; As the time went
+by I marvelled that I was still alive.&nbsp; I had no sensation whatever
+in my lower limbs, while a chilling numbness was wrapping about my heart
+and creeping into it.&nbsp; Small waves, with spiteful foaming crests,
+continually broke over me and into my mouth, sending me off into more
+strangling paroxysms.</p>
+<p>The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing
+chorus of screams in the distance, and knew that the <i>Martinez</i>
+had gone down.&nbsp; Later,&mdash;how much later I have no knowledge,&mdash;I
+came to myself with a start of fear.&nbsp; I was alone.&nbsp; I could
+hear no calls or cries&mdash;only the sound of the waves, made weirdly
+hollow and reverberant by the fog.&nbsp; A panic in a crowd, which partakes
+of a sort of community of interest, is not so terrible as a panic when
+one is by oneself; and such a panic I now suffered.&nbsp; Whither was
+I drifting?&nbsp; The red-faced man had said that the tide was ebbing
+through the Golden Gate.&nbsp; Was I, then, being carried out to sea?&nbsp;
+And the life-preserver in which I floated?&nbsp; Was it not liable to
+go to pieces at any moment?&nbsp; I had heard of such things being made
+of paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all
+buoyancy.&nbsp; And I could not swim a stroke.&nbsp; And I was alone,
+floating, apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness.&nbsp;
+I confess that a madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the women
+had shrieked, and beat the water with my numb hands.</p>
+<p>How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness intervened,
+of which I remember no more than one remembers of troubled and painful
+sleep.&nbsp; When I aroused, it was as after centuries of time; and
+I saw, almost above me and emerging from the fog, the bow of a vessel,
+and three triangular sails, each shrewdly lapping the other and filled
+with wind.&nbsp; Where the bow cut the water there was a great foaming
+and gurgling, and I seemed directly in its path.&nbsp; I tried to cry
+out, but was too exhausted.&nbsp; The bow plunged down, just missing
+me and sending a swash of water clear over my head.&nbsp; Then the long,
+black side of the vessel began slipping past, so near that I could have
+touched it with my hands.&nbsp; I tried to reach it, in a mad resolve
+to claw into the wood with my nails, but my arms were heavy and lifeless.&nbsp;
+Again I strove to call out, but made no sound.</p>
+<p>The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a hollow
+between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing at the wheel,
+and of another man who seemed to be doing little else than smoke a cigar.&nbsp;
+I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he slowly turned his head and
+glanced out over the water in my direction.&nbsp; It was a careless,
+unpremeditated glance, one of those haphazard things men do when they
+have no immediate call to do anything in particular, but act because
+they are alive and must do something.</p>
+<p>But life and death were in that glance.&nbsp; I could see the vessel
+being swallowed up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the wheel,
+and the head of the other man turning, slowly turning, as his gaze struck
+the water and casually lifted along it toward me.&nbsp; His face wore
+an absent expression, as of deep thought, and I became afraid that if
+his eyes did light upon me he would nevertheless not see me.&nbsp; But
+his eyes did light upon me, and looked squarely into mine; and he did
+see me, for he sprang to the wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and
+whirled it round and round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting
+orders of some sort.&nbsp; The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent
+to its former course and leapt almost instantly from view into the fog.</p>
+<p>I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the
+power of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and darkness
+that was rising around me.&nbsp; A little later I heard the stroke of
+oars, growing nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man.&nbsp; When
+he was very near I heard him crying, in vexed fashion, &ldquo;Why in
+hell don&rsquo;t you sing out?&rdquo;&nbsp; This meant me, I thought,
+and then the blankness and darkness rose over me.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.&nbsp;
+Sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me.&nbsp; They were
+stars, I knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the
+suns.&nbsp; As I reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush
+back on the counter swing, a great gong struck and thundered.&nbsp;
+For an immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries,
+I enjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.</p>
+<p>But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told
+myself it must be.&nbsp; My rhythm grew shorter and shorter.&nbsp; I
+was jerked from swing to counter swing with irritating haste.&nbsp;
+I could scarcely catch my breath, so fiercely was I impelled through
+the heavens.&nbsp; The gong thundered more frequently and more furiously.&nbsp;
+I grew to await it with a nameless dread.&nbsp; Then it seemed as though
+I were being dragged over rasping sands, white and hot in the sun.&nbsp;
+This gave place to a sense of intolerable anguish.&nbsp; My skin was
+scorching in the torment of fire.&nbsp; The gong clanged and knelled.&nbsp;
+The sparkling points of light flashed past me in an interminable stream,
+as though the whole sidereal system were dropping into the void.&nbsp;
+I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened my eyes.&nbsp; Two
+men were kneeling beside me, working over me.&nbsp; My mighty rhythm
+was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea.&nbsp; The terrific
+gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and clattered
+with each leap of the ship.&nbsp; The rasping, scorching sands were
+a man&rsquo;s hard hands chafing my naked chest.&nbsp; I squirmed under
+the pain of it, and half lifted my head.&nbsp; My chest was raw and
+red, and I could see tiny blood globules starting through the torn and
+inflamed cuticle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll do, Yonson,&rdquo; one of the men said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Carn&rsquo;t yer see you&rsquo;ve bloomin&rsquo; well rubbed
+all the gent&rsquo;s skin orf?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type,
+ceased chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet.&nbsp; The man who
+had spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly
+pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound
+of Bow Bells with his mother&rsquo;s milk.&nbsp; A draggled muslin cap
+on his head and a dirty gunny-sack about his slim hips proclaimed him
+cook of the decidedly dirty ship&rsquo;s galley in which I found myself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; &rsquo;ow yer feelin&rsquo; now, sir?&rdquo; he
+asked, with the subservient smirk which comes only of generations of
+tip-seeking ancestors.</p>
+<p>For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped
+by Yonson to my feet.&nbsp; The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was
+grating horribly on my nerves.&nbsp; I could not collect my thoughts.&nbsp;
+Clutching the woodwork of the galley for support,&mdash;and I confess
+the grease with which it was scummed put my teeth on edge,&mdash;I reached
+across a hot cooking-range to the offending utensil, unhooked it, and
+wedged it securely into the coal-box.</p>
+<p>The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my hand
+a steaming mug with an &ldquo;&rsquo;Ere, this&rsquo;ll do yer good.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It was a nauseous mess,&mdash;ship&rsquo;s coffee,&mdash;but the heat
+of it was revivifying.&nbsp; Between gulps of the molten stuff I glanced
+down at my raw and bleeding chest and turned to the Scandinavian.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you, Mr. Yonson,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;but don&rsquo;t
+you think your measures were rather heroic?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than
+of my words, that he held up his palm for inspection.&nbsp; It was remarkably
+calloused.&nbsp; I passed my hand over the horny projections, and my
+teeth went on edge once more from the horrible rasping sensation produced.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My name is Johnson, not Yonson,&rdquo; he said, in very good,
+though slow, English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.</p>
+<p>There was mild protest in his pale blue eyes, and withal a timid
+frankness and manliness that quite won me to him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you, Mr. Johnson,&rdquo; I corrected, and reached out
+my hand for his.</p>
+<p>He hesitated, awkward and bashful, shifted his weight from one leg
+to the other, then blunderingly gripped my hand in a hearty shake.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you any dry clothes I may put on?&rdquo; I asked the
+cook.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; he answered, with cheerful alacrity.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll run down an&rsquo; tyke a look over my kit, if you&rsquo;ve
+no objections, sir, to wearin&rsquo; my things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He dived out of the galley door, or glided rather, with a swiftness
+and smoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like
+as oily.&nbsp; In fact, this oiliness, or greasiness, as I was later
+to learn, was probably the most salient expression of his personality.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And where am I?&rdquo; I asked Johnson, whom I took, and rightly,
+to be one of the sailors.&nbsp; &ldquo;What vessel is this, and where
+is she bound?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Off the Farallones, heading about sou-west,&rdquo; he answered,
+slowly and methodically, as though groping for his best English, and
+rigidly observing the order of my queries.&nbsp; &ldquo;The schooner
+<i>Ghost</i>, bound seal-hunting to Japan.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And who is the captain?&nbsp; I must see him as soon as I
+am dressed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Johnson looked puzzled and embarrassed.&nbsp; He hesitated while
+he groped in his vocabulary and framed a complete answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+cap&rsquo;n is Wolf Larsen, or so men call him.&nbsp; I never heard
+his other name.&nbsp; But you better speak soft with him.&nbsp; He is
+mad this morning.&nbsp; The mate&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But he did not finish.&nbsp; The cook had glided in.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better sling yer &rsquo;ook out of &rsquo;ere, Yonson,&rdquo;
+he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;The old man&rsquo;ll be wantin&rsquo; yer on deck,
+an&rsquo; this ayn&rsquo;t no d&rsquo;y to fall foul of &rsquo;im.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Johnson turned obediently to the door, at the same time, over the
+cook&rsquo;s shoulder, favouring me with an amazingly solemn and portentous
+wink as though to emphasize his interrupted remark and the need for
+me to be soft-spoken with the captain.</p>
+<p>Hanging over the cook&rsquo;s arm was a loose and crumpled array
+of evil-looking and sour-smelling garments.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They was put aw&rsquo;y wet, sir,&rdquo; he vouchsafed explanation.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ll &rsquo;ave to make them do till I dry yours
+out by the fire.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Clinging to the woodwork, staggering with the roll of the ship, and
+aided by the cook, I managed to slip into a rough woollen undershirt.&nbsp;
+On the instant my flesh was creeping and crawling from the harsh contact.&nbsp;
+He noticed my involuntary twitching and grimacing, and smirked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I only &rsquo;ope yer don&rsquo;t ever &rsquo;ave to get used
+to such as that in this life, &rsquo;cos you&rsquo;ve got a bloomin&rsquo;
+soft skin, that you &rsquo;ave, more like a lydy&rsquo;s than any I
+know of.&nbsp; I was bloomin&rsquo; well sure you was a gentleman as
+soon as I set eyes on yer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had taken a dislike to him at first, and as he helped to dress
+me this dislike increased.&nbsp; There was something repulsive about
+his touch.&nbsp; I shrank from his hand; my flesh revolted.&nbsp; And
+between this and the smells arising from various pots boiling and bubbling
+on the galley fire, I was in haste to get out into the fresh air.&nbsp;
+Further, there was the need of seeing the captain about what arrangements
+could be made for getting me ashore.</p>
+<p>A cheap cotton shirt, with frayed collar and a bosom discoloured
+with what I took to be ancient blood-stains, was put on me amid a running
+and apologetic fire of comment.&nbsp; A pair of workman&rsquo;s brogans
+encased my feet, and for trousers I was furnished with a pair of pale
+blue, washed-out overalls, one leg of which was fully ten inches shorter
+than the other.&nbsp; The abbreviated leg looked as though the devil
+had there clutched for the Cockney&rsquo;s soul and missed the shadow
+for the substance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And whom have I to thank for this kindness?&rdquo; I asked,
+when I stood completely arrayed, a tiny boy&rsquo;s cap on my head,
+and for coat a dirty, striped cotton jacket which ended at the small
+of my back and the sleeves of which reached just below my elbows.</p>
+<p>The cook drew himself up in a smugly humble fashion, a deprecating
+smirk on his face.&nbsp; Out of my experience with stewards on the Atlantic
+liners at the end of the voyage, I could have sworn he was waiting for
+his tip.&nbsp; From my fuller knowledge of the creature I now know that
+the posture was unconscious.&nbsp; An hereditary servility, no doubt,
+was responsible.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mugridge, sir,&rdquo; he fawned, his effeminate features running
+into a greasy smile.&nbsp; &ldquo;Thomas Mugridge, sir, an&rsquo; at
+yer service.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right, Thomas,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I shall not
+forget you&mdash;when my clothes are dry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A soft light suffused his face and his eyes glistened, as though
+somewhere in the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and
+stirred with dim memories of tips received in former lives.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you, sir,&rdquo; he said, very gratefully and very humbly
+indeed.</p>
+<p>Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and
+I stepped out on deck.&nbsp; I was still weak from my prolonged immersion.&nbsp;
+A puff of wind caught me,&mdash;and I staggered across the moving deck
+to a corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support.&nbsp; The schooner,
+heeled over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing and plunging
+into the long Pacific roll.&nbsp; If she were heading south-west as
+Johnson had said, the wind, then, I calculated, was blowing nearly from
+the south.&nbsp; The fog was gone, and in its place the sun sparkled
+crisply on the surface of the water, I turned to the east, where I knew
+California must lie, but could see nothing save low-lying fog-banks&mdash;the
+same fog, doubtless, that had brought about the disaster to the <i>Martinez</i>
+and placed me in my present situation.&nbsp; To the north, and not far
+away, a group of naked rocks thrust above the sea, on one of which I
+could distinguish a lighthouse.&nbsp; In the south-west, and almost
+in our course, I saw the pyramidal loom of some vessel&rsquo;s sails.</p>
+<p>Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more immediate
+surroundings.&nbsp; My first thought was that a man who had come through
+a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than
+I received.&nbsp; Beyond a sailor at the wheel who stared curiously
+across the top of the cabin, I attracted no notice whatever.</p>
+<p>Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships.&nbsp;
+There, on a hatch, a large man was lying on his back.&nbsp; He was fully
+clothed, though his shirt was ripped open in front.&nbsp; Nothing was
+to be seen of his chest, however, for it was covered with a mass of
+black hair, in appearance like the furry coat of a dog.&nbsp; His face
+and neck were hidden beneath a black beard, intershot with grey, which
+would have been stiff and bushy had it not been limp and draggled and
+dripping with water.&nbsp; His eyes were closed, and he was apparently
+unconscious; but his mouth was wide open, his breast, heaving as though
+from suffocation as he laboured noisily for breath.&nbsp; A sailor,
+from time to time and quite methodically, as a matter of routine, dropped
+a canvas bucket into the ocean at the end of a rope, hauled it in hand
+under hand, and sluiced its contents over the prostrate man.</p>
+<p>Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely chewing
+the end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had rescued me from
+the sea.&nbsp; His height was probably five feet ten inches, or ten
+and a half; but my first impression, or feel of the man, was not of
+this, but of his strength.&nbsp; And yet, while he was of massive build,
+with broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not characterize his strength
+as massive.&nbsp; It was what might be termed a sinewy, knotty strength,
+of the kind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but which, in him, because
+of his heavy build, partook more of the enlarged gorilla order.&nbsp;
+Not that in appearance he seemed in the least gorilla-like.&nbsp; What
+I am striving to express is this strength itself, more as a thing apart
+from his physical semblance.&nbsp; It was a strength we are wont to
+associate with things primitive, with wild animals, and the creatures
+we imagine our tree-dwelling prototypes to have been&mdash;a strength
+savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essence of life in that it is
+the potency of motion, the elemental stuff itself out of which the many
+forms of life have been moulded; in short, that which writhes in the
+body of a snake when the head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake,
+is dead, or which lingers in the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils
+and quivers from the prod of a finger.</p>
+<p>Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who
+paced up and down.&nbsp; He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet
+struck the deck squarely and with surety; every movement of a muscle,
+from the heave of the shoulders to the tightening of the lips about
+the cigar, was decisive, and seemed to come out of a strength that was
+excessive and overwhelming.&nbsp; In fact, though this strength pervaded
+every action of his, it seemed but the advertisement of a greater strength
+that lurked within, that lay dormant and no more than stirred from time
+to time, but which might arouse, at any moment, terrible and compelling,
+like the rage of a lion or the wrath of a storm.</p>
+<p>The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned encouragingly
+at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the direction of the man
+who paced up and down by the hatchway.&nbsp; Thus I was given to understand
+that he was the captain, the &ldquo;Old Man,&rdquo; in the cook&rsquo;s
+vernacular, the individual whom I must interview and put to the trouble
+of somehow getting me ashore.&nbsp; I had half started forward, to get
+over with what I was certain would be a stormy five minutes, when a
+more violent suffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate person who
+was lying on his back.&nbsp; He wrenched and writhed about convulsively.&nbsp;
+The chin, with the damp black beard, pointed higher in the air as the
+back muscles stiffened and the chest swelled in an unconscious and instinctive
+effort to get more air.&nbsp; Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I
+knew that the skin was taking on a purplish hue.</p>
+<p>The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and
+gazed down at the dying man.&nbsp; So fierce had this final struggle
+become that the sailor paused in the act of flinging more water over
+him and stared curiously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and dripping
+its contents to the deck.&nbsp; The dying man beat a tattoo on the hatch
+with his heels, straightened out his legs, and stiffened in one great
+tense effort, and rolled his head from side to side.&nbsp; Then the
+muscles relaxed, the head stopped rolling, and a sigh, as of profound
+relief, floated upward from his lips.&nbsp; The jaw dropped, the upper
+lip lifted, and two rows of tobacco-discoloured teeth appeared.&nbsp;
+It seemed as though his features had frozen into a diabolical grin at
+the world he had left and outwitted.</p>
+<p>Then a most surprising thing occurred.&nbsp; The captain broke loose
+upon the dead man like a thunderclap.&nbsp; Oaths rolled from his lips
+in a continuous stream.&nbsp; And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or
+mere expressions of indecency.&nbsp; Each word was a blasphemy, and
+there were many words.&nbsp; They crisped and crackled like electric
+sparks.&nbsp; I had never heard anything like it in my life, nor could
+I have conceived it possible.&nbsp; With a turn for literary expression
+myself, and a penchant for forcible figures and phrases, I appreciated,
+as no other listener, I dare say, the peculiar vividness and strength
+and absolute blasphemy of his metaphors.&nbsp; The cause of it all,
+as near as I could make out, was that the man, who was mate, had gone
+on a debauch before leaving San Francisco, and then had the poor taste
+to die at the beginning of the voyage and leave Wolf Larsen short-handed.</p>
+<p>It should be unnecessary to state, at least to my friends, that I
+was shocked.&nbsp; Oaths and vile language of any sort had always been
+repellent to me.&nbsp; I felt a wilting sensation, a sinking at the
+heart, and, I might just as well say, a giddiness.&nbsp; To me, death
+had always been invested with solemnity and dignity.&nbsp; It had been
+peaceful in its occurrence, sacred in its ceremonial.&nbsp; But death
+in its more sordid and terrible aspects was a thing with which I had
+been unacquainted till now.&nbsp; As I say, while I appreciated the
+power of the terrific denunciation that swept out of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked.&nbsp; The scorching torrent was
+enough to wither the face of the corpse.&nbsp; I should not have been
+surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled and flared
+up in smoke and flame.&nbsp; But the dead man was unconcerned.&nbsp;
+He continued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery
+and defiance.&nbsp; He was master of the situation.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Wolf Larsen ceased swearing as suddenly as he had begun.&nbsp; He
+relighted his cigar and glanced around.&nbsp; His eyes chanced upon
+the cook.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Cooky?&rdquo; he began, with a suaveness that was cold
+and of the temper of steel.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; the cook eagerly interpolated, with appeasing
+and apologetic servility.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think you&rsquo;ve stretched that neck of
+yours just about enough?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s unhealthy, you know.&nbsp;
+The mate&rsquo;s gone, so I can&rsquo;t afford to lose you too.&nbsp;
+You must be very, very careful of your health, Cooky.&nbsp; Understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His last word, in striking contrast with the smoothness of his previous
+utterance, snapped like the lash of a whip.&nbsp; The cook quailed under
+it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; was the meek reply, as the offending head
+disappeared into the galley.</p>
+<p>At this sweeping rebuke, which the cook had only pointed, the rest
+of the crew became uninterested and fell to work at one task or another.&nbsp;
+A number of men, however, who were lounging about a companion-way between
+the galley and hatch, and who did not seem to be sailors, continued
+talking in low tones with one another.&nbsp; These, I afterward learned,
+were the hunters, the men who shot the seals, and a very superior breed
+to common sailor-folk.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Johansen!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called out.&nbsp; A sailor stepped
+forward obediently.&nbsp; &ldquo;Get your palm and needle and sew the
+beggar up.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll find some old canvas in the sail-locker.&nbsp;
+Make it do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;ll I put on his feet, sir?&rdquo; the man asked,
+after the customary &ldquo;Ay, ay, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll see to that,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen answered, and
+elevated his voice in a call of &ldquo;Cooky!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thomas Mugridge popped out of his galley like a jack-in-the-box.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go below and fill a sack with coal.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Any of you fellows got a Bible or Prayer-book?&rdquo; was
+the captain&rsquo;s next demand, this time of the hunters lounging about
+the companion-way.</p>
+<p>They shook their heads, and some one made a jocular remark which
+I did not catch, but which raised a general laugh.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen made the same demand of the sailors.&nbsp; Bibles and
+Prayer-books seemed scarce articles, but one of the men volunteered
+to pursue the quest amongst the watch below, returning in a minute with
+the information that there was none.</p>
+<p>The captain shrugged his shoulders.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then we&rsquo;ll
+drop him over without any palavering, unless our clerical-looking castaway
+has the burial service at sea by heart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>By this time he had swung fully around and was facing me.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;re
+a preacher, aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>The hunters,&mdash;there were six of them,&mdash;to a man, turned
+and regarded me.&nbsp; I was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow.&nbsp;
+A laugh went up at my appearance,&mdash;a laugh that was not lessened
+or softened by the dead man stretched and grinning on the deck before
+us; a laugh that was as rough and harsh and frank as the sea itself;
+that arose out of coarse feelings and blunted sensibilities, from natures
+that knew neither courtesy nor gentleness.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his grey eyes lighted with a slight
+glint of amusement; and in that moment, having stepped forward quite
+close to him, I received my first impression of the man himself, of
+the man as apart from his body, and from the torrent of blasphemy I
+had heard him spew forth.&nbsp; The face, with large features and strong
+lines, of the square order, yet well filled out, was apparently massive
+at first sight; but again, as with the body, the massiveness seemed
+to vanish, and a conviction to grow of a tremendous and excessive mental
+or spiritual strength that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps of his
+being.&nbsp; The jaw, the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and
+swelling heavily above the eyes,&mdash;these, while strong in themselves,
+unusually strong, seemed to speak an immense vigour or virility of spirit
+that lay behind and beyond and out of sight.&nbsp; There was no sounding
+such a spirit, no measuring, no determining of metes and bounds, nor
+neatly classifying in some pigeon-hole with others of similar type.</p>
+<p>The eyes&mdash;and it was my destiny to know them well&mdash;were
+large and handsome, wide apart as the true artist&rsquo;s are wide,
+sheltering under a heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows.&nbsp;
+The eyes themselves were of that baffling protean grey which is never
+twice the same; which runs through many shades and colourings like intershot
+silk in sunshine; which is grey, dark and light, and greenish-grey,
+and sometimes of the clear azure of the deep sea.&nbsp; They were eyes
+that masked the soul with a thousand guises, and that sometimes opened,
+at rare moments, and allowed it to rush up as though it were about to
+fare forth nakedly into the world on some wonderful adventure,&mdash;eyes
+that could brood with the hopeless sombreness of leaden skies; that
+could snap and crackle points of fire like those which sparkle from
+a whirling sword; that could grow chill as an arctic landscape, and
+yet again, that could warm and soften and be all a-dance with love-lights,
+intense and masculine, luring and compelling, which at the same time
+fascinate and dominate women till they surrender in a gladness of joy
+and of relief and sacrifice.</p>
+<p>But to return.&nbsp; I told him that, unhappily for the burial service,
+I was not a preacher, when he sharply demanded:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you do for a living?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had
+I ever canvassed it.&nbsp; I was quite taken aback, and before I could
+find myself had sillily stammered, &ldquo;I&mdash;I am a gentleman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His lip curled in a swift sneer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have worked, I do work,&rdquo; I cried impetuously, as though
+he were my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very
+much aware of my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For your living?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I
+was quite beside myself&mdash;&ldquo;rattled,&rdquo; as Furuseth would
+have termed it, like a quaking child before a stern school-master.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who feeds you?&rdquo; was his next question.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have an income,&rdquo; I answered stoutly, and could have
+bitten my tongue the next instant.&nbsp; &ldquo;All of which, you will
+pardon my observing, has nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to
+see you about.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But he disregarded my protest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who earned it?&nbsp; Eh?&nbsp; I thought so.&nbsp; Your father.&nbsp;
+You stand on dead men&rsquo;s legs.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve never had any
+of your own.&nbsp; You couldn&rsquo;t walk alone between two sunrises
+and hustle the meat for your belly for three meals.&nbsp; Let me see
+your hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His tremendous, dormant strength must have stirred, swiftly and accurately,
+or I must have slept a moment, for before I knew it he had stepped two
+paces forward, gripped my right hand in his, and held it up for inspection.&nbsp;
+I tried to withdraw it, but his fingers tightened, without visible effort,
+till I thought mine would be crushed.&nbsp; It is hard to maintain one&rsquo;s
+dignity under such circumstances.&nbsp; I could not squirm or struggle
+like a schoolboy.&nbsp; Nor could I attack such a creature who had but
+to twist my arm to break it.&nbsp; Nothing remained but to stand still
+and accept the indignity.&nbsp; I had time to notice that the pockets
+of the dead man had been emptied on the deck, and that his body and
+his grin had been wrapped from view in canvas, the folds of which the
+sailor, Johansen, was sewing together with coarse white twine, shoving
+the needle through with a leather contrivance fitted on the palm of
+his hand.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen dropped my hand with a flirt of disdain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dead men&rsquo;s hands have kept it soft.&nbsp; Good for little
+else than dish-washing and scullion work.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish to be put ashore,&rdquo; I said firmly, for I now had
+myself in control.&nbsp; &ldquo;I shall pay you whatever you judge your
+delay and trouble to be worth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked at me curiously.&nbsp; Mockery shone in his eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have a counter proposition to make, and for the good of
+your soul.&nbsp; My mate&rsquo;s gone, and there&rsquo;ll be a lot of
+promotion.&nbsp; A sailor comes aft to take mate&rsquo;s place, cabin-boy
+goes for&rsquo;ard to take sailor&rsquo;s place, and you take the cabin-boy&rsquo;s
+place, sign the articles for the cruise, twenty dollars per month and
+found.&nbsp; Now what do you say?&nbsp; And mind you, it&rsquo;s for
+your own soul&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp; It will be the making of you.&nbsp;
+You might learn in time to stand on your own legs, and perhaps to toddle
+along a bit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But I took no notice.&nbsp; The sails of the vessel I had seen off
+to the south-west had grown larger and plainer.&nbsp; They were of the
+same schooner-rig as the <i>Ghost</i>, though the hull itself, I could
+see, was smaller.&nbsp; She was a pretty sight, leaping and flying toward
+us, and evidently bound to pass at close range.&nbsp; The wind had been
+momentarily increasing, and the sun, after a few angry gleams, had disappeared.&nbsp;
+The sea had turned a dull leaden grey and grown rougher, and was now
+tossing foaming whitecaps to the sky.&nbsp; We were travelling faster,
+and heeled farther over.&nbsp; Once, in a gust, the rail dipped under
+the sea, and the decks on that side were for the moment awash with water
+that made a couple of the hunters hastily lift their feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That vessel will soon be passing us,&rdquo; I said, after
+a moment&rsquo;s pause.&nbsp; &ldquo;As she is going in the opposite
+direction, she is very probably bound for San Francisco.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very probably,&rdquo; was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s answer, as he
+turned partly away from me and cried out, &ldquo;Cooky!&nbsp; Oh, Cooky!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Cockney popped out of the galley.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s that boy?&nbsp; Tell him I want him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir;&rdquo; and Thomas Mugridge fled swiftly aft and
+disappeared down another companion-way near the wheel.&nbsp; A moment
+later he emerged, a heavy-set young fellow of eighteen or nineteen,
+with a glowering, villainous countenance, trailing at his heels.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Ere &rsquo;e is, sir,&rdquo; the cook said.</p>
+<p>But Wolf Larsen ignored that worthy, turning at once to the cabin-boy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s your name, boy?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;George Leach, sir,&rdquo; came the sullen answer, and the
+boy&rsquo;s bearing showed clearly that he divined the reason for which
+he had been summoned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not an Irish name,&rdquo; the captain snapped sharply.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;O&rsquo;Toole or McCarthy would suit your mug a damn sight better.&nbsp;
+Unless, very likely, there&rsquo;s an Irishman in your mother&rsquo;s
+woodpile.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I saw the young fellow&rsquo;s hands clench at the insult, and the
+blood crawl scarlet up his neck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But let that go,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen continued.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+may have very good reasons for forgetting your name, and I&rsquo;ll
+like you none the worse for it as long as you toe the mark.&nbsp; Telegraph
+Hill, of course, is your port of entry.&nbsp; It sticks out all over
+your mug.&nbsp; Tough as they make them and twice as nasty.&nbsp; I
+know the kind.&nbsp; Well, you can make up your mind to have it taken
+out of you on this craft.&nbsp; Understand?&nbsp; Who shipped you, anyway?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;McCready and Swanson.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sir!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen thundered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;McCready and Swanson, sir,&rdquo; the boy corrected, his eyes
+burning with a bitter light.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who got the advance money?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They did, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought as much.&nbsp; And damned glad you were to let them
+have it.&nbsp; Couldn&rsquo;t make yourself scarce too quick, with several
+gentlemen you may have heard of looking for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy metamorphosed into a savage on the instant.&nbsp; His body
+bunched together as though for a spring, and his face became as an infuriated
+beast&rsquo;s as he snarled, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A what?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen asked, a peculiar softness in his
+voice, as though he were overwhelmingly curious to hear the unspoken
+word.</p>
+<p>The boy hesitated, then mastered his temper.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nothin&rsquo;,
+sir.&nbsp; I take it back.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you have shown me I was right.&rdquo;&nbsp; This with
+a gratified smile.&nbsp; &ldquo;How old are you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just turned sixteen, sir,&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A lie.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll never see eighteen again.&nbsp;
+Big for your age at that, with muscles like a horse.&nbsp; Pack up your
+kit and go for&rsquo;ard into the fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re
+a boat-puller now.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re promoted; see?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Without waiting for the boy&rsquo;s acceptance, the captain turned
+to the sailor who had just finished the gruesome task of sewing up the
+corpse.&nbsp; &ldquo;Johansen, do you know anything about navigation?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, never mind; you&rsquo;re mate just the same.&nbsp; Get
+your traps aft into the mate&rsquo;s berth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, ay, sir,&rdquo; was the cheery response, as Johansen started
+forward.</p>
+<p>In the meantime the erstwhile cabin-boy had not moved.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+are you waiting for?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t sign for boat-puller, sir,&rdquo; was the reply.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I signed for cabin-boy.&nbsp; An&rsquo; I don&rsquo;t want no
+boat-pullin&rsquo; in mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pack up and go for&rsquo;ard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This time Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s command was thrillingly imperative.&nbsp;
+The boy glowered sullenly, but refused to move.</p>
+<p>Then came another stirring of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s tremendous strength.&nbsp;
+It was utterly unexpected, and it was over and done with between the
+ticks of two seconds.&nbsp; He had sprung fully six feet across the
+deck and driven his fist into the other&rsquo;s stomach.&nbsp; At the
+same moment, as though I had been struck myself, I felt a sickening
+shock in the pit of my stomach.&nbsp; I instance this to show the sensitiveness
+of my nervous organization at the time, and how unused I was to spectacles
+of brutality.&nbsp; The cabin-boy&mdash;and he weighed one hundred and
+sixty-five at the very least&mdash;crumpled up.&nbsp; His body wrapped
+limply about the fist like a wet rag about a stick.&nbsp; He lifted
+into the air, described a short curve, and struck the deck alongside
+the corpse on his head and shoulders, where he lay and writhed about
+in agony.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; Larsen asked of me.&nbsp; &ldquo;Have you made
+up your mind?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had glanced occasionally at the approaching schooner, and it was
+now almost abreast of us and not more than a couple of hundred yards
+away.&nbsp; It was a very trim and neat little craft.&nbsp; I could
+see a large, black number on one of its sails, and I had seen pictures
+of pilot-boats.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What vessel is that?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The pilot-boat <i>Lady Mine</i>,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen answered
+grimly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Got rid of her pilots and running into San Francisco.&nbsp;
+She&rsquo;ll be there in five or six hours with this wind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you please signal it, then, so that I may be put ashore.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sorry, but I&rsquo;ve lost the signal book overboard,&rdquo;
+he remarked, and the group of hunters grinned.</p>
+<p>I debated a moment, looking him squarely in the eyes.&nbsp; I had
+seen the frightful treatment of the cabin-boy, and knew that I should
+very probably receive the same, if not worse.&nbsp; As I say, I debated
+with myself, and then I did what I consider the bravest act of my life.&nbsp;
+I ran to the side, waving my arms and shouting:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Lady Mine</i> ahoy!&nbsp; Take me ashore!&nbsp; A thousand
+dollars if you take me ashore!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I waited, watching two men who stood by the wheel, one of them steering.&nbsp;
+The other was lifting a megaphone to his lips.&nbsp; I did not turn
+my head, though I expected every moment a killing blow from the human
+brute behind me.&nbsp; At last, after what seemed centuries, unable
+longer to stand the strain, I looked around.&nbsp; He had not moved.&nbsp;
+He was standing in the same position, swaying easily to the roll of
+the ship and lighting a fresh cigar.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is the matter?&nbsp; Anything wrong?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was the cry from the <i>Lady Mine.</i></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes!&rdquo; I shouted, at the top of my lungs.&nbsp; &ldquo;Life
+or death!&nbsp; One thousand dollars if you take me ashore!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Too much &rsquo;Frisco tanglefoot for the health of my crew!&rdquo;
+Wolf Larsen shouted after.&nbsp; &ldquo;This one&rdquo;&mdash;indicating
+me with his thumb&mdash;&ldquo;fancies sea-serpents and monkeys just
+now!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The man on the <i>Lady Mine</i> laughed back through the megaphone.&nbsp;
+The pilot-boat plunged past.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give him hell for me!&rdquo; came a final cry, and the two
+men waved their arms in farewell.</p>
+<p>I leaned despairingly over the rail, watching the trim little schooner
+swiftly increasing the bleak sweep of ocean between us.&nbsp; And she
+would probably be in San Francisco in five or six hours!&nbsp; My head
+seemed bursting.&nbsp; There was an ache in my throat as though my heart
+were up in it.&nbsp; A curling wave struck the side and splashed salt
+spray on my lips.&nbsp; The wind puffed strongly, and the <i>Ghost</i>
+heeled far over, burying her lee rail.&nbsp; I could hear the water
+rushing down upon the deck.</p>
+<p>When I turned around, a moment later, I saw the cabin-boy staggering
+to his feet.&nbsp; His face was ghastly white, twitching with suppressed
+pain.&nbsp; He looked very sick.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Leach, are you going for&rsquo;ard?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; came the answer of a spirit cowed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you?&rdquo; I was asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give you a thousand&mdash;&rdquo; I began, but
+was interrupted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stow that!&nbsp; Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy?&nbsp;
+Or do I have to take you in hand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>What was I to do?&nbsp; To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps,
+would not help my case.&nbsp; I looked steadily into the cruel grey
+eyes.&nbsp; They might have been granite for all the light and warmth
+of a human soul they contained.&nbsp; One may see the soul stir in some
+men&rsquo;s eyes, but his were bleak, and cold, and grey as the sea
+itself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say &lsquo;yes, sir.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; I corrected.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Van Weyden, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;First name?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Humphrey, sir; Humphrey Van Weyden.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Age?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thirty-five, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll do.&nbsp; Go to the cook and learn your duties.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary servitude
+to Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; He was stronger than I, that was all.&nbsp; But
+it was very unreal at the time.&nbsp; It is no less unreal now that
+I look back upon it.&nbsp; It will always be to me a monstrous, inconceivable
+thing, a horrible nightmare.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hold on, don&rsquo;t go yet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Johansen, call all hands.&nbsp; Now that we&rsquo;ve everything
+cleaned up, we&rsquo;ll have the funeral and get the decks cleared of
+useless lumber.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors,
+under the captain&rsquo;s direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse
+upon a hatch-cover.&nbsp; On either side the deck, against the rail
+and bottoms up, were lashed a number of small boats.&nbsp; Several men
+picked up the hatch-cover with its ghastly freight, carried it to the
+lee side, and rested it on the boats, the feet pointing overboard.&nbsp;
+To the feet was attached the sack of coal which the cook had fetched.</p>
+<p>I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and awe-inspiring
+event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial at any rate.&nbsp;
+One of the hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his mates called &ldquo;Smoke,&rdquo;
+was telling stories, liberally intersprinkled with oaths and obscenities;
+and every minute or so the group of hunters gave mouth to a laughter
+that sounded to me like a wolf-chorus or the barking of hell-hounds.&nbsp;
+The sailors trooped noisily aft, some of the watch below rubbing the
+sleep from their eyes, and talked in low tones together.&nbsp; There
+was an ominous and worried expression on their faces.&nbsp; It was evident
+that they did not like the outlook of a voyage under such a captain
+and begun so inauspiciously.&nbsp; From time to time they stole glances
+at Wolf Larsen, and I could see that they were apprehensive of the man.</p>
+<p>He stepped up to the hatch-cover, and all caps came off.&nbsp; I
+ran my eyes over them&mdash;twenty men all told; twenty-two including
+the man at the wheel and myself.&nbsp; I was pardonably curious in my
+survey, for it appeared my fate to be pent up with them on this miniature
+floating world for I knew not how many weeks or months.&nbsp; The sailors,
+in the main, were English and Scandinavian, and their faces seemed of
+the heavy, stolid order.&nbsp; The hunters, on the other hand, had stronger
+and more diversified faces, with hard lines and the marks of the free
+play of passions.&nbsp; Strange to say, and I noted it all once, Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s features showed no such evil stamp.&nbsp; There seemed
+nothing vicious in them.&nbsp; True, there were lines, but they were
+the lines of decision and firmness.&nbsp; It seemed, rather, a frank
+and open countenance, which frankness or openness was enhanced by the
+fact that he was smooth-shaven.&nbsp; I could hardly believe&mdash;until
+the next incident occurred&mdash;that it was the face of a man who could
+behave as he had behaved to the cabin-boy.</p>
+<p>At this moment, as he opened his mouth to speak, puff after puff
+struck the schooner and pressed her side under.&nbsp; The wind shrieked
+a wild song through the rigging.&nbsp; Some of the hunters glanced anxiously
+aloft.&nbsp; The lee rail, where the dead man lay, was buried in the
+sea, and as the schooner lifted and righted the water swept across the
+deck wetting us above our shoe-tops.&nbsp; A shower of rain drove down
+upon us, each drop stinging like a hailstone.&nbsp; As it passed, Wolf
+Larsen began to speak, the bare-headed men swaying in unison, to the
+heave and lunge of the deck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I only remember one part of the service,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and
+that is, &lsquo;And the body shall be cast into the sea.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+So cast it in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He ceased speaking.&nbsp; The men holding the hatch-cover seemed
+perplexed, puzzled no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony.&nbsp;
+He burst upon them in a fury.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lift up that end there, damn you!&nbsp; What the hell&rsquo;s
+the matter with you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and,
+like a dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the sea.&nbsp;
+The coal at his feet dragged him down.&nbsp; He was gone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Johansen,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate,
+&ldquo;keep all hands on deck now they&rsquo;re here.&nbsp; Get in the
+topsails and jibs and make a good job of it.&nbsp; We&rsquo;re in for
+a sou&rsquo;-easter.&nbsp; Better reef the jib and mainsail too, while
+you&rsquo;re about it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders
+and the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts&mdash;all naturally
+confusing to a landsman such as myself.&nbsp; But it was the heartlessness
+of it that especially struck me.&nbsp; The dead man was an episode that
+was past, an incident that was dropped, in a canvas covering with a
+sack of coal, while the ship sped along and her work went on.&nbsp;
+Nobody had been affected.&nbsp; The hunters were laughing at a fresh
+story of Smoke&rsquo;s; the men pulling and hauling, and two of them
+climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was studying the clouding sky to windward;
+and the dead man, dying obscenely, buried sordidly, and sinking down,
+down&mdash;</p>
+<p>Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness,
+rushed upon me.&nbsp; Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and
+inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime.&nbsp;
+I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across
+the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San Francisco
+and the California coast.&nbsp; Rain-squalls were driving in between,
+and I could scarcely see the fog.&nbsp; And this strange vessel, with
+its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and ever leaping up
+and out, was heading away into the south-west, into the great and lonely
+Pacific expanse.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner <i>Ghost</i>, as
+I strove to fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation
+and pain.&nbsp; The cook, who was called &ldquo;the doctor&rdquo; by
+the crew, &ldquo;Tommy&rdquo; by the hunters, and &ldquo;Cooky&rdquo;
+by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person.&nbsp; The difference worked in
+my status brought about a corresponding difference in treatment from
+him.&nbsp; Servile and fawning as he had been before, he was now as
+domineering and bellicose.&nbsp; In truth, I was no longer the fine
+gentleman with a skin soft as a &ldquo;lydy&rsquo;s,&rdquo; but only
+an ordinary and very worthless cabin-boy.</p>
+<p>He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and
+his behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties.&nbsp;
+Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state-rooms, I was
+supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my colossal ignorance
+concerning such things as peeling potatoes or washing greasy pots was
+a source of unending and sarcastic wonder to him.&nbsp; He refused to
+take into consideration what I was, or, rather, what my life and the
+things I was accustomed to had been.&nbsp; This was part of the attitude
+he chose to adopt toward me; and I confess, ere the day was done, that
+I hated him with more lively feelings than I had ever hated any one
+in my life before.</p>
+<p>This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that
+the <i>Ghost</i>, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn
+till later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an &ldquo;&rsquo;owlin&rsquo;
+sou&rsquo;-easter.&rdquo;&nbsp; At half-past five, under his directions,
+I set the table in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and
+then carried the tea and cooked food down from the galley.&nbsp; In
+this connection I cannot forbear relating my first experience with a
+boarding sea.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look sharp or you&rsquo;ll get doused,&rdquo; was Mr. Mugridge&rsquo;s
+parting injunction, as I left the galley with a big tea-pot in one hand,
+and in the hollow of the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked bread.&nbsp;
+One of the hunters, a tall, loose-jointed chap named Henderson, was
+going aft at the time from the steerage (the name the hunters facetiously
+gave their midships sleeping quarters) to the cabin.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen
+was on the poop, smoking his everlasting cigar.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Ere she comes.&nbsp; Sling yer &rsquo;ook!&rdquo; the
+cook cried.</p>
+<p>I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley
+door slide shut with a bang.&nbsp; Then I saw Henderson leaping like
+a madman for the main rigging, up which he shot, on the inside, till
+he was many feet higher than my head.&nbsp; Also I saw a great wave,
+curling and foaming, poised far above the rail.&nbsp; I was directly
+under it.&nbsp; My mind did not work quickly, everything was so new
+and strange.&nbsp; I grasped that I was in danger, but that was all.&nbsp;
+I stood still, in trepidation.&nbsp; Then Wolf Larsen shouted from the
+poop:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Grab hold something, you&mdash;you Hump!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But it was too late.&nbsp; I sprang toward the rigging, to which
+I might have clung, and was met by the descending wall of water.&nbsp;
+What happened after that was very confusing.&nbsp; I was beneath the
+water, suffocating and drowning.&nbsp; My feet were out from under me,
+and I was turning over and over and being swept along I knew not where.&nbsp;
+Several times I collided against hard objects, once striking my right
+knee a terrible blow.&nbsp; Then the flood seemed suddenly to subside
+and I was breathing the good air again.&nbsp; I had been swept against
+the galley and around the steerage companion-way from the weather side
+into the lee scuppers.&nbsp; The pain from my hurt knee was agonizing.&nbsp;
+I could not put my weight on it, or, at least, I thought I could not
+put my weight on it; and I felt sure the leg was broken.&nbsp; But the
+cook was after me, shouting through the lee galley door:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Ere, you!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t tyke all night about it!&nbsp;
+Where&rsquo;s the pot?&nbsp; Lost overboard?&nbsp; Serve you bloody
+well right if yer neck was broke!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I managed to struggle to my feet.&nbsp; The great tea-pot was still
+in my hand.&nbsp; I limped to the galley and handed it to him.&nbsp;
+But he was consumed with indignation, real or feigned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gawd blime me if you ayn&rsquo;t a slob.&nbsp; Wot &rsquo;re
+you good for anyw&rsquo;y, I&rsquo;d like to know?&nbsp; Eh?&nbsp; Wot
+&rsquo;re you good for any&rsquo;wy?&nbsp; Cawn&rsquo;t even carry a
+bit of tea aft without losin&rsquo; it.&nbsp; Now I&rsquo;ll &rsquo;ave
+to boil some more.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; wot &rsquo;re you snifflin&rsquo; about?&rdquo;
+he burst out at me, with renewed rage.&nbsp; &ldquo;&rsquo;Cos you&rsquo;ve
+&rsquo;urt yer pore little leg, pore little mamma&rsquo;s darlin&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was not sniffling, though my face might well have been drawn and
+twitching from the pain.&nbsp; But I called up all my resolution, set
+my teeth, and hobbled back and forth from galley to cabin and cabin
+to galley without further mishap.&nbsp; Two things I had acquired by
+my accident: an injured knee-cap that went undressed and from which
+I suffered for weary months, and the name of &ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; which
+Wolf Larsen had called me from the poop.&nbsp; Thereafter, fore and
+aft, I was known by no other name, until the term became a part of my
+thought-processes and I identified it with myself, thought of myself
+as Hump, as though Hump were I and had always been I.</p>
+<p>It was no easy task, waiting on the cabin table, where sat Wolf Larsen,
+Johansen, and the six hunters.&nbsp; The cabin was small, to begin with,
+and to move around, as I was compelled to, was not made easier by the
+schooner&rsquo;s violent pitching and wallowing.&nbsp; But what struck
+me most forcibly was the total lack of sympathy on the part of the men
+whom I served.&nbsp; I could feel my knee through my clothes, swelling,
+and swelling, and I was sick and faint from the pain of it.&nbsp; I
+could catch glimpses of my face, white and ghastly, distorted with pain,
+in the cabin mirror.&nbsp; All the men must have seen my condition,
+but not one spoke or took notice of me, till I was almost grateful to
+Wolf Larsen, later on (I was washing the dishes), when he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let a little thing like that bother you.&nbsp;
+You&rsquo;ll get used to such things in time.&nbsp; It may cripple you
+some, but all the same you&rsquo;ll be learning to walk.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what you call a paradox, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+he added.</p>
+<p>He seemed pleased when I nodded my head with the customary &ldquo;Yes,
+sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose you know a bit about literary things?&nbsp; Eh?&nbsp;
+Good.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll have some talks with you some time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then, taking no further account of me, he turned his back and
+went up on deck.</p>
+<p>That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was
+sent to sleep in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk.&nbsp; I
+was glad to get out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be
+off my feet.&nbsp; To my surprise, my clothes had dried on me and there
+seemed no indications of catching cold, either from the last soaking
+or from the prolonged soaking from the foundering of the <i>Martinez</i>.&nbsp;
+Under ordinary circumstances, after all that I had undergone, I should
+have been fit for bed and a trained nurse.</p>
+<p>But my knee was bothering me terribly.&nbsp; As well as I could make
+out, the kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the swelling.&nbsp;
+As I sat in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were all in the steerage,
+smoking and talking in loud voices), Henderson took a passing glance
+at it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Looks nasty,&rdquo; he commented.&nbsp; &ldquo;Tie a rag around
+it, and it&rsquo;ll be all right.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad
+of my back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict injunctions
+to do nothing but rest.&nbsp; But I must do these men justice.&nbsp;
+Callous as they were to my suffering, they were equally callous to their
+own when anything befell them.&nbsp; And this was due, I believe, first,
+to habit; and second, to the fact that they were less sensitively organized.&nbsp;
+I really believe that a finely-organized, high-strung man would suffer
+twice and thrice as much as they from a like injury.</p>
+<p>Tired as I was,&mdash;exhausted, in fact,&mdash;I was prevented from
+sleeping by the pain in my knee.&nbsp; It was all I could do to keep
+from groaning aloud.&nbsp; At home I should undoubtedly have given vent
+to my anguish; but this new and elemental environment seemed to call
+for a savage repression.&nbsp; Like the savage, the attitude of these
+men was stoical in great things, childish in little things.&nbsp; I
+remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the hunters,
+lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did not even murmur
+or change the expression on his face.&nbsp; Yet I have seen the same
+man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous passion over a trifle.</p>
+<p>He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and
+cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another
+hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim.&nbsp;
+He held that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born.&nbsp;
+The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd,
+narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born
+on the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its
+mother was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to
+teach their nestlings how to fly.</p>
+<p>For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table
+or lay in their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists.&nbsp;
+But they were supremely interested, for every little while they ardently
+took sides, and sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices
+surged back and forth in waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in
+the confined space.&nbsp; Childish and immaterial as the topic was,
+the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial.&nbsp;
+In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at all.&nbsp; Their
+method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation.&nbsp; They
+proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the
+proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack
+on the opposing man&rsquo;s judgment, common sense, nationality, or
+past history.&nbsp; Rebuttal was precisely similar.&nbsp; I have related
+this in order to show the mental calibre of the men with whom I was
+thrown in contact.&nbsp; Intellectually they were children, inhabiting
+the physical forms of men.</p>
+<p>And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and offensive-smelling
+tobacco.&nbsp; The air was thick and murky with the smoke of it; and
+this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she struggled
+through the storm, would surely have made me sea-sick had I been a victim
+to that malady.&nbsp; As it was, it made me quite squeamish, though
+this nausea might have been due to the pain of my leg and exhaustion.</p>
+<p>As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation.&nbsp;
+It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar
+and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should
+be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner.&nbsp; Cabin-boy!&nbsp;
+I had never done any hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life.&nbsp;
+I had lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days&mdash;the
+life of a scholar and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income.&nbsp;
+Violent life and athletic sports had never appealed to me.&nbsp; I had
+always been a book-worm; so my sisters and father had called me during
+my childhood.&nbsp; I had gone camping but once in my life, and then
+I left the party almost at its start and returned to the comforts and
+conveniences of a roof.&nbsp; And here I was, with dreary and endless
+vistas before me of table-setting, potato-peeling, and dish-washing.&nbsp;
+And I was not strong.&nbsp; The doctors had always said that I had a
+remarkable constitution, but I had never developed it or my body through
+exercise.&nbsp; My muscles were small and soft, like a woman&rsquo;s,
+or so the doctors had said time and again in the course of their attempts
+to persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads.&nbsp; But I had preferred
+to use my head rather than my body; and here I was, in no fit condition
+for the rough life in prospect.</p>
+<p>These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and
+are related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak
+and helpless <i>r&ocirc;le</i> I was destined to play.&nbsp; But I thought,
+also, of my mother and sisters, and pictured their grief.&nbsp; I was
+among the missing dead of the <i>Martinez</i> disaster, an unrecovered
+body.&nbsp; I could see the head-lines in the papers; the fellows at
+the University Club and the Bibelot shaking their heads and saying,
+&ldquo;Poor chap!&rdquo;&nbsp; And I could see Charley Furuseth, as
+I had said good-bye to him that morning, lounging in a dressing-gown
+on the be-pillowed window couch and delivering himself of oracular and
+pessimistic epigrams.</p>
+<p>And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains
+and falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner <i>Ghost</i>
+was fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of the Pacific&mdash;and
+I was on her.&nbsp; I could hear the wind above.&nbsp; It came to my
+ears as a muffled roar.&nbsp; Now and again feet stamped overhead.&nbsp;
+An endless creaking was going on all about me, the woodwork and the
+fittings groaning and squeaking and complaining in a thousand keys.&nbsp;
+The hunters were still arguing and roaring like some semi-human amphibious
+breed.&nbsp; The air was filled with oaths and indecent expressions.&nbsp;
+I could see their faces, flushed and angry, the brutality distorted
+and emphasized by the sickly yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back
+and forth with the ship.&nbsp; Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks
+looked like the sleeping dens of animals in a menagerie.&nbsp; Oilskins
+and sea-boots were hanging from the walls, and here and there rifles
+and shotguns rested securely in the racks.&nbsp; It was a sea-fitting
+for the buccaneers and pirates of by-gone years.&nbsp; My imagination
+ran riot, and still I could not sleep.&nbsp; And it was a long, long
+night, weary and dreary and long.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>But my first night in the hunters&rsquo; steerage was also my last.&nbsp;
+Next day Johansen, the new mate, was routed from the cabin by Wolf Larsen,
+and sent into the steerage to sleep thereafter, while I took possession
+of the tiny cabin state-room, which, on the first day of the voyage,
+had already had two occupants.&nbsp; The reason for this change was
+quickly learned by the hunters, and became the cause of a deal of grumbling
+on their part.&nbsp; It seemed that Johansen, in his sleep, lived over
+each night the events of the day.&nbsp; His incessant talking and shouting
+and bellowing of orders had been too much for Wolf Larsen, who had accordingly
+foisted the nuisance upon his hunters.</p>
+<p>After a sleepless night, I arose weak and in agony, to hobble through
+my second day on the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Thomas Mugridge routed me out
+at half-past five, much in the fashion that Bill Sykes must have routed
+out his dog; but Mr. Mugridge&rsquo;s brutality to me was paid back
+in kind and with interest.&nbsp; The unnecessary noise he made (I had
+lain wide-eyed the whole night) must have awakened one of the hunters;
+for a heavy shoe whizzed through the semi-darkness, and Mr. Mugridge,
+with a sharp howl of pain, humbly begged everybody&rsquo;s pardon.&nbsp;
+Later on, in the galley, I noticed that his ear was bruised and swollen.&nbsp;
+It never went entirely back to its normal shape, and was called a &ldquo;cauliflower
+ear&rdquo; by the sailors.</p>
+<p>The day was filled with miserable variety.&nbsp; I had taken my dried
+clothes down from the galley the night before, and the first thing I
+did was to exchange the cook&rsquo;s garments for them.&nbsp; I looked
+for my purse.&nbsp; In addition to some small change (and I have a good
+memory for such things), it had contained one hundred and eighty-five
+dollars in gold and paper.&nbsp; The purse I found, but its contents,
+with the exception of the small silver, had been abstracted.&nbsp; I
+spoke to the cook about it, when I went on deck to take up my duties
+in the galley, and though I had looked forward to a surly answer, I
+had not expected the belligerent harangue that I received.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look &rsquo;ere, &rsquo;Ump,&rdquo; he began, a malicious
+light in his eyes and a snarl in his throat; &ldquo;d&rsquo;ye want
+yer nose punched?&nbsp; If you think I&rsquo;m a thief, just keep it
+to yerself, or you&rsquo;ll find &rsquo;ow bloody well mistyken you
+are.&nbsp; Strike me blind if this ayn&rsquo;t gratitude for yer!&nbsp;
+&rsquo;Ere you come, a pore mis&rsquo;rable specimen of &rsquo;uman
+scum, an&rsquo; I tykes yer into my galley an&rsquo; treats yer &rsquo;ansom,
+an&rsquo; this is wot I get for it.&nbsp; Nex&rsquo; time you can go
+to &rsquo;ell, say I, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;ve a good mind to give you what-for
+anyw&rsquo;y.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So saying, he put up his fists and started for me.&nbsp; To my shame
+be it, I cowered away from the blow and ran out the galley door.&nbsp;
+What else was I to do?&nbsp; Force, nothing but force, obtained on this
+brute-ship.&nbsp; Moral suasion was a thing unknown.&nbsp; Picture it
+to yourself: a man of ordinary stature, slender of build, and with weak,
+undeveloped muscles, who has lived a peaceful, placid life, and is unused
+to violence of any sort&mdash;what could such a man possibly do?&nbsp;
+There was no more reason that I should stand and face these human beasts
+than that I should stand and face an infuriated bull.</p>
+<p>So I thought it out at the time, feeling the need for vindication
+and desiring to be at peace with my conscience.&nbsp; But this vindication
+did not satisfy.&nbsp; Nor, to this day can I permit my manhood to look
+back upon those events and feel entirely exonerated.&nbsp; The situation
+was something that really exceeded rational formulas for conduct and
+demanded more than the cold conclusions of reason.&nbsp; When viewed
+in the light of formal logic, there is not one thing of which to be
+ashamed; but nevertheless a shame rises within me at the recollection,
+and in the pride of my manhood I feel that my manhood has in unaccountable
+ways been smirched and sullied.</p>
+<p>All of which is neither here nor there.&nbsp; The speed with which
+I ran from the galley caused excruciating pain in my knee, and I sank
+down helplessly at the break of the poop.&nbsp; But the Cockney had
+not pursued me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look at &rsquo;im run!&nbsp; Look at &rsquo;im run!&rdquo;
+I could hear him crying.&nbsp; &ldquo;An&rsquo; with a gyme leg at that!&nbsp;
+Come on back, you pore little mamma&rsquo;s darling.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t
+&rsquo;it yer; no, I won&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I came back and went on with my work; and here the episode ended
+for the time, though further developments were yet to take place.&nbsp;
+I set the breakfast-table in the cabin, and at seven o&rsquo;clock waited
+on the hunters and officers.&nbsp; The storm had evidently broken during
+the night, though a huge sea was still running and a stiff wind blowing.&nbsp;
+Sail had been made in the early watches, so that the <i>Ghost</i> was
+racing along under everything except the two topsails and the flying
+jib.&nbsp; These three sails, I gathered from the conversation, were
+to be set immediately after breakfast.&nbsp; I learned, also, that Wolf
+Larsen was anxious to make the most of the storm, which was driving
+him to the south-west into that portion of the sea where he expected
+to pick up with the north-east trades.&nbsp; It was before this steady
+wind that he hoped to make the major portion of the run to Japan, curving
+south into the tropics and north again as he approached the coast of
+Asia.</p>
+<p>After breakfast I had another unenviable experience.&nbsp; When I
+had finished washing the dishes, I cleaned the cabin stove and carried
+the ashes up on deck to empty them.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen and Henderson
+were standing near the wheel, deep in conversation.&nbsp; The sailor,
+Johnson, was steering.&nbsp; As I started toward the weather side I
+saw him make a sudden motion with his head, which I mistook for a token
+of recognition and good-morning.&nbsp; In reality, he was attempting
+to warn me to throw my ashes over the lee side.&nbsp; Unconscious of
+my blunder, I passed by Wolf Larsen and the hunter and flung the ashes
+over the side to windward.&nbsp; The wind drove them back, and not only
+over me, but over Henderson and Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; The next instant
+the latter kicked me, violently, as a cur is kicked.&nbsp; I had not
+realized there could be so much pain in a kick.&nbsp; I reeled away
+from him and leaned against the cabin in a half-fainting condition.&nbsp;
+Everything was swimming before my eyes, and I turned sick.&nbsp; The
+nausea overpowered me, and I managed to crawl to the side of the vessel.&nbsp;
+But Wolf Larsen did not follow me up.&nbsp; Brushing the ashes from
+his clothes, he had resumed his conversation with Henderson.&nbsp; Johansen,
+who had seen the affair from the break of the poop, sent a couple of
+sailors aft to clean up the mess.</p>
+<p>Later in the morning I received a surprise of a totally different
+sort.&nbsp; Following the cook&rsquo;s instructions, I had gone into
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s state-room to put it to rights and make the bed.&nbsp;
+Against the wall, near the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with
+books.&nbsp; I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names
+as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey.&nbsp; There were scientific
+works, too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall, Proctor,
+and Darwin.&nbsp; Astronomy and physics were represented, and I remarked
+Bulfinch&rsquo;s <i>Age of Fable</i>, Shaw&rsquo;s <i>History of English
+and</i> <i>American Literature</i>, and Johnson&rsquo;s <i>Natural History</i>
+in two large volumes.&nbsp; Then there were a number of grammars, such
+as Metcalf&rsquo;s, and Reed and Kellogg&rsquo;s; and I smiled as I
+saw a copy of <i>The Dean&rsquo;s English.</i></p>
+<p>I could not reconcile these books with the man from what I had seen
+of him, and I wondered if he could possibly read them.&nbsp; But when
+I came to make the bed I found, between the blankets, dropped apparently
+as he had sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning, the Cambridge Edition.&nbsp;
+It was open at &ldquo;In a Balcony,&rdquo; and I noticed, here and there,
+passages underlined in pencil.&nbsp; Further, letting drop the volume
+during a lurch of the ship, a sheet of paper fell out.&nbsp; It was
+scrawled over with geometrical diagrams and calculations of some sort.</p>
+<p>It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as
+one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality.&nbsp;
+At once he became an enigma.&nbsp; One side or the other of his nature
+was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering.&nbsp;
+I had already remarked that his language was excellent, marred with
+an occasional slight inaccuracy.&nbsp; Of course, in common speech with
+the sailors and hunters, it sometimes fairly bristled with errors, which
+was due to the vernacular itself; but in the few words he had held with
+me it had been clear and correct.</p>
+<p>This glimpse I had caught of his other side must have emboldened
+me, for I resolved to speak to him about the money I had lost.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have been robbed,&rdquo; I said to him, a little later,
+when I found him pacing up and down the poop alone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; he corrected, not harshly, but sternly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have been robbed, sir,&rdquo; I amended.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How did it happen?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>Then I told him the whole circumstance, how my clothes had been left
+to dry in the galley, and how, later, I was nearly beaten by the cook
+when I mentioned the matter.</p>
+<p>He smiled at my recital.&nbsp; &ldquo;Pickings,&rdquo; he concluded;
+&ldquo;Cooky&rsquo;s pickings.&nbsp; And don&rsquo;t you think your
+miserable life worth the price?&nbsp; Besides, consider it a lesson.&nbsp;
+You&rsquo;ll learn in time how to take care of your money for yourself.&nbsp;
+I suppose, up to now, your lawyer has done it for you, or your business
+agent.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I could feel the quiet sneer through his words, but demanded, &ldquo;How
+can I get it back again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s your look-out.&nbsp; You haven&rsquo;t any lawyer
+or business agent now, so you&rsquo;ll have to depend on yourself.&nbsp;
+When you get a dollar, hang on to it.&nbsp; A man who leaves his money
+lying around, the way you did, deserves to lose it.&nbsp; Besides, you
+have sinned.&nbsp; You have no right to put temptation in the way of
+your fellow-creatures.&nbsp; You tempted Cooky, and he fell.&nbsp; You
+have placed his immortal soul in jeopardy.&nbsp; By the way, do you
+believe in the immortal soul?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that
+the deeps were opening to me and that I was gazing into his soul.&nbsp;
+But it was an illusion.&nbsp; Far as it might have seemed, no man has
+ever seen very far into Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s soul, or seen it at all,&mdash;of
+this I am convinced.&nbsp; It was a very lonely soul, I was to learn,
+that never unmasked, though at rare moments it played at doing so.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I read immortality in your eyes,&rdquo; I answered, dropping
+the &ldquo;sir,&rdquo;&mdash;an experiment, for I thought the intimacy
+of the conversation warranted it.</p>
+<p>He took no notice.&nbsp; &ldquo;By that, I take it, you see something
+that is alive, but that necessarily does not have to live for ever.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I read more than that,&rdquo; I continued boldly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you read consciousness.&nbsp; You read the consciousness
+of life that it is alive; but still no further away, no endlessness
+of life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How clearly he thought, and how well he expressed what he thought!&nbsp;
+From regarding me curiously, he turned his head and glanced out over
+the leaden sea to windward.&nbsp; A bleakness came into his eyes, and
+the lines of his mouth grew severe and harsh.&nbsp; He was evidently
+in a pessimistic mood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then to what end?&rdquo; he demanded abruptly, turning back
+to me.&nbsp; &ldquo;If I am immortal&mdash;why?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I halted.&nbsp; How could I explain my idealism to this man?&nbsp;
+How could I put into speech a something felt, a something like the strains
+of music heard in sleep, a something that convinced yet transcended
+utterance?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you believe, then?&rdquo; I countered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I believe that life is a mess,&rdquo; he answered promptly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move
+for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end
+will cease to move.&nbsp; The big eat the little that they may continue
+to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength.&nbsp;
+The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.&nbsp; What
+do you make of those things?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He swept his am in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors
+who were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They move, so does the jelly-fish move.&nbsp; They move in
+order to eat in order that they may keep moving.&nbsp; There you have
+it.&nbsp; They live for their belly&rsquo;s sake, and the belly is for
+their sake.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a circle; you get nowhere.&nbsp; Neither
+do they.&nbsp; In the end they come to a standstill.&nbsp; They move
+no more.&nbsp; They are dead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They have dreams,&rdquo; I interrupted, &ldquo;radiant, flashing
+dreams&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of grub,&rdquo; he concluded sententiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And of more&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Grub.&nbsp; Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying
+it.&rdquo;&nbsp; His voice sounded harsh.&nbsp; There was no levity
+in it.&nbsp; &ldquo;For, look you, they dream of making lucky voyages
+which will bring them more money, of becoming the mates of ships, of
+finding fortunes&mdash;in short, of being in a better position for preying
+on their fellows, of having all night in, good grub and somebody else
+to do the dirty work.&nbsp; You and I are just like them.&nbsp; There
+is no difference, except that we have eaten more and better.&nbsp; I
+am eating them now, and you too.&nbsp; But in the past you have eaten
+more than I have.&nbsp; You have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes,
+and eaten good meals.&nbsp; Who made those beds? and those clothes?
+and those meals?&nbsp; Not you.&nbsp; You never made anything in your
+own sweat.&nbsp; You live on an income which your father earned.&nbsp;
+You are like a frigate bird swooping down upon the boobies and robbing
+them of the fish they have caught.&nbsp; You are one with a crowd of
+men who have made what they call a government, who are masters of all
+the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and would like
+to eat themselves.&nbsp; You wear the warm clothes.&nbsp; They made
+the clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business
+agent who handles your money, for a job.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But that is beside the matter,&rdquo; I cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not at all.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was speaking rapidly now, and
+his eyes were flashing.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is piggishness, and it is life.&nbsp;
+Of what use or sense is an immortality of piggishness?&nbsp; What is
+the end?&nbsp; What is it all about?&nbsp; You have made no food.&nbsp;
+Yet the food you have eaten or wasted might have saved the lives of
+a score of wretches who made the food but did not eat it.&nbsp; What
+immortal end did you serve? or did they?&nbsp; Consider yourself and
+me.&nbsp; What does your boasted immortality amount to when your life
+runs foul of mine?&nbsp; You would like to go back to the land, which
+is a favourable place for your kind of piggishness.&nbsp; It is a whim
+of mine to keep you aboard this ship, where my piggishness flourishes.&nbsp;
+And keep you I will.&nbsp; I may make or break you.&nbsp; You may die
+to-day, this week, or next month.&nbsp; I could kill you now, with a
+blow of my fist, for you are a miserable weakling.&nbsp; But if we are
+immortal, what is the reason for this?&nbsp; To be piggish as you and
+I have been all our lives does not seem to be just the thing for immortals
+to be doing.&nbsp; Again, what&rsquo;s it all about?&nbsp; Why have
+I kept you here?&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because you are stronger,&rdquo; I managed to blurt out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But why stronger?&rdquo; he went on at once with his perpetual
+queries.&nbsp; &ldquo;Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than
+you?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you see?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you see?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But the hopelessness of it,&rdquo; I protested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I agree with you,&rdquo; he answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then why
+move at all, since moving is living?&nbsp; Without moving and being
+part of the yeast there would be no hopelessness.&nbsp; But,&mdash;and
+there it is,&mdash;we want to live and move, though we have no reason
+to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move,
+to want to live and move.&nbsp; If it were not for this, life would
+be dead.&nbsp; It is because of this life that is in you that you dream
+of your immortality.&nbsp; The life that is in you is alive and wants
+to go on being alive for ever.&nbsp; Bah!&nbsp; An eternity of piggishness!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He abruptly turned on his heel and started forward.&nbsp; He stopped
+at the break of the poop and called me to him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By the way, how much was it that Cooky got away with?&rdquo;
+he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One hundred and eighty-five dollars, sir,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>He nodded his head.&nbsp; A moment later, as I started down the companion
+stairs to lay the table for dinner, I heard him loudly curing some men
+amidships.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>By the following morning the storm had blown itself quite out and
+the <i>Ghost</i> was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath
+of wind.&nbsp; Occasional light airs were felt, however, and Wolf Larsen
+patrolled the poop constantly, his eyes ever searching the sea to the
+north-eastward, from which direction the great trade-wind must blow.</p>
+<p>The men were all on deck and busy preparing their various boats for
+the season&rsquo;s hunting.&nbsp; There are seven boats aboard, the
+captain&rsquo;s dingey, and the six which the hunters will use.&nbsp;
+Three, a hunter, a boat-puller, and a boat-steerer, compose a boat&rsquo;s
+crew.&nbsp; On board the schooner the boat-pullers and steerers are
+the crew.&nbsp; The hunters, too, are supposed to be in command of the
+watches, subject, always, to the orders of Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>All this, and more, I have learned.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i> is considered
+the fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets.&nbsp;
+In fact, she was once a private yacht, and was built for speed.&nbsp;
+Her lines and fittings&mdash;though I know nothing about such things&mdash;speak
+for themselves.&nbsp; Johnson was telling me about her in a short chat
+I had with him during yesterday&rsquo;s second dog-watch.&nbsp; He spoke
+enthusiastically, with the love for a fine craft such as some men feel
+for horses.&nbsp; He is greatly disgusted with the outlook, and I am
+given to understand that Wolf Larsen bears a very unsavoury reputation
+among the sealing captains.&nbsp; It was the <i>Ghost</i> herself that
+lured Johnson into signing for the voyage, but he is already beginning
+to repent.</p>
+<p>As he told me, the <i>Ghost</i> is an eighty-ton schooner of a remarkably
+fine model.&nbsp; Her beam, or width, is twenty-three feet, and her
+length a little over ninety feet.&nbsp; A lead keel of fabulous but
+unknown weight makes her very stable, while she carries an immense spread
+of canvas.&nbsp; From the deck to the truck of the maintopmast is something
+over a hundred feet, while the foremast with its topmast is eight or
+ten feet shorter.&nbsp; I am giving these details so that the size of
+this little floating world which holds twenty-two men may be appreciated.&nbsp;
+It is a very little world, a mote, a speck, and I marvel that men should
+dare to venture the sea on a contrivance so small and fragile.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen has, also, a reputation for reckless carrying on of sail.&nbsp;
+I overheard Henderson and another of the hunters, Standish, a Californian,
+talking about it.&nbsp; Two years ago he dismasted the <i>Ghost</i>
+in a gale on Bering Sea, whereupon the present masts were put in, which
+are stronger and heavier in every way.&nbsp; He is said to have remarked,
+when he put them in, that he preferred turning her over to losing the
+sticks.</p>
+<p>Every man aboard, with the exception of Johansen, who is rather overcome
+by his promotion, seems to have an excuse for having sailed on the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp;
+Half the men forward are deep-water sailors, and their excuse is that
+they did not know anything about her or her captain.&nbsp; And those
+who do know, whisper that the hunters, while excellent shots, were so
+notorious for their quarrelsome and rascally proclivities that they
+could not sign on any decent schooner.</p>
+<p>I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew,&mdash;Louis
+he is called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a
+very sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a listener.&nbsp;
+In the afternoon, while the cook was below asleep and I was peeling
+the everlasting potatoes, Louis dropped into the galley for a &ldquo;yarn.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+His excuse for being aboard was that he was drunk when he signed.&nbsp;
+He assured me again and again that it was the last thing in the world
+he would dream of doing in a sober moment.&nbsp; It seems that he has
+been seal-hunting regularly each season for a dozen years, and is accounted
+one of the two or three very best boat-steerers in both fleets.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, my boy,&rdquo; he shook his head ominously at me, &ldquo;&rsquo;tis
+the worst schooner ye could iv selected, nor were ye drunk at the time
+as was I.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis sealin&rsquo; is the sailor&rsquo;s paradise&mdash;on
+other ships than this.&nbsp; The mate was the first, but mark me words,
+there&rsquo;ll be more dead men before the trip is done with.&nbsp;
+Hist, now, between you an&rsquo; meself and the stanchion there, this
+Wolf Larsen is a regular devil, an&rsquo; the <i>Ghost&rsquo;ll</i>
+be a hell-ship like she&rsquo;s always ben since he had hold iv her.&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t I know?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t I know?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t I remember
+him in Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row an&rsquo; shot four
+iv his men?&nbsp; Wasn&rsquo;t I a-layin&rsquo; on the <i>Emma L</i>.,
+not three hundred yards away?&nbsp; An&rsquo; there was a man the same
+year he killed with a blow iv his fist.&nbsp; Yes, sir, killed &rsquo;im
+dead-oh.&nbsp; His head must iv smashed like an eggshell.&nbsp; An&rsquo;
+wasn&rsquo;t there the Governor of Kura Island, an&rsquo; the Chief
+iv Police, Japanese gentlemen, sir, an&rsquo; didn&rsquo;t they come
+aboard the <i>Ghost</i> as his guests, a-bringin&rsquo; their wives
+along&mdash;wee an&rsquo; pretty little bits of things like you see
+&rsquo;em painted on fans.&nbsp; An&rsquo; as he was a-gettin&rsquo;
+under way, didn&rsquo;t the fond husbands get left astern-like in their
+sampan, as it might be by accident?&nbsp; An&rsquo; wasn&rsquo;t it
+a week later that the poor little ladies was put ashore on the other
+side of the island, with nothin&rsquo; before &rsquo;em but to walk
+home acrost the mountains on their weeny-teeny little straw sandals
+which wouldn&rsquo;t hang together a mile?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t I know?&nbsp;
+&rsquo;Tis the beast he is, this Wolf Larsen&mdash;the great big beast
+mentioned iv in Revelation; an&rsquo; no good end will he ever come
+to.&nbsp; But I&rsquo;ve said nothin&rsquo; to ye, mind ye.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve
+whispered never a word; for old fat Louis&rsquo;ll live the voyage out
+if the last mother&rsquo;s son of yez go to the fishes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wolf Larsen!&rdquo; he snorted a moment later.&nbsp; &ldquo;Listen
+to the word, will ye!&nbsp; Wolf&mdash;&rsquo;tis what he is.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;s not black-hearted like some men.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis no heart
+he has at all.&nbsp; Wolf, just wolf, &rsquo;tis what he is.&nbsp; D&rsquo;ye
+wonder he&rsquo;s well named?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But if he is so well-known for what he is,&rdquo; I queried,
+&ldquo;how is it that he can get men to ship with him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; how is it ye can get men to do anything on God&rsquo;s
+earth an&rsquo; sea?&rdquo; Louis demanded with Celtic fire.&nbsp; &ldquo;How
+d&rsquo;ye find me aboard if &rsquo;twasn&rsquo;t that I was drunk as
+a pig when I put me name down?&nbsp; There&rsquo;s them that can&rsquo;t
+sail with better men, like the hunters, and them that don&rsquo;t know,
+like the poor devils of wind-jammers for&rsquo;ard there.&nbsp; But
+they&rsquo;ll come to it, they&rsquo;ll come to it, an&rsquo; be sorry
+the day they was born.&nbsp; I could weep for the poor creatures, did
+I but forget poor old fat Louis and the troubles before him.&nbsp; But
+&rsquo;tis not a whisper I&rsquo;ve dropped, mind ye, not a whisper.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Them hunters is the wicked boys,&rdquo; he broke forth again,
+for he suffered from a constitutional plethora of speech.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+wait till they get to cutting up iv jinks and rowin&rsquo; &rsquo;round.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;s the boy&rsquo;ll fix &rsquo;em.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis him that&rsquo;ll
+put the fear of God in their rotten black hearts.&nbsp; Look at that
+hunter iv mine, Horner.&nbsp; &lsquo;Jock&rsquo; Horner they call him,
+so quiet-like an&rsquo; easy-goin&rsquo;, soft-spoken as a girl, till
+ye&rsquo;d think butter wouldn&rsquo;t melt in the mouth iv him.&nbsp;
+Didn&rsquo;t he kill his boat-steerer last year?&nbsp; &rsquo;Twas called
+a sad accident, but I met the boat-puller in Yokohama an&rsquo; the
+straight iv it was given me.&nbsp; An&rsquo; there&rsquo;s Smoke, the
+black little devil&mdash;didn&rsquo;t the Roosians have him for three
+years in the salt mines of Siberia, for poachin&rsquo; on Copper Island,
+which is a Roosian preserve?&nbsp; Shackled he was, hand an&rsquo; foot,
+with his mate.&nbsp; An&rsquo; didn&rsquo;t they have words or a ruction
+of some kind?&mdash;for &rsquo;twas the other fellow Smoke sent up in
+the buckets to the top of the mine; an&rsquo; a piece at a time he went
+up, a leg to-day, an&rsquo; to-morrow an arm, the next day the head,
+an&rsquo; so on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you can&rsquo;t mean it!&rdquo; I cried out, overcome
+with the horror of it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mean what!&rdquo; he demanded, quick as a flash.&nbsp; &ldquo;&rsquo;Tis
+nothin&rsquo; I&rsquo;ve said.&nbsp; Deef I am, and dumb, as ye should
+be for the sake iv your mother; an&rsquo; never once have I opened me
+lips but to say fine things iv them an&rsquo; him, God curse his soul,
+an&rsquo; may he rot in purgatory ten thousand years, and then go down
+to the last an&rsquo; deepest hell iv all!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Johnson, the man who had chafed me raw when I first came aboard,
+seemed the least equivocal of the men forward or aft.&nbsp; In fact,
+there was nothing equivocal about him.&nbsp; One was struck at once
+by his straightforwardness and manliness, which, in turn, were tempered
+by a modesty which might be mistaken for timidity.&nbsp; But timid he
+was not.&nbsp; He seemed, rather, to have the courage of his convictions,
+the certainty of his manhood.&nbsp; It was this that made him protest,
+at the commencement of our acquaintance, against being called Yonson.&nbsp;
+And upon this, and him, Louis passed judgment and prophecy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we&rsquo;ve
+for&rsquo;ard with us,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;The best sailorman
+in the fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s my boat-puller.&nbsp;
+But it&rsquo;s to trouble he&rsquo;ll come with Wolf Larsen, as the
+sparks fly upward.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s meself that knows.&nbsp; I can see
+it brewin&rsquo; an&rsquo; comin&rsquo; up like a storm in the sky.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;ve talked to him like a brother, but it&rsquo;s little he sees
+in takin&rsquo; in his lights or flyin&rsquo; false signals.&nbsp; He
+grumbles out when things don&rsquo;t go to suit him, and there&rsquo;ll
+be always some tell-tale carryin&rsquo; word iv it aft to the Wolf.&nbsp;
+The Wolf is strong, and it&rsquo;s the way of a wolf to hate strength,
+an&rsquo; strength it is he&rsquo;ll see in Johnson&mdash;no knucklin&rsquo;
+under, and a &lsquo;Yes, sir, thank ye kindly, sir,&rsquo; for a curse
+or a blow.&nbsp; Oh, she&rsquo;s a-comin&rsquo;!&nbsp; She&rsquo;s a-comin&rsquo;!&nbsp;
+An&rsquo; God knows where I&rsquo;ll get another boat-puller!&nbsp;
+What does the fool up an&rsquo; say, when the old man calls him Yonson,
+but &lsquo;Me name is Johnson, sir,&rsquo; an&rsquo; then spells it
+out, letter for letter.&nbsp; Ye should iv seen the old man&rsquo;s
+face!&nbsp; I thought he&rsquo;d let drive at him on the spot.&nbsp;
+He didn&rsquo;t, but he will, an&rsquo; he&rsquo;ll break that squarehead&rsquo;s
+heart, or it&rsquo;s little I know iv the ways iv men on the ships iv
+the sea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable.&nbsp; I am compelled to
+Mister him and to Sir him with every speech.&nbsp; One reason for this
+is that Wolf Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him.&nbsp; It is
+an unprecedented thing, I take it, for a captain to be chummy with the
+cook; but this is certainly what Wolf Larsen is doing.&nbsp; Two or
+three times he put his head into the galley and chaffed Mugridge good-naturedly,
+and once, this afternoon, he stood by the break of the poop and chatted
+with him for fully fifteen minutes.&nbsp; When it was over, and Mugridge
+was back in the galley, he became greasily radiant, and went about his
+work, humming coster songs in a nerve-racking and discordant falsetto.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I always get along with the officers,&rdquo; he remarked to
+me in a confidential tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know the w&rsquo;y, I do,
+to myke myself uppreci-yted.&nbsp; There was my last skipper&mdash;w&rsquo;y
+I thought nothin&rsquo; of droppin&rsquo; down in the cabin for a little
+chat and a friendly glass.&nbsp; &lsquo;Mugridge,&rsquo; sez &rsquo;e
+to me, &lsquo;Mugridge,&rsquo; sez &rsquo;e, &lsquo;you&rsquo;ve missed
+yer vokytion.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;An&rsquo; &rsquo;ow&rsquo;s that?&rsquo;
+sez I.&nbsp; &lsquo;Yer should &rsquo;a been born a gentleman, an&rsquo;
+never &rsquo;ad to work for yer livin&rsquo;.&rsquo;&nbsp; God strike
+me dead, &rsquo;Ump, if that ayn&rsquo;t wot &rsquo;e sez, an&rsquo;
+me a-sittin&rsquo; there in &rsquo;is own cabin, jolly-like an&rsquo;
+comfortable, a-smokin&rsquo; &rsquo;is cigars an&rsquo; drinkin&rsquo;
+&rsquo;is rum.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction.&nbsp; I never heard
+a voice I hated so.&nbsp; His oily, insinuating tones, his greasy smile
+and his monstrous self-conceit grated on my nerves till sometimes I
+was all in a tremble.&nbsp; Positively, he was the most disgusting and
+loathsome person I have ever met.&nbsp; The filth of his cooking was
+indescribable; and, as he cooked everything that was eaten aboard, I
+was compelled to select what I ate with great circumspection, choosing
+from the least dirty of his concoctions.</p>
+<p>My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work.&nbsp;
+The nails were discoloured and black, while the skin was already grained
+with dirt which even a scrubbing-brush could not remove.&nbsp; Then
+blisters came, in a painful and never-ending procession, and I had a
+great burn on my forearm, acquired by losing my balance in a roll of
+the ship and pitching against the galley stove.&nbsp; Nor was my knee
+any better.&nbsp; The swelling had not gone down, and the cap was still
+up on edge.&nbsp; Hobbling about on it from morning till night was not
+helping it any.&nbsp; What I needed was rest, if it were ever to get
+well.</p>
+<p>Rest!&nbsp; I never before knew the meaning of the word.&nbsp; I
+had been resting all my life and did not know it.&nbsp; But now, could
+I sit still for one half-hour and do nothing, not even think, it would
+be the most pleasurable thing in the world.&nbsp; But it is a revelation,
+on the other hand.&nbsp; I shall be able to appreciate the lives of
+the working people hereafter.&nbsp; I did not dream that work was so
+terrible a thing.&nbsp; From half-past five in the morning till ten
+o&rsquo;clock at night I am everybody&rsquo;s slave, with not one moment
+to myself, except such as I can steal near the end of the second dog-watch.&nbsp;
+Let me pause for a minute to look out over the sea sparkling in the
+sun, or to gaze at a sailor going aloft to the gaff-topsails, or running
+out the bowsprit, and I am sure to hear the hateful voice, &ldquo;&rsquo;Ere,
+you, &rsquo;Ump, no sodgerin&rsquo;.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve got my peepers
+on yer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the gossip
+is going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight.&nbsp; Henderson
+seems the best of the hunters, a slow-going fellow, and hard to rouse;
+but roused he must have been, for Smoke had a bruised and discoloured
+eye, and looked particularly vicious when he came into the cabin for
+supper.</p>
+<p>A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the callousness
+and brutishness of these men.&nbsp; There is one green hand in the crew,
+Harrison by name, a clumsy-looking country boy, mastered, I imagine,
+by the spirit of adventure, and making his first voyage.&nbsp; In the
+light baffling airs the schooner had been tacking about a great deal,
+at which times the sails pass from one side to the other and a man is
+sent aloft to shift over the fore-gaff-topsail.&nbsp; In some way, when
+Harrison was aloft, the sheet jammed in the block through which it runs
+at the end of the gaff.&nbsp; As I understood it, there were two ways
+of getting it cleared,&mdash;first, by lowering the foresail, which
+was comparatively easy and without danger; and second, by climbing out
+the peak-halyards to the end of the gaff itself, an exceedingly hazardous
+performance.</p>
+<p>Johansen called out to Harrison to go out the halyards.&nbsp; It
+was patent to everybody that the boy was afraid.&nbsp; And well he might
+be, eighty feet above the deck, to trust himself on those thin and jerking
+ropes.&nbsp; Had there been a steady breeze it would not have been so
+bad, but the <i>Ghost</i> was rolling emptily in a long sea, and with
+each roll the canvas flapped and boomed and the halyards slacked and
+jerked taut.&nbsp; They were capable of snapping a man off like a fly
+from a whip-lash.</p>
+<p>Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of him,
+but hesitated.&nbsp; It was probably the first time he had been aloft
+in his life.&nbsp; Johansen, who had caught the contagion of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+masterfulness, burst out with a volley of abuse and curses.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll do, Johansen,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said brusquely.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have you know that I do the swearing on this ship.&nbsp;
+If I need your assistance, I&rsquo;ll call you in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; the mate acknowledged submissively.</p>
+<p>In the meantime Harrison had started out on the halyards.&nbsp; I
+was looking up from the galley door, and I could see him trembling,
+as if with ague, in every limb.&nbsp; He proceeded very slowly and cautiously,
+an inch at a time.&nbsp; Outlined against the clear blue of the sky,
+he had the appearance of an enormous spider crawling along the tracery
+of its web.</p>
+<p>It was a slight uphill climb, for the foresail peaked high; and the
+halyards, running through various blocks on the gaff and mast, gave
+him separate holds for hands and feet.&nbsp; But the trouble lay in
+that the wind was not strong enough nor steady enough to keep the sail
+full.&nbsp; When he was half-way out, the <i>Ghost</i> took a long roll
+to windward and back again into the hollow between two seas.&nbsp; Harrison
+ceased his progress and held on tightly.&nbsp; Eighty feet beneath,
+I could see the agonized strain of his muscles as he gripped for very
+life.&nbsp; The sail emptied and the gaff swung amid-ships.&nbsp; The
+halyards slackened, and, though it all happened very quickly, I could
+see them sag beneath the weight of his body.&nbsp; Then the gag swung
+to the side with an abrupt swiftness, the great sail boomed like a cannon,
+and the three rows of reef-points slatted against the canvas like a
+volley of rifles.&nbsp; Harrison, clinging on, made the giddy rush through
+the air.&nbsp; This rush ceased abruptly.&nbsp; The halyards became
+instantly taut.&nbsp; It was the snap of the whip.&nbsp; His clutch
+was broken.&nbsp; One hand was torn loose from its hold.&nbsp; The other
+lingered desperately for a moment, and followed.&nbsp; His body pitched
+out and down, but in some way he managed to save himself with his legs.&nbsp;
+He was hanging by them, head downward.&nbsp; A quick effort brought
+his hands up to the halyards again; but he was a long time regaining
+his former position, where he hung, a pitiable object.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet he has no appetite for supper,&rdquo; I heard
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s voice, which came to me from around the corner of
+the galley.&nbsp; &ldquo;Stand from under, you, Johansen!&nbsp; Watch
+out!&nbsp; Here she comes!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In truth, Harrison was very sick, as a person is sea-sick; and for
+a long time he clung to his precarious perch without attempting to move.&nbsp;
+Johansen, however, continued violently to urge him on to the completion
+of his task.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is a shame,&rdquo; I heard Johnson growling in painfully
+slow and correct English.&nbsp; He was standing by the main rigging,
+a few feet away from me.&nbsp; &ldquo;The boy is willing enough.&nbsp;
+He will learn if he has a chance.&nbsp; But this is&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He paused awhile, for the word &ldquo;murder&rdquo; was his final judgment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hist, will ye!&rdquo; Louis whispered to him, &ldquo;For the
+love iv your mother hold your mouth!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But Johnson, looking on, still continued his grumbling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; the hunter Standish spoke to Wolf Larsen,
+&ldquo;that&rsquo;s my boat-puller, and I don&rsquo;t want to lose him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, Standish,&rdquo; was the reply.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s your boat-puller when you&rsquo;ve got him in the
+boat; but he&rsquo;s my sailor when I have him aboard, and I&rsquo;ll
+do what I damn well please with him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But that&rsquo;s no reason&mdash;&rdquo; Standish began in
+a torrent of speech.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll do, easy as she goes,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen counselled
+back.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve told you what&rsquo;s what, and let it
+stop at that.&nbsp; The man&rsquo;s mine, and I&rsquo;ll make soup of
+him and eat it if I want to.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was an angry gleam in the hunter&rsquo;s eye, but he turned
+on his heel and entered the steerage companion-way, where he remained,
+looking upward.&nbsp; All hands were on deck now, and all eyes were
+aloft, where a human life was at grapples with death.&nbsp; The callousness
+of these men, to whom industrial organization gave control of the lives
+of other men, was appalling.&nbsp; I, who had lived out of the whirl
+of the world, had never dreamed that its work was carried on in such
+fashion.&nbsp; Life had always seemed a peculiarly sacred thing, but
+here it counted for nothing, was a cipher in the arithmetic of commerce.&nbsp;
+I must say, however, that the sailors themselves were sympathetic, as
+instance the case of Johnson; but the masters (the hunters and the captain)
+were heartlessly indifferent.&nbsp; Even the protest of Standish arose
+out of the fact that he did not wish to lose his boat-puller.&nbsp;
+Had it been some other hunter&rsquo;s boat-puller, he, like them, would
+have been no more than amused.</p>
+<p>But to return to Harrison.&nbsp; It took Johansen, insulting and
+reviling the poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started again.&nbsp;
+A little later he made the end of the gaff, where, astride the spar
+itself, he had a better chance for holding on.&nbsp; He cleared the
+sheet, and was free to return, slightly downhill now, along the halyards
+to the mast.&nbsp; But he had lost his nerve.&nbsp; Unsafe as was his
+present position, he was loath to forsake it for the more unsafe position
+on the halyards.</p>
+<p>He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down to
+the deck.&nbsp; His eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling
+violently.&nbsp; I had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human
+face.&nbsp; Johansen called vainly for him to come down.&nbsp; At any
+moment he was liable to be snapped off the gaff, but he was helpless
+with fright.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen, walking up and down with Smoke and in
+conversation, took no more notice of him, though he cried sharply, once,
+to the man at the wheel:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re off your course, my man!&nbsp; Be careful, unless
+you&rsquo;re looking for trouble!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, ay, sir,&rdquo; the helmsman responded, putting a couple
+of spokes down.</p>
+<p>He had been guilty of running the <i>Ghost</i> several points off
+her course in order that what little wind there was should fill the
+foresail and hold it steady.&nbsp; He had striven to help the unfortunate
+Harrison at the risk of incurring Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s anger.</p>
+<p>The time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible.&nbsp; Thomas
+Mugridge, on the other hand, considered it a laughable affair, and was
+continually bobbing his head out the galley door to make jocose remarks.&nbsp;
+How I hated him!&nbsp; And how my hatred for him grew and grew, during
+that fearful time, to cyclopean dimensions.&nbsp; For the first time
+in my life I experienced the desire to murder&mdash;&ldquo;saw red,&rdquo;
+as some of our picturesque writers phrase it.&nbsp; Life in general
+might still be sacred, but life in the particular case of Thomas Mugridge
+had become very profane indeed.&nbsp; I was frightened when I became
+conscious that I was seeing red, and the thought flashed through my
+mind: was I, too, becoming tainted by the brutality of my environment?&mdash;I,
+who even in the most flagrant crimes had denied the justice and righteousness
+of capital punishment?</p>
+<p>Fully half-an-hour went by, and then I saw Johnson and Louis in some
+sort of altercation.&nbsp; It ended with Johnson flinging off Louis&rsquo;s
+detaining arm and starting forward.&nbsp; He crossed the deck, sprang
+into the fore rigging, and began to climb.&nbsp; But the quick eye of
+Wolf Larsen caught him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, you, what are you up to?&rdquo; he cried.</p>
+<p>Johnson&rsquo;s ascent was arrested.&nbsp; He looked his captain
+in the eyes and replied slowly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am going to get that boy down.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll get down out of that rigging, and damn lively
+about it!&nbsp; D&rsquo;ye hear?&nbsp; Get down!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Johnson hesitated, but the long years of obedience to the masters
+of ships overpowered him, and he dropped sullenly to the deck and went
+on forward.</p>
+<p>At half after five I went below to set the cabin table, but I hardly
+knew what I did, for my eyes and my brain were filled with the vision
+of a man, white-faced and trembling, comically like a bug, clinging
+to the thrashing gaff.&nbsp; At six o&rsquo;clock, when I served supper,
+going on deck to get the food from the galley, I saw Harrison, still
+in the same position.&nbsp; The conversation at the table was of other
+things.&nbsp; Nobody seemed interested in the wantonly imperilled life.&nbsp;
+But making an extra trip to the galley a little later, I was gladdened
+by the sight of Harrison staggering weakly from the rigging to the forecastle
+scuttle.&nbsp; He had finally summoned the courage to descend.</p>
+<p>Before closing this incident, I must give a scrap of conversation
+I had with Wolf Larsen in the cabin, while I was washing the dishes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were looking squeamish this afternoon,&rdquo; he began.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;What was the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I could see that he knew what had made me possibly as sick as Harrison,
+that he was trying to draw me, and I answered, &ldquo;It was because
+of the brutal treatment of that boy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He gave a short laugh.&nbsp; &ldquo;Like sea-sickness, I suppose.&nbsp;
+Some men are subject to it, and others are not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not so,&rdquo; I objected.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just so,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;The earth is as full
+of brutality as the sea is full of motion.&nbsp; And some men are made
+sick by the one, and some by the other.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the only
+reason.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you, who make a mock of human life, don&rsquo;t you place
+any value upon it whatever?&rdquo; I demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Value?&nbsp; What value?&rdquo;&nbsp; He looked at me, and
+though his eyes were steady and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile
+in them.&nbsp; &ldquo;What kind of value?&nbsp; How do you measure it?&nbsp;
+Who values it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do,&rdquo; I made answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then what is it worth to you?&nbsp; Another man&rsquo;s life,
+I mean.&nbsp; Come now, what is it worth?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The value of life?&nbsp; How could I put a tangible value upon it?&nbsp;
+Somehow, I, who have always had expression, lacked expression when with
+Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; I have since determined that a part of it was due
+to the man&rsquo;s personality, but that the greater part was due to
+his totally different outlook.&nbsp; Unlike other materialists I had
+met and with whom I had something in common to start on, I had nothing
+in common with him.&nbsp; Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity
+of his mind that baffled me.&nbsp; He drove so directly to the core
+of the matter, divesting a question always of all superfluous details,
+and with such an air of finality, that I seemed to find myself struggling
+in deep water, with no footing under me.&nbsp; Value of life?&nbsp;
+How could I answer the question on the spur of the moment?&nbsp; The
+sacredness of life I had accepted as axiomatic.&nbsp; That it was intrinsically
+valuable was a truism I had never questioned.&nbsp; But when he challenged
+the truism I was speechless.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We were talking about this yesterday,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I held that life was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured
+life that it might live, and that living was merely successful piggishness.&nbsp;
+Why, if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest
+thing in the world.&nbsp; There is only so much water, so much earth,
+so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless.&nbsp;
+Nature is a spendthrift.&nbsp; Look at the fish and their millions of
+eggs.&nbsp; For that matter, look at you and me.&nbsp; In our loins
+are the possibilities of millions of lives.&nbsp; Could we but find
+time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn
+life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate
+continents.&nbsp; Life?&nbsp; Bah!&nbsp; It has no value.&nbsp; Of cheap
+things it is the cheapest.&nbsp; Everywhere it goes begging.&nbsp; Nature
+spills it out with a lavish hand.&nbsp; Where there is room for one
+life, she sows a thousand lives, and it&rsquo;s life eats life till
+the strongest and most piggish life is left.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have read Darwin,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But you
+read him misunderstandingly when you conclude that the struggle for
+existence sanctions your wanton destruction of life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders.&nbsp; &ldquo;You know you only mean that
+in relation to human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish
+you destroy as much as I or any other man.&nbsp; And human life is in
+no wise different, though you feel it is and think that you reason why
+it is.&nbsp; Why should I be parsimonious with this life which is cheap
+and without value?&nbsp; There are more sailors than there are ships
+on the sea for them, more workers than there are factories or machines
+for them.&nbsp; Why, you who live on the land know that you house your
+poor people in the slums of cities and loose famine and pestilence upon
+them, and that there still remain more poor people, dying for want of
+a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which is life destroyed), than you
+know what to do with.&nbsp; Have you ever seen the London dockers fighting
+like wild beasts for a chance to work?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He started for the companion stairs, but turned his head for a final
+word.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do you know the only value life has is what life
+puts upon itself?&nbsp; And it is of course over-estimated since it
+is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.&nbsp; Take that man I
+had aloft.&nbsp; He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure
+beyond diamonds or rubies.&nbsp; To you?&nbsp; No.&nbsp; To me?&nbsp;
+Not at all.&nbsp; To himself?&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; But I do not accept his
+estimate.&nbsp; He sadly overrates himself.&nbsp; There is plenty more
+life demanding to be born.&nbsp; Had he fallen and dripped his brains
+upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss
+to the world.&nbsp; He was worth nothing to the world.&nbsp; The supply
+is too large.&nbsp; To himself only was he of value, and to show how
+fictitious even this value was, being dead he is unconscious that he
+has lost himself.&nbsp; He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies.&nbsp;
+Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away
+by a bucket of sea-water, and he does not even know that the diamonds
+and rubies are gone.&nbsp; He does not lose anything, for with the loss
+of himself he loses the knowledge of loss.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you see?&nbsp;
+And what have you to say?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That you are at least consistent,&rdquo; was all I could say,
+and I went on washing the dishes.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the north-east
+trades.&nbsp; I came on deck, after a good night&rsquo;s rest in spite
+of my poor knee, to find the <i>Ghost</i> foaming along, wing-and-wing,
+and every sail drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze astern.&nbsp;
+Oh, the wonder of the great trade-wind!&nbsp; All day we sailed, and
+all night, and the next day, and the next, day after day, the wind always
+astern and blowing steadily and strong.&nbsp; The schooner sailed herself.&nbsp;
+There was no pulling and hauling on sheets and tackles, no shifting
+of topsails, no work at all for the sailors to do except to steer.&nbsp;
+At night when the sun went down, the sheets were slackened; in the morning,
+when they yielded up the damp of the dew and relaxed, they were pulled
+tight again&mdash;and that was all.</p>
+<p>Ten knots, twelve knots, eleven knots, varying from time to time,
+is the speed we are making.&nbsp; And ever out of the north-east the
+brave wind blows, driving us on our course two hundred and fifty miles
+between the dawns.&nbsp; It saddens me and gladdens me, the gait with
+which we are leaving San Francisco behind and with which we are foaming
+down upon the tropics.&nbsp; Each day grows perceptibly warmer.&nbsp;
+In the second dog-watch the sailors come on deck, stripped, and heave
+buckets of water upon one another from overside.&nbsp; Flying-fish are
+beginning to be seen, and during the night the watch above scrambles
+over the deck in pursuit of those that fall aboard.&nbsp; In the morning,
+Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the galley is pleasantly areek with
+the odour of their frying; while dolphin meat is served fore and aft
+on such occasions as Johnson catches the blazing beauties from the bowsprit
+end.</p>
+<p>Johnson seems to spend all his spare time there or aloft at the crosstrees,
+watching the <i>Ghost</i> cleaving the water under press of sail.&nbsp;
+There is passion, adoration, in his eyes, and he goes about in a sort
+of trance, gazing in ecstasy at the swelling sails, the foaming wake,
+and the heave and the run of her over the liquid mountains that are
+moving with us in stately procession.</p>
+<p>The days and nights are &ldquo;all a wonder and a wild delight,&rdquo;
+and though I have little time from my dreary work, I steal odd moments
+to gaze and gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the world
+possessed.&nbsp; Above, the sky is stainless blue&mdash;blue as the
+sea itself, which under the forefoot is of the colour and sheen of azure
+satin.&nbsp; All around the horizon are pale, fleecy clouds, never changing,
+never moving, like a silver setting for the flawless turquoise sky.</p>
+<p>I do not forget one night, when I should have been asleep, of lying
+on the forecastle-head and gazing down at the spectral ripple of foam
+thrust aside by the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> forefoot.&nbsp; It sounded
+like the gurgling of a brook over mossy stones in some quiet dell, and
+the crooning song of it lured me away and out of myself till I was no
+longer Hump the cabin-boy, nor Van Weyden, the man who had dreamed away
+thirty-five years among books.&nbsp; But a voice behind me, the unmistakable
+voice of Wolf Larsen, strong with the invincible certitude of the man
+and mellow with appreciation of the words he was quoting, aroused me.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;O the blazing tropic night, when the wake&rsquo;s a
+welt of light<br />That holds the hot sky tame,<br />And the steady
+forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors<br />Where the scared
+whale flukes in flame.<br />Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear
+lass,<br />And her ropes are taut with the dew,<br />For we&rsquo;re
+booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,<br />We&rsquo;re
+sagging south on the Long Trail&mdash;the trail that is always new.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Eh, Hump?&nbsp; How&rsquo;s it strike you?&rdquo; he asked,
+after the due pause which words and setting demanded.</p>
+<p>I looked into his face.&nbsp; It was aglow with light, as the sea
+itself, and the eyes were flashing in the starshine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It strikes me as remarkable, to say the least, that you should
+show enthusiasm,&rdquo; I answered coldly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, man, it&rsquo;s living! it&rsquo;s life!&rdquo; he cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Which is a cheap thing and without value.&rdquo;&nbsp; I flung
+his words at him.</p>
+<p>He laughed, and it was the first time I had heard honest mirth in
+his voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, I cannot get you to understand, cannot drive it into your
+head, what a thing this life is.&nbsp; Of course life is valueless,
+except to itself.&nbsp; And I can tell you that my life is pretty valuable
+just now&mdash;to myself.&nbsp; It is beyond price, which you will acknowledge
+is a terrific overrating, but which I cannot help, for it is the life
+that is in me that makes the rating.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He appeared waiting for the words with which to express the thought
+that was in him, and finally went on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as
+if all time were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine.&nbsp;
+I know truth, divine good from evil, right from wrong.&nbsp; My vision
+is clear and far.&nbsp; I could almost believe in God.&nbsp; But,&rdquo;
+and his voice changed and the light went out of his face,&mdash;&ldquo;what
+is this condition in which I find myself? this joy of living? this exultation
+of life? this inspiration, I may well call it?&nbsp; It is what comes
+when there is nothing wrong with one&rsquo;s digestion, when his stomach
+is in trim and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well.&nbsp; It
+is the bribe for living, the champagne of the blood, the effervescence
+of the ferment&mdash;that makes some men think holy thoughts, and other
+men to see God or to create him when they cannot see him.&nbsp; That
+is all, the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast,
+the babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness that it is
+alive.&nbsp; And&mdash;bah!&nbsp; To-morrow I shall pay for it as the
+drunkard pays.&nbsp; And I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely,
+cease crawling of myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the
+sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and
+movement of my muscles that it may become strength and movement in fin
+and scale and the guts of fishes.&nbsp; Bah!&nbsp; And bah! again.&nbsp;
+The champagne is already flat.&nbsp; The sparkle and bubble has gone
+out and it is a tasteless drink.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He left me as suddenly as he had come, springing to the deck with
+the weight and softness of a tiger.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i> ploughed
+on her way.&nbsp; I noted the gurgling forefoot was very like a snore,
+and as I listened to it the effect of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s swift rush
+from sublime exultation to despair slowly left me.&nbsp; Then some deep-water
+sailor, from the waist of the ship, lifted a rich tenor voice in the
+&ldquo;Song of the Trade Wind&rdquo;:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I am the wind the seamen love&mdash;<br />I am steady,
+and strong, and true;<br />They follow my track by the clouds above,<br />O&rsquo;er
+the fathomless tropic blue.</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>Through daylight and dark I follow the bark<br />I keep like a hound
+on her trail;<br />I&rsquo;m strongest at noon, yet under the moon,<br />I
+stiffen the bunt of her sail.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of
+his strange moods and vagaries.&nbsp; At other times I take him for
+a great man, a genius who has never arrived.&nbsp; And, finally, I am
+convinced that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand
+years or generations too late and an anachronism in this culminating
+century of civilization.&nbsp; He is certainly an individualist of the
+most pronounced type.&nbsp; Not only that, but he is very lonely.&nbsp;
+There is no congeniality between him and the rest of the men aboard
+ship.&nbsp; His tremendous virility and mental strength wall him apart.&nbsp;
+They are more like children to him, even the hunters, and as children
+he treats them, descending perforce to their level and playing with
+them as a man plays with puppies.&nbsp; Or else he probes them with
+the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in their mental processes
+and examining their souls as though to see of what soul-stuff is made.</p>
+<p>I have seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter
+or that, with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of interest,
+pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a curiosity almost
+laughable to me who stood onlooker and who understood.&nbsp; Concerning
+his own rages, I am convinced that they are not real, that they are
+sometimes experiments, but that in the main they are the habits of a
+pose or attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellow-men.&nbsp;
+I know, with the possible exception of the incident of the dead mate,
+that I have not seen him really angry; nor do I wish ever to see him
+in a genuine rage, when all the force of him is called into play.</p>
+<p>While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas
+Mugridge in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident upon
+which I have already touched once or twice.&nbsp; The twelve o&rsquo;clock
+dinner was over, one day, and I had just finished putting the cabin
+in order, when Wolf Larsen and Thomas Mugridge descended the companion
+stairs.&nbsp; Though the cook had a cubby-hole of a state-room opening
+off from the cabin, in the cabin itself he had never dared to linger
+or to be seen, and he flitted to and fro, once or twice a day, a timid
+spectre.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So you know how to play &lsquo;Nap,&rsquo;&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+was saying in a pleased sort of voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;I might have guessed
+an Englishman would know.&nbsp; I learned it myself in English ships.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile, so pleased
+was he at chumming thus with the captain.&nbsp; The little airs he put
+on and the painful striving to assume the easy carriage of a man born
+to a dignified place in life would have been sickening had they not
+been ludicrous.&nbsp; He quite ignored my presence, though I credited
+him with being simply unable to see me.&nbsp; His pale, wishy-washy
+eyes were swimming like lazy summer seas, though what blissful visions
+they beheld were beyond my imagination.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Get the cards, Hump,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen ordered, as they took
+seats at the table.&nbsp; &ldquo;And bring out the cigars and the whisky
+you&rsquo;ll find in my berth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I returned with the articles in time to hear the Cockney hinting
+broadly that there was a mystery about him, that he might be a gentleman&rsquo;s
+son gone wrong or something or other; also, that he was a remittance
+man and was paid to keep away from England&mdash;&ldquo;p&rsquo;yed
+&rsquo;ansomely, sir,&rdquo; was the way he put it; &ldquo;p&rsquo;yed
+&rsquo;ansomely to sling my &rsquo;ook an&rsquo; keep slingin&rsquo;
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had brought the customary liquor glasses, but Wolf Larsen frowned,
+shook his head, and signalled with his hands for me to bring the tumblers.&nbsp;
+These he filled two-thirds full with undiluted whisky&mdash;&ldquo;a
+gentleman&rsquo;s drink?&rdquo; quoth Thomas Mugridge,&mdash;and they
+clinked their glasses to the glorious game of &ldquo;Nap,&rdquo; lighted
+cigars, and fell to shuffling and dealing the cards.</p>
+<p>They played for money.&nbsp; They increased the amounts of the bets.&nbsp;
+They drank whisky, they drank it neat, and I fetched more.&nbsp; I do
+not know whether Wolf Larsen cheated or not,&mdash;a thing he was thoroughly
+capable of doing,&mdash;but he won steadily.&nbsp; The cook made repeated
+journeys to his bunk for money.&nbsp; Each time he performed the journey
+with greater swagger, but he never brought more than a few dollars at
+a time.&nbsp; He grew maudlin, familiar, could hardly see the cards
+or sit upright.&nbsp; As a preliminary to another journey to his bunk,
+he hooked Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s buttonhole with a greasy forefinger and
+vacuously proclaimed and reiterated, &ldquo;I got money, I got money,
+I tell yer, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;m a gentleman&rsquo;s son.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen was unaffected by the drink, yet he drank glass for glass,
+and if anything his glasses were fuller.&nbsp; There was no change in
+him.&nbsp; He did not appear even amused at the other&rsquo;s antics.</p>
+<p>In the end, with loud protestations that he could lose like a gentleman,
+the cook&rsquo;s last money was staked on the game&mdash;and lost.&nbsp;
+Whereupon he leaned his head on his hands and wept.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen
+looked curiously at him, as though about to probe and vivisect him,
+then changed his mind, as from the foregone conclusion that there was
+nothing there to probe.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said to me, elaborately polite, &ldquo;kindly
+take Mr. Mugridge&rsquo;s arm and help him up on deck.&nbsp; He is not
+feeling very well.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And tell Johnson to douse him with a few buckets of salt water,&rdquo;
+he added, in a lower tone for my ear alone.</p>
+<p>I left Mr. Mugridge on deck, in the hands of a couple of grinning
+sailors who had been told off for the purpose.&nbsp; Mr. Mugridge was
+sleepily spluttering that he was a gentleman&rsquo;s son.&nbsp; But
+as I descended the companion stairs to clear the table I heard him shriek
+as the first bucket of water struck him.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen was counting his winnings.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One hundred and eighty-five dollars even,&rdquo; he said aloud.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Just as I thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;The beggar came aboard without
+a cent.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what you have won is mine, sir,&rdquo; I said boldly.</p>
+<p>He favoured me with a quizzical smile.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hump, I have
+studied some grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Was mine,&rsquo; you should have said, not &rsquo;is mine.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is a question, not of grammar, but of ethics,&rdquo; I
+answered.</p>
+<p>It was possibly a minute before he spoke.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;D&rsquo;ye know, Hump,&rdquo; he said, with a slow seriousness
+which had in it an indefinable strain of sadness, &ldquo;that this is
+the first time I have heard the word &lsquo;ethics&rsquo; in the mouth
+of a man.&nbsp; You and I are the only men on this ship who know its
+meaning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At one time in my life,&rdquo; he continued, after another
+pause, &ldquo;I dreamed that I might some day talk with men who used
+such language, that I might lift myself out of the place in life in
+which I had been born, and hold conversation and mingle with men who
+talked about just such things as ethics.&nbsp; And this is the first
+time I have ever heard the word pronounced.&nbsp; Which is all by the
+way, for you are wrong.&nbsp; It is a question neither of grammar nor
+ethics, but of fact.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;The fact is that
+you have the money.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His face brightened.&nbsp; He seemed pleased at my perspicacity.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But it is avoiding the real question,&rdquo; I continued, &ldquo;which
+is one of right.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; he remarked, with a wry pucker of his mouth, &ldquo;I
+see you still believe in such things as right and wrong.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you?&mdash;at all?&rdquo; I demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not the least bit.&nbsp; Might is right, and that is all there
+is to it.&nbsp; Weakness is wrong.&nbsp; Which is a very poor way of
+saying that it is good for oneself to be strong, and evil for oneself
+to be weak&mdash;or better yet, it is pleasurable to be strong, because
+of the profits; painful to be weak, because of the penalties.&nbsp;
+Just now the possession of this money is a pleasurable thing.&nbsp;
+It is good for one to possess it.&nbsp; Being able to possess it, I
+wrong myself and the life that is in me if I give it to you and forego
+the pleasure of possessing it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you wrong me by withholding it,&rdquo; I objected.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not at all.&nbsp; One man cannot wrong another man.&nbsp;
+He can only wrong himself.&nbsp; As I see it, I do wrong always when
+I consider the interests of others.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you see?&nbsp;
+How can two particles of the yeast wrong each other by striving to devour
+each other?&nbsp; It is their inborn heritage to strive to devour, and
+to strive not to be devoured.&nbsp; When they depart from this they
+sin.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you don&rsquo;t believe in altruism?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>He received the word as if it had a familiar ring, though he pondered
+it thoughtfully.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let me see, it means something about co&ouml;peration,
+doesn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, in a way there has come to be a sort of connection,&rdquo;
+I answered unsurprised by this time at such gaps in his vocabulary,
+which, like his knowledge, was the acquirement of a self-read, self-educated
+man, whom no one had directed in his studies, and who had thought much
+and talked little or not at all.&nbsp; &ldquo;An altruistic act is an
+act performed for the welfare of others.&nbsp; It is unselfish, as opposed
+to an act performed for self, which is selfish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He nodded his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, yes, I remember it now.&nbsp;
+I ran across it in Spencer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Spencer!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Have you read him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not very much,&rdquo; was his confession.&nbsp; &ldquo;I understood
+quite a good deal of <i>First Principles</i>, but his <i>Biology</i>
+took the wind out of my sails, and his <i>Psychology</i> left me butting
+around in the doldrums for many a day.&nbsp; I honestly could not understand
+what he was driving at.&nbsp; I put it down to mental deficiency on
+my part, but since then I have decided that it was for want of preparation.&nbsp;
+I had no proper basis.&nbsp; Only Spencer and myself know how hard I
+hammered.&nbsp; But I did get something out of his <i>Data of Ethics</i>.&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s where I ran across &lsquo;altruism,&rsquo; and I remember
+now how it was used.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I wondered what this man could have got from such a work.&nbsp; Spencer
+I remembered enough to know that altruism was imperative to his ideal
+of highest conduct.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen, evidently, had sifted the great
+philosopher&rsquo;s teachings, rejecting and selecting according to
+his needs and desires.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What else did you run across?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>His brows drew in slightly with the mental effort of suitably phrasing
+thoughts which he had never before put into speech.&nbsp; I felt an
+elation of spirit.&nbsp; I was groping into his soul-stuff as he made
+a practice of groping in the soul-stuff of others.&nbsp; I was exploring
+virgin territory.&nbsp; A strange, a terribly strange, region was unrolling
+itself before my eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In as few words as possible,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;Spencer
+puts it something like this: First, a man must act for his own benefit&mdash;to
+do this is to be moral and good.&nbsp; Next, he must act for the benefit
+of his children.&nbsp; And third, he must act for the benefit of his
+race.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And the highest, finest, right conduct,&rdquo; I interjected,
+&ldquo;is that act which benefits at the same time the man, his children,
+and his race.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t stand for that,&rdquo; he replied.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t see the necessity for it, nor the common sense.&nbsp;
+I cut out the race and the children.&nbsp; I would sacrifice nothing
+for them.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s just so much slush and sentiment, and you
+must see it yourself, at least for one who does not believe in eternal
+life.&nbsp; With immortality before me, altruism would be a paying business
+proposition.&nbsp; I might elevate my soul to all kinds of altitudes.&nbsp;
+But with nothing eternal before me but death, given for a brief spell
+this yeasty crawling and squirming which is called life, why, it would
+be immoral for me to perform any act that was a sacrifice.&nbsp; Any
+sacrifice that makes me lose one crawl or squirm is foolish,&mdash;and
+not only foolish, for it is a wrong against myself and a wicked thing.&nbsp;
+I must not lose one crawl or squirm if I am to get the most out of the
+ferment.&nbsp; Nor will the eternal movelessness that is coming to me
+be made easier or harder by the sacrifices or selfishnesses of the time
+when I was yeasty and acrawl.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you are an individualist, a materialist, and, logically,
+a hedonist.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Big words,&rdquo; he smiled.&nbsp; &ldquo;But what is a hedonist?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He nodded agreement when I had given the definition.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+you are also,&rdquo; I continued, &ldquo;a man one could not trust in
+the least thing where it was possible for a selfish interest to intervene?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now you&rsquo;re beginning to understand,&rdquo; he said,
+brightening.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are a man utterly without what the world calls morals?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A man of whom to be always afraid&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way to put it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As one is afraid of a snake, or a tiger, or a shark?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now you know me,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;And you know
+me as I am generally known.&nbsp; Other men call me &lsquo;Wolf.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are a sort of monster,&rdquo; I added audaciously, &ldquo;a
+Caliban who has pondered Setebos, and who acts as you act, in idle moments,
+by whim and fancy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His brow clouded at the allusion.&nbsp; He did not understand, and
+I quickly learned that he did not know the poem.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m just reading Browning,&rdquo; he confessed, &ldquo;and
+it&rsquo;s pretty tough.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t got very far along, and
+as it is I&rsquo;ve about lost my bearings.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Not to be tiresome, I shall say that I fetched the book from his
+state-room and read &ldquo;Caliban&rdquo; aloud.&nbsp; He was delighted.&nbsp;
+It was a primitive mode of reasoning and of looking at things that he
+understood thoroughly.&nbsp; He interrupted again and again with comment
+and criticism.&nbsp; When I finished, he had me read it over a second
+time, and a third.&nbsp; We fell into discussion&mdash;philosophy, science,
+evolution, religion.&nbsp; He betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read
+man, and, it must be granted, the sureness and directness of the primitive
+mind.&nbsp; The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength, and
+his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism
+of Charley Furuseth.&nbsp; Not that I&mdash;a confirmed and, as Furuseth
+phrased it, a temperamental idealist&mdash;was to be compelled; but
+that Wolf Larsen stormed the last strongholds of my faith with a vigour
+that received respect, while not accorded conviction.</p>
+<p>Time passed.&nbsp; Supper was at hand and the table not laid.&nbsp;
+I became restless and anxious, and when Thomas Mugridge glared down
+the companion-way, sick and angry of countenance, I prepared to go about
+my duties.&nbsp; But Wolf Larsen cried out to him:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cooky, you&rsquo;ve got to hustle to-night.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m
+busy with Hump, and you&rsquo;ll do the best you can without him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And again the unprecedented was established.&nbsp; That night I sat
+at table with the captain and the hunters, while Thomas Mugridge waited
+on us and washed the dishes afterward&mdash;a whim, a Caliban-mood of
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s, and one I foresaw would bring me trouble.&nbsp;
+In the meantime we talked and talked, much to the disgust of the hunters,
+who could not understand a word.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Three days of rest, three blessed days of rest, are what I had with
+Wolf Larsen, eating at the cabin table and doing nothing but discuss
+life, literature, and the universe, the while Thomas Mugridge fumed
+and raged and did my work as well as his own.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Watch out for squalls, is all I can say to you,&rdquo; was
+Louis&rsquo;s warning, given during a spare half-hour on deck while
+Wolf Larsen was engaged in straightening out a row among the hunters.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ye can&rsquo;t tell what&rsquo;ll be happenin&rsquo;,&rdquo;
+Louis went on, in response to my query for more definite information.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The man&rsquo;s as contrary as air currents or water currents.&nbsp;
+You can never guess the ways iv him.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis just as you&rsquo;re
+thinkin&rsquo; you know him and are makin&rsquo; a favourable slant
+along him, that he whirls around, dead ahead and comes howlin&rsquo;
+down upon you and a-rippin&rsquo; all iv your fine-weather sails to
+rags.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So I was not altogether surprised when the squall foretold by Louis
+smote me.&nbsp; We had been having a heated discussion,&mdash;upon life,
+of course,&mdash;and, grown over-bold, I was passing stiff strictures
+upon Wolf Larsen and the life of Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; In fact, I was vivisecting
+him and turning over his soul-stuff as keenly and thoroughly as it was
+his custom to do it to others.&nbsp; It may be a weakness of mine that
+I have an incisive way of speech; but I threw all restraint to the winds
+and cut and slashed until the whole man of him was snarling.&nbsp; The
+dark sun-bronze of his face went black with wrath, his eyes were ablaze.&nbsp;
+There was no clearness or sanity in them&mdash;nothing but the terrific
+rage of a madman.&nbsp; It was the wolf in him that I saw, and a mad
+wolf at that.</p>
+<p>He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm.&nbsp; I had steeled
+myself to brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly; but the enormous
+strength of the man was too much for my fortitude.&nbsp; He had gripped
+me by the biceps with his single hand, and when that grip tightened
+I wilted and shrieked aloud.&nbsp; My feet went out from under me.&nbsp;
+I simply could not stand upright and endure the agony.&nbsp; The muscles
+refused their duty.&nbsp; The pain was too great.&nbsp; My biceps was
+being crushed to a pulp.</p>
+<p>He seemed to recover himself, for a lucid gleam came into his eyes,
+and he relaxed his hold with a short laugh that was more like a growl.&nbsp;
+I fell to the floor, feeling very faint, while he sat down, lighted
+a cigar, and watched me as a cat watches a mouse.&nbsp; As I writhed
+about I could see in his eyes that curiosity I had so often noted, that
+wonder and perplexity, that questing, that everlasting query of his
+as to what it was all about.</p>
+<p>I finally crawled to my feet and ascended the companion stairs.&nbsp;
+Fair weather was over, and there was nothing left but to return to the
+galley.&nbsp; My left arm was numb, as though paralysed, and days passed
+before I could use it, while weeks went by before the last stiffness
+and pain went out of it.&nbsp; And he had done nothing but put his hand
+upon my arm and squeeze.&nbsp; There had been no wrenching or jerking.&nbsp;
+He had just closed his hand with a steady pressure.&nbsp; What he might
+have done I did not fully realize till next day, when he put his head
+into the galley, and, as a sign of renewed friendliness, asked me how
+my arm was getting on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It might have been worse,&rdquo; he smiled.</p>
+<p>I was peeling potatoes.&nbsp; He picked one up from the pan.&nbsp;
+It was fair-sized, firm, and unpeeled.&nbsp; He closed his hand upon
+it, squeezed, and the potato squirted out between his fingers in mushy
+streams.&nbsp; The pulpy remnant he dropped back into the pan and turned
+away, and I had a sharp vision of how it might have fared with me had
+the monster put his real strength upon me.</p>
+<p>But the three days&rsquo; rest was good in spite of it all, for it
+had given my knee the very chance it needed.&nbsp; It felt much better,
+the swelling had materially decreased, and the cap seemed descending
+into its proper place.&nbsp; Also, the three days&rsquo; rest brought
+the trouble I had foreseen.&nbsp; It was plainly Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s
+intention to make me pay for those three days.&nbsp; He treated me vilely,
+cursed me continually, and heaped his own work upon me.&nbsp; He even
+ventured to raise his fist to me, but I was becoming animal-like myself,
+and I snarled in his face so terribly that it must have frightened him
+back.&nbsp; It is no pleasant picture I can conjure up of myself, Humphrey
+Van Weyden, in that noisome ship&rsquo;s galley, crouched in a corner
+over my task, my face raised to the face of the creature about to strike
+me, my lips lifted and snarling like a dog&rsquo;s, my eyes gleaming
+with fear and helplessness and the courage that comes of fear and helplessness.&nbsp;
+I do not like the picture.&nbsp; It reminds me too strongly of a rat
+in a trap.&nbsp; I do not care to think of it; but it was elective,
+for the threatened blow did not descend.</p>
+<p>Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as
+I glared.&nbsp; A pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and
+showing our teeth.&nbsp; He was a coward, afraid to strike me because
+I had not quailed sufficiently in advance; so he chose a new way to
+intimidate me.&nbsp; There was only one galley knife that, as a knife,
+amounted to anything.&nbsp; This, through many years of service and
+wear, had acquired a long, lean blade.&nbsp; It was unusually cruel-looking,
+and at first I had shuddered every time I used it.&nbsp; The cook borrowed
+a stone from Johansen and proceeded to sharpen the knife.&nbsp; He did
+it with great ostentation, glancing significantly at me the while.&nbsp;
+He whetted it up and down all day long.&nbsp; Every odd moment he could
+find he had the knife and stone out and was whetting away.&nbsp; The
+steel acquired a razor edge.&nbsp; He tried it with the ball of his
+thumb or across the nail.&nbsp; He shaved hairs from the back of his
+hand, glanced along the edge with microscopic acuteness, and found,
+or feigned that he found, always, a slight inequality in its edge somewhere.&nbsp;
+Then he would put it on the stone again and whet, whet, whet, till I
+could have laughed aloud, it was so very ludicrous.</p>
+<p>It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using it,
+that under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice, like
+mine, that would impel him to do the very thing his whole nature protested
+against doing and was afraid of doing.&nbsp; &ldquo;Cooky&rsquo;s sharpening
+his knife for Hump,&rdquo; was being whispered about among the sailors,
+and some of them twitted him about it.&nbsp; This he took in good part,
+and was really pleased, nodding his head with direful foreknowledge
+and mystery, until George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy, ventured some
+rough pleasantry on the subject.</p>
+<p>Now it happened that Leach was one of the sailors told off to douse
+Mugridge after his game of cards with the captain.&nbsp; Leach had evidently
+done his task with a thoroughness that Mugridge had not forgiven, for
+words followed and evil names involving smirched ancestries.&nbsp; Mugridge
+menaced with the knife he was sharpening for me.&nbsp; Leach laughed
+and hurled more of his Telegraph Hill Billingsgate, and before either
+he or I knew what had happened, his right arm had been ripped open from
+elbow to wrist by a quick slash of the knife.&nbsp; The cook backed
+away, a fiendish expression on his face, the knife held before him in
+a position of defence.&nbsp; But Leach took it quite calmly, though
+blood was spouting upon the deck as generously as water from a fountain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to get you, Cooky,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and
+I&rsquo;ll get you hard.&nbsp; And I won&rsquo;t be in no hurry about
+it.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be without that knife when I come for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So saying, he turned and walked quietly forward.&nbsp; Mugridge&rsquo;s
+face was livid with fear at what he had done and at what he might expect
+sooner or later from the man he had stabbed.&nbsp; But his demeanour
+toward me was more ferocious than ever.&nbsp; In spite of his fear at
+the reckoning he must expect to pay for what he had done, he could see
+that it had been an object-lesson to me, and he became more domineering
+and exultant.&nbsp; Also there was a lust in him, akin to madness, which
+had come with sight of the blood he had drawn.&nbsp; He was beginning
+to see red in whatever direction he looked.&nbsp; The psychology of
+it is sadly tangled, and yet I could read the workings of his mind as
+clearly as though it were a printed book.</p>
+<p>Several days went by, the <i>Ghost</i> still foaming down the trades,
+and I could swear I saw madness growing in Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp;
+And I confess that I became afraid, very much afraid.&nbsp; Whet, whet,
+whet, it went all day long.&nbsp; The look in his eyes as he felt the
+keen edge and glared at me was positively carnivorous.&nbsp; I was afraid
+to turn my shoulder to him, and when I left the galley I went out backwards&mdash;to
+the amusement of the sailors and hunters, who made a point of gathering
+in groups to witness my exit.&nbsp; The strain was too great.&nbsp;
+I sometimes thought my mind would give way under it&mdash;a meet thing
+on this ship of madmen and brutes.&nbsp; Every hour, every minute of
+my existence was in jeopardy.&nbsp; I was a human soul in distress,
+and yet no soul, fore or aft, betrayed sufficient sympathy to come to
+my aid.&nbsp; At times I thought of throwing myself on the mercy of
+Wolf Larsen, but the vision of the mocking devil in his eyes that questioned
+life and sneered at it would come strong upon me and compel me to refrain.&nbsp;
+At other times I seriously contemplated suicide, and the whole force
+of my hopeful philosophy was required to keep me from going over the
+side in the darkness of night.</p>
+<p>Several times Wolf Larsen tried to inveigle me into discussion, but
+I gave him short answers and eluded him.&nbsp; Finally, he commanded
+me to resume my seat at the cabin table for a time and let the cook
+do my work.&nbsp; Then I spoke frankly, telling him what I was enduring
+from Thomas Mugridge because of the three days of favouritism which
+had been shown me.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen regarded me with smiling eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So you&rsquo;re afraid, eh?&rdquo; he sneered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said defiantly and honestly, &ldquo;I am afraid.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way with you fellows,&rdquo; he cried, half
+angrily, &ldquo;sentimentalizing about your immortal souls and afraid
+to die.&nbsp; At sight of a sharp knife and a cowardly Cockney the clinging
+of life to life overcomes all your fond foolishness.&nbsp; Why, my dear
+fellow, you will live for ever.&nbsp; You are a god, and God cannot
+be killed.&nbsp; Cooky cannot hurt you.&nbsp; You are sure of your resurrection.&nbsp;
+What&rsquo;s there to be afraid of?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have eternal life before you.&nbsp; You are a millionaire
+in immortality, and a millionaire whose fortune cannot be lost, whose
+fortune is less perishable than the stars and as lasting as space or
+time.&nbsp; It is impossible for you to diminish your principal.&nbsp;
+Immortality is a thing without beginning or end.&nbsp; Eternity is eternity,
+and though you die here and now you will go on living somewhere else
+and hereafter.&nbsp; And it is all very beautiful, this shaking off
+of the flesh and soaring of the imprisoned spirit.&nbsp; Cooky cannot
+hurt you.&nbsp; He can only give you a boost on the path you eternally
+must tread.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Or, if you do not wish to be boosted just yet, why not boost
+Cooky?&nbsp; According to your ideas, he, too, must be an immortal millionaire.&nbsp;
+You cannot bankrupt him.&nbsp; His paper will always circulate at par.&nbsp;
+You cannot diminish the length of his living by killing him, for he
+is without beginning or end.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s bound to go on living,
+somewhere, somehow.&nbsp; Then boost him.&nbsp; Stick a knife in him
+and let his spirit free.&nbsp; As it is, it&rsquo;s in a nasty prison,
+and you&rsquo;ll do him only a kindness by breaking down the door.&nbsp;
+And who knows?&mdash;it may be a very beautiful spirit that will go
+soaring up into the blue from that ugly carcass.&nbsp; Boost him along,
+and I&rsquo;ll promote you to his place, and he&rsquo;s getting forty-five
+dollars a month.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was plain that I could look for no help or mercy from Wolf Larsen.&nbsp;
+Whatever was to be done I must do for myself; and out of the courage
+of fear I evolved the plan of fighting Thomas Mugridge with his own
+weapons.&nbsp; I borrowed a whetstone from Johansen.&nbsp; Louis, the
+boat-steerer, had already begged me for condensed milk and sugar.&nbsp;
+The lazarette, where such delicacies were stored, was situated beneath
+the cabin floor.&nbsp; Watching my chance, I stole five cans of the
+milk, and that night, when it was Louis&rsquo;s watch on deck, I traded
+them with him for a dirk as lean and cruel-looking as Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s
+vegetable knife.&nbsp; It was rusty and dull, but I turned the grindstone
+while Louis gave it an edge.&nbsp; I slept more soundly than usual that
+night.</p>
+<p>Next morning, after breakfast, Thomas Mugridge began his whet, whet,
+whet.&nbsp; I glanced warily at him, for I was on my knees taking the
+ashes from the stove.&nbsp; When I returned from throwing them overside,
+he was talking to Harrison, whose honest yokel&rsquo;s face was filled
+with fascination and wonder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Mugridge was saying, &ldquo;an&rsquo; wot does
+&rsquo;is worship do but give me two years in Reading.&nbsp; But blimey
+if I cared.&nbsp; The other mug was fixed plenty.&nbsp; Should &rsquo;a
+seen &rsquo;im.&nbsp; Knife just like this.&nbsp; I stuck it in, like
+into soft butter, an&rsquo; the w&rsquo;y &rsquo;e squealed was better&rsquo;n
+a tu-penny gaff.&rdquo;&nbsp; He shot a glance in my direction to see
+if I was taking it in, and went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;&lsquo;I didn&rsquo;t
+mean it Tommy,&rsquo; &rsquo;e was snifflin&rsquo;; &lsquo;so &rsquo;elp
+me Gawd, I didn&rsquo;t mean it!&rsquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;&lsquo;I&rsquo;ll
+fix yer bloody well right,&rsquo; I sez, an&rsquo; kept right after
+&rsquo;im.&nbsp; I cut &rsquo;im in ribbons, that&rsquo;s wot I did,
+an&rsquo; &rsquo;e a-squealin&rsquo; all the time.&nbsp; Once &rsquo;e
+got &rsquo;is &rsquo;and on the knife an&rsquo; tried to &rsquo;old
+it.&nbsp; &lsquo;Ad &rsquo;is fingers around it, but I pulled it through,
+cuttin&rsquo; to the bone.&nbsp; O, &rsquo;e was a sight, I can tell
+yer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A call from the mate interrupted the gory narrative, and Harrison
+went aft.&nbsp; Mugridge sat down on the raised threshold to the galley
+and went on with his knife-sharpening.&nbsp; I put the shovel away and
+calmly sat down on the coal-box facing him.&nbsp; He favoured me with
+a vicious stare.&nbsp; Still calmly, though my heart was going pitapat,
+I pulled out Louis&rsquo;s dirk and began to whet it on the stone.&nbsp;
+I had looked for almost any sort of explosion on the Cockney&rsquo;s
+part, but to my surprise he did not appear aware of what I was doing.&nbsp;
+He went on whetting his knife.&nbsp; So did I.&nbsp; And for two hours
+we sat there, face to face, whet, whet, whet, till the news of it spread
+abroad and half the ship&rsquo;s company was crowding the galley doors
+to see the sight.</p>
+<p>Encouragement and advice were freely tendered, and Jock Horner, the
+quiet, self-spoken hunter who looked as though he would not harm a mouse,
+advised me to leave the ribs alone and to thrust upward for the abdomen,
+at the same time giving what he called the &ldquo;Spanish twist&rdquo;
+to the blade.&nbsp; Leach, his bandaged arm prominently to the fore,
+begged me to leave a few remnants of the cook for him; and Wolf Larsen
+paused once or twice at the break of the poop to glance curiously at
+what must have been to him a stirring and crawling of the yeasty thing
+he knew as life.</p>
+<p>And I make free to say that for the time being life assumed the same
+sordid values to me.&nbsp; There was nothing pretty about it, nothing
+divine&mdash;only two cowardly moving things that sat whetting steel
+upon stone, and a group of other moving things, cowardly and otherwise,
+that looked on.&nbsp; Half of them, I am sure, were anxious to see us
+shedding each other&rsquo;s blood.&nbsp; It would have been entertainment.&nbsp;
+And I do not think there was one who would have interfered had we closed
+in a death-struggle.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, the whole thing was laughable and childish.&nbsp;
+Whet, whet, whet,&mdash;Humphrey Van Weyden sharpening his knife in
+a ship&rsquo;s galley and trying its edge with his thumb!&nbsp; Of all
+situations this was the most inconceivable.&nbsp; I know that my own
+kind could not have believed it possible.&nbsp; I had not been called
+&ldquo;Sissy&rdquo; Van Weyden all my days without reason, and that
+&ldquo;Sissy&rdquo; Van Weyden should be capable of doing this thing
+was a revelation to Humphrey Van Weyden, who knew not whether to be
+exultant or ashamed.</p>
+<p>But nothing happened.&nbsp; At the end of two hours Thomas Mugridge
+put away knife and stone and held out his hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wot&rsquo;s the good of mykin&rsquo; a &rsquo;oly show of
+ourselves for them mugs?&rdquo; he demanded.&nbsp; &ldquo;They don&rsquo;t
+love us, an&rsquo; bloody well glad they&rsquo;d be a-seein&rsquo; us
+cuttin&rsquo; our throats.&nbsp; Yer not &rsquo;arf bad, &rsquo;Ump!&nbsp;
+You&rsquo;ve got spunk, as you Yanks s&rsquo;y, an&rsquo; I like yer
+in a w&rsquo;y.&nbsp; So come on an&rsquo; shyke.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Coward that I might be, I was less a coward than he.&nbsp; It was
+a distinct victory I had gained, and I refused to forego any of it by
+shaking his detestable hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said pridelessly, &ldquo;tyke it or leave
+it, I&rsquo;ll like yer none the less for it.&rdquo;&nbsp; And to save
+his face he turned fiercely upon the onlookers.&nbsp; &ldquo;Get outa
+my galley-doors, you bloomin&rsquo; swabs!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This command was reinforced by a steaming kettle of water, and at
+sight of it the sailors scrambled out of the way.&nbsp; This was a sort
+of victory for Thomas Mugridge, and enabled him to accept more gracefully
+the defeat I had given him, though, of course, he was too discreet to
+attempt to drive the hunters away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see Cooky&rsquo;s finish,&rdquo; I heard Smoke say to Horner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You bet,&rdquo; was the reply.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hump runs the
+galley from now on, and Cooky pulls in his horns.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mugridge heard and shot a swift glance at me, but I gave no sign
+that the conversation had reached me.&nbsp; I had not thought my victory
+was so far-reaching and complete, but I resolved to let go nothing I
+had gained.&nbsp; As the days went by, Smoke&rsquo;s prophecy was verified.&nbsp;
+The Cockney became more humble and slavish to me than even to Wolf Larsen.&nbsp;
+I mistered him and sirred him no longer, washed no more greasy pots,
+and peeled no more potatoes.&nbsp; I did my own work, and my own work
+only, and when and in what fashion I saw fit.&nbsp; Also I carried the
+dirk in a sheath at my hip, sailor-fashion, and maintained toward Thomas
+Mugridge a constant attitude which was composed of equal parts of domineering,
+insult, and contempt.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases&mdash;if by intimacy may be
+denoted those relations which exist between master and man, or, better
+yet, between king and jester.&nbsp; I am to him no more than a toy,
+and he values me no more than a child values a toy.&nbsp; My function
+is to amuse, and so long as I amuse all goes well; but let him become
+bored, or let him have one of his black moods come upon him, and at
+once I am relegated from cabin table to galley, while, at the same time,
+I am fortunate to escape with my life and a whole body.</p>
+<p>The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me.&nbsp;
+There is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man
+whom he does not despise.&nbsp; He seems consuming with the tremendous
+power that is in him and that seems never to have found adequate expression
+in works.&nbsp; He is as Lucifer would be, were that proud spirit banished
+to a society of soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.</p>
+<p>This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he
+is oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race.&nbsp; Knowing him,
+I review the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding.&nbsp;
+The white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible pantheon
+were of the same fibre as he.&nbsp; The frivolity of the laughter-loving
+Latins is no part of him.&nbsp; When he laughs it is from a humour that
+is nothing else than ferocious.&nbsp; But he laughs rarely; he is too
+often sad.&nbsp; And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of
+the race.&nbsp; It is the race heritage, the sadness which has made
+the race sober-minded, clean-lived and fanatically moral, and which,
+in this latter connection, has culminated among the English in the Reformed
+Church and Mrs. Grundy.</p>
+<p>In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been
+religion in its more agonizing forms.&nbsp; But the compensations of
+such religion are denied Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; His brutal materialism will
+not permit it.&nbsp; So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remains
+for him, but to be devilish.&nbsp; Were he not so terrible a man, I
+could sometimes feel sorry for him, as instance three mornings ago,
+when I went into his stateroom to fill his water-bottle and came unexpectedly
+upon him.&nbsp; He did not see me.&nbsp; His head was buried in his
+hands, and his shoulders were heaving convulsively as with sobs.&nbsp;
+He seemed torn by some mighty grief.&nbsp; As I softly withdrew I could
+hear him groaning, &ldquo;God!&nbsp; God!&nbsp; God!&rdquo;&nbsp; Not
+that he was calling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from
+his soul.</p>
+<p>At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by
+evening, strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling about
+the cabin.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never been sick in my life, Hump,&rdquo; he said,
+as I guided him to his room.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nor did I ever have a headache
+except the time my head was healing after having been laid open for
+six inches by a capstan-bar.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as
+wild animals suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer, without
+plaint, without sympathy, utterly alone.</p>
+<p>This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed
+and put things in order, I found him well and hard at work.&nbsp; Table
+and bunk were littered with designs and calculations.&nbsp; On a large
+transparent sheet, compass and square in hand, he was copying what appeared
+to be a scale of some sort or other.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hello, Hump,&rdquo; he greeted me genially.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+just finishing the finishing touches.&nbsp; Want to see it work?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what is it?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to
+kindergarten simplicity,&rdquo; he answered gaily.&nbsp; &ldquo;From
+to-day a child will be able to navigate a ship.&nbsp; No more long-winded
+calculations.&nbsp; All you need is one star in the sky on a dirty night
+to know instantly where you are.&nbsp; Look.&nbsp; I place the transparent
+scale on this star-map, revolving the scale on the North Pole.&nbsp;
+On the scale I&rsquo;ve worked out the circles of altitude and the lines
+of bearing.&nbsp; All I do is to put it on a star, revolve the scale
+till it is opposite those figures on the map underneath, and presto!
+there you are, the ship&rsquo;s precise location!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear blue
+this morning as the sea, were sparkling with light.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must be well up in mathematics,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Where
+did you go to school?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never saw the inside of one, worse luck,&rdquo; was the answer.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I had to dig it out for myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And why do you think I have made this thing?&rdquo; he demanded,
+abruptly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of
+time?&rdquo;&nbsp; He laughed one of his horrible mocking laughs.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Not at all.&nbsp; To get it patented, to make money from it,
+to revel in piggishness with all night in while other men do the work.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s my purpose.&nbsp; Also, I have enjoyed working it out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The creative joy,&rdquo; I murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess that&rsquo;s what it ought to be called.&nbsp; Which
+is another way of expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the
+triumph of movement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride
+of the yeast because it is yeast and crawls.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate materialism
+and went about making the bed.&nbsp; He continued copying lines and
+figures upon the transparent scale.&nbsp; It was a task requiring the
+utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but admire the way he tempered
+his strength to the fineness and delicacy of the need.</p>
+<p>When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a
+fascinated sort of way.&nbsp; He was certainly a handsome man&mdash;beautiful
+in the masculine sense.&nbsp; And again, with never-failing wonder,
+I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness
+in his face.&nbsp; It was the face, I am convinced, of a man who did
+no wrong.&nbsp; And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood.&nbsp;
+What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing
+contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience.&nbsp;
+I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it.&nbsp; He was a
+magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type
+that came into the world before the development of the moral nature.&nbsp;
+He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.</p>
+<p>As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face.&nbsp;
+Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and
+sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin
+to a dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added both to
+his savagery and his beauty.&nbsp; The lips were full, yet possessed
+of the firmness, almost harshness, which is characteristic of thin lips.&nbsp;
+The set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh,
+with all the fierceness and indomitableness of the male&mdash;the nose
+also.&nbsp; It was the nose of a being born to conquer and command.&nbsp;
+It just hinted of the eagle beak.&nbsp; It might have been Grecian,
+it might have been Roman, only it was a shade too massive for the one,
+a shade too delicate for the other.&nbsp; And while the whole face was
+the incarnation of fierceness and strength, the primal melancholy from
+which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines of mouth and eye and brow,
+seemed to give a largeness and completeness which otherwise the face
+would have lacked.</p>
+<p>And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him.&nbsp; I cannot
+say how greatly the man had come to interest me.&nbsp; Who was he?&nbsp;
+What was he?&nbsp; How had he happened to be?&nbsp; All powers seemed
+his, all potentialities&mdash;why, then, was he no more than the obscure
+master of a seal-hunting schooner with a reputation for frightful brutality
+amongst the men who hunted seals?</p>
+<p>My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why is it that you have not done great things in this world?&nbsp;
+With the power that is yours you might have risen to any height.&nbsp;
+Unpossessed of conscience or moral instinct, you might have mastered
+the world, broken it to your hand.&nbsp; And yet here you are, at the
+top of your life, where diminishing and dying begin, living an obscure
+and sordid existence, hunting sea animals for the satisfaction of woman&rsquo;s
+vanity and love of decoration, revelling in a piggishness, to use your
+own words, which is anything and everything except splendid.&nbsp; Why,
+with all that wonderful strength, have you not done something?&nbsp;
+There was nothing to stop you, nothing that could stop you.&nbsp; What
+was wrong?&nbsp; Did you lack ambition?&nbsp; Did you fall under temptation?&nbsp;
+What was the matter?&nbsp; What was the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had lifted his eyes to me at the commencement of my outburst,
+and followed me complacently until I had done and stood before him breathless
+and dismayed.&nbsp; He waited a moment, as though seeking where to begin,
+and then said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth
+to sow?&nbsp; If you will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony
+places, where there was not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up
+because they had no deepness of earth.&nbsp; And when the sun was up
+they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away.&nbsp;
+And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up and choked them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he queried, half petulantly.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+was not well.&nbsp; I was one of those seeds.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying.&nbsp; I
+finished my work and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke to
+me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway
+you will see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord.&nbsp; I was born within
+a hundred miles of that stretch of water.&nbsp; But I was not born Norwegian.&nbsp;
+I am a Dane.&nbsp; My father and mother were Danes, and how they ever
+came to that bleak bight of land on the west coast I do not know.&nbsp;
+I never heard.&nbsp; Outside of that there is nothing mysterious.&nbsp;
+They were poor people and unlettered.&nbsp; They came of generations
+of poor unlettered people&mdash;peasants of the sea who sowed their
+sons on the waves as has been their custom since time began.&nbsp; There
+is no more to tell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But there is,&rdquo; I objected.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is still
+obscure to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What can I tell you?&rdquo; he demanded, with a recrudescence
+of fierceness.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of the meagreness of a child&rsquo;s life?
+of fish diet and coarse living? of going out with the boats from the
+time I could crawl? of my brothers, who went away one by one to the
+deep-sea farming and never came back? of myself, unable to read or write,
+cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the coastwise, old-country ships?
+of the rough fare and rougher usage, where kicks and blows were bed
+and breakfast and took the place of speech, and fear and hatred and
+pain were my only soul-experiences?&nbsp; I do not care to remember.&nbsp;
+A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think of it.&nbsp; But
+there were coastwise skippers I would have returned and killed when
+a man&rsquo;s strength came to me, only the lines of my life were cast
+at the time in other places.&nbsp; I did return, not long ago, but unfortunately
+the skippers were dead, all but one, a mate in the old days, a skipper
+when I met him, and when I left him a cripple who would never walk again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the
+inside of a school, how did you learn to read and write?&rdquo; I queried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In the English merchant service.&nbsp; Cabin-boy at twelve,
+ship&rsquo;s boy at fourteen, ordinary seamen at sixteen, able seaman
+at seventeen, and cock of the fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle, infinite ambition
+and infinite loneliness, receiving neither help nor sympathy, I did
+it all for myself&mdash;navigation, mathematics, science, literature,
+and what not.&nbsp; And of what use has it been?&nbsp; Master and owner
+of a ship at the top of my life, as you say, when I am beginning to
+diminish and die.&nbsp; Paltry, isn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; And when the sun
+was up I was scorched, and because I had no root I withered away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple,&rdquo;
+I chided.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves
+who rose to the purple,&rdquo; he answered grimly.&nbsp; &ldquo;No man
+makes opportunity.&nbsp; All the great men ever did was to know it when
+it came to them.&nbsp; The Corsican knew.&nbsp; I have dreamed as greatly
+as the Corsican.&nbsp; I should have known the opportunity, but it never
+came.&nbsp; The thorns sprung up and choked me.&nbsp; And, Hump, I can
+tell you that you know more about me than any living man, except my
+own brother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what is he?&nbsp; And where is he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Master of the steamship <i>Macedonia</i>, seal-hunter,&rdquo;
+was the answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;We will meet him most probably on the Japan
+coast.&nbsp; Men call him &lsquo;Death&rsquo; Larsen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Death Larsen!&rdquo; I involuntarily cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is
+he like you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hardly.&nbsp; He is a lump of an animal without any head.&nbsp;
+He has all my&mdash;my&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Brutishness,&rdquo; I suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&mdash;thank you for the word,&mdash;all my brutishness,
+but he can scarcely read or write.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And he has never philosophized on life,&rdquo; I added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air
+of sadness.&nbsp; &ldquo;And he is all the happier for leaving life
+alone.&nbsp; He is too busy living it to think about it.&nbsp; My mistake
+was in ever opening the books.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The <i>Ghost</i> has attained the southernmost point of the arc she
+is describing across the Pacific, and is already beginning to edge away
+to the west and north toward some lone island, it is rumoured, where
+she will fill her water-casks before proceeding to the season&rsquo;s
+hunt along the coast of Japan.&nbsp; The hunters have experimented and
+practised with their rifles and shotguns till they are satisfied, and
+the boat-pullers and steerers have made their spritsails, bound the
+oars and rowlocks in leather and sennit so that they will make no noise
+when creeping on the seals, and put their boats in apple-pie order&mdash;to
+use Leach&rsquo;s homely phrase.</p>
+<p>His arm, by the way, has healed nicely, though the scar will remain
+all his life.&nbsp; Thomas Mugridge lives in mortal fear of him, and
+is afraid to venture on deck after dark.&nbsp; There are two or three
+standing quarrels in the forecastle.&nbsp; Louis tells me that the gossip
+of the sailors finds its way aft, and that two of the telltales have
+been badly beaten by their mates.&nbsp; He shakes his head dubiously
+over the outlook for the man Johnson, who is boat-puller in the same
+boat with him.&nbsp; Johnson has been guilty of speaking his mind too
+freely, and has collided two or three times with Wolf Larsen over the
+pronunciation of his name.&nbsp; Johansen he thrashed on the amidships
+deck the other night, since which time the mate has called him by his
+proper name.&nbsp; But of course it is out of the question that Johnson
+should thrash Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>Louis has also given me additional information about Death Larsen,
+which tallies with the captain&rsquo;s brief description.&nbsp; We may
+expect to meet Death Larsen on the Japan coast.&nbsp; &ldquo;And look
+out for squalls,&rdquo; is Louis&rsquo;s prophecy, &ldquo;for they hate
+one another like the wolf whelps they are.&rdquo;&nbsp; Death Larsen
+is in command of the only sealing steamer in the fleet, the <i>Macedonia</i>,
+which carries fourteen boats, whereas the rest of the schooners carry
+only six.&nbsp; There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of strange
+raids and expeditions she may make, ranging from opium smuggling into
+the States and arms smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open piracy.&nbsp;
+Yet I cannot but believe for I have never yet caught him in a lie, while
+he has a cyclopaedic knowledge of sealing and the men of the sealing
+fleets.</p>
+<p>As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and
+aft, on this veritable hell-ship.&nbsp; Men fight and struggle ferociously
+for one another&rsquo;s lives.&nbsp; The hunters are looking for a shooting
+scrape at any moment between Smoke and Henderson, whose old quarrel
+has not healed, while Wolf Larsen says positively that he will kill
+the survivor of the affair, if such affair comes off.&nbsp; He frankly
+states that the position he takes is based on no moral grounds, that
+all the hunters could kill and eat one another so far as he is concerned,
+were it not that he needs them alive for the hunting.&nbsp; If they
+will only hold their hands until the season is over, he promises them
+a royal carnival, when all grudges can he settled and the survivors
+may toss the non-survivors overboard and arrange a story as to how the
+missing men were lost at sea.&nbsp; I think even the hunters are appalled
+at his cold-bloodedness.&nbsp; Wicked men though they be, they are certainly
+very much afraid of him.</p>
+<p>Thomas Mugridge is cur-like in his subjection to me, while I go about
+in secret dread of him.&nbsp; His is the courage of fear,&mdash;a strange
+thing I know well of myself,&mdash;and at any moment it may master the
+fear and impel him to the taking of my life.&nbsp; My knee is much better,
+though it often aches for long periods, and the stiffness is gradually
+leaving the arm which Wolf Larsen squeezed.&nbsp; Otherwise I am in
+splendid condition, feel that I am in splendid condition.&nbsp; My muscles
+are growing harder and increasing in size.&nbsp; My hands, however,
+are a spectacle for grief.&nbsp; They have a parboiled appearance, are
+afflicted with hang-nails, while the nails are broken and discoloured,
+and the edges of the quick seem to be assuming a fungoid sort of growth.&nbsp;
+Also, I am suffering from boils, due to the diet, most likely, for I
+was never afflicted in this manner before.</p>
+<p>I was amused, a couple of evenings back, by seeing Wolf Larsen reading
+the Bible, a copy of which, after the futile search for one at the beginning
+of the voyage, had been found in the dead mate&rsquo;s sea-chest.&nbsp;
+I wondered what Wolf Larsen could get from it, and he read aloud to
+me from Ecclesiastes.&nbsp; I could imagine he was speaking the thoughts
+of his own mind as he read to me, and his voice, reverberating deeply
+and mournfully in the confined cabin, charmed and held me.&nbsp; He
+may be uneducated, but he certainly knows how to express the significance
+of the written word.&nbsp; I can hear him now, as I shall always hear
+him, the primal melancholy vibrant in his voice as he read:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure
+of kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers,
+and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that
+of all sorts.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So I was great, and increased more than all that were before
+me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom returned with me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and
+on the labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity
+and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous
+and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
+to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the
+good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
+oath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun,
+that there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of
+men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live,
+and after that they go to the dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope;
+for a living dog is better than a dead lion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know
+not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of
+them is forgotten.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now
+perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything
+that is done under the sun.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;There you have it, Hump,&rdquo; he said, closing the book
+upon his finger and looking up at me.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Preacher who
+was king over Israel in Jerusalem thought as I think.&nbsp; You call
+me a pessimist.&nbsp; Is not this pessimism of the blackest?&mdash;&lsquo;All
+is vanity and vexation of spirit,&rsquo; &lsquo;There is no profit under
+the sun,&rsquo; &lsquo;There is one event unto all,&rsquo; to the fool
+and the wise, the clean and the unclean, the sinner and the saint, and
+that event is death, and an evil thing, he says.&nbsp; For the Preacher
+loved life, and did not want to die, saying, &lsquo;For a living dog
+is better than a dead lion.&rsquo;&nbsp; He preferred the vanity and
+vexation to the silence and unmovableness of the grave.&nbsp; And so
+I.&nbsp; To crawl is piggish; but to not crawl, to be as the clod and
+rock, is loathsome to contemplate.&nbsp; It is loathsome to the life
+that is in me, the very essence of which is movement, the power of movement,
+and the consciousness of the power of movement.&nbsp; Life itself is
+unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is greater unsatisfaction.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are worse off than Omar,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;He,
+at least, after the customary agonizing of youth, found content and
+made of his materialism a joyous thing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who was Omar?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more
+work that day, nor the next, nor the next.</p>
+<p>In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rub&aacute;iy&aacute;t,
+and it was to him like a great find of treasure.&nbsp; Much I remembered,
+possibly two-thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out the
+remainder without difficulty.&nbsp; We talked for hours over single
+stanzas, and I found him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion
+which, for the life of me, I could not discover myself.&nbsp; Possibly
+I recited with a certain joyous lilt which was my own, for&mdash;his
+memory was good, and at a second rendering, very often the first, he
+made a quatrain his own&mdash;he recited the same lines and invested
+them with an unrest and passionate revolt that was well-nigh convincing.</p>
+<p>I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was
+not surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant&rsquo;s irritability,
+and quite at variance with the Persian&rsquo;s complacent philosophy
+and genial code of life:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;What, without asking, hither hurried <i>Whence?<br /></i>And,
+without asking, <i>Whither</i> hurried hence!<br />Oh, many a Cup of
+this forbidden Wine<br />Must drown the memory of that insolence!&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Great!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Great!&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s the keynote.&nbsp; Insolence!&nbsp; He could not have used
+a better word.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In vain I objected and denied.&nbsp; He deluged me, overwhelmed me
+with argument.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not the nature of life to be otherwise.&nbsp; Life,
+when it knows that it must cease living, will always rebel.&nbsp; It
+cannot help itself.&nbsp; The Preacher found life and the works of life
+all a vanity and vexation, an evil thing; but death, the ceasing to
+be able to be vain and vexed, he found an eviler thing.&nbsp; Through
+chapter after chapter he is worried by the one event that cometh to
+all alike.&nbsp; So Omar, so I, so you, even you, for you rebelled against
+dying when Cooky sharpened a knife for you.&nbsp; You were afraid to
+die; the life that was in you, that composes you, that is greater than
+you, did not want to die.&nbsp; You have talked of the instinct of immortality.&nbsp;
+I talk of the instinct of life, which is to live, and which, when death
+looms near and large, masters the instinct, so called, of immortality.&nbsp;
+It mastered it in you (you cannot deny it), because a crazy Cockney
+cook sharpened a knife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are afraid of him now.&nbsp; You are afraid of me.&nbsp;
+You cannot deny it.&nbsp; If I should catch you by the throat, thus,&rdquo;&mdash;his
+hand was about my throat and my breath was shut off,&mdash;&ldquo;and
+began to press the life out of you thus, and thus, your instinct of
+immortality will go glimmering, and your instinct of life, which is
+longing for life, will flutter up, and you will struggle to save yourself.&nbsp;
+Eh?&nbsp; I see the fear of death in your eyes.&nbsp; You beat the air
+with your arms.&nbsp; You exert all your puny strength to struggle to
+live.&nbsp; Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as a butterfly
+resting there.&nbsp; Your chest is heaving, your tongue protruding,
+your skin turning dark, your eyes swimming.&nbsp; &lsquo;To live!&nbsp;
+To live!&nbsp; To live!&rsquo; you are crying; and you are crying to
+live here and now, not hereafter.&nbsp; You doubt your immortality,
+eh?&nbsp; Ha! ha!&nbsp; You are not sure of it.&nbsp; You won&rsquo;t
+chance it.&nbsp; This life only you are certain is real.&nbsp; Ah, it
+is growing dark and darker.&nbsp; It is the darkness of death, the ceasing
+to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is gathering about
+you, descending upon you, rising around you.&nbsp; Your eyes are becoming
+set.&nbsp; They are glazing.&nbsp; My voice sounds faint and far.&nbsp;
+You cannot see my face.&nbsp; And still you struggle in my grip.&nbsp;
+You kick with your legs.&nbsp; Your body draws itself up in knots like
+a snake&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Your chest heaves and strains.&nbsp; To live!&nbsp;
+To live!&nbsp; To live&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I heard no more.&nbsp; Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness
+he had so graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying
+on the floor and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully
+with that old familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, have I convinced you?&rdquo; he demanded.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here
+take a drink of this.&nbsp; I want to ask you some questions.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I rolled my head negatively on the floor.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your arguments
+are too&mdash;er&mdash;forcible,&rdquo; I managed to articulate, at
+cost of great pain to my aching throat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be all right in half-an-hour,&rdquo; he assured
+me.&nbsp; &ldquo;And I promise I won&rsquo;t use any more physical demonstrations.&nbsp;
+Get up now.&nbsp; You can sit on a chair.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the
+Preacher was resumed.&nbsp; And half the night we sat up over it.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The last twenty-four hours have witnessed a carnival of brutality.&nbsp;
+From cabin to forecastle it seems to have broken out like a contagion.&nbsp;
+I scarcely know where to begin.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was really the cause
+of it.&nbsp; The relations among the men, strained and made tense by
+feuds, quarrels and grudges, were in a state of unstable equilibrium,
+and evil passions flared up in flame like prairie-grass.</p>
+<p>Thomas Mugridge is a sneak, a spy, an informer.&nbsp; He has been
+attempting to curry favour and reinstate himself in the good graces
+of the captain by carrying tales of the men forward.&nbsp; He it was,
+I know, that carried some of Johnson&rsquo;s hasty talk to Wolf Larsen.&nbsp;
+Johnson, it seems, bought a suit of oilskins from the slop-chest and
+found them to be of greatly inferior quality.&nbsp; Nor was he slow
+in advertising the fact.&nbsp; The slop-chest is a sort of miniature
+dry-goods store which is carried by all sealing schooners and which
+is stocked with articles peculiar to the needs of the sailors.&nbsp;
+Whatever a sailor purchases is taken from his subsequent earnings on
+the sealing grounds; for, as it is with the hunters so it is with the
+boat-pullers and steerers&mdash;in the place of wages they receive a
+&ldquo;lay,&rdquo; a rate of so much per skin for every skin captured
+in their particular boat.</p>
+<p>But of Johnson&rsquo;s grumbling at the slop-chest I knew nothing,
+so that what I witnessed came with a shock of sudden surprise.&nbsp;
+I had just finished sweeping the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf
+Larsen into a discussion of Hamlet, his favourite Shakespearian character,
+when Johansen descended the companion stairs followed by Johnson.&nbsp;
+The latter&rsquo;s cap came off after the custom of the sea, and he
+stood respectfully in the centre of the cabin, swaying heavily and uneasily
+to the roll of the schooner and facing the captain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shut the doors and draw the slide,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said
+to me.</p>
+<p>As I obeyed I noticed an anxious light come into Johnson&rsquo;s
+eyes, but I did not dream of its cause.&nbsp; I did not dream of what
+was to occur until it did occur, but he knew from the very first what
+was coming and awaited it bravely.&nbsp; And in his action I found complete
+refutation of all Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s materialism.&nbsp; The sailor
+Johnson was swayed by idea, by principle, and truth, and sincerity.&nbsp;
+He was right, he knew he was right, and he was unafraid.&nbsp; He would
+die for the right if needs be, he would be true to himself, sincere
+with his soul.&nbsp; And in this was portrayed the victory of the spirit
+over the flesh, the indomitability and moral grandeur of the soul that
+knows no restriction and rises above time and space and matter with
+a surety and invincibleness born of nothing else than eternity and immortality.</p>
+<p>But to return.&nbsp; I noticed the anxious light in Johnson&rsquo;s
+eyes, but mistook it for the native shyness and embarrassment of the
+man.&nbsp; The mate, Johansen, stood away several feet to the side of
+him, and fully three yards in front of him sat Wolf Larsen on one of
+the pivotal cabin chairs.&nbsp; An appreciable pause fell after I had
+closed the doors and drawn the slide, a pause that must have lasted
+fully a minute.&nbsp; It was broken by Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yonson,&rdquo; he began.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My name is Johnson, sir,&rdquo; the sailor boldly corrected.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Johnson, then, damn you!&nbsp; Can you guess why I have
+sent for you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, and no, sir,&rdquo; was the slow reply.&nbsp; &ldquo;My
+work is done well.&nbsp; The mate knows that, and you know it, sir.&nbsp;
+So there cannot be any complaint.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And is that all?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen queried, his voice soft,
+and low, and purring.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know you have it in for me,&rdquo; Johnson continued with
+his unalterable and ponderous slowness.&nbsp; &ldquo;You do not like
+me.&nbsp; You&mdash;you&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen prompted.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t
+be afraid of my feelings.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not afraid,&rdquo; the sailor retorted, a slight angry
+flush rising through his sunburn.&nbsp; &ldquo;If I speak not fast,
+it is because I have not been from the old country as long as you.&nbsp;
+You do not like me because I am too much of a man; that is why, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are too much of a man for ship discipline, if that is
+what you mean, and if you know what I mean,&rdquo; was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+retort.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know English, and I know what you mean, sir,&rdquo; Johnson
+answered, his flush deepening at the slur on his knowledge of the English
+language.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Johnson,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said, with an air of dismissing
+all that had gone before as introductory to the main business in hand,
+&ldquo;I understand you&rsquo;re not quite satisfied with those oilskins?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I am not.&nbsp; They are no good, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve been shooting off your mouth about them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I say what I think, sir,&rdquo; the sailor answered courageously,
+not failing at the same time in ship courtesy, which demanded that &ldquo;sir&rdquo;
+be appended to each speech he made.</p>
+<p>It was at this moment that I chanced to glance at Johansen.&nbsp;
+His big fists were clenching and unclenching, and his face was positively
+fiendish, so malignantly did he look at Johnson.&nbsp; I noticed a black
+discoloration, still faintly visible, under Johansen&rsquo;s eye, a
+mark of the thrashing he had received a few nights before from the sailor.&nbsp;
+For the first time I began to divine that something terrible was about
+to be enacted,&mdash;what, I could not imagine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know what happens to men who say what you&rsquo;ve
+said about my slop-chest and me?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen was demanding.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know, sir,&rdquo; was the answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen demanded, sharply and imperatively.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What you and the mate there are going to do to me, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look at him, Hump,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said to me, &ldquo;look
+at this bit of animated dust, this aggregation of matter that moves
+and breathes and defies me and thoroughly believes itself to be compounded
+of something good; that is impressed with certain human fictions such
+as righteousness and honesty, and that will live up to them in spite
+of all personal discomforts and menaces.&nbsp; What do you think of
+him, Hump?&nbsp; What do you think of him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think that he is a better man than you are,&rdquo; I answered,
+impelled, somehow, with a desire to draw upon myself a portion of the
+wrath I felt was about to break upon his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;His human
+fictions, as you choose to call them, make for nobility and manhood.&nbsp;
+You have no fictions, no dreams, no ideals.&nbsp; You are a pauper.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He nodded his head with a savage pleasantness.&nbsp; &ldquo;Quite
+true, Hump, quite true.&nbsp; I have no fictions that make for nobility
+and manhood.&nbsp; A living dog is better than a dead lion, say I with
+the Preacher.&nbsp; My only doctrine is the doctrine of expediency,
+and it makes for surviving.&nbsp; This bit of the ferment we call &lsquo;Johnson,&rsquo;
+when he is no longer a bit of the ferment, only dust and ashes, will
+have no more nobility than any dust and ashes, while I shall still be
+alive and roaring.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know what I am going to do?&rdquo; he questioned.</p>
+<p>I shook my head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I am going to exercise my prerogative of roaring and
+show you how fares nobility.&nbsp; Watch me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Three yards away from Johnson he was, and sitting down.&nbsp; Nine
+feet!&nbsp; And yet he left the chair in full leap, without first gaining
+a standing position.&nbsp; He left the chair, just as he sat in it,
+squarely, springing from the sitting posture like a wild animal, a tiger,
+and like a tiger covered the intervening space.&nbsp; It was an avalanche
+of fury that Johnson strove vainly to fend off.&nbsp; He threw one arm
+down to protect the stomach, the other arm up to protect the head; but
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s fist drove midway between, on the chest, with a
+crushing, resounding impact.&nbsp; Johnson&rsquo;s breath, suddenly
+expelled, shot from his mouth and as suddenly checked, with the forced,
+audible expiration of a man wielding an axe.&nbsp; He almost fell backward,
+and swayed from side to side in an effort to recover his balance.</p>
+<p>I cannot give the further particulars of the horrible scene that
+followed.&nbsp; It was too revolting.&nbsp; It turns me sick even now
+when I think of it.&nbsp; Johnson fought bravely enough, but he was
+no match for Wolf Larsen, much less for Wolf Larsen and the mate.&nbsp;
+It was frightful.&nbsp; I had not imagined a human being could endure
+so much and still live and struggle on.&nbsp; And struggle on Johnson
+did.&nbsp; Of course there was no hope for him, not the slightest, and
+he knew it as well as I, but by the manhood that was in him he could
+not cease from fighting for that manhood.</p>
+<p>It was too much for me to witness.&nbsp; I felt that I should lose
+my mind, and I ran up the companion stairs to open the doors and escape
+on deck.&nbsp; But Wolf Larsen, leaving his victim for the moment, and
+with one of his tremendous springs, gained my side and flung me into
+the far corner of the cabin.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The phenomena of life, Hump,&rdquo; he girded at me.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Stay and watch it.&nbsp; You may gather data on the immortality
+of the soul.&nbsp; Besides, you know, we can&rsquo;t hurt Johnson&rsquo;s
+soul.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s only the fleeting form we may demolish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It seemed centuries&mdash;possibly it was no more than ten minutes
+that the beating continued.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen and Johansen were all
+about the poor fellow.&nbsp; They struck him with their fists, kicked
+him with their heavy shoes, knocked him down, and dragged him to his
+feet to knock him down again.&nbsp; His eyes were blinded so that he
+could not set, and the blood running from ears and nose and mouth turned
+the cabin into a shambles.&nbsp; And when he could no longer rise they
+still continued to beat and kick him where he lay.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Easy, Johansen; easy as she goes,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen finally
+said.</p>
+<p>But the beast in the mate was up and rampant, and Wolf Larsen was
+compelled to brush him away with a back-handed sweep of the arm, gentle
+enough, apparently, but which hurled Johansen back like a cork, driving
+his head against the wall with a crash.&nbsp; He fell to the floor,
+half stunned for the moment, breathing heavily and blinking his eyes
+in a stupid sort of way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Jerk open the doors,&mdash;Hump,&rdquo; I was commanded.</p>
+<p>I obeyed, and the two brutes picked up the senseless man like a sack
+of rubbish and hove him clear up the companion stairs, through the narrow
+doorway, and out on deck.&nbsp; The blood from his nose gushed in a
+scarlet stream over the feet of the helmsman, who was none other than
+Louis, his boat-mate.&nbsp; But Louis took and gave a spoke and gazed
+imperturbably into the binnacle.</p>
+<p>Not so was the conduct of George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy.&nbsp;
+Fore and aft there was nothing that could have surprised us more than
+his consequent behaviour.&nbsp; He it was that came up on the poop without
+orders and dragged Johnson forward, where he set about dressing his
+wounds as well as he could and making him comfortable.&nbsp; Johnson,
+as Johnson, was unrecognizable; and not only that, for his features,
+as human features at all, were unrecognizable, so discoloured and swollen
+had they become in the few minutes which had elapsed between the beginning
+of the beating and the dragging forward of the body.</p>
+<p>But of Leach&rsquo;s behaviour&mdash; By the time I had finished
+cleansing the cabin he had taken care of Johnson.&nbsp; I had come up
+on deck for a breath of fresh air and to try to get some repose for
+my overwrought nerves.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was smoking a cigar and examining
+the patent log which the <i>Ghost</i> usually towed astern, but which
+had been hauled in for some purpose.&nbsp; Suddenly Leach&rsquo;s voice
+came to my ears.&nbsp; It was tense and hoarse with an overmastering
+rage.&nbsp; I turned and saw him standing just beneath the break of
+the poop on the port side of the galley.&nbsp; His face was convulsed
+and white, his eyes were flashing, his clenched fists raised overhead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;May God damn your soul to hell, Wolf Larsen, only hell&rsquo;s
+too good for you, you coward, you murderer, you pig!&rdquo; was his
+opening salutation.</p>
+<p>I was thunderstruck.&nbsp; I looked for his instant annihilation.&nbsp;
+But it was not Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s whim to annihilate him.&nbsp; He
+sauntered slowly forward to the break of the poop, and, leaning his
+elbow on the corner of the cabin, gazed down thoughtfully and curiously
+at the excited boy.</p>
+<p>And the boy indicted Wolf Larsen as he had never been indicted before.&nbsp;
+The sailors assembled in a fearful group just outside the forecastle
+scuttle and watched and listened.&nbsp; The hunters piled pell-mell
+out of the steerage, but as Leach&rsquo;s tirade continued I saw that
+there was no levity in their faces.&nbsp; Even they were frightened,
+not at the boy&rsquo;s terrible words, but at his terrible audacity.&nbsp;
+It did not seem possible that any living creature could thus beard Wolf
+Larsen in his teeth.&nbsp; I know for myself that I was shocked into
+admiration of the boy, and I saw in him the splendid invincibleness
+of immortality rising above the flesh and the fears of the flesh, as
+in the prophets of old, to condemn unrighteousness.</p>
+<p>And such condemnation!&nbsp; He haled forth Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s soul
+naked to the scorn of men.&nbsp; He rained upon it curses from God and
+High Heaven, and withered it with a heat of invective that savoured
+of a mediaeval excommunication of the Catholic Church.&nbsp; He ran
+the gamut of denunciation, rising to heights of wrath that were sublime
+and almost Godlike, and from sheer exhaustion sinking to the vilest
+and most indecent abuse.</p>
+<p>His rage was a madness.&nbsp; His lips were flecked with a soapy
+froth, and sometimes he choked and gurgled and became inarticulate.&nbsp;
+And through it all, calm and impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing
+down, Wolf Larsen seemed lost in a great curiosity.&nbsp; This wild
+stirring of yeasty life, this terrific revolt and defiance of matter
+that moved, perplexed and interested him.</p>
+<p>Each moment I looked, and everybody looked, for him to leap upon
+the boy and destroy him.&nbsp; But it was not his whim.&nbsp; His cigar
+went out, and he continued to gaze silently and curiously.</p>
+<p>Leach had worked himself into an ecstasy of impotent rage.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pig!&nbsp; Pig!&nbsp; Pig!&rdquo; he was reiterating at the
+top of his lungs.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you come down and kill
+me, you murderer?&nbsp; You can do it!&nbsp; I ain&rsquo;t afraid!&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s no one to stop you!&nbsp; Damn sight better dead and outa
+your reach than alive and in your clutches!&nbsp; Come on, you coward!&nbsp;
+Kill me!&nbsp; Kill me!&nbsp; Kill me!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was at this stage that Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s erratic soul brought
+him into the scene.&nbsp; He had been listening at the galley door,
+but he now came out, ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side,
+but obviously to see the killing he was certain would take place.&nbsp;
+He smirked greasily up into the face of Wolf Larsen, who seemed not
+to see him.&nbsp; But the Cockney was unabashed, though mad, stark mad.&nbsp;
+He turned to Leach, saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Such langwidge!&nbsp; Shockin&rsquo;!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Leach&rsquo;s rage was no longer impotent.&nbsp; Here at last was
+something ready to hand.&nbsp; And for the first time since the stabbing
+the Cockney had appeared outside the galley without his knife.&nbsp;
+The words had barely left his mouth when he was knocked down by Leach.&nbsp;
+Three times he struggled to his feet, striving to gain the galley, and
+each time was knocked down.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Lord!&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;&rsquo;Elp!&nbsp;
+&rsquo;Elp!&nbsp; Tyke &rsquo;im aw&rsquo;y, carn&rsquo;t yer?&nbsp;
+Tyke &rsquo;im aw&rsquo;y!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The hunters laughed from sheer relief.&nbsp; Tragedy had dwindled,
+the farce had begun.&nbsp; The sailors now crowded boldly aft, grinning
+and shuffling, to watch the pummelling of the hated Cockney.&nbsp; And
+even I felt a great joy surge up within me.&nbsp; I confess that I delighted
+in this beating Leach was giving to Thomas Mugridge, though it was as
+terrible, almost, as the one Mugridge had caused to be given to Johnson.&nbsp;
+But the expression of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s face never changed.&nbsp;
+He did not change his position either, but continued to gaze down with
+a great curiosity.&nbsp; For all his pragmatic certitude, it seemed
+as if he watched the play and movement of life in the hope of discovering
+something more about it, of discerning in its maddest writhings a something
+which had hitherto escaped him,&mdash;the key to its mystery, as it
+were, which would make all clear and plain.</p>
+<p>But the beating!&nbsp; It was quite similar to the one I had witnessed
+in the cabin.&nbsp; The Cockney strove in vain to protect himself from
+the infuriated boy.&nbsp; And in vain he strove to gain the shelter
+of the cabin.&nbsp; He rolled toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward
+it when he was knocked down.&nbsp; But blow followed blow with bewildering
+rapidity.&nbsp; He was knocked about like a shuttlecock, until, finally,
+like Johnson, he was beaten and kicked as he lay helpless on the deck.&nbsp;
+And no one interfered.&nbsp; Leach could have killed him, but, having
+evidently filled the measure of his vengeance, he drew away from his
+prostrate foe, who was whimpering and wailing in a puppyish sort of
+way, and walked forward.</p>
+<p>But these two affairs were only the opening events of the day&rsquo;s
+programme.&nbsp; In the afternoon Smoke and Henderson fell foul of each
+other, and a fusillade of shots came up from the steerage, followed
+by a stampede of the other four hunters for the deck.&nbsp; A column
+of thick, acrid smoke&mdash;the kind always made by black powder&mdash;was
+arising through the open companion-way, and down through it leaped Wolf
+Larsen.&nbsp; The sound of blows and scuffling came to our ears.&nbsp;
+Both men were wounded, and he was thrashing them both for having disobeyed
+his orders and crippled themselves in advance of the hunting season.&nbsp;
+In fact, they were badly wounded, and, having thrashed them, he proceeded
+to operate upon them in a rough surgical fashion and to dress their
+wounds.&nbsp; I served as assistant while he probed and cleansed the
+passages made by the bullets, and I saw the two men endure his crude
+surgery without anaesthetics and with no more to uphold them than a
+stiff tumbler of whisky.</p>
+<p>Then, in the first dog-watch, trouble came to a head in the forecastle.&nbsp;
+It took its rise out of the tittle-tattle and tale-bearing which had
+been the cause of Johnson&rsquo;s beating, and from the noise we heard,
+and from the sight of the bruised men next day, it was patent that half
+the forecastle had soundly drubbed the other half.</p>
+<p>The second dog-watch and the day were wound up by a fight between
+Johansen and the lean, Yankee-looking hunter, Latimer.&nbsp; It was
+caused by remarks of Latimer&rsquo;s concerning the noises made by the
+mate in his sleep, and though Johansen was whipped, he kept the steerage
+awake for the rest of the night while he blissfully slumbered and fought
+the fight over and over again.</p>
+<p>As for myself, I was oppressed with nightmare.&nbsp; The day had
+been like some horrible dream.&nbsp; Brutality had followed brutality,
+and flaming passions and cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek
+one another&rsquo;s lives, and to strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy.&nbsp;
+My nerves were shocked.&nbsp; My mind itself was shocked.&nbsp; All
+my days had been passed in comparative ignorance of the animality of
+man.&nbsp; In fact, I had known life only in its intellectual phases.&nbsp;
+Brutality I had experienced, but it was the brutality of the intellect&mdash;the
+cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth, the cruel epigrams and occasional
+harsh witticisms of the fellows at the Bibelot, and the nasty remarks
+of some of the professors during my undergraduate days.</p>
+<p>That was all.&nbsp; But that men should wreak their anger on others
+by the bruising of the flesh and the letting of blood was something
+strangely and fearfully new to me.&nbsp; Not for nothing had I been
+called &ldquo;Sissy&rdquo; Van Weyden, I thought, as I tossed restlessly
+on my bunk between one nightmare and another.&nbsp; And it seemed to
+me that my innocence of the realities of life had been complete indeed.&nbsp;
+I laughed bitterly to myself, and seemed to find in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+forbidding philosophy a more adequate explanation of life than I found
+in my own.</p>
+<p>And I was frightened when I became conscious of the trend of my thought.&nbsp;
+The continual brutality around me was degenerative in its effect.&nbsp;
+It bid fair to destroy for me all that was best and brightest in life.&nbsp;
+My reason dictated that the beating Thomas Mugridge had received was
+an ill thing, and yet for the life of me I could not prevent my soul
+joying in it.&nbsp; And even while I was oppressed by the enormity of
+my sin,&mdash;for sin it was,&mdash;I chuckled with an insane delight.&nbsp;
+I was no longer Humphrey Van Weyden.&nbsp; I was Hump, cabin-boy on
+the schooner <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was my captain, Thomas
+Mugridge and the rest were my companions, and I was receiving repeated
+impresses from the die which had stamped them all.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>For three days I did my own work and Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s too;
+and I flatter myself that I did his work well.&nbsp; I know that it
+won Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction
+during the brief time my <i>r&eacute;gime</i> lasted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The first clean bite since I come aboard,&rdquo; Harrison
+said to me at the galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans
+from the forecastle.&nbsp; &ldquo;Somehow Tommy&rsquo;s grub always
+tastes of grease, stale grease, and I reckon he ain&rsquo;t changed
+his shirt since he left &rsquo;Frisco.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know he hasn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll bet he sleeps in it,&rdquo; Harrison added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you won&rsquo;t lose,&rdquo; I agreed.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+same shirt, and he hasn&rsquo;t had it off once in all this time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But three days was all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to recover
+from the effects of the beating.&nbsp; On the fourth day, lame and sore,
+scarcely able to see, so closed were his eyes, he was haled from his
+bunk by the nape of the neck and set to his duty.&nbsp; He sniffled
+and wept, but Wolf Larsen was pitiless.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And see that you serve no more slops,&rdquo; was his parting
+injunction.&nbsp; &ldquo;No more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean
+shirt occasionally, or you&rsquo;ll get a tow over the side.&nbsp; Understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and a short
+lurch of the <i>Ghost</i> sent him staggering.&nbsp; In attempting to
+recover himself, he reached for the iron railing which surrounded the
+stove and kept the pots from sliding off; but he missed the railing,
+and his hand, with his weight behind it, landed squarely on the hot
+surface.&nbsp; There was a sizzle and odour of burning flesh, and a
+sharp cry of pain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot &rsquo;ave I done?&rdquo; he wailed; sitting
+down in the coal-box and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;W&rsquo;y &rsquo;as all this come on me?&nbsp; It mykes me fair
+sick, it does, an&rsquo; I try so &rsquo;ard to go through life &rsquo;armless
+an&rsquo; &rsquo;urtin&rsquo; nobody.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The tears were running down his puffed and discoloured cheeks, and
+his face was drawn with pain.&nbsp; A savage expression flitted across
+it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, &rsquo;ow I &rsquo;ate &rsquo;im!&nbsp; &rsquo;Ow I &rsquo;ate
+&rsquo;im!&rdquo; he gritted out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whom?&rdquo; I asked; but the poor wretch was weeping again
+over his misfortunes.&nbsp; Less difficult it was to guess whom he hated
+than whom he did not hate.&nbsp; For I had come to see a malignant devil
+in him which impelled him to hate all the world.&nbsp; I sometimes thought
+that he hated even himself, so grotesquely had life dealt with him,
+and so monstrously.&nbsp; At such moments a great sympathy welled up
+within me, and I felt shame that I had ever joyed in his discomfiture
+or pain.&nbsp; Life had been unfair to him.&nbsp; It had played him
+a scurvy trick when it fashioned him into the thing he was, and it had
+played him scurvy tricks ever since.&nbsp; What chance had he to be
+anything else than he was?&nbsp; And as though answering my unspoken
+thought, he wailed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never &rsquo;ad no chance, not &rsquo;arf a chance!&nbsp;
+&rsquo;Oo was there to send me to school, or put tommy in my &rsquo;ungry
+belly, or wipe my bloody nose for me, w&rsquo;en I was a kiddy?&nbsp;
+&rsquo;Oo ever did anything for me, heh?&nbsp; &rsquo;Oo, I s&rsquo;y?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never mind, Tommy,&rdquo; I said, placing a soothing hand
+on his shoulder.&nbsp; &ldquo;Cheer up.&nbsp; It&rsquo;ll all come right
+in the end.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve long years before you, and you can make
+anything you please of yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lie! a bloody lie!&rdquo; he shouted in my face,
+flinging off the hand.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lie, and you know it.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;m already myde, an&rsquo; myde out of leavin&rsquo;s an&rsquo;
+scraps.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s all right for you, &rsquo;Ump.&nbsp; You was
+born a gentleman.&nbsp; You never knew wot it was to go &rsquo;ungry,
+to cry yerself asleep with yer little belly gnawin&rsquo; an&rsquo;
+gnawin&rsquo;, like a rat inside yer.&nbsp; It carn&rsquo;t come right.&nbsp;
+If I was President of the United Stytes to-morrer, &rsquo;ow would it
+fill my belly for one time w&rsquo;en I was a kiddy and it went empty?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Ow could it, I s&rsquo;y?&nbsp; I was born to sufferin&rsquo;
+and sorrer.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve had more cruel sufferin&rsquo; than any
+ten men, I &rsquo;ave.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been in orspital arf my bleedin&rsquo;
+life.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve &rsquo;ad the fever in Aspinwall, in &rsquo;Avana,
+in New Orleans.&nbsp; I near died of the scurvy and was rotten with
+it six months in Barbadoes.&nbsp; Smallpox in &rsquo;Onolulu, two broken
+legs in Shanghai, pnuemonia in Unalaska, three busted ribs an&rsquo;
+my insides all twisted in &rsquo;Frisco.&nbsp; An&rsquo; &rsquo;ere
+I am now.&nbsp; Look at me!&nbsp; Look at me!&nbsp; My ribs kicked loose
+from my back again.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll be coughin&rsquo; blood before
+eyght bells.&nbsp; &rsquo;Ow can it be myde up to me, I arsk?&nbsp;
+&rsquo;Oo&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; to do it?&nbsp; Gawd?&nbsp; &rsquo;Ow
+Gawd must &rsquo;ave &rsquo;ated me w&rsquo;en &rsquo;e signed me on
+for a voyage in this bloomin&rsquo; world of &rsquo;is!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This tirade against destiny went on for an hour or more, and then
+he buckled to his work, limping and groaning, and in his eyes a great
+hatred for all created things.&nbsp; His diagnosis was correct, however,
+for he was seized with occasional sicknesses, during which he vomited
+blood and suffered great pain.&nbsp; And as he said, it seemed God hated
+him too much to let him die, for he ultimately grew better and waxed
+more malignant than ever.</p>
+<p>Several days more passed before Johnson crawled on deck and went
+about his work in a half-hearted way.&nbsp; He was still a sick man,
+and I more than once observed him creeping painfully aloft to a topsail,
+or drooping wearily as he stood at the wheel.&nbsp; But, still worse,
+it seemed that his spirit was broken.&nbsp; He was abject before Wolf
+Larsen and almost grovelled to Johansen.&nbsp; Not so was the conduct
+of Leach.&nbsp; He went about the deck like a tiger cub, glaring his
+hatred openly at Wolf Larsen and Johansen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do for you yet, you slab-footed Swede,&rdquo; I
+heard him say to Johansen one night on deck.</p>
+<p>The mate cursed him in the darkness, and the next moment some missile
+struck the galley a sharp rap.&nbsp; There was more cursing, and a mocking
+laugh, and when all was quiet I stole outside and found a heavy knife
+imbedded over an inch in the solid wood.&nbsp; A few minutes later the
+mate came fumbling about in search of it, but I returned it privily
+to Leach next day.&nbsp; He grinned when I handed it over, yet it was
+a grin that contained more sincere thanks than a multitude of the verbosities
+of speech common to the members of my own class.</p>
+<p>Unlike any one else in the ship&rsquo;s company, I now found myself
+with no quarrels on my hands and in the good graces of all.&nbsp; The
+hunters possibly no more than tolerated me, though none of them disliked
+me; while Smoke and Henderson, convalescent under a deck awning and
+swinging day and night in their hammocks, assured me that I was better
+than any hospital nurse, and that they would not forget me at the end
+of the voyage when they were paid off.&nbsp; (As though I stood in need
+of their money!&nbsp; I, who could have bought them out, bag and baggage,
+and the schooner and its equipment, a score of times over!)&nbsp; But
+upon me had devolved the task of tending their wounds, and pulling them
+through, and I did my best by them.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen underwent another bad attack of headache which lasted
+two days.&nbsp; He must have suffered severely, for he called me in
+and obeyed my commands like a sick child.&nbsp; But nothing I could
+do seemed to relieve him.&nbsp; At my suggestion, however, he gave up
+smoking and drinking; though why such a magnificent animal as he should
+have headaches at all puzzles me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis the hand of God, I&rsquo;m tellin&rsquo; you,&rdquo;
+is the way Louis sees it.&nbsp; &ldquo;&rsquo;Tis a visitation for his
+black-hearted deeds, and there&rsquo;s more behind and comin&rsquo;,
+or else&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Or else,&rdquo; I prompted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;God is noddin&rsquo; and not doin&rsquo; his duty, though
+it&rsquo;s me as shouldn&rsquo;t say it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was mistaken when I said that I was in the good graces of all.&nbsp;
+Not only does Thomas Mugridge continue to hate me, but he has discovered
+a new reason for hating me.&nbsp; It took me no little while to puzzle
+it out, but I finally discovered that it was because I was more luckily
+born than he&mdash;&ldquo;gentleman born,&rdquo; he put it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And still no more dead men,&rdquo; I twitted Louis, when Smoke
+and Henderson, side by side, in friendly conversation, took their first
+exercise on deck.</p>
+<p>Louis surveyed me with his shrewd grey eyes, and shook his head portentously.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s a-comin&rsquo;, I tell you, and it&rsquo;ll be sheets
+and halyards, stand by all hands, when she begins to howl.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve
+had the feel iv it this long time, and I can feel it now as plainly
+as I feel the rigging iv a dark night.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s close, she&rsquo;s
+close.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who goes first?&rdquo; I queried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not fat old Louis, I promise you,&rdquo; he laughed.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;For &rsquo;tis in the bones iv me I know that come this time
+next year I&rsquo;ll be gazin&rsquo; in the old mother&rsquo;s eyes,
+weary with watchin&rsquo; iv the sea for the five sons she gave to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wot&rsquo;s &rsquo;e been s&rsquo;yin&rsquo; to yer?&rdquo;
+Thomas Mugridge demanded a moment later.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That he&rsquo;s going home some day to see his mother,&rdquo;
+I answered diplomatically.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never &rsquo;ad none,&rdquo; was the Cockney&rsquo;s comment,
+as he gazed with lustreless, hopeless eyes into mine.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It has dawned upon me that I have never placed a proper valuation
+upon womankind.&nbsp; For that matter, though not amative to any considerable
+degree so far as I have discovered, I was never outside the atmosphere
+of women until now.&nbsp; My mother and sisters were always about me,
+and I was always trying to escape them; for they worried me to distraction
+with their solicitude for my health and with their periodic inroads
+on my den, when my orderly confusion, upon which I prided myself, was
+turned into worse confusion and less order, though it looked neat enough
+to the eye.&nbsp; I never could find anything when they had departed.&nbsp;
+But now, alas, how welcome would have been the feel of their presence,
+the frou-frou and swish-swish of their skirts which I had so cordially
+detested!&nbsp; I am sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be
+irritable with them again.&nbsp; They may dose me and doctor me morning,
+noon, and night, and dust and sweep and put my den to rights every minute
+of the day, and I shall only lean back and survey it all and be thankful
+in that I am possessed of a mother and some several sisters.</p>
+<p>All of which has set me wondering.&nbsp; Where are the mothers of
+these twenty and odd men on the <i>Ghost</i>?&nbsp; It strikes me as
+unnatural and unhealthful that men should be totally separated from
+women and herd through the world by themselves.&nbsp; Coarseness and
+savagery are the inevitable results.&nbsp; These men about me should
+have wives, and sisters, and daughters; then would they be capable of
+softness, and tenderness, and sympathy.&nbsp; As it is, not one of them
+is married.&nbsp; In years and years not one of them has been in contact
+with a good woman, or within the influence, or redemption, which irresistibly
+radiates from such a creature.&nbsp; There is no balance in their lives.&nbsp;
+Their masculinity, which in itself is of the brute, has been over-developed.&nbsp;
+The other and spiritual side of their natures has been dwarfed&mdash;atrophied,
+in fact.</p>
+<p>They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one another
+and growing daily more calloused from the grinding.&nbsp; It seems to
+me impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers.&nbsp; It would appear
+that they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race apart, wherein
+there is no such thing as sex; that they are hatched out by the sun
+like turtle eggs, or receive life in some similar and sordid fashion;
+and that all their days they fester in brutality and viciousness, and
+in the end die as unlovely as they have lived.</p>
+<p>Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with Johansen
+last night&mdash;the first superfluous words with which he has favoured
+me since the voyage began.&nbsp; He left Sweden when he was eighteen,
+is now thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home
+once.&nbsp; He had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in some
+sailor boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still
+alive.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She must be a pretty old woman now,&rdquo; he said, staring
+meditatively into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison,
+who was steering a point off the course.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When did you last write to her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He performed his mental arithmetic aloud.&nbsp; &ldquo;Eighty-one;
+no&mdash;eighty-two, eh? no&mdash;eighty-three?&nbsp; Yes, eighty-three.&nbsp;
+Ten years ago.&nbsp; From some little port in Madagascar.&nbsp; I was
+trading.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he went on, as though addressing his neglected
+mother across half the girth of the earth, &ldquo;each year I was going
+home.&nbsp; So what was the good to write?&nbsp; It was only a year.&nbsp;
+And each year something happened, and I did not go.&nbsp; But I am mate,
+now, and when I pay off at &rsquo;Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars,
+I will ship myself on a windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which
+will give me more money; and then I will pay my passage from there home.&nbsp;
+Then she will not do any more work.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But does she work? now?&nbsp; How old is she?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;About seventy,&rdquo; he answered.&nbsp; And then, boastingly,
+&ldquo;We work from the time we are born until we die, in my country.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s why we live so long.&nbsp; I will live to a hundred.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I shall never forget this conversation.&nbsp; The words were the
+last I ever heard him utter.&nbsp; Perhaps they were the last he did
+utter, too.&nbsp; For, going down into the cabin to turn in, I decided
+that it was too stuffy to sleep below.&nbsp; It was a calm night.&nbsp;
+We were out of the Trades, and the <i>Ghost</i> was forging ahead barely
+a knot an hour.&nbsp; So I tucked a blanket and pillow under my arm
+and went up on deck.</p>
+<p>As I passed between Harrison and the binnacle, which was built into
+the top of the cabin, I noticed that he was this time fully three points
+off.&nbsp; Thinking that he was asleep, and wishing him to escape reprimand
+or worse, I spoke to him.&nbsp; But he was not asleep.&nbsp; His eyes
+were wide and staring.&nbsp; He seemed greatly perturbed, unable to
+reply to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; I asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are
+you sick?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his head, and with a deep sign as of awakening, caught his
+breath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better get on your course, then,&rdquo; I chided.</p>
+<p>He put a few spokes over, and I watched the compass-card swing slowly
+to N.N.W. and steady itself with slight oscillations.</p>
+<p>I took a fresh hold on my bedclothes and was preparing to start on,
+when some movement caught my eye and I looked astern to the rail.&nbsp;
+A sinewy hand, dripping with water, was clutching the rail.&nbsp; A
+second hand took form in the darkness beside it.&nbsp; I watched, fascinated.&nbsp;
+What visitant from the gloom of the deep was I to behold?&nbsp; Whatever
+it was, I knew that it was climbing aboard by the log-line.&nbsp; I
+saw a head, the hair wet and straight, shape itself, and then the unmistakable
+eyes and face of Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; His right cheek was red with blood,
+which flowed from some wound in the head.</p>
+<p>He drew himself inboard with a quick effort, and arose to his feet,
+glancing swiftly, as he did so, at the man at the wheel, as though to
+assure himself of his identity and that there was nothing to fear from
+him.&nbsp; The sea-water was streaming from him.&nbsp; It made little
+audible gurgles which distracted me.&nbsp; As he stepped toward me I
+shrank back instinctively, for I saw that in his eyes which spelled
+death.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right, Hump,&rdquo; he said in a low voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Where&rsquo;s
+the mate?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I shook my head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Johansen!&rdquo; he called softly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Johansen!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where is he?&rdquo; he demanded of Harrison.</p>
+<p>The young fellow seemed to have recovered his composure, for he answered
+steadily enough, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, sir.&nbsp; I saw him go
+for&rsquo;ard a little while ago.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So did I go for&rsquo;ard.&nbsp; But you will observe that
+I didn&rsquo;t come back the way I went.&nbsp; Can you explain it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must have been overboard, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shall I look for him in the steerage, sir?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen shook his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t find
+him, Hump.&nbsp; But you&rsquo;ll do.&nbsp; Come on.&nbsp; Never mind
+your bedding.&nbsp; Leave it where it is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I followed at his heels.&nbsp; There was nothing stirring amidships.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Those cursed hunters,&rdquo; was his comment.&nbsp; &ldquo;Too
+damned fat and lazy to stand a four-hour watch.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But on the forecastle-head we found three sailors asleep.&nbsp; He
+turned them over and looked at their faces.&nbsp; They composed the
+watch on deck, and it was the ship&rsquo;s custom, in good weather,
+to let the watch sleep with the exception of the officer, the helmsman,
+and the look-out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s look-out?&rdquo; he demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Me, sir,&rdquo; answered Holyoak, one of the deep-water sailors,
+a slight tremor in his voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;I winked off just this very
+minute, sir.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m sorry, sir.&nbsp; It won&rsquo;t happen
+again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you hear or see anything on deck?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir, I&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But Wolf Larsen had turned away with a snort of disgust, leaving
+the sailor rubbing his eyes with surprise at having been let of so easily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Softly, now,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen warned me in a whisper, as
+he doubled his body into the forecastle scuttle and prepared to descend.</p>
+<p>I followed with a quaking heart.&nbsp; What was to happen I knew
+no more than did I know what had happened.&nbsp; But blood had been
+shed, and it was through no whim of Wolf Larsen that he had gone over
+the side with his scalp laid open.&nbsp; Besides, Johansen was missing.</p>
+<p>It was my first descent into the forecastle, and I shall not soon
+forget my impression of it, caught as I stood on my feet at the bottom
+of the ladder.&nbsp; Built directly in the eyes of the schooner, it
+was of the shape of a triangle, along the three sides of which stood
+the bunks, in double-tier, twelve of them.&nbsp; It was no larger than
+a hall bedroom in Grub Street, and yet twelve men were herded into it
+to eat and sleep and carry on all the functions of living.&nbsp; My
+bedroom at home was not large, yet it could have contained a dozen similar
+forecastles, and taking into consideration the height of the ceiling,
+a score at least.</p>
+<p>It smelled sour and musty, and by the dim light of the swinging sea-lamp
+I saw every bit of available wall-space hung deep with sea-boots, oilskins,
+and garments, clean and dirty, of various sorts.&nbsp; These swung back
+and forth with every roll of the vessel, giving rise to a brushing sound,
+as of trees against a roof or wall.&nbsp; Somewhere a boot thumped loudly
+and at irregular intervals against the wall; and, though it was a mild
+night on the sea, there was a continual chorus of the creaking timbers
+and bulkheads and of abysmal noises beneath the flooring.</p>
+<p>The sleepers did not mind.&nbsp; There were eight of them,&mdash;the
+two watches below,&mdash;and the air was thick with the warmth and odour
+of their breathing, and the ear was filled with the noise of their snoring
+and of their sighs and half-groans, tokens plain of the rest of the
+animal-man.&nbsp; But were they sleeping? all of them?&nbsp; Or had
+they been sleeping?&nbsp; This was evidently Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s quest&mdash;to
+find the men who appeared to be asleep and who were not asleep or who
+had not been asleep very recently.&nbsp; And he went about it in a way
+that reminded me of a story out of Boccaccio.</p>
+<p>He took the sea-lamp from its swinging frame and handed it to me.&nbsp;
+He began at the first bunks forward on the star-board side.&nbsp; In
+the top one lay Oofty-Oofty, a Kanaka and splendid seaman, so named
+by his mates.&nbsp; He was asleep on his back and breathing as placidly
+as a woman.&nbsp; One arm was under his head, the other lay on top of
+the blankets.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen put thumb and forefinger to the wrist
+and counted the pulse.&nbsp; In the midst of it the Kanaka roused.&nbsp;
+He awoke as gently as he slept.&nbsp; There was no movement of the body
+whatever.&nbsp; The eyes, only, moved.&nbsp; They flashed wide open,
+big and black, and stared, unblinking, into our faces.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen
+put his finger to his lips as a sign for silence, and the eyes closed
+again.</p>
+<p>In the lower bunk lay Louis, grossly fat and warm and sweaty, asleep
+unfeignedly and sleeping laboriously.&nbsp; While Wolf Larsen held his
+wrist he stirred uneasily, bowing his body so that for a moment it rested
+on shoulders and heels.&nbsp; His lips moved, and he gave voice to this
+enigmatic utterance:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A shilling&rsquo;s worth a quarter; but keep your lamps out
+for thruppenny-bits, or the publicans &rsquo;ll shove &rsquo;em on you
+for sixpence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then he rolled over on his side with a heavy, sobbing sigh, saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A sixpence is a tanner, and a shilling a bob; but what a pony
+is I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Satisfied with the honesty of his and the Kanaka&rsquo;s sleep, Wolf
+Larsen passed on to the next two bunks on the starboard side, occupied
+top and bottom, as we saw in the light of the sea-lamp, by Leach and
+Johnson.</p>
+<p>As Wolf Larsen bent down to the lower bunk to take Johnson&rsquo;s
+pulse, I, standing erect and holding the lamp, saw Leach&rsquo;s head
+rise stealthily as he peered over the side of his bunk to see what was
+going on.&nbsp; He must have divined Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s trick and the
+sureness of detection, for the light was at once dashed from my hand
+and the forecastle was left in darkness.&nbsp; He must have leaped,
+also, at the same instant, straight down on Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>The first sounds were those of a conflict between a bull and a wolf.&nbsp;
+I heard a great infuriated bellow go up from Wolf Larsen, and from Leach
+a snarling that was desperate and blood-curdling.&nbsp; Johnson must
+have joined him immediately, so that his abject and grovelling conduct
+on deck for the past few days had been no more than planned deception.</p>
+<p>I was so terror-stricken by this fight in the dark that I leaned
+against the ladder, trembling and unable to ascend.&nbsp; And upon me
+was that old sickness at the pit of the stomach, caused always by the
+spectacle of physical violence.&nbsp; In this instance I could not see,
+but I could hear the impact of the blows&mdash;the soft crushing sound
+made by flesh striking forcibly against flesh.&nbsp; Then there was
+the crashing about of the entwined bodies, the laboured breathing, the
+short quick gasps of sudden pain.</p>
+<p>There must have been more men in the conspiracy to murder the captain
+and mate, for by the sounds I knew that Leach and Johnson had been quickly
+reinforced by some of their mates.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Get a knife somebody!&rdquo; Leach was shouting.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pound him on the head!&nbsp; Mash his brains out!&rdquo; was
+Johnson&rsquo;s cry.</p>
+<p>But after his first bellow, Wolf Larsen made no noise.&nbsp; He was
+fighting grimly and silently for life.&nbsp; He was sore beset.&nbsp;
+Down at the very first, he had been unable to gain his feet, and for
+all of his tremendous strength I felt that there was no hope for him.</p>
+<p>The force with which they struggled was vividly impressed on me;
+for I was knocked down by their surging bodies and badly bruised.&nbsp;
+But in the confusion I managed to crawl into an empty lower bunk out
+of the way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All hands!&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve got him!&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve got
+him!&rdquo; I could hear Leach crying.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who?&rdquo; demanded those who had been really asleep, and
+who had wakened to they knew not what.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the bloody mate!&rdquo; was Leach&rsquo;s crafty
+answer, strained from him in a smothered sort of way.</p>
+<p>This was greeted with whoops of joy, and from then on Wolf Larsen
+had seven strong men on top of him, Louis, I believe, taking no part
+in it.&nbsp; The forecastle was like an angry hive of bees aroused by
+some marauder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What ho! below there!&rdquo; I heard Latimer shout down the
+scuttle, too cautious to descend into the inferno of passion he could
+hear raging beneath him in the darkness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t somebody get a knife?&nbsp; Oh, won&rsquo;t somebody
+get a knife?&rdquo; Leach pleaded in the first interval of comparative
+silence.</p>
+<p>The number of the assailants was a cause of confusion.&nbsp; They
+blocked their own efforts, while Wolf Larsen, with but a single purpose,
+achieved his.&nbsp; This was to fight his way across the floor to the
+ladder.&nbsp; Though in total darkness, I followed his progress by its
+sound.&nbsp; No man less than a giant could have done what he did, once
+he had gained the foot of the ladder.&nbsp; Step by step, by the might
+of his arms, the whole pack of men striving to drag him back and down,
+he drew his body up from the floor till he stood erect.&nbsp; And then,
+step by step, hand and foot, he slowly struggled up the ladder.</p>
+<p>The very last of all, I saw.&nbsp; For Latimer, having finally gone
+for a lantern, held it so that its light shone down the scuttle.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen was nearly to the top, though I could not see him.&nbsp;
+All that was visible was the mass of men fastened upon him.&nbsp; It
+squirmed about, like some huge many-legged spider, and swayed back and
+forth to the regular roll of the vessel.&nbsp; And still, step by step
+with long intervals between, the mass ascended.&nbsp; Once it tottered,
+about to fall back, but the broken hold was regained and it still went
+up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo; Latimer cried.</p>
+<p>In the rays of the lantern I could see his perplexed face peering
+down.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Larsen,&rdquo; I heard a muffled voice from within the mass.</p>
+<p>Latimer reached down with his free hand.&nbsp; I saw a hand shoot
+up to clasp his.&nbsp; Latimer pulled, and the next couple of steps
+were made with a rush.&nbsp; Then Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s other hand reached
+up and clutched the edge of the scuttle.&nbsp; The mass swung clear
+of the ladder, the men still clinging to their escaping foe.&nbsp; They
+began to drop of, to be brushed off against the sharp edge of the scuttle,
+to be knocked off by the legs which were now kicking powerfully.&nbsp;
+Leach was the last to go, falling sheer back from the top of the scuttle
+and striking on head and shoulders upon his sprawling mates beneath.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen and the lantern disappeared, and we were left in darkness.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>There was a deal of cursing and groaning as the men at the bottom
+of the ladder crawled to their feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Somebody strike a light, my thumb&rsquo;s out of joint,&rdquo;
+said one of the men, Parsons, a swarthy, saturnine man, boat-steerer
+in Standish&rsquo;s boat, in which Harrison was puller.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find it knockin&rsquo; about by the bitts,&rdquo;
+Leach said, sitting down on the edge of the bunk in which I was concealed.</p>
+<p>There was a fumbling and a scratching of matches, and the sea-lamp
+flared up, dim and smoky, and in its weird light bare-legged men moved
+about nursing their bruises and caring for their hurts.&nbsp; Oofty-Oofty
+laid hold of Parsons&rsquo;s thumb, pulling it out stoutly and snapping
+it back into place.&nbsp; I noticed at the same time that the Kanaka&rsquo;s
+knuckles were laid open clear across and to the bone.&nbsp; He exhibited
+them, exposing beautiful white teeth in a grin as he did so, and explaining
+that the wounds had come from striking Wolf Larsen in the mouth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So it was you, was it, you black beggar?&rdquo; belligerently
+demanded one Kelly, an Irish-American and a longshoreman, making his
+first trip to sea, and boat-puller for Kerfoot.</p>
+<p>As he made the demand he spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth and
+shoved his pugnacious face close to Oofty-Oofty.&nbsp; The Kanaka leaped
+backward to his bunk, to return with a second leap, flourishing a long
+knife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aw, go lay down, you make me tired,&rdquo; Leach interfered.&nbsp;
+He was evidently, for all of his youth and inexperience, cock of the
+forecastle.&nbsp; &ldquo;G&rsquo;wan, you Kelly.&nbsp; You leave Oofty
+alone.&nbsp; How in hell did he know it was you in the dark?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Kelly subsided with some muttering, and the Kanaka flashed his white
+teeth in a grateful smile.&nbsp; He was a beautiful creature, almost
+feminine in the pleasing lines of his figure, and there was a softness
+and dreaminess in his large eyes which seemed to contradict his well-earned
+reputation for strife and action.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How did he get away?&rdquo; Johnson asked.</p>
+<p>He was sitting on the side of his bunk, the whole pose of his figure
+indicating utter dejection and hopelessness.&nbsp; He was still breathing
+heavily from the exertion he had made.&nbsp; His shirt had been ripped
+entirely from him in the struggle, and blood from a gash in the cheek
+was flowing down his naked chest, marking a red path across his white
+thigh and dripping to the floor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because he is the devil, as I told you before,&rdquo; was
+Leach&rsquo;s answer; and thereat he was on his feet and raging his
+disappointment with tears in his eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And not one of you to get a knife!&rdquo; was his unceasing
+lament.</p>
+<p>But the rest of the hands had a lively fear of consequences to come
+and gave no heed to him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How&rsquo;ll he know which was which?&rdquo; Kelly asked,
+and as he went on he looked murderously about him&mdash;&ldquo;unless
+one of us peaches.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll know as soon as ever he claps eyes on us,&rdquo;
+Parsons replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;One look at you&rsquo;d be enough.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell him the deck flopped up and gouged yer teeth out iv yer
+jaw,&rdquo; Louis grinned.&nbsp; He was the only man who was not out
+of his bunk, and he was jubilant in that he possessed no bruises to
+advertise that he had had a hand in the night&rsquo;s work.&nbsp; &ldquo;Just
+wait till he gets a glimpse iv yer mugs to-morrow, the gang iv ye,&rdquo;
+he chuckled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll say we thought it was the mate,&rdquo; said one.&nbsp;
+And another, &ldquo;I know what I&rsquo;ll say&mdash;that I heered a
+row, jumped out of my bunk, got a jolly good crack on the jaw for my
+pains, and sailed in myself.&nbsp; Couldn&rsquo;t tell who or what it
+was in the dark and just hit out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; &rsquo;twas me you hit, of course,&rdquo; Kelly
+seconded, his face brightening for the moment.</p>
+<p>Leach and Johnson took no part in the discussion, and it was plain
+to see that their mates looked upon them as men for whom the worst was
+inevitable, who were beyond hope and already dead.&nbsp; Leach stood
+their fears and reproaches for some time.&nbsp; Then he broke out:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You make me tired!&nbsp; A nice lot of gazabas you are!&nbsp;
+If you talked less with yer mouth and did something with yer hands,
+he&rsquo;d a-ben done with by now.&nbsp; Why couldn&rsquo;t one of you,
+just one of you, get me a knife when I sung out?&nbsp; You make me sick!&nbsp;
+A-beefin&rsquo; and bellerin&rsquo; &rsquo;round, as though he&rsquo;d
+kill you when he gets you!&nbsp; You know damn well he wont.&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t
+afford to.&nbsp; No shipping masters or beach-combers over here, and
+he wants yer in his business, and he wants yer bad.&nbsp; Who&rsquo;s
+to pull or steer or sail ship if he loses yer?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s me and
+Johnson have to face the music.&nbsp; Get into yer bunks, now, and shut
+yer faces; I want to get some sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right all right,&rdquo; Parsons spoke up.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Mebbe he won&rsquo;t do for us, but mark my words, hell &rsquo;ll
+be an ice-box to this ship from now on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>All the while I had been apprehensive concerning my own predicament.&nbsp;
+What would happen to me when these men discovered my presence?&nbsp;
+I could never fight my way out as Wolf Larsen had done.&nbsp; And at
+this moment Latimer called down the scuttles:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hump!&nbsp; The old man wants you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He ain&rsquo;t down here!&rdquo; Parsons called back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, he is,&rdquo; I said, sliding out of the bunk and striving
+my hardest to keep my voice steady and bold.</p>
+<p>The sailors looked at me in consternation.&nbsp; Fear was strong
+in their faces, and the devilishness which comes of fear.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming!&rdquo; I shouted up to Latimer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No you don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; Kelly cried, stepping between me
+and the ladder, his right hand shaped into a veritable strangler&rsquo;s
+clutch.&nbsp; &ldquo;You damn little sneak!&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll shut yer
+mouth!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let him go,&rdquo; Leach commanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not on yer life,&rdquo; was the angry retort.</p>
+<p>Leach never changed his position on the edge of the bunk.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let
+him go, I say,&rdquo; he repeated; but this time his voice was gritty
+and metallic.</p>
+<p>The Irishman wavered.&nbsp; I made to step by him, and he stood aside.&nbsp;
+When I had gained the ladder, I turned to the circle of brutal and malignant
+faces peering at me through the semi-darkness.&nbsp; A sudden and deep
+sympathy welled up in me.&nbsp; I remembered the Cockney&rsquo;s way
+of putting it.&nbsp; How God must have hated them that they should be
+tortured so!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have seen and heard nothing, believe me,&rdquo; I said quietly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I tell yer, he&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; I could hear Leach
+saying as I went up the ladder.&nbsp; &ldquo;He don&rsquo;t like the
+old man no more nor you or me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I found Wolf Larsen in the cabin, stripped and bloody, waiting for
+me.&nbsp; He greeted me with one of his whimsical smiles.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come, get to work, Doctor.&nbsp; The signs are favourable
+for an extensive practice this voyage.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what
+the <i>Ghost</i> would have been without you, and if I could only cherish
+such noble sentiments I would tell you her master is deeply grateful.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I knew the run of the simple medicine-chest the <i>Ghost</i> carried,
+and while I was heating water on the cabin stove and getting the things
+ready for dressing his wounds, he moved about, laughing and chatting,
+and examining his hurts with a calculating eye.&nbsp; I had never before
+seen him stripped, and the sight of his body quite took my breath away.&nbsp;
+It has never been my weakness to exalt the flesh&mdash;far from it;
+but there is enough of the artist in me to appreciate its wonder.</p>
+<p>I must say that I was fascinated by the perfect lines of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+figure, and by what I may term the terrible beauty of it.&nbsp; I had
+noted the men in the forecastle.&nbsp; Powerfully muscled though some
+of them were, there had been something wrong with all of them, an insufficient
+development here, an undue development there, a twist or a crook that
+destroyed symmetry, legs too short or too long, or too much sinew or
+bone exposed, or too little.&nbsp; Oofty-Oofty had been the only one
+whose lines were at all pleasing, while, in so far as they pleased,
+that far had they been what I should call feminine.</p>
+<p>But Wolf Larsen was the man-type, the masculine, and almost a god
+in his perfectness.&nbsp; As he moved about or raised his arms the great
+muscles leapt and moved under the satiny skin.&nbsp; I have forgotten
+to say that the bronze ended with his face.&nbsp; His body, thanks to
+his Scandinavian stock, was fair as the fairest woman&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+I remember his putting his hand up to feel of the wound on his head,
+and my watching the biceps move like a living thing under its white
+sheath.&nbsp; It was the biceps that had nearly crushed out my life
+once, that I had seen strike so many killing blows.&nbsp; I could not
+take my eyes from him.&nbsp; I stood motionless, a roll of antiseptic
+cotton in my hand unwinding and spilling itself down to the floor.</p>
+<p>He noticed me, and I became conscious that I was staring at him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;God made you well,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did he?&rdquo; he answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have often thought
+so myself, and wondered why.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Purpose&mdash;&rdquo; I began.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Utility,&rdquo; he interrupted.&nbsp; &ldquo;This body was
+made for use.&nbsp; These muscles were made to grip, and tear, and destroy
+living things that get between me and life.&nbsp; But have you thought
+of the other living things?&nbsp; They, too, have muscles, of one kind
+and another, made to grip, and tear, and destroy; and when they come
+between me and life, I out-grip them, out-tear them, out-destroy them.&nbsp;
+Purpose does not explain that.&nbsp; Utility does.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is not beautiful,&rdquo; I protested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Life isn&rsquo;t, you mean,&rdquo; he smiled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yet
+you say I was made well.&nbsp; Do you see this?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He braced his legs and feet, pressing the cabin floor with his toes
+in a clutching sort of way.&nbsp; Knots and ridges and mounds of muscles
+writhed and bunched under the skin.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Feel them,&rdquo; he commanded.</p>
+<p>They were hard as iron.&nbsp; And I observed, also, that his whole
+body had unconsciously drawn itself together, tense and alert; that
+muscles were softly crawling and shaping about the hips, along the back,
+and across the shoulders; that the arms were slightly lifted, their
+muscles contracting, the fingers crooking till the hands were like talons;
+and that even the eyes had changed expression and into them were coming
+watchfulness and measurement and a light none other than of battle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stability, equilibrium,&rdquo; he said, relaxing on the instant
+and sinking his body back into repose.&nbsp; &ldquo;Feet with which
+to clutch the ground, legs to stand on and to help withstand, while
+with arms and hands, teeth and nails, I struggle to kill and to be not
+killed.&nbsp; Purpose?&nbsp; Utility is the better word.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I did not argue.&nbsp; I had seen the mechanism of the primitive
+fighting beast, and I was as strongly impressed as if I had seen the
+engines of a great battleship or Atlantic liner.</p>
+<p>I was surprised, considering the fierce struggle in the forecastle,
+at the superficiality of his hurts, and I pride myself that I dressed
+them dexterously.&nbsp; With the exception of several bad wounds, the
+rest were merely severe bruises and lacerations.&nbsp; The blow which
+he had received before going overboard had laid his scalp open several
+inches.&nbsp; This, under his direction, I cleansed and sewed together,
+having first shaved the edges of the wound.&nbsp; Then the calf of his
+leg was badly lacerated and looked as though it had been mangled by
+a bulldog.&nbsp; Some sailor, he told me, had laid hold of it by his
+teeth, at the beginning of the fight, and hung on and been dragged to
+the top of the forecastle ladder, when he was kicked loose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By the way, Hump, as I have remarked, you are a handy man,&rdquo;
+Wolf Larsen began, when my work was done.&nbsp; &ldquo;As you know,
+we&rsquo;re short a mate.&nbsp; Hereafter you shall stand watches, receive
+seventy-five dollars per month, and be addressed fore and aft as Mr.
+Van Weyden.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&mdash;I don&rsquo;t understand navigation, you know,&rdquo;
+I gasped.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not necessary at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I really do not care to sit in the high places,&rdquo; I objected.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I find life precarious enough in my present humble situation.&nbsp;
+I have no experience.&nbsp; Mediocrity, you see, has its compensations.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled as though it were all settled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t be mate on this hell-ship!&rdquo; I cried defiantly.</p>
+<p>I saw his face grow hard and the merciless glitter come into his
+eyes.&nbsp; He walked to the door of his room, saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now, Mr. Van Weyden, good-night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-night, Mr. Larsen,&rdquo; I answered weakly.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I cannot say that the position of mate carried with it anything more
+joyful than that there were no more dishes to wash.&nbsp; I was ignorant
+of the simplest duties of mate, and would have fared badly indeed, had
+the sailors not sympathized with me.&nbsp; I knew nothing of the minutiae
+of ropes and rigging, of the trimming and setting of sails; but the
+sailors took pains to put me to rights,&mdash;Louis proving an especially
+good teacher,&mdash;and I had little trouble with those under me.</p>
+<p>With the hunters it was otherwise.&nbsp; Familiar in varying degree
+with the sea, they took me as a sort of joke.&nbsp; In truth, it was
+a joke to me, that I, the veriest landsman, should be filling the office
+of mate; but to be taken as a joke by others was a different matter.&nbsp;
+I made no complaint, but Wolf Larsen demanded the most punctilious sea
+etiquette in my case,&mdash;far more than poor Johansen had ever received;
+and at the expense of several rows, threats, and much grumbling, he
+brought the hunters to time.&nbsp; I was &ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden&rdquo;
+fore and aft, and it was only unofficially that Wolf Larsen himself
+ever addressed me as &ldquo;Hump.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was amusing.&nbsp; Perhaps the wind would haul a few points while
+we were at dinner, and as I left the table he would say, &ldquo;Mr.
+Van Weyden, will you kindly put about on the port tack.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And I would go on deck, beckon Louis to me, and learn from him what
+was to be done.&nbsp; Then, a few minutes later, having digested his
+instructions and thoroughly mastered the manoeuvre, I would proceed
+to issue my orders.&nbsp; I remember an early instance of this kind,
+when Wolf Larsen appeared on the scene just as I had begun to give orders.&nbsp;
+He smoked his cigar and looked on quietly till the thing was accomplished,
+and then paced aft by my side along the weather poop.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I beg pardon, Mr. Van Weyden,
+I congratulate you.&nbsp; I think you can now fire your father&rsquo;s
+legs back into the grave to him.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve discovered your
+own and learned to stand on them.&nbsp; A little rope-work, sail-making,
+and experience with storms and such things, and by the end of the voyage
+you could ship on any coasting schooner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was during this period, between the death of Johansen and the
+arrival on the sealing grounds, that I passed my pleasantest hours on
+the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was quite considerate, the sailors
+helped me, and I was no longer in irritating contact with Thomas Mugridge.&nbsp;
+And I make free to say, as the days went by, that I found I was taking
+a certain secret pride in myself.&nbsp; Fantastic as the situation was,&mdash;a
+land-lubber second in command,&mdash;I was, nevertheless, carrying it
+off well; and during that brief time I was proud of myself, and I grew
+to love the heave and roll of the <i>Ghost</i> under my feet as she
+wallowed north and west through the tropic sea to the islet where we
+filled our water-casks.</p>
+<p>But my happiness was not unalloyed.&nbsp; It was comparative, a period
+of less misery slipped in between a past of great miseries and a future
+of great miseries.&nbsp; For the <i>Ghost</i>, so far as the seamen
+were concerned, was a hell-ship of the worst description.&nbsp; They
+never had a moment&rsquo;s rest or peace.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen treasured
+against them the attempt on his life and the drubbing he had received
+in the forecastle; and morning, noon, and night, and all night as well,
+he devoted himself to making life unlivable for them.</p>
+<p>He knew well the psychology of the little thing, and it was the little
+things by which he kept the crew worked up to the verge of madness.&nbsp;
+I have seen Harrison called from his bunk to put properly away a misplaced
+paintbrush, and the two watches below haled from their tired sleep to
+accompany him and see him do it.&nbsp; A little thing, truly, but when
+multiplied by the thousand ingenious devices of such a mind, the mental
+state of the men in the forecastle may be slightly comprehended.</p>
+<p>Of course much grumbling went on, and little outbursts were continually
+occurring.&nbsp; Blows were struck, and there were always two or three
+men nursing injuries at the hands of the human beast who was their master.&nbsp;
+Concerted action was impossible in face of the heavy arsenal of weapons
+carried in the steerage and cabin.&nbsp; Leach and Johnson were the
+two particular victims of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s diabolic temper, and the
+look of profound melancholy which had settled on Johnson&rsquo;s face
+and in his eyes made my heart bleed.</p>
+<p>With Leach it was different.&nbsp; There was too much of the fighting
+beast in him.&nbsp; He seemed possessed by an insatiable fury which
+gave no time for grief.&nbsp; His lips had become distorted into a permanent
+snarl, which at mere sight of Wolf Larsen broke out in sound, horrible
+and menacing and, I do believe, unconsciously.&nbsp; I have seen him
+follow Wolf Larsen about with his eyes, like an animal its keeper, the
+while the animal-like snarl sounded deep in his throat and vibrated
+forth between his teeth.</p>
+<p>I remember once, on deck, in bright day, touching him on the shoulder
+as preliminary to giving an order.&nbsp; His back was toward me, and
+at the first feel of my hand he leaped upright in the air and away from
+me, snarling and turning his head as he leaped.&nbsp; He had for the
+moment mistaken me for the man he hated.</p>
+<p>Both he and Johnson would have killed Wolf Larsen at the slightest
+opportunity, but the opportunity never came.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was too
+wise for that, and, besides, they had no adequate weapons.&nbsp; With
+their fists alone they had no chance whatever.&nbsp; Time and again
+he fought it out with Leach who fought back always, like a wildcat,
+tooth and nail and fist, until stretched, exhausted or unconscious,
+on the deck.&nbsp; And he was never averse to another encounter.&nbsp;
+All the devil that was in him challenged the devil in Wolf Larsen.&nbsp;
+They had but to appear on deck at the same time, when they would be
+at it, cursing, snarling, striking; and I have seen Leach fling himself
+upon Wolf Larsen without warning or provocation.&nbsp; Once he threw
+his heavy sheath-knife, missing Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s throat by an inch.&nbsp;
+Another time he dropped a steel marlinspike from the mizzen crosstree.&nbsp;
+It was a difficult cast to make on a rolling ship, but the sharp point
+of the spike, whistling seventy-five feet through the air, barely missed
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s head as he emerged from the cabin companion-way
+and drove its length two inches and over into the solid deck-planking.&nbsp;
+Still another time, he stole into the steerage, possessed himself of
+a loaded shot-gun, and was making a rush for the deck with it when caught
+by Kerfoot and disarmed.</p>
+<p>I often wondered why Wolf Larsen did not kill him and make an end
+of it.&nbsp; But he only laughed and seemed to enjoy it.&nbsp; There
+seemed a certain spice about it, such as men must feel who take delight
+in making pets of ferocious animals.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It gives a thrill to life,&rdquo; he explained to me, &ldquo;when
+life is carried in one&rsquo;s hand.&nbsp; Man is a natural gambler,
+and life is the biggest stake he can lay.&nbsp; The greater the odds,
+the greater the thrill.&nbsp; Why should I deny myself the joy of exciting
+Leach&rsquo;s soul to fever-pitch?&nbsp; For that matter, I do him a
+kindness.&nbsp; The greatness of sensation is mutual.&nbsp; He is living
+more royally than any man for&rsquo;ard, though he does not know it.&nbsp;
+For he has what they have not&mdash;purpose, something to do and be
+done, an all-absorbing end to strive to attain, the desire to kill me,
+the hope that he may kill me.&nbsp; Really, Hump, he is living deep
+and high.&nbsp; I doubt that he has ever lived so swiftly and keenly
+before, and I honestly envy him, sometimes, when I see him raging at
+the summit of passion and sensibility.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, but it is cowardly, cowardly!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+have all the advantage.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of the two of us, you and I, who is the greater coward?&rdquo;
+he asked seriously.&nbsp; &ldquo;If the situation is unpleasing, you
+compromise with your conscience when you make yourself a party to it.&nbsp;
+If you were really great, really true to yourself, you would join forces
+with Leach and Johnson.&nbsp; But you are afraid, you are afraid.&nbsp;
+You want to live.&nbsp; The life that is in you cries out that it must
+live, no matter what the cost; so you live ignominiously, untrue to
+the best you dream of, sinning against your whole pitiful little code,
+and, if there were a hell, heading your soul straight for it.&nbsp;
+Bah!&nbsp; I play the braver part.&nbsp; I do no sin, for I am true
+to the promptings of the life that is in me.&nbsp; I am sincere with
+my soul at least, and that is what you are not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a sting in what he said.&nbsp; Perhaps, after all, I was
+playing a cowardly part.&nbsp; And the more I thought about it the more
+it appeared that my duty to myself lay in doing what he had advised,
+lay in joining forces with Johnson and Leach and working for his death.&nbsp;
+Right here, I think, entered the austere conscience of my Puritan ancestry,
+impelling me toward lurid deeds and sanctioning even murder as right
+conduct.&nbsp; I dwelt upon the idea.&nbsp; It would be a most moral
+act to rid the world of such a monster.&nbsp; Humanity would be better
+and happier for it, life fairer and sweeter.</p>
+<p>I pondered it long, lying sleepless in my bunk and reviewing in endless
+procession the facts of the situation.&nbsp; I talked with Johnson and
+Leach, during the night watches when Wolf Larsen was below.&nbsp; Both
+men had lost hope&mdash;Johnson, because of temperamental despondency;
+Leach, because he had beaten himself out in the vain struggle and was
+exhausted.&nbsp; But he caught my hand in a passionate grip one night,
+saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think yer square, Mr. Van Weyden.&nbsp; But stay where you
+are and keep yer mouth shut.&nbsp; Say nothin&rsquo; but saw wood.&nbsp;
+We&rsquo;re dead men, I know it; but all the same you might be able
+to do us a favour some time when we need it damn bad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was only next day, when Wainwright Island loomed to windward,
+close abeam, that Wolf Larsen opened his mouth in prophecy.&nbsp; He
+had attacked Johnson, been attacked by Leach, and had just finished
+whipping the pair of them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Leach,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you know I&rsquo;m going to
+kill you some time or other, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A snarl was the answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And as for you, Johnson, you&rsquo;ll get so tired of life
+before I&rsquo;m through with you that you&rsquo;ll fling yourself over
+the side.&nbsp; See if you don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a suggestion,&rdquo; he added, in an aside to
+me.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet you a month&rsquo;s pay he acts upon
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had cherished a hope that his victims would find an opportunity
+to escape while filling our water-barrels, but Wolf Larsen had selected
+his spot well.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i> lay half-a-mile beyond the surf-line
+of a lonely beach.&nbsp; Here debauched a deep gorge, with precipitous,
+volcanic walls which no man could scale.&nbsp; And here, under his direct
+supervision&mdash;for he went ashore himself&mdash;Leach and Johnson
+filled the small casks and rolled them down to the beach.&nbsp; They
+had no chance to make a break for liberty in one of the boats.</p>
+<p>Harrison and Kelly, however, made such an attempt.&nbsp; They composed
+one of the boats&rsquo; crews, and their task was to ply between the
+schooner and the shore, carrying a single cask each trip.&nbsp; Just
+before dinner, starting for the beach with an empty barrel, they altered
+their course and bore away to the left to round the promontory which
+jutted into the sea between them and liberty.&nbsp; Beyond its foaming
+base lay the pretty villages of the Japanese colonists and smiling valleys
+which penetrated deep into the interior.&nbsp; Once in the fastnesses
+they promised, and the two men could defy Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>I had observed Henderson and Smoke loitering about the deck all morning,
+and I now learned why they were there.&nbsp; Procuring their rifles,
+they opened fire in a leisurely manner, upon the deserters.&nbsp; It
+was a cold-blooded exhibition of marksmanship.&nbsp; At first their
+bullets zipped harmlessly along the surface of the water on either side
+the boat; but, as the men continued to pull lustily, they struck closer
+and closer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, watch me take Kelly&rsquo;s right oar,&rdquo; Smoke said,
+drawing a more careful aim.</p>
+<p>I was looking through the glasses, and I saw the oar-blade shatter
+as he shot.&nbsp; Henderson duplicated it, selecting Harrison&rsquo;s
+right oar.&nbsp; The boat slewed around.&nbsp; The two remaining oars
+were quickly broken.&nbsp; The men tried to row with the splinters,
+and had them shot out of their hands.&nbsp; Kelly ripped up a bottom
+board and began paddling, but dropped it with a cry of pain as its splinters
+drove into his hands.&nbsp; Then they gave up, letting the boat drift
+till a second boat, sent from the shore by Wolf Larsen, took them in
+tow and brought them aboard.</p>
+<p>Late that afternoon we hove up anchor and got away.&nbsp; Nothing
+was before us but the three or four months&rsquo; hunting on the sealing
+grounds.&nbsp; The outlook was black indeed, and I went about my work
+with a heavy heart.&nbsp; An almost funereal gloom seemed to have descended
+upon the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen had taken to his bunk with
+one of his strange, splitting headaches.&nbsp; Harrison stood listlessly
+at the wheel, half supporting himself by it, as though wearied by the
+weight of his flesh.&nbsp; The rest of the men were morose and silent.&nbsp;
+I came upon Kelly crouching to the lee of the forecastle scuttle, his
+head on his knees, his arms about his head, in an attitude of unutterable
+despondency.</p>
+<p>Johnson I found lying full length on the forecastle head, staring
+at the troubled churn of the forefoot, and I remembered with horror
+the suggestion Wolf Larsen had made.&nbsp; It seemed likely to bear
+fruit.&nbsp; I tried to break in on the man&rsquo;s morbid thoughts
+by calling him away, but he smiled sadly at me and refused to obey.</p>
+<p>Leach approached me as I returned aft.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I want to ask a favour, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If it&rsquo;s yer luck to ever make &rsquo;Frisco once more,
+will you hunt up Matt McCarthy?&nbsp; He&rsquo;s my old man.&nbsp; He
+lives on the Hill, back of the Mayfair bakery, runnin&rsquo; a cobbler&rsquo;s
+shop that everybody knows, and you&rsquo;ll have no trouble.&nbsp; Tell
+him I lived to be sorry for the trouble I brought him and the things
+I done, and&mdash;and just tell him &lsquo;God bless him,&rsquo; for
+me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I nodded my head, but said, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll all win back to San
+Francisco, Leach, and you&rsquo;ll be with me when I go to see Matt
+McCarthy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to believe you,&rdquo; he answered, shaking
+my hand, &ldquo;but I can&rsquo;t.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen &rsquo;ll do for
+me, I know it; and all I can hope is, he&rsquo;ll do it quick.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And as he left me I was aware of the same desire at my heart.&nbsp;
+Since it was to be done, let it be done with despatch.&nbsp; The general
+gloom had gathered me into its folds.&nbsp; The worst appeared inevitable;
+and as I paced the deck, hour after hour, I found myself afflicted with
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s repulsive ideas.&nbsp; What was it all about?&nbsp;
+Where was the grandeur of life that it should permit such wanton destruction
+of human souls?&nbsp; It was a cheap and sordid thing after all, this
+life, and the sooner over the better.&nbsp; Over and done with!&nbsp;
+I, too, leaned upon the rail and gazed longingly into the sea, with
+the certainty that sooner or later I should be sinking down, down, through
+the cool green depths of its oblivion.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Strange to say, in spite of the general foreboding, nothing of especial
+moment happened on the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; We ran on to the north and
+west till we raised the coast of Japan and picked up with the great
+seal herd.&nbsp; Coming from no man knew where in the illimitable Pacific,
+it was travelling north on its annual migration to the rookeries of
+Bering Sea.&nbsp; And north we travelled with it, ravaging and destroying,
+flinging the naked carcasses to the shark and salting down the skins
+so that they might later adorn the fair shoulders of the women of the
+cities.</p>
+<p>It was wanton slaughter, and all for woman&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp; No
+man ate of the seal meat or the oil.&nbsp; After a good day&rsquo;s
+killing I have seen our decks covered with hides and bodies, slippery
+with fat and blood, the scuppers running red; masts, ropes, and rails
+spattered with the sanguinary colour; and the men, like butchers plying
+their trade, naked and red of arm and hand, hard at work with ripping
+and flensing-knives, removing the skins from the pretty sea-creatures
+they had killed.</p>
+<p>It was my task to tally the pelts as they came aboard from the boats,
+to oversee the skinning and afterward the cleansing of the decks and
+bringing things ship-shape again.&nbsp; It was not pleasant work.&nbsp;
+My soul and my stomach revolted at it; and yet, in a way, this handling
+and directing of many men was good for me.&nbsp; It developed what little
+executive ability I possessed, and I was aware of a toughening or hardening
+which I was undergoing and which could not be anything but wholesome
+for &ldquo;Sissy&rdquo; Van Weyden.</p>
+<p>One thing I was beginning to feel, and that was that I could never
+again be quite the same man I had been.&nbsp; While my hope and faith
+in human life still survived Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s destructive criticism,
+he had nevertheless been a cause of change in minor matters.&nbsp; He
+had opened up for me the world of the real, of which I had known practically
+nothing and from which I had always shrunk.&nbsp; I had learned to look
+more closely at life as it was lived, to recognize that there were such
+things as facts in the world, to emerge from the realm of mind and idea
+and to place certain values on the concrete and objective phases of
+existence.</p>
+<p>I saw more of Wolf Larsen than ever when we had gained the grounds.&nbsp;
+For when the weather was fair and we were in the midst of the herd,
+all hands were away in the boats, and left on board were only he and
+I, and Thomas Mugridge, who did not count.&nbsp; But there was no play
+about it.&nbsp; The six boats, spreading out fan-wise from the schooner
+until the first weather boat and the last lee boat were anywhere from
+ten to twenty miles apart, cruised along a straight course over the
+sea till nightfall or bad weather drove them in.&nbsp; It was our duty
+to sail the <i>Ghost</i> well to leeward of the last lee boat, so that
+all the boats should have fair wind to run for us in case of squalls
+or threatening weather.</p>
+<p>It is no slight matter for two men, particularly when a stiff wind
+has sprung up, to handle a vessel like the <i>Ghost</i>, steering, keeping
+look-out for the boats, and setting or taking in sail; so it devolved
+upon me to learn, and learn quickly.&nbsp; Steering I picked up easily,
+but running aloft to the crosstrees and swinging my whole weight by
+my arms when I left the ratlines and climbed still higher, was more
+difficult.&nbsp; This, too, I learned, and quickly, for I felt somehow
+a wild desire to vindicate myself in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s eyes, to prove
+my right to live in ways other than of the mind.&nbsp; Nay, the time
+came when I took joy in the run of the masthead and in the clinging
+on by my legs at that precarious height while I swept the sea with glasses
+in search of the boats.</p>
+<p>I remember one beautiful day, when the boats left early and the reports
+of the hunters&rsquo; guns grew dim and distant and died away as they
+scattered far and wide over the sea.&nbsp; There was just the faintest
+wind from the westward; but it breathed its last by the time we managed
+to get to leeward of the last lee boat.&nbsp; One by one&mdash;I was
+at the masthead and saw&mdash;the six boats disappeared over the bulge
+of the earth as they followed the seal into the west.&nbsp; We lay,
+scarcely rolling on the placid sea, unable to follow.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen
+was apprehensive.&nbsp; The barometer was down, and the sky to the east
+did not please him.&nbsp; He studied it with unceasing vigilance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If she comes out of there,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;hard and
+snappy, putting us to windward of the boats, it&rsquo;s likely there&rsquo;ll
+be empty bunks in steerage and fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>By eleven o&rsquo;clock the sea had become glass.&nbsp; By midday,
+though we were well up in the northerly latitudes, the heat was sickening.&nbsp;
+There was no freshness in the air.&nbsp; It was sultry and oppressive,
+reminding me of what the old Californians term &ldquo;earthquake weather.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+There was something ominous about it, and in intangible ways one was
+made to feel that the worst was about to come.&nbsp; Slowly the whole
+eastern sky filled with clouds that over-towered us like some black
+sierra of the infernal regions.&nbsp; So clearly could one see ca&ntilde;on,
+gorge, and precipice, and the shadows that lie therein, that one looked
+unconsciously for the white surf-line and bellowing caverns where the
+sea charges on the land.&nbsp; And still we rocked gently, and there
+was no wind.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no square&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Old
+Mother Nature&rsquo;s going to get up on her hind legs and howl for
+all that&rsquo;s in her, and it&rsquo;ll keep us jumping, Hump, to pull
+through with half our boats.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d better run up and loosen
+the topsails.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But if it is going to howl, and there are only two of us?&rdquo;
+I asked, a note of protest in my voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why we&rsquo;ve got to make the best of the first of it and
+run down to our boats before our canvas is ripped out of us.&nbsp; After
+that I don&rsquo;t give a rap what happens.&nbsp; The sticks &rsquo;ll
+stand it, and you and I will have to, though we&rsquo;ve plenty cut
+out for us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Still the calm continued.&nbsp; We ate dinner, a hurried and anxious
+meal for me with eighteen men abroad on the sea and beyond the bulge
+of the earth, and with that heaven-rolling mountain range of clouds
+moving slowly down upon us.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen did not seem affected,
+however; though I noticed, when we returned to the deck, a slight twitching
+of the nostrils, a perceptible quickness of movement.&nbsp; His face
+was stern, the lines of it had grown hard, and yet in his eyes&mdash;blue,
+clear blue this day&mdash;there was a strange brilliancy, a bright scintillating
+light.&nbsp; It struck me that he was joyous, in a ferocious sort of
+way; that he was glad there was an impending struggle; that he was thrilled
+and upborne with knowledge that one of the great moments of living,
+when the tide of life surges up in flood, was upon him.</p>
+<p>Once, and unwitting that he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud,
+mockingly and defiantly, at the advancing storm.&nbsp; I see him yet
+standing there like a pigmy out of the <i>Arabian Nights</i> before
+the huge front of some malignant genie.&nbsp; He was daring destiny,
+and he was unafraid.</p>
+<p>He walked to the galley.&nbsp; &ldquo;Cooky, by the time you&rsquo;ve
+finished pots and pans you&rsquo;ll be wanted on deck.&nbsp; Stand ready
+for a call.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said, becoming cognizant of the fascinated
+gaze I bent upon him, &ldquo;this beats whisky and is where your Omar
+misses.&nbsp; I think he only half lived after all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The western half of the sky had by now grown murky.&nbsp; The sun
+had dimmed and faded out of sight.&nbsp; It was two in the afternoon,
+and a ghostly twilight, shot through by wandering purplish lights, had
+descended upon us.&nbsp; In this purplish light Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+face glowed and glowed, and to my excited fancy he appeared encircled
+by a halo.&nbsp; We lay in the midst of an unearthly quiet, while all
+about us were signs and omens of oncoming sound and movement.&nbsp;
+The sultry heat had become unendurable.&nbsp; The sweat was standing
+on my forehead, and I could feel it trickling down my nose.&nbsp; I
+felt as though I should faint, and reached out to the rail for support.</p>
+<p>And then, just then, the faintest possible whisper of air passed
+by.&nbsp; It was from the east, and like a whisper it came and went.&nbsp;
+The drooping canvas was not stirred, and yet my face had felt the air
+and been cooled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cooky,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called in a low voice.&nbsp; Thomas
+Mugridge turned a pitiable scared face.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let go that foreboom
+tackle and pass it across, and when she&rsquo;s willing let go the sheet
+and come in snug with the tackle.&nbsp; And if you make a mess of it,
+it will be the last you ever make.&nbsp; Understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden, stand by to pass the head-sails over.&nbsp;
+Then jump for the topsails and spread them quick as God&rsquo;ll let
+you&mdash;the quicker you do it the easier you&rsquo;ll find it.&nbsp;
+As for Cooky, if he isn&rsquo;t lively bat him between the eyes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was aware of the compliment and pleased, in that no threat had
+accompanied my instructions.&nbsp; We were lying head to north-west,
+and it was his intention to jibe over all with the first puff.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll have the breeze on our quarter,&rdquo; he explained
+to me.&nbsp; &ldquo;By the last guns the boats were bearing away slightly
+to the south&rsquo;ard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He turned and walked aft to the wheel.&nbsp; I went forward and took
+my station at the jibs.&nbsp; Another whisper of wind, and another,
+passed by.&nbsp; The canvas flapped lazily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank Gawd she&rsquo;s not comin&rsquo; all of a bunch, Mr.
+Van Weyden,&rdquo; was the Cockney&rsquo;s fervent ejaculation.</p>
+<p>And I was indeed thankful, for I had by this time learned enough
+to know, with all our canvas spread, what disaster in such event awaited
+us.&nbsp; The whispers of wind became puffs, the sails filled, the <i>Ghost</i>
+moved.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen put the wheel hard up, to port, and we began
+to pay off.&nbsp; The wind was now dead astern, muttering and puffing
+stronger and stronger, and my head-sails were pounding lustily.&nbsp;
+I did not see what went on elsewhere, though I felt the sudden surge
+and heel of the schooner as the wind-pressures changed to the jibing
+of the fore- and main-sails.&nbsp; My hands were full with the flying-jib,
+jib, and staysail; and by the time this part of my task was accomplished
+the <i>Ghost</i> was leaping into the south-west, the wind on her quarter
+and all her sheets to starboard.&nbsp; Without pausing for breath, though
+my heart was beating like a trip-hammer from my exertions, I sprang
+to the topsails, and before the wind had become too strong we had them
+fairly set and were coiling down.&nbsp; Then I went aft for orders.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen nodded approval and relinquished the wheel to me.&nbsp;
+The wind was strengthening steadily and the sea rising.&nbsp; For an
+hour I steered, each moment becoming more difficult.&nbsp; I had not
+the experience to steer at the gait we were going on a quartering course.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now take a run up with the glasses and raise some of the boats.&nbsp;
+We&rsquo;ve made at least ten knots, and we&rsquo;re going twelve or
+thirteen now.&nbsp; The old girl knows how to walk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I contested myself with the fore crosstrees, some seventy feet above
+the deck.&nbsp; As I searched the vacant stretch of water before me,
+I comprehended thoroughly the need for haste if we were to recover any
+of our men.&nbsp; Indeed, as I gazed at the heavy sea through which
+we were running, I doubted that there was a boat afloat.&nbsp; It did
+not seem possible that such frail craft could survive such stress of
+wind and water.</p>
+<p>I could not feel the full force of the wind, for we were running
+with it; but from my lofty perch I looked down as though outside the
+<i>Ghost</i> and apart from her, and saw the shape of her outlined sharply
+against the foaming sea as she tore along instinct with life.&nbsp;
+Sometimes she would lift and send across some great wave, burying her
+starboard-rail from view, and covering her deck to the hatches with
+the boiling ocean.&nbsp; At such moments, starting from a windward roll,
+I would go flying through the air with dizzying swiftness, as though
+I clung to the end of a huge, inverted pendulum, the arc of which, between
+the greater rolls, must have been seventy feet or more.&nbsp; Once,
+the terror of this giddy sweep overpowered me, and for a while I clung
+on, hand and foot, weak and trembling, unable to search the sea for
+the missing boats or to behold aught of the sea but that which roared
+beneath and strove to overwhelm the <i>Ghost</i>.</p>
+<p>But the thought of the men in the midst of it steadied me, and in
+my quest for them I forgot myself.&nbsp; For an hour I saw nothing but
+the naked, desolate sea.&nbsp; And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight
+struck the ocean and turned its surface to wrathful silver, I caught
+a small black speck thrust skyward for an instant and swallowed up.&nbsp;
+I waited patiently.&nbsp; Again the tiny point of black projected itself
+through the wrathful blaze a couple of points off our port-bow.&nbsp;
+I did not attempt to shout, but communicated the news to Wolf Larsen
+by waving my arm.&nbsp; He changed the course, and I signalled affirmation
+when the speck showed dead ahead.</p>
+<p>It grew larger, and so swiftly that for the first time I fully appreciated
+the speed of our flight.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen motioned for me to come down,
+and when I stood beside him at the wheel gave me instructions for heaving
+to.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Expect all hell to break loose,&rdquo; he cautioned me, &ldquo;but
+don&rsquo;t mind it.&nbsp; Yours is to do your own work and to have
+Cooky stand by the fore-sheet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I managed to make my way forward, but there was little choice of
+sides, for the weather-rail seemed buried as often as the lee.&nbsp;
+Having instructed Thomas Mugridge as to what he was to do, I clambered
+into the fore-rigging a few feet.&nbsp; The boat was now very close,
+and I could make out plainly that it was lying head to wind and sea
+and dragging on its mast and sail, which had been thrown overboard and
+made to serve as a sea-anchor.&nbsp; The three men were bailing.&nbsp;
+Each rolling mountain whelmed them from view, and I would wait with
+sickening anxiety, fearing that they would never appear again.&nbsp;
+Then, and with black suddenness, the boat would shoot clear through
+the foaming crest, bow pointed to the sky, and the whole length of her
+bottom showing, wet and dark, till she seemed on end.&nbsp; There would
+be a fleeting glimpse of the three men flinging water in frantic haste,
+when she would topple over and fall into the yawning valley, bow down
+and showing her full inside length to the stern upreared almost directly
+above the bow.&nbsp; Each time that she reappeared was a miracle.</p>
+<p>The <i>Ghost</i> suddenly changed her course, keeping away, and it
+came to me with a shock that Wolf Larsen was giving up the rescue as
+impossible.&nbsp; Then I realized that he was preparing to heave to,
+and dropped to the deck to be in readiness.&nbsp; We were now dead before
+the wind, the boat far away and abreast of us.&nbsp; I felt an abrupt
+easing of the schooner, a loss for the moment of all strain and pressure,
+coupled with a swift acceleration of speed.&nbsp; She was rushing around
+on her heel into the wind.</p>
+<p>As she arrived at right angles to the sea, the full force of the
+wind (from which we had hitherto run away) caught us.&nbsp; I was unfortunately
+and ignorantly facing it.&nbsp; It stood up against me like a wall,
+filling my lungs with air which I could not expel.&nbsp; And as I choked
+and strangled, and as the <i>Ghost</i> wallowed for an instant, broadside
+on and rolling straight over and far into the wind, I beheld a huge
+sea rise far above my head.&nbsp; I turned aside, caught my breath,
+and looked again.&nbsp; The wave over-topped the <i>Ghost</i>, and I
+gazed sheer up and into it.&nbsp; A shaft of sunlight smote the over-curl,
+and I caught a glimpse of translucent, rushing green, backed by a milky
+smother of foam.</p>
+<p>Then it descended, pandemonium broke loose, everything happened at
+once.&nbsp; I was struck a crushing, stunning blow, nowhere in particular
+and yet everywhere.&nbsp; My hold had been broken loose, I was under
+water, and the thought passed through my mind that this was the terrible
+thing of which I had heard, the being swept in the trough of the sea.&nbsp;
+My body struck and pounded as it was dashed helplessly along and turned
+over and over, and when I could hold my breath no longer, I breathed
+the stinging salt water into my lungs.&nbsp; But through it all I clung
+to the one idea&mdash;<i>I must get the jib</i> <i>backed over to windward</i>.&nbsp;
+I had no fear of death.&nbsp; I had no doubt but that I should come
+through somehow.&nbsp; And as this idea of fulfilling Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+order persisted in my dazed consciousness, I seemed to see him standing
+at the wheel in the midst of the wild welter, pitting his will against
+the will of the storm and defying it.</p>
+<p>I brought up violently against what I took to be the rail, breathed,
+and breathed the sweet air again.&nbsp; I tried to rise, but struck
+my head and was knocked back on hands and knees.&nbsp; By some freak
+of the waters I had been swept clear under the forecastle-head and into
+the eyes.&nbsp; As I scrambled out on all fours, I passed over the body
+of Thomas Mugridge, who lay in a groaning heap.&nbsp; There was no time
+to investigate.&nbsp; I must get the jib backed over.</p>
+<p>When I emerged on deck it seemed that the end of everything had come.&nbsp;
+On all sides there was a rending and crashing of wood and steel and
+canvas.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i> was being wrenched and torn to fragments.&nbsp;
+The foresail and fore-topsail, emptied of the wind by the manoeuvre,
+and with no one to bring in the sheet in time, were thundering into
+ribbons, the heavy boom threshing and splintering from rail to rail.&nbsp;
+The air was thick with flying wreckage, detached ropes and stays were
+hissing and coiling like snakes, and down through it all crashed the
+gaff of the foresail.</p>
+<p>The spar could not have missed me by many inches, while it spurred
+me to action.&nbsp; Perhaps the situation was not hopeless.&nbsp; I
+remembered Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s caution.&nbsp; He had expected all hell
+to break loose, and here it was.&nbsp; And where was he?&nbsp; I caught
+sight of him toiling at the main-sheet, heaving it in and flat with
+his tremendous muscles, the stern of the schooner lifted high in the
+air and his body outlined against a white surge of sea sweeping past.&nbsp;
+All this, and more,&mdash;a whole world of chaos and wreck,&mdash;in
+possibly fifteen seconds I had seen and heard and grasped.</p>
+<p>I did not stop to see what had become of the small boat, but sprang
+to the jib-sheet.&nbsp; The jib itself was beginning to slap, partially
+filling and emptying with sharp reports; but with a turn of the sheet
+and the application of my whole strength each time it slapped, I slowly
+backed it.&nbsp; This I know: I did my best.&nbsp; I pulled till I burst
+open the ends of all my fingers; and while I pulled, the flying-jib
+and staysail split their cloths apart and thundered into nothingness.</p>
+<p>Still I pulled, holding what I gained each time with a double turn
+until the next slap gave me more.&nbsp; Then the sheet gave with greater
+ease, and Wolf Larsen was beside me, heaving in alone while I was busied
+taking up the slack.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Make fast!&rdquo; he shouted.&nbsp; &ldquo;And come on!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As I followed him, I noted that in spite of rack and ruin a rough
+order obtained.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i> was hove to.&nbsp; She was still
+in working order, and she was still working.&nbsp; Though the rest of
+her sails were gone, the jib, backed to windward, and the mainsail hauled
+down flat, were themselves holding, and holding her bow to the furious
+sea as well.</p>
+<p>I looked for the boat, and, while Wolf Larsen cleared the boat-tackles,
+saw it lift to leeward on a big sea an not a score of feet away.&nbsp;
+And, so nicely had he made his calculation, we drifted fairly down upon
+it, so that nothing remained to do but hook the tackles to either end
+and hoist it aboard.&nbsp; But this was not done so easily as it is
+written.</p>
+<p>In the bow was Kerfoot, Oofty-Oofty in the stern, and Kelly amidships.&nbsp;
+As we drifted closer the boat would rise on a wave while we sank in
+the trough, till almost straight above me I could see the heads of the
+three men craned overside and looking down.&nbsp; Then, the next moment,
+we would lift and soar upward while they sank far down beneath us.&nbsp;
+It seemed incredible that the next surge should not crush the <i>Ghost</i>
+down upon the tiny eggshell.</p>
+<p>But, at the right moment, I passed the tackle to the Kanaka, while
+Wolf Larsen did the same thing forward to Kerfoot.&nbsp; Both tackles
+were hooked in a trice, and the three men, deftly timing the roll, made
+a simultaneous leap aboard the schooner.&nbsp; As the <i>Ghost</i> rolled
+her side out of water, the boat was lifted snugly against her, and before
+the return roll came, we had heaved it in over the side and turned it
+bottom up on the deck.&nbsp; I noticed blood spouting from Kerfoot&rsquo;s
+left hand.&nbsp; In some way the third finger had been crushed to a
+pulp.&nbsp; But he gave no sign of pain, and with his single right hand
+helped us lash the boat in its place.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stand by to let that jib over, you Oofty!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+commanded, the very second we had finished with the boat.&nbsp; &ldquo;Kelly,
+come aft and slack off the main-sheet!&nbsp; You, Kerfoot, go for&rsquo;ard
+and see what&rsquo;s become of Cooky!&nbsp; Mr. Van Weyden, run aloft
+again, and cut away any stray stuff on your way!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And having commanded, he went aft with his peculiar tigerish leaps
+to the wheel.&nbsp; While I toiled up the fore-shrouds the <i>Ghost</i>
+slowly paid off.&nbsp; This time, as we went into the trough of the
+sea and were swept, there were no sails to carry away.&nbsp; And, halfway
+to the crosstrees and flattened against the rigging by the full force
+of the wind so that it would have been impossible for me to have fallen,
+the <i>Ghost</i> almost on her beam-ends and the masts parallel with
+the water, I looked, not down, but at almost right angles from the perpendicular,
+to the deck of the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; But I saw, not the deck, but
+where the deck should have been, for it was buried beneath a wild tumbling
+of water.&nbsp; Out of this water I could see the two masts rising,
+and that was all.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i>, for the moment, was buried
+beneath the sea.&nbsp; As she squared off more and more, escaping from
+the side pressure, she righted herself and broke her deck, like a whale&rsquo;s
+back, through the ocean surface.</p>
+<p>Then we raced, and wildly, across the wild sea, the while I hung
+like a fly in the crosstrees and searched for the other boats.&nbsp;
+In half-an-hour I sighted the second one, swamped and bottom up, to
+which were desperately clinging Jock Horner, fat Louis, and Johnson.&nbsp;
+This time I remained aloft, and Wolf Larsen succeeded in heaving to
+without being swept.&nbsp; As before, we drifted down upon it.&nbsp;
+Tackles were made fast and lines flung to the men, who scrambled aboard
+like monkeys.&nbsp; The boat itself was crushed and splintered against
+the schooner&rsquo;s side as it came inboard; but the wreck was securely
+lashed, for it could be patched and made whole again.</p>
+<p>Once more the <i>Ghost</i> bore away before the storm, this time
+so submerging herself that for some seconds I thought she would never
+reappear.&nbsp; Even the wheel, quite a deal higher than the waist,
+was covered and swept again and again.&nbsp; At such moments I felt
+strangely alone with God, alone with him and watching the chaos of his
+wrath.&nbsp; And then the wheel would reappear, and Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+broad shoulders, his hands gripping the spokes and holding the schooner
+to the course of his will, himself an earth-god, dominating the storm,
+flinging its descending waters from him and riding it to his own ends.&nbsp;
+And oh, the marvel of it! the marvel of it!&nbsp; That tiny men should
+live and breathe and work, and drive so frail a contrivance of wood
+and cloth through so tremendous an elemental strife.</p>
+<p>As before, the <i>Ghost</i> swung out of the trough, lifting her
+deck again out of the sea, and dashed before the howling blast.&nbsp;
+It was now half-past five, and half-an-hour later, when the last of
+the day lost itself in a dim and furious twilight, I sighted a third
+boat.&nbsp; It was bottom up, and there was no sign of its crew.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen repeated his manoeuvre, holding off and then rounding up
+to windward and drifting down upon it.&nbsp; But this time he missed
+by forty feet, the boat passing astern.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Number four boat!&rdquo; Oofty-Oofty cried, his keen eyes
+reading its number in the one second when it lifted clear of the foam,
+and upside down.</p>
+<p>It was Henderson&rsquo;s boat and with him had been lost Holyoak
+and Williams, another of the deep-water crowd.&nbsp; Lost they indubitably
+were; but the boat remained, and Wolf Larsen made one more reckless
+effort to recover it.&nbsp; I had come down to the deck, and I saw Horner
+and Kerfoot vainly protest against the attempt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By God, I&rsquo;ll not be robbed of my boat by any storm that
+ever blew out of hell!&rdquo; he shouted, and though we four stood with
+our heads together that we might hear, his voice seemed faint and far,
+as though removed from us an immense distance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden!&rdquo; he cried, and I heard through the tumult
+as one might hear a whisper.&nbsp; &ldquo;Stand by that jib with Johnson
+and Oofty!&nbsp; The rest of you tail aft to the mainsheet!&nbsp; Lively
+now! or I&rsquo;ll sail you all into Kingdom Come!&nbsp; Understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And when he put the wheel hard over and the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i>
+bow swung off, there was nothing for the hunters to do but obey and
+make the best of a risky chance.&nbsp; How great the risk I realized
+when I was once more buried beneath the pounding seas and clinging for
+life to the pinrail at the foot of the foremast.&nbsp; My fingers were
+torn loose, and I swept across to the side and over the side into the
+sea.&nbsp; I could not swim, but before I could sink I was swept back
+again.&nbsp; A strong hand gripped me, and when the <i>Ghost</i> finally
+emerged, I found that I owed my life to Johnson.&nbsp; I saw him looking
+anxiously about him, and noted that Kelly, who had come forward at the
+last moment, was missing.</p>
+<p>This time, having missed the boat, and not being in the same position
+as in the previous instances, Wolf Larsen was compelled to resort to
+a different manoeuvre.&nbsp; Running off before the wind with everything
+to starboard, he came about, and returned close-hauled on the port tack.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Grand!&rdquo; Johnson shouted in my ear, as we successfully
+came through the attendant deluge, and I knew he referred, not to Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s seamanship, but to the performance of the <i>Ghost</i>
+herself.</p>
+<p>It was now so dark that there was no sign of the boat; but Wolf Larsen
+held back through the frightful turmoil as if guided by unerring instinct.&nbsp;
+This time, though we were continually half-buried, there was no trough
+in which to be swept, and we drifted squarely down upon the upturned
+boat, badly smashing it as it was heaved inboard.</p>
+<p>Two hours of terrible work followed, in which all hands of us&mdash;two
+hunters, three sailors, Wolf Larsen and I&mdash;reefed, first one and
+then the other, the jib and mainsail.&nbsp; Hove to under this short
+canvas, our decks were comparatively free of water, while the <i>Ghost</i>
+bobbed and ducked amongst the combers like a cork.</p>
+<p>I had burst open the ends of my fingers at the very first, and during
+the reefing I had worked with tears of pain running down my cheeks.&nbsp;
+And when all was done, I gave up like a woman and rolled upon the deck
+in the agony of exhaustion.</p>
+<p>In the meantime Thomas Mugridge, like a drowned rat, was being dragged
+out from under the forecastle head where he had cravenly ensconced himself.&nbsp;
+I saw him pulled aft to the cabin, and noted with a shock of surprise
+that the galley had disappeared.&nbsp; A clean space of deck showed
+where it had stood.</p>
+<p>In the cabin I found all hands assembled, sailors as well, and while
+coffee was being cooked over the small stove we drank whisky and crunched
+hard-tack.&nbsp; Never in my life had food been so welcome.&nbsp; And
+never had hot coffee tasted so good.&nbsp; So violently did the <i>Ghost</i>,
+pitch and toss and tumble that it was impossible for even the sailors
+to move about without holding on, and several times, after a cry of
+&ldquo;Now she takes it!&rdquo; we were heaped upon the wall of the
+port cabins as though it had been the deck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To hell with a look-out,&rdquo; I heard Wolf Larsen say when
+we had eaten and drunk our fill.&nbsp; &ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing
+can be done on deck.&nbsp; If anything&rsquo;s going to run us down
+we couldn&rsquo;t get out of its way.&nbsp; Turn in, all hands, and
+get some sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The sailors slipped forward, setting the side-lights as they went,
+while the two hunters remained to sleep in the cabin, it not being deemed
+advisable to open the slide to the steerage companion-way.&nbsp; Wolf
+Larsen and I, between us, cut off Kerfoot&rsquo;s crushed finger and
+sewed up the stump.&nbsp; Mugridge, who, during all the time he had
+been compelled to cook and serve coffee and keep the fire going, had
+complained of internal pains, now swore that he had a broken rib or
+two.&nbsp; On examination we found that he had three.&nbsp; But his
+case was deferred to next day, principally for the reason that I did
+not know anything about broken ribs and would first have to read it
+up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it was worth it,&rdquo; I said to Wolf
+Larsen, &ldquo;a broken boat for Kelly&rsquo;s life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But Kelly didn&rsquo;t amount to much,&rdquo; was the reply.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Good-night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>After all that had passed, suffering intolerable anguish in my finger-ends,
+and with three boats missing, to say nothing of the wild capers the
+<i>Ghost</i> was cutting, I should have thought it impossible to sleep.&nbsp;
+But my eyes must have closed the instant my head touched the pillow,
+and in utter exhaustion I slept throughout the night, the while the
+<i>Ghost</i>, lonely and undirected, fought her way through the storm.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The next day, while the storm was blowing itself out, Wolf Larsen
+and I crammed anatomy and surgery and set Mugridge&rsquo;s ribs.&nbsp;
+Then, when the storm broke, Wolf Larsen cruised back and forth over
+that portion of the ocean where we had encountered it, and somewhat
+more to the westward, while the boats were being repaired and new sails
+made and bent.&nbsp; Sealing schooner after sealing schooner we sighted
+and boarded, most of which were in search of lost boats, and most of
+which were carrying boats and crews they had picked up and which did
+not belong to them.&nbsp; For the thick of the fleet had been to the
+westward of us, and the boats, scattered far and wide, had headed in
+mad flight for the nearest refuge.</p>
+<p>Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the <i>Cisco</i>,
+and, to Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s huge delight and my own grief, he culled
+Smoke, with Nilson and Leach, from the <i>San Diego</i>.&nbsp; So that,
+at the end of five days, we found ourselves short but four men&mdash;Henderson,
+Holyoak, Williams, and Kelly,&mdash;and were once more hunting on the
+flanks of the herd.</p>
+<p>As we followed it north we began to encounter the dreaded sea-fogs.&nbsp;
+Day after day the boats lowered and were swallowed up almost ere they
+touched the water, while we on board pumped the horn at regular intervals
+and every fifteen minutes fired the bomb gun.&nbsp; Boats were continually
+being lost and found, it being the custom for a boat to hunt, on lay,
+with whatever schooner picked it up, until such time it was recovered
+by its own schooner.&nbsp; But Wolf Larsen, as was to be expected, being
+a boat short, took possession of the first stray one and compelled its
+men to hunt with the <i>Ghost</i>, not permitting them to return to
+their own schooner when we sighted it.&nbsp; I remember how he forced
+the hunter and his two men below, a riffle at their breasts, when their
+captain passed by at biscuit-toss and hailed us for information.</p>
+<p>Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life,
+was soon limping about again and performing his double duties of cook
+and cabin-boy.&nbsp; Johnson and Leach were bullied and beaten as much
+as ever, and they looked for their lives to end with the end of the
+hunting season; while the rest of the crew lived the lives of dogs and
+were worked like dogs by their pitiless master.&nbsp; As for Wolf Larsen
+and myself, we got along fairly well; though I could not quite rid myself
+of the idea that right conduct, for me, lay in killing him.&nbsp; He
+fascinated me immeasurably, and I feared him immeasurably.&nbsp; And
+yet, I could not imagine him lying prone in death.&nbsp; There was an
+endurance, as of perpetual youth, about him, which rose up and forbade
+the picture.&nbsp; I could see him only as living always, and dominating
+always, fighting and destroying, himself surviving.</p>
+<p>One diversion of his, when we were in the midst of the herd and the
+sea was too rough to lower the boats, was to lower with two boat-pullers
+and a steerer and go out himself.&nbsp; He was a good shot, too, and
+brought many a skin aboard under what the hunters termed impossible
+hunting conditions.&nbsp; It seemed the breath of his nostrils, this
+carrying his life in his hands and struggling for it against tremendous
+odds.</p>
+<p>I was learning more and more seamanship; and one clear day&mdash;a
+thing we rarely encountered now&mdash;I had the satisfaction of running
+and handling the <i>Ghost</i> and picking up the boats myself.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen had been smitten with one of his headaches, and I stood
+at the wheel from morning until evening, sailing across the ocean after
+the last lee boat, and heaving to and picking it and the other five
+up without command or suggestion from him.</p>
+<p>Gales we encountered now and again, for it was a raw and stormy region,
+and, in the middle of June, a typhoon most memorable to me and most
+important because of the changes wrought through it upon my future.&nbsp;
+We must have been caught nearly at the centre of this circular storm,
+and Wolf Larsen ran out of it and to the southward, first under a double-reefed
+jib, and finally under bare poles.&nbsp; Never had I imagined so great
+a sea.&nbsp; The seas previously encountered were as ripples compared
+with these, which ran a half-mile from crest to crest and which upreared,
+I am confident, above our masthead.&nbsp; So great was it that Wolf
+Larsen himself did not dare heave to, though he was being driven far
+to the southward and out of the seal herd.</p>
+<p>We must have been well in the path of the trans-Pacific steamships
+when the typhoon moderated, and here, to the surprise of the hunters,
+we found ourselves in the midst of seals&mdash;a second herd, or sort
+of rear-guard, they declared, and a most unusual thing.&nbsp; But it
+was &ldquo;Boats over!&rdquo; the boom-boom of guns, and the pitiful
+slaughter through the long day.</p>
+<p>It was at this time that I was approached by Leach.&nbsp; I had just
+finished tallying the skins of the last boat aboard, when he came to
+my side, in the darkness, and said in a low tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can you tell me, Mr. Van Weyden, how far we are off the coast,
+and what the bearings of Yokohama are?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>My heart leaped with gladness, for I knew what he had in mind, and
+I gave him the bearings&mdash;west-north-west, and five hundred miles
+away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you, sir,&rdquo; was all he said as he slipped back
+into the darkness.</p>
+<p>Next morning No. 3 boat and Johnson and Leach were missing.&nbsp;
+The water-breakers and grub-boxes from all the other boats were likewise
+missing, as were the beds and sea bags of the two men.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen
+was furious.&nbsp; He set sail and bore away into the west-north-west,
+two hunters constantly at the mastheads and sweeping the sea with glasses,
+himself pacing the deck like an angry lion.&nbsp; He knew too well my
+sympathy for the runaways to send me aloft as look-out.</p>
+<p>The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle
+in a haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity.&nbsp;
+But he put the <i>Ghost</i> through her best paces so as to get between
+the deserters and the land.&nbsp; This accomplished, he cruised back
+and forth across what he knew must be their course.</p>
+<p>On the morning of the third day, shortly after eight bells, a cry
+that the boat was sighted came down from Smoke at the masthead.&nbsp;
+All hands lined the rail.&nbsp; A snappy breeze was blowing from the
+west with the promise of more wind behind it; and there, to leeward,
+in the troubled silver of the rising sun, appeared and disappeared a
+black speck.</p>
+<p>We squared away and ran for it.&nbsp; My heart was as lead.&nbsp;
+I felt myself turning sick in anticipation; and as I looked at the gleam
+of triumph in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s eyes, his form swam before me, and
+I felt almost irresistibly impelled to fling myself upon him.&nbsp;
+So unnerved was I by the thought of impending violence to Leach and
+Johnson that my reason must have left me.&nbsp; I know that I slipped
+down into the steerage in a daze, and that I was just beginning the
+ascent to the deck, a loaded shot-gun in my hands, when I heard the
+startled cry:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s five men in that boat!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I supported myself in the companion-way, weak and trembling, while
+the observation was being verified by the remarks of the rest of the
+men.&nbsp; Then my knees gave from under me and I sank down, myself
+again, but overcome by shock at knowledge of what I had so nearly done.&nbsp;
+Also, I was very thankful as I put the gun away and slipped back on
+deck.</p>
+<p>No one had remarked my absence.&nbsp; The boat was near enough for
+us to make out that it was larger than any sealing boat and built on
+different lines.&nbsp; As we drew closer, the sail was taken in and
+the mast unstepped.&nbsp; Oars were shipped, and its occupants waited
+for us to heave to and take them aboard.</p>
+<p>Smoke, who had descended to the deck and was now standing by my side,
+began to chuckle in a significant way.&nbsp; I looked at him inquiringly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Talk of a mess!&rdquo; he giggled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s wrong?&rdquo; I demanded.</p>
+<p>Again he chuckled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you see there, in the
+stern-sheets, on the bottom?&nbsp; May I never shoot a seal again if
+that ain&rsquo;t a woman!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I looked closely, but was not sure until exclamations broke out on
+all sides.&nbsp; The boat contained four men, and its fifth occupant
+was certainly a woman.&nbsp; We were agog with excitement, all except
+Wolf Larsen, who was too evidently disappointed in that it was not his
+own boat with the two victims of his malice.</p>
+<p>We ran down the flying jib, hauled the jib-sheets to wind-ward and
+the main-sheet flat, and came up into the wind.&nbsp; The oars struck
+the water, and with a few strokes the boat was alongside.&nbsp; I now
+caught my first fair glimpse of the woman.&nbsp; She was wrapped in
+a long ulster, for the morning was raw; and I could see nothing but
+her face and a mass of light brown hair escaping from under the seaman&rsquo;s
+cap on her head.&nbsp; The eyes were large and brown and lustrous, the
+mouth sweet and sensitive, and the face itself a delicate oval, though
+sun and exposure to briny wind had burnt the face scarlet.</p>
+<p>She seemed to me like a being from another world.&nbsp; I was aware
+of a hungry out-reaching for her, as of a starving man for bread.&nbsp;
+But then, I had not seen a woman for a very long time.&nbsp; I know
+that I was lost in a great wonder, almost a stupor,&mdash;this, then,
+was a woman?&mdash;so that I forgot myself and my mate&rsquo;s duties,
+and took no part in helping the new-comers aboard.&nbsp; For when one
+of the sailors lifted her into Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s downstretched arms,
+she looked up into our curious faces and smiled amusedly and sweetly,
+as only a woman can smile, and as I had seen no one smile for so long
+that I had forgotten such smiles existed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s voice brought me sharply back to myself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you take the lady below and see to her comfort?&nbsp;
+Make up that spare port cabin.&nbsp; Put Cooky to work on it.&nbsp;
+And see what you can do for that face.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s burned badly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He turned brusquely away from us and began to question the new men.&nbsp;
+The boat was cast adrift, though one of them called it a &ldquo;bloody
+shame&rdquo; with Yokohama so near.</p>
+<p>I found myself strangely afraid of this woman I was escorting aft.&nbsp;
+Also I was awkward.&nbsp; It seemed to me that I was realizing for the
+first time what a delicate, fragile creature a woman is; and as I caught
+her arm to help her down the companion stairs, I was startled by its
+smallness and softness.&nbsp; Indeed, she was a slender, delicate woman
+as women go, but to me she was so ethereally slender and delicate that
+I was quite prepared for her arm to crumble in my grasp.&nbsp; All this,
+in frankness, to show my first impression, after long denial of women
+in general and of Maud Brewster in particular.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No need to go to any great trouble for me,&rdquo; she protested,
+when I had seated her in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s arm-chair, which I had
+dragged hastily from his cabin.&nbsp; &ldquo;The men were looking for
+land at any moment this morning, and the vessel should be in by night;
+don&rsquo;t you think so?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her simple faith in the immediate future took me aback.&nbsp; How
+could I explain to her the situation, the strange man who stalked the
+sea like Destiny, all that it had taken me months to learn?&nbsp; But
+I answered honestly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If it were any other captain except ours, I should say you
+would be ashore in Yokohama to-morrow.&nbsp; But our captain is a strange
+man, and I beg of you to be prepared for anything&mdash;understand?&mdash;for
+anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&mdash;I confess I hardly do understand,&rdquo; she hesitated,
+a perturbed but not frightened expression in her eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;Or
+is it a misconception of mine that shipwrecked people are always shown
+every consideration?&nbsp; This is such a little thing, you know.&nbsp;
+We are so close to land.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Candidly, I do not know,&rdquo; I strove to reassure her.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I wished merely to prepare you for the worst, if the worst is
+to come.&nbsp; This man, this captain, is a brute, a demon, and one
+can never tell what will be his next fantastic act.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was growing excited, but she interrupted me with an &ldquo;Oh,
+I see,&rdquo; and her voice sounded weary.&nbsp; To think was patently
+an effort.&nbsp; She was clearly on the verge of physical collapse.</p>
+<p>She asked no further questions, and I vouchsafed no remark, devoting
+myself to Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s command, which was to make her comfortable.&nbsp;
+I bustled about in quite housewifely fashion, procuring soothing lotions
+for her sunburn, raiding Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s private stores for a bottle
+of port I knew to be there, and directing Thomas Mugridge in the preparation
+of the spare state-room.</p>
+<p>The wind was freshening rapidly, the <i>Ghost</i> heeling over more
+and more, and by the time the state-room was ready she was dashing through
+the water at a lively clip.&nbsp; I had quite forgotten the existence
+of Leach and Johnson, when suddenly, like a thunderclap, &ldquo;Boat
+ho!&rdquo; came down the open companion-way.&nbsp; It was Smoke&rsquo;s
+unmistakable voice, crying from the masthead.&nbsp; I shot a glance
+at the woman, but she was leaning back in the arm-chair, her eyes closed,
+unutterably tired.&nbsp; I doubted that she had heard, and I resolved
+to prevent her seeing the brutality I knew would follow the capture
+of the deserters.&nbsp; She was tired.&nbsp; Very good.&nbsp; She should
+sleep.</p>
+<p>There were swift commands on deck, a stamping of feet and a slapping
+of reef-points as the <i>Ghost</i> shot into the wind and about on the
+other tack.&nbsp; As she filled away and heeled, the arm-chair began
+to slide across the cabin floor, and I sprang for it just in time to
+prevent the rescued woman from being spilled out.</p>
+<p>Her eyes were too heavy to suggest more than a hint of the sleepy
+surprise that perplexed her as she looked up at me, and she half stumbled,
+half tottered, as I led her to her cabin.&nbsp; Mugridge grinned insinuatingly
+in my face as I shoved him out and ordered him back to his galley work;
+and he won his revenge by spreading glowing reports among the hunters
+as to what an excellent &ldquo;lydy&rsquo;s-myde&rdquo; I was proving
+myself to be.</p>
+<p>She leaned heavily against me, and I do believe that she had fallen
+asleep again between the arm-chair and the state-room.&nbsp; This I
+discovered when she nearly fell into the bunk during a sudden lurch
+of the schooner.&nbsp; She aroused, smiled drowsily, and was off to
+sleep again; and asleep I left her, under a heavy pair of sailor&rsquo;s
+blankets, her head resting on a pillow I had appropriated from Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s bunk.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I came on deck to find the <i>Ghost</i> heading up close on the port
+tack and cutting in to windward of a familiar spritsail close-hauled
+on the same tack ahead of us.&nbsp; All hands were on deck, for they
+knew that something was to happen when Leach and Johnson were dragged
+aboard.</p>
+<p>It was four bells.&nbsp; Louis came aft to relieve the wheel.&nbsp;
+There was a dampness in the air, and I noticed he had on his oilskins.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are we going to have?&rdquo; I asked him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A healthy young slip of a gale from the breath iv it, sir,&rdquo;
+he answered, &ldquo;with a splatter iv rain just to wet our gills an&rsquo;
+no more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Too bad we sighted them,&rdquo; I said, as the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i>
+bow was flung off a point by a large sea and the boat leaped for a moment
+past the jibs and into our line of vision.</p>
+<p>Louis gave a spoke and temporized.&nbsp; &ldquo;They&rsquo;d never
+iv made the land, sir, I&rsquo;m thinkin&rsquo;.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Think not?&rdquo; I queried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&nbsp; Did you feel that?&rdquo;&nbsp; (A puff had
+caught the schooner, and he was forced to put the wheel up rapidly to
+keep her out of the wind.)&nbsp; &ldquo;&rsquo;Tis no egg-shell&rsquo;ll
+float on this sea an hour come, an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s a stroke iv luck
+for them we&rsquo;re here to pick &rsquo;em up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen strode aft from amidships, where he had been talking
+with the rescued men.&nbsp; The cat-like springiness in his tread was
+a little more pronounced than usual, and his eyes were bright and snappy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Three oilers and a fourth engineer,&rdquo; was his greeting.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But we&rsquo;ll make sailors out of them, or boat-pullers at
+any rate.&nbsp; Now, what of the lady?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I know not why, but I was aware of a twinge or pang like the cut
+of a knife when he mentioned her.&nbsp; I thought it a certain silly
+fastidiousness on my part, but it persisted in spite of me, and I merely
+shrugged my shoulders in answer.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen pursed his lips in a long, quizzical whistle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s her name, then?&rdquo; he demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; I replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;She is
+asleep.&nbsp; She was very tired.&nbsp; In fact, I am waiting to hear
+the news from you.&nbsp; What vessel was it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mail steamer,&rdquo; he answered shortly.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>The
+City of Tokio</i>, from &rsquo;Frisco, bound for Yokohama.&nbsp; Disabled
+in that typhoon.&nbsp; Old tub.&nbsp; Opened up top and bottom like
+a sieve.&nbsp; They were adrift four days.&nbsp; And you don&rsquo;t
+know who or what she is, eh?&mdash;maid, wife, or widow?&nbsp; Well,
+well.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his head in a bantering way, and regarded me with laughing
+eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you&mdash;&rdquo; I began.&nbsp; It was on the verge of
+my tongue to ask if he were going to take the castaways into Yokohama.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Am I what?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you intend doing with Leach and Johnson?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;Really, Hump, I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp;
+You see, with these additions I&rsquo;ve about all the crew I want.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And they&rsquo;ve about all the escaping they want,&rdquo;
+I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why not give them a change of treatment?&nbsp;
+Take them aboard, and deal gently with them.&nbsp; Whatever they have
+done they have been hounded into doing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By you,&rdquo; I answered steadily.&nbsp; &ldquo;And I give
+you warning, Wolf Larsen, that I may forget love of my own life in the
+desire to kill you if you go too far in maltreating those poor wretches.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bravo!&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;You do me proud, Hump!&nbsp;
+You&rsquo;ve found your legs with a vengeance.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re quite
+an individual.&nbsp; You were unfortunate in having your life cast in
+easy places, but you&rsquo;re developing, and I like you the better
+for it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His voice and expression changed.&nbsp; His face was serious.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Do you believe in promises?&rdquo; he asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are
+they sacred things?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then here&rsquo;s a compact,&rdquo; he went on, consummate
+actor.&nbsp; &ldquo;If I promise not to lay my hands upon Leach will
+you promise, in turn, not to attempt to kill me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, not that I&rsquo;m afraid of you, not that I&rsquo;m afraid
+of you,&rdquo; he hastened to add.</p>
+<p>I could hardly believe my ears.&nbsp; What was coming over the man?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it a go?&rdquo; he asked impatiently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A go,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>His hand went out to mine, and as I shook it heartily I could have
+sworn I saw the mocking devil shine up for a moment in his eyes.</p>
+<p>We strolled across the poop to the lee side.&nbsp; The boat was close
+at hand now, and in desperate plight.&nbsp; Johnson was steering, Leach
+bailing.&nbsp; We overhauled them about two feet to their one.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen motioned Louis to keep off slightly, and we dashed abreast
+of the boat, not a score of feet to windward.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i>
+blanketed it.&nbsp; The spritsail flapped emptily and the boat righted
+to an even keel, causing the two men swiftly to change position.&nbsp;
+The boat lost headway, and, as we lifted on a huge surge, toppled and
+fell into the trough.</p>
+<p>It was at this moment that Leach and Johnson looked up into the faces
+of their shipmates, who lined the rail amidships.&nbsp; There was no
+greeting.&nbsp; They were as dead men in their comrades&rsquo; eyes,
+and between them was the gulf that parts the living and the dead.</p>
+<p>The next instant they were opposite the poop, where stood Wolf Larsen
+and I.&nbsp; We were falling in the trough, they were rising on the
+surge.&nbsp; Johnson looked at me, and I could see that his face was
+worn and haggard.&nbsp; I waved my hand to him, and he answered the
+greeting, but with a wave that was hopeless and despairing.&nbsp; It
+was as if he were saying farewell.&nbsp; I did not see into the eyes
+of Leach, for he was looking at Wolf Larsen, the old and implacable
+snarl of hatred strong as ever on his face.</p>
+<p>Then they were gone astern.&nbsp; The spritsail filled with the wind,
+suddenly, careening the frail open craft till it seemed it would surely
+capsize.&nbsp; A whitecap foamed above it and broke across in a snow-white
+smother.&nbsp; Then the boat emerged, half swamped, Leach flinging the
+water out and Johnson clinging to the steering-oar, his face white and
+anxious.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen barked a short laugh in my ear and strode away to the
+weather side of the poop.&nbsp; I expected him to give orders for the
+<i>Ghost</i> to heave to, but she kept on her course and he made no
+sign.&nbsp; Louis stood imperturbably at the wheel, but I noticed the
+grouped sailors forward turning troubled faces in our direction.&nbsp;
+Still the <i>Ghost</i> tore along, till the boat dwindled to a speck,
+when Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s voice rang out in command and he went about
+on the starboard tack.</p>
+<p>Back we held, two miles and more to windward of the struggling cockle-shell,
+when the flying jib was run down and the schooner hove to.&nbsp; The
+sealing boats are not made for windward work.&nbsp; Their hope lies
+in keeping a weather position so that they may run before the wind for
+the schooner when it breezes up.&nbsp; But in all that wild waste there
+was no refuge for Leach and Johnson save on the <i>Ghost</i>, and they
+resolutely began the windward beat.&nbsp; It was slow work in the heavy
+sea that was running.&nbsp; At any moment they were liable to be overwhelmed
+by the hissing combers.&nbsp; Time and again and countless times we
+watched the boat luff into the big whitecaps, lose headway, and be flung
+back like a cork.</p>
+<p>Johnson was a splendid seaman, and he knew as much about small boats
+as he did about ships.&nbsp; At the end of an hour and a half he was
+nearly alongside, standing past our stern on the last leg out, aiming
+to fetch us on the next leg back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So you&rsquo;ve changed your mind?&rdquo; I heard Wolf Larsen
+mutter, half to himself, half to them as though they could hear.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You want to come aboard, eh?&nbsp; Well, then, just keep a-coming.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hard up with that helm!&rdquo; he commanded Oofty-Oofty, the
+Kanaka, who had in the meantime relieved Louis at the wheel.</p>
+<p>Command followed command.&nbsp; As the schooner paid off, the fore-
+and main-sheets were slacked away for fair wind.&nbsp; And before the
+wind we were, and leaping, when Johnson, easing his sheet at imminent
+peril, cut across our wake a hundred feet away.&nbsp; Again Wolf Larsen
+laughed, at the same time beckoning them with his arm to follow.&nbsp;
+It was evidently his intention to play with them,&mdash;a lesson, I
+took it, in lieu of a beating, though a dangerous lesson, for the frail
+craft stood in momentary danger of being overwhelmed.</p>
+<p>Johnson squared away promptly and ran after us.&nbsp; There was nothing
+else for him to do.&nbsp; Death stalked everywhere, and it was only
+a matter of time when some one of those many huge seas would fall upon
+the boat, roll over it, and pass on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis the fear iv death at the hearts iv them,&rdquo;
+Louis muttered in my ear, as I passed forward to see to taking in the
+flying jib and staysail.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;ll heave to in a little while and pick them up,&rdquo;
+I answered cheerfully.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s bent upon giving them
+a lesson, that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Louis looked at me shrewdly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Think so?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Surely,&rdquo; I answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think nothing but iv my own skin, these days,&rdquo; was
+his answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;An&rsquo; &rsquo;tis with wonder I&rsquo;m
+filled as to the workin&rsquo; out iv things.&nbsp; A pretty mess that
+&rsquo;Frisco whisky got me into, an&rsquo; a prettier mess that woman&rsquo;s
+got you into aft there.&nbsp; Ah, it&rsquo;s myself that knows ye for
+a blitherin&rsquo; fool.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; I demanded; for, having sped his
+shaft, he was turning away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do I mean?&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;And it&rsquo;s
+you that asks me!&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis not what I mean, but what the Wolf
+&rsquo;ll mean.&nbsp; The Wolf, I said, the Wolf!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If trouble comes, will you stand by?&rdquo; I asked impulsively,
+for he had voiced my own fear.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stand by?&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis old fat Louis I stand by, an&rsquo;
+trouble enough it&rsquo;ll be.&nbsp; We&rsquo;re at the beginnin&rsquo;
+iv things, I&rsquo;m tellin&rsquo; ye, the bare beginnin&rsquo; iv things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had not thought you so great a coward,&rdquo; I sneered.</p>
+<p>He favoured me with a contemptuous stare.&nbsp; &ldquo;If I raised
+never a hand for that poor fool,&rdquo;&mdash;pointing astern to the
+tiny sail,&mdash;&ldquo;d&rsquo;ye think I&rsquo;m hungerin&rsquo; for
+a broken head for a woman I never laid me eyes upon before this day?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I turned scornfully away and went aft.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better get in those topsails, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; Wolf
+Larsen said, as I came on the poop.</p>
+<p>I felt relief, at least as far as the two men were concerned.&nbsp;
+It was clear he did not wish to run too far away from them.&nbsp; I
+picked up hope at the thought and put the order swiftly into execution.&nbsp;
+I had scarcely opened my mouth to issue the necessary commands, when
+eager men were springing to halyards and downhauls, and others were
+racing aloft.&nbsp; This eagerness on their part was noted by Wolf Larsen
+with a grim smile.</p>
+<p>Still we increased our lead, and when the boat had dropped astern
+several miles we hove to and waited.&nbsp; All eyes watched it coming,
+even Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s; but he was the only unperturbed man aboard.&nbsp;
+Louis, gazing fixedly, betrayed a trouble in his face he was not quite
+able to hide.</p>
+<p>The boat drew closer and closer, hurling along through the seething
+green like a thing alive, lifting and sending and uptossing across the
+huge-backed breakers, or disappearing behind them only to rush into
+sight again and shoot skyward.&nbsp; It seemed impossible that it could
+continue to live, yet with each dizzying sweep it did achieve the impossible.&nbsp;
+A rain-squall drove past, and out of the flying wet the boat emerged,
+almost upon us.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hard up, there!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen shouted, himself springing
+to the wheel and whirling it over.</p>
+<p>Again the <i>Ghost</i> sprang away and raced before the wind, and
+for two hours Johnson and Leach pursued us.&nbsp; We hove to and ran
+away, hove to and ran away, and ever astern the struggling patch of
+sail tossed skyward and fell into the rushing valleys.&nbsp; It was
+a quarter of a mile away when a thick squall of rain veiled it from
+view.&nbsp; It never emerged.&nbsp; The wind blew the air clear again,
+but no patch of sail broke the troubled surface.&nbsp; I thought I saw,
+for an instant, the boat&rsquo;s bottom show black in a breaking crest.&nbsp;
+At the best, that was all.&nbsp; For Johnson and Leach the travail of
+existence had ceased.</p>
+<p>The men remained grouped amidships.&nbsp; No one had gone below,
+and no one was speaking.&nbsp; Nor were any looks being exchanged.&nbsp;
+Each man seemed stunned&mdash;deeply contemplative, as it were, and,
+not quite sure, trying to realize just what had taken place.&nbsp; Wolf
+Larsen gave them little time for thought.&nbsp; He at once put the <i>Ghost</i>
+upon her course&mdash;a course which meant the seal herd and not Yokohama
+harbour.&nbsp; But the men were no longer eager as they pulled and hauled,
+and I heard curses amongst them, which left their lips smothered and
+as heavy and lifeless as were they.&nbsp; Not so was it with the hunters.&nbsp;
+Smoke the irrepressible related a story, and they descended into the
+steerage, bellowing with laughter.</p>
+<p>As I passed to leeward of the galley on my way aft I was approached
+by the engineer we had rescued.&nbsp; His face was white, his lips were
+trembling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good God! sir, what kind of a craft is this?&rdquo; he cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have eyes, you have seen,&rdquo; I answered, almost brutally,
+what of the pain and fear at my own heart.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your promise?&rdquo; I said to Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was not thinking of taking them aboard when I made that
+promise,&rdquo; he answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;And anyway, you&rsquo;ll agree
+I&rsquo;ve not laid my hands upon them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Far from it, far from it,&rdquo; he laughed a moment later.</p>
+<p>I made no reply.&nbsp; I was incapable of speaking, my mind was too
+confused.&nbsp; I must have time to think, I knew.&nbsp; This woman,
+sleeping even now in the spare cabin, was a responsibility, which I
+must consider, and the only rational thought that flickered through
+my mind was that I must do nothing hastily if I were to be any help
+to her at all.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The remainder of the day passed uneventfully.&nbsp; The young slip
+of a gale, having wetted our gills, proceeded to moderate.&nbsp; The
+fourth engineer and the three oilers, after a warm interview with Wolf
+Larsen, were furnished with outfits from the slop-chests, assigned places
+under the hunters in the various boats and watches on the vessel, and
+bundled forward into the forecastle.&nbsp; They went protestingly, but
+their voices were not loud.&nbsp; They were awed by what they had already
+seen of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s character, while the tale of woe they speedily
+heard in the forecastle took the last bit of rebellion out of them.</p>
+<p>Miss Brewster&mdash;we had learned her name from the engineer&mdash;slept
+on and on.&nbsp; At supper I requested the hunters to lower their voices,
+so she was not disturbed; and it was not till next morning that she
+made her appearance.&nbsp; It had been my intention to have her meals
+served apart, but Wolf Larsen put down his foot.&nbsp; Who was she that
+she should be too good for cabin table and cabin society? had been his
+demand.</p>
+<p>But her coming to the table had something amusing in it.&nbsp; The
+hunters fell silent as clams.&nbsp; Jock Horner and Smoke alone were
+unabashed, stealing stealthy glances at her now and again, and even
+taking part in the conversation.&nbsp; The other four men glued their
+eyes on their plates and chewed steadily and with thoughtful precision,
+their ears moving and wobbling, in time with their jaws, like the ears
+of so many animals.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen had little to say at first, doing no more than reply
+when he was addressed.&nbsp; Not that he was abashed.&nbsp; Far from
+it.&nbsp; This woman was a new type to him, a different breed from any
+he had ever known, and he was curious.&nbsp; He studied her, his eyes
+rarely leaving her face unless to follow the movements of her hands
+or shoulders.&nbsp; I studied her myself, and though it was I who maintained
+the conversation, I know that I was a bit shy, not quite self-possessed.&nbsp;
+His was the perfect poise, the supreme confidence in self, which nothing
+could shake; and he was no more timid of a woman than he was of storm
+and battle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And when shall we arrive at Yokohama?&rdquo; she asked, turning
+to him and looking him squarely in the eyes.</p>
+<p>There it was, the question flat.&nbsp; The jaws stopped working,
+the ears ceased wobbling, and though eyes remained glued on plates,
+each man listened greedily for the answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In four months, possibly three if the season closes early,&rdquo;
+Wolf Larsen said.</p>
+<p>She caught her breath and stammered, &ldquo;I&mdash;I thought&mdash;I
+was given to understand that Yokohama was only a day&rsquo;s sail away.&nbsp;
+It&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp; Here she paused and looked about the table at
+the circle of unsympathetic faces staring hard at the plates.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It is not right,&rdquo; she concluded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That is a question you must settle with Mr. Van Weyden there,&rdquo;
+he replied, nodding to me with a mischievous twinkle.&nbsp; &ldquo;Mr.
+Van Weyden is what you may call an authority on such things as rights.&nbsp;
+Now I, who am only a sailor, would look upon the situation somewhat
+differently.&nbsp; It may possibly be your misfortune that you have
+to remain with us, but it is certainly our good fortune.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He regarded her smilingly.&nbsp; Her eyes fell before his gaze, but
+she lifted them again, and defiantly, to mine.&nbsp; I read the unspoken
+question there: was it right?&nbsp; But I had decided that the part
+I was to play must be a neutral one, so I did not answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you think?&rdquo; she demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That it is unfortunate, especially if you have any engagements
+falling due in the course of the next several months.&nbsp; But, since
+you say that you were voyaging to Japan for your health, I can assure
+you that it will improve no better anywhere than aboard the <i>Ghost</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I saw her eyes flash with indignation, and this time it was I who
+dropped mine, while I felt my face flushing under her gaze.&nbsp; It
+was cowardly, but what else could I do?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Van Weyden speaks with the voice of authority,&rdquo;
+Wolf Larsen laughed.</p>
+<p>I nodded my head, and she, having recovered herself, waited expectantly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not that he is much to speak of now,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen went
+on, &ldquo;but he has improved wonderfully.&nbsp; You should have seen
+him when he came on board.&nbsp; A more scrawny, pitiful specimen of
+humanity one could hardly conceive.&nbsp; Isn&rsquo;t that so, Kerfoot?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Kerfoot, thus directly addressed, was startled into dropping his
+knife on the floor, though he managed to grunt affirmation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Developed himself by peeling potatoes and washing dishes.&nbsp;
+Eh, Kerfoot?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Again that worthy grunted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look at him now.&nbsp; True, he is not what you would term
+muscular, but still he has muscles, which is more than he had when he
+came aboard.&nbsp; Also, he has legs to stand on.&nbsp; You would not
+think so to look at him, but he was quite unable to stand alone at first.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The hunters were snickering, but she looked at me with a sympathy
+in her eyes which more than compensated for Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s nastiness.&nbsp;
+In truth, it had been so long since I had received sympathy that I was
+softened, and I became then, and gladly, her willing slave.&nbsp; But
+I was angry with Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; He was challenging my manhood with
+his slurs, challenging the very legs he claimed to be instrumental in
+getting for me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I may have learned to stand on my own legs,&rdquo; I retorted.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But I have yet to stamp upon others with them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked at me insolently.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your education is only half
+completed, then,&rdquo; he said dryly, and turned to her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are very hospitable upon the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Mr. Van
+Weyden has discovered that.&nbsp; We do everything to make our guests
+feel at home, eh, Mr. Van Weyden?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Even to the peeling of potatoes and the washing of dishes,&rdquo;
+I answered, &ldquo;to say nothing to wringing their necks out of very
+fellowship.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I beg of you not to receive false impressions of us from Mr.
+Van Weyden,&rdquo; he interposed with mock anxiety.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+will observe, Miss Brewster, that he carries a dirk in his belt, a&mdash;ahem&mdash;a
+most unusual thing for a ship&rsquo;s officer to do.&nbsp; While really
+very estimable, Mr. Van Weyden is sometimes&mdash;how shall I say?&mdash;er&mdash;quarrelsome,
+and harsh measures are necessary.&nbsp; He is quite reasonable and fair
+in his calm moments, and as he is calm now he will not deny that only
+yesterday he threatened my life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was well-nigh choking, and my eyes were certainly fiery.&nbsp;
+He drew attention to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look at him now.&nbsp; He can scarcely control himself in
+your presence.&nbsp; He is not accustomed to the presence of ladies
+anyway.&nbsp; I shall have to arm myself before I dare go on deck with
+him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his head sadly, murmuring, &ldquo;Too bad, too bad,&rdquo;
+while the hunters burst into guffaws of laughter.</p>
+<p>The deep-sea voices of these men, rumbling and bellowing in the confined
+space, produced a wild effect.&nbsp; The whole setting was wild, and
+for the first time, regarding this strange woman and realizing how incongruous
+she was in it, I was aware of how much a part of it I was myself.&nbsp;
+I knew these men and their mental processes, was one of them myself,
+living the seal-hunting life, eating the seal-hunting fare, thinking,
+largely, the seal-hunting thoughts.&nbsp; There was for me no strangeness
+to it, to the rough clothes, the coarse faces, the wild laughter, and
+the lurching cabin walls and swaying sea-lamps.</p>
+<p>As I buttered a piece of bread my eyes chanced to rest upon my hand.&nbsp;
+The knuckles were skinned and inflamed clear across, the fingers swollen,
+the nails rimmed with black.&nbsp; I felt the mattress-like growth of
+beard on my neck, knew that the sleeve of my coat was ripped, that a
+button was missing from the throat of the blue shirt I wore.&nbsp; The
+dirk mentioned by Wolf Larsen rested in its sheath on my hip.&nbsp;
+It was very natural that it should be there,&mdash;how natural I had
+not imagined until now, when I looked upon it with her eyes and knew
+how strange it and all that went with it must appear to her.</p>
+<p>But she divined the mockery in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s words, and again
+favoured me with a sympathetic glance.&nbsp; But there was a look of
+bewilderment also in her eyes.&nbsp; That it was mockery made the situation
+more puzzling to her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I may be taken off by some passing vessel, perhaps,&rdquo;
+she suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There will be no passing vessels, except other sealing-schooners,&rdquo;
+Wolf Larsen made answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have no clothes, nothing,&rdquo; she objected.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+hardly realize, sir, that I am not a man, or that I am unaccustomed
+to the vagrant, careless life which you and your men seem to lead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The sooner you get accustomed to it, the better,&rdquo; he
+said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll furnish you with cloth, needles, and thread,&rdquo;
+he added.&nbsp; &ldquo;I hope it will not be too dreadful a hardship
+for you to make yourself a dress or two.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made a wry pucker with her mouth, as though to advertise her
+ignorance of dressmaking.&nbsp; That she was frightened and bewildered,
+and that she was bravely striving to hide it, was quite plain to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;re like Mr. Van Weyden there, accustomed
+to having things done for you.&nbsp; Well, I think doing a few things
+for yourself will hardly dislocate any joints.&nbsp; By the way, what
+do you do for a living?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She regarded him with amazement unconcealed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean no offence, believe me.&nbsp; People eat, therefore
+they must procure the wherewithal.&nbsp; These men here shoot seals
+in order to live; for the same reason I sail this schooner; and Mr.
+Van Weyden, for the present at any rate, earns his salty grub by assisting
+me.&nbsp; Now what do you do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you feed yourself?&nbsp; Or does some one else feed you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid some one else has fed me most of my life,&rdquo;
+she laughed, trying bravely to enter into the spirit of his quizzing,
+though I could see a terror dawning and growing in her eyes as she watched
+Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I suppose some one else makes your bed for you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I <i>have</i> made beds,&rdquo; she replied.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very often?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head with mock ruefulness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know what they do to poor men in the States, who, like
+you, do not work for their living?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am very ignorant,&rdquo; she pleaded.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+do they do to the poor men who are like me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They send them to jail.&nbsp; The crime of not earning a living,
+in their case, is called vagrancy.&nbsp; If I were Mr. Van Weyden, who
+harps eternally on questions of right and wrong, I&rsquo;d ask, by what
+right do you live when you do nothing to deserve living?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But as you are not Mr. Van Weyden, I don&rsquo;t have to answer,
+do I?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She beamed upon him through her terror-filled eyes, and the pathos
+of it cut me to the heart.&nbsp; I must in some way break in and lead
+the conversation into other channels.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you ever earned a dollar by your own labour?&rdquo; he
+demanded, certain of her answer, a triumphant vindictiveness in his
+voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I have,&rdquo; she answered slowly, and I could have
+laughed aloud at his crestfallen visage.&nbsp; &ldquo;I remember my
+father giving me a dollar once, when I was a little girl, for remaining
+absolutely quiet for five minutes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled indulgently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But that was long ago,&rdquo; she continued.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+you would scarcely demand a little girl of nine to earn her own living.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At present, however,&rdquo; she said, after another slight
+pause, &ldquo;I earn about eighteen hundred dollars a year.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With one accord, all eyes left the plates and settled on her.&nbsp;
+A woman who earned eighteen hundred dollars a year was worth looking
+at.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was undisguised in his admiration.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Salary, or piece-work?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Piece-work,&rdquo; she answered promptly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Eighteen hundred,&rdquo; he calculated.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
+a hundred and fifty dollars a month.&nbsp; Well, Miss Brewster, there
+is nothing small about the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Consider yourself on
+salary during the time you remain with us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made no acknowledgment.&nbsp; She was too unused as yet to the
+whims of the man to accept them with equanimity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I forgot to inquire,&rdquo; he went on suavely, &ldquo;as
+to the nature of your occupation.&nbsp; What commodities do you turn
+out?&nbsp; What tools and materials do you require?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Paper and ink,&rdquo; she laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;And, oh! also
+a typewriter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are Maud Brewster,&rdquo; I said slowly and with certainty,
+almost as though I were charging her with a crime.</p>
+<p>Her eyes lifted curiously to mine.&nbsp; &ldquo;How do you know?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; I demanded.</p>
+<p>She acknowledged her identity with a nod.&nbsp; It was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+turn to be puzzled.&nbsp; The name and its magic signified nothing to
+him.&nbsp; I was proud that it did mean something to me, and for the
+first time in a weary while I was convincingly conscious of a superiority
+over him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I remember writing a review of a thin little volume&mdash;&rdquo;
+I had begun carelessly, when she interrupted me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You!&rdquo; she cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was now staring at me in wide-eyed wonder.</p>
+<p>I nodded my identity, in turn.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Humphrey Van Weyden,&rdquo; she concluded; then added with
+a sigh of relief, and unaware that she had glanced that relief at Wolf
+Larsen, &ldquo;I am so glad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I remember the review,&rdquo; she went on hastily, becoming
+aware of the awkwardness of her remark; &ldquo;that too, too flattering
+review.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; I denied valiantly.&nbsp; &ldquo;You impeach
+my sober judgment and make my canons of little worth.&nbsp; Besides,
+all my brother critics were with me.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t Lang include
+your &lsquo;Kiss Endured&rsquo; among the four supreme sonnets by women
+in the English language?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you called me the American Mrs. Meynell!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Was it not true?&rdquo; I demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, not that,&rdquo; she answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;I was hurt.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We can measure the unknown only by the known,&rdquo; I replied,
+in my finest academic manner.&nbsp; &ldquo;As a critic I was compelled
+to place you.&nbsp; You have now become a yardstick yourself.&nbsp;
+Seven of your thin little volumes are on my shelves; and there are two
+thicker volumes, the essays, which, you will pardon my saying, and I
+know not which is flattered more, fully equal your verse.&nbsp; The
+time is not far distant when some unknown will arise in England and
+the critics will name her the English Maud Brewster.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are very kind, I am sure,&rdquo; she murmured; and the
+very conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of associations
+it aroused of the old life on the other side of the world, gave me a
+quick thrill&mdash;rich with remembrance but stinging sharp with home-sickness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you are Maud Brewster,&rdquo; I said solemnly, gazing
+across at her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you are Humphrey Van Weyden,&rdquo; she said, gazing back
+at me with equal solemnity and awe.&nbsp; &ldquo;How unusual!&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t understand.&nbsp; We surely are not to expect some wildly
+romantic sea-story from your sober pen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I am not gathering material, I assure you,&rdquo; was
+my answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have neither aptitude nor inclination for
+fiction.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell me, why have you always buried yourself in California?&rdquo;
+she next asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;It has not been kind of you.&nbsp; We of
+the East have seen to very little of you&mdash;too little, indeed, of
+the Dean of American Letters, the Second.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I bowed to, and disclaimed, the compliment.&nbsp; &ldquo;I nearly
+met you, once, in Philadelphia, some Browning affair or other&mdash;you
+were to lecture, you know.&nbsp; My train was four hours late.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then we quite forgot where we were, leaving Wolf Larsen stranded
+and silent in the midst of our flood of gossip.&nbsp; The hunters left
+the table and went on deck, and still we talked.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen alone
+remained.&nbsp; Suddenly I became aware of him, leaning back from the
+table and listening curiously to our alien speech of a world he did
+not know.</p>
+<p>I broke short off in the middle of a sentence.&nbsp; The present,
+with all its perils and anxieties, rushed upon me with stunning force.&nbsp;
+It smote Miss Brewster likewise, a vague and nameless terror rushing
+into her eyes as she regarded Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>He rose to his feet and laughed awkwardly.&nbsp; The sound of it
+was metallic.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t mind me,&rdquo; he said, with a self-depreciatory
+wave of his hand.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t count.&nbsp; Go on, go
+on, I pray you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But the gates of speech were closed, and we, too, rose from the table
+and laughed awkwardly.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The chagrin Wolf Larsen felt from being ignored by Maud Brewster
+and me in the conversation at table had to express itself in some fashion,
+and it fell to Thomas Mugridge to be the victim.&nbsp; He had not mended
+his ways nor his shirt, though the latter he contended he had changed.&nbsp;
+The garment itself did not bear out the assertion, nor did the accumulations
+of grease on stove and pot and pan attest a general cleanliness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve given you warning, Cooky,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said,
+&ldquo;and now you&rsquo;ve got to take your medicine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mugridge&rsquo;s face turned white under its sooty veneer, and when
+Wolf Larsen called for a rope and a couple of men, the miserable Cockney
+fled wildly out of the galley and dodged and ducked about the deck with
+the grinning crew in pursuit.&nbsp; Few things could have been more
+to their liking than to give him a tow over the side, for to the forecastle
+he had sent messes and concoctions of the vilest order.&nbsp; Conditions
+favoured the undertaking.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i> was slipping through
+the water at no more than three miles an hour, and the sea was fairly
+calm.&nbsp; But Mugridge had little stomach for a dip in it.&nbsp; Possibly
+he had seen men towed before.&nbsp; Besides, the water was frightfully
+cold, and his was anything but a rugged constitution.</p>
+<p>As usual, the watches below and the hunters turned out for what promised
+sport.&nbsp; Mugridge seemed to be in rabid fear of the water, and he
+exhibited a nimbleness and speed we did not dream he possessed.&nbsp;
+Cornered in the right-angle of the poop and galley, he sprang like a
+cat to the top of the cabin and ran aft.&nbsp; But his pursuers forestalling
+him, he doubled back across the cabin, passed over the galley, and gained
+the deck by means of the steerage-scuttle.&nbsp; Straight forward he
+raced, the boat-puller Harrison at his heels and gaining on him.&nbsp;
+But Mugridge, leaping suddenly, caught the jib-boom-lift.&nbsp; It happened
+in an instant.&nbsp; Holding his weight by his arms, and in mid-air
+doubling his body at the hips, he let fly with both feet.&nbsp; The
+oncoming Harrison caught the kick squarely in the pit of the stomach,
+groaned involuntarily, and doubled up and sank backward to the deck.</p>
+<p>Hand-clapping and roars of laughter from the hunters greeted the
+exploit, while Mugridge, eluding half of his pursuers at the foremast,
+ran aft and through the remainder like a runner on the football field.&nbsp;
+Straight aft he held, to the poop and along the poop to the stern.&nbsp;
+So great was his speed that as he curved past the corner of the cabin
+he slipped and fell.&nbsp; Nilson was standing at the wheel, and the
+Cockney&rsquo;s hurtling body struck his legs.&nbsp; Both went down
+together, but Mugridge alone arose.&nbsp; By some freak of pressures,
+his frail body had snapped the strong man&rsquo;s leg like a pipe-stem.</p>
+<p>Parsons took the wheel, and the pursuit continued.&nbsp; Round and
+round the decks they went, Mugridge sick with fear, the sailors hallooing
+and shouting directions to one another, and the hunters bellowing encouragement
+and laughter.&nbsp; Mugridge went down on the fore-hatch under three
+men; but he emerged from the mass like an eel, bleeding at the mouth,
+the offending shirt ripped into tatters, and sprang for the main-rigging.&nbsp;
+Up he went, clear up, beyond the ratlines, to the very masthead.</p>
+<p>Half-a-dozen sailors swarmed to the crosstrees after him, where they
+clustered and waited while two of their number, Oofty-Oofty and Black
+(who was Latimer&rsquo;s boat-steerer), continued up the thin steel
+stays, lifting their bodies higher and higher by means of their arms.</p>
+<p>It was a perilous undertaking, for, at a height of over a hundred
+feet from the deck, holding on by their hands, they were not in the
+best of positions to protect themselves from Mugridge&rsquo;s feet.&nbsp;
+And Mugridge kicked savagely, till the Kanaka, hanging on with one hand,
+seized the Cockney&rsquo;s foot with the other.&nbsp; Black duplicated
+the performance a moment later with the other foot.&nbsp; Then the three
+writhed together in a swaying tangle, struggling, sliding, and falling
+into the arms of their mates on the crosstrees.</p>
+<p>The a&euml;rial battle was over, and Thomas Mugridge, whining and
+gibbering, his mouth flecked with bloody foam, was brought down to deck.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen rove a bowline in a piece of rope and slipped it under his
+shoulders.&nbsp; Then he was carried aft and flung into the sea.&nbsp;
+Forty,&mdash;fifty,&mdash;sixty feet of line ran out, when Wolf Larsen
+cried &ldquo;Belay!&rdquo;&nbsp; Oofty-Oofty took a turn on a bitt,
+the rope tautened, and the <i>Ghost</i>, lunging onward, jerked the
+cook to the surface.</p>
+<p>It was a pitiful spectacle.&nbsp; Though he could not drown, and
+was nine-lived in addition, he was suffering all the agonies of half-drowning.&nbsp;
+The <i>Ghost</i> was going very slowly, and when her stern lifted on
+a wave and she slipped forward she pulled the wretch to the surface
+and gave him a moment in which to breathe; but between each lift the
+stern fell, and while the bow lazily climbed the next wave the line
+slacked and he sank beneath.</p>
+<p>I had forgotten the existence of Maud Brewster, and I remembered
+her with a start as she stepped lightly beside me.&nbsp; It was her
+first time on deck since she had come aboard.&nbsp; A dead silence greeted
+her appearance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is the cause of the merriment?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ask Captain Larsen,&rdquo; I answered composedly and coldly,
+though inwardly my blood was boiling at the thought that she should
+be witness to such brutality.</p>
+<p>She took my advice and was turning to put it into execution, when
+her eyes lighted on Oofty-Oofty, immediately before her, his body instinct
+with alertness and grace as he held the turn of the rope.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you fishing?&rdquo; she asked him.</p>
+<p>He made no reply.&nbsp; His eyes, fixed intently on the sea astern,
+suddenly flashed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shark ho, sir!&rdquo; he cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heave in!&nbsp; Lively!&nbsp; All hands tail on!&rdquo; Wolf
+Larsen shouted, springing himself to the rope in advance of the quickest.</p>
+<p>Mugridge had heard the Kanaka&rsquo;s warning cry and was screaming
+madly.&nbsp; I could see a black fin cutting the water and making for
+him with greater swiftness than he was being pulled aboard.&nbsp; It
+was an even toss whether the shark or we would get him, and it was a
+matter of moments.&nbsp; When Mugridge was directly beneath us, the
+stern descended the slope of a passing wave, thus giving the advantage
+to the shark.&nbsp; The fin disappeared.&nbsp; The belly flashed white
+in swift upward rush.&nbsp; Almost equally swift, but not quite, was
+Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; He threw his strength into one tremendous jerk.&nbsp;
+The Cockney&rsquo;s body left the water; so did part of the shark&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+He drew up his legs, and the man-eater seemed no more than barely to
+touch one foot, sinking back into the water with a splash.&nbsp; But
+at the moment of contact Thomas Mugridge cried out.&nbsp; Then he came
+in like a fresh-caught fish on a line, clearing the rail generously
+and striking the deck in a heap, on hands and knees, and rolling over.</p>
+<p>But a fountain of blood was gushing forth.&nbsp; The right foot was
+missing, amputated neatly at the ankle.&nbsp; I looked instantly to
+Maud Brewster.&nbsp; Her face was white, her eyes dilated with horror.&nbsp;
+She was gazing, not at Thomas Mugridge, but at Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; And
+he was aware of it, for he said, with one of his short laughs:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Man-play, Miss Brewster.&nbsp; Somewhat rougher, I warrant,
+than what you have been used to, but still-man-play.&nbsp; The shark
+was not in the reckoning.&nbsp; It&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But at this juncture, Mugridge, who had lifted his head and ascertained
+the extent of his loss, floundered over on the deck and buried his teeth
+in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s leg.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen stooped, coolly, to the
+Cockney, and pressed with thumb and finger at the rear of the jaws and
+below the ears.&nbsp; The jaws opened with reluctance, and Wolf Larsen
+stepped free.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As I was saying,&rdquo; he went on, as though nothing unwonted
+had happened, &ldquo;the shark was not in the reckoning.&nbsp; It was&mdash;ahem&mdash;shall
+we say Providence?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She gave no sign that she had heard, though the expression of her
+eyes changed to one of inexpressible loathing as she started to turn
+away.&nbsp; She no more than started, for she swayed and tottered, and
+reached her hand weakly out to mine.&nbsp; I caught her in time to save
+her from falling, and helped her to a seat on the cabin.&nbsp; I thought
+she might faint outright, but she controlled herself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you get a tourniquet, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+called to me.</p>
+<p>I hesitated.&nbsp; Her lips moved, and though they formed no words,
+she commanded me with her eyes, plainly as speech, to go to the help
+of the unfortunate man.&nbsp; &ldquo;Please,&rdquo; she managed to whisper,
+and I could but obey.</p>
+<p>By now I had developed such skill at surgery that Wolf Larsen, with
+a few words of advice, left me to my task with a couple of sailors for
+assistants.&nbsp; For his task he elected a vengeance on the shark.&nbsp;
+A heavy swivel-hook, baited with fat salt-pork, was dropped overside;
+and by the time I had compressed the severed veins and arteries, the
+sailors were singing and heaving in the offending monster.&nbsp; I did
+not see it myself, but my assistants, first one and then the other,
+deserted me for a few moments to run amidships and look at what was
+going on.&nbsp; The shark, a sixteen-footer, was hoisted up against
+the main-rigging.&nbsp; Its jaws were pried apart to their greatest
+extension, and a stout stake, sharpened at both ends, was so inserted
+that when the pries were removed the spread jaws were fixed upon it.&nbsp;
+This accomplished, the hook was cut out.&nbsp; The shark dropped back
+into the sea, helpless, yet with its full strength, doomed&mdash;to
+lingering starvation&mdash;a living death less meet for it than for
+the man who devised the punishment.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I knew what it was as she came toward me.&nbsp; For ten minutes I
+had watched her talking earnestly with the engineer, and now, with a
+sign for silence, I drew her out of earshot of the helmsman.&nbsp; Her
+face was white and set; her large eyes, larger than usual what of the
+purpose in them, looked penetratingly into mine.&nbsp; I felt rather
+timid and apprehensive, for she had come to search Humphrey Van Weyden&rsquo;s
+soul, and Humphrey Van Weyden had nothing of which to be particularly
+proud since his advent on the <i>Ghost.</i></p>
+<p>We walked to the break of the poop, where she turned and faced me.&nbsp;
+I glanced around to see that no one was within hearing distance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; I asked gently; but the expression of determination
+on her face did not relax.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can readily understand,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;that this
+morning&rsquo;s affair was largely an accident; but I have been talking
+with Mr. Haskins.&nbsp; He tells me that the day we were rescued, even
+while I was in the cabin, two men were drowned, deliberately drowned&mdash;murdered.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a query in her voice, and she faced me accusingly, as though
+I were guilty of the deed, or at least a party to it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The information is quite correct,&rdquo; I answered.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The two men were murdered.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you permitted it!&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was unable to prevent it, is a better way of phrasing it,&rdquo;
+I replied, still gently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you tried to prevent it?&rdquo;&nbsp; There was an emphasis
+on the &ldquo;tried,&rdquo; and a pleading little note in her voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, but you didn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she hurried on, divining
+my answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;But why didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I shrugged my shoulders.&nbsp; &ldquo;You must remember, Miss Brewster,
+that you are a new inhabitant of this little world, and that you do
+not yet understand the laws which operate within it.&nbsp; You bring
+with you certain fine conceptions of humanity, manhood, conduct, and
+such things; but here you will find them misconceptions.&nbsp; I have
+found it so,&rdquo; I added, with an involuntary sigh.</p>
+<p>She shook her head incredulously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What would you advise, then?&rdquo; I asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;That
+I should take a knife, or a gun, or an axe, and kill this man?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She half started back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, not that!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then what should I do?&nbsp; Kill myself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You speak in purely materialistic terms,&rdquo; she objected.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;There is such a thing as moral courage, and moral courage is
+never without effect.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; I smiled, &ldquo;you advise me to kill neither
+him nor myself, but to let him kill me.&rdquo;&nbsp; I held up my hand
+as she was about to speak.&nbsp; &ldquo;For moral courage is a worthless
+asset on this little floating world.&nbsp; Leach, one of the men who
+were murdered, had moral courage to an unusual degree.&nbsp; So had
+the other man, Johnson.&nbsp; Not only did it not stand them in good
+stead, but it destroyed them.&nbsp; And so with me if I should exercise
+what little moral courage I may possess.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must understand, Miss Brewster, and understand clearly,
+that this man is a monster.&nbsp; He is without conscience.&nbsp; Nothing
+is sacred to him, nothing is too terrible for him to do.&nbsp; It was
+due to his whim that I was detained aboard in the first place.&nbsp;
+It is due to his whim that I am still alive.&nbsp; I do nothing, can
+do nothing, because I am a slave to this monster, as you are now a slave
+to him; because I desire to live, as you will desire to live; because
+I cannot fight and overcome him, just as you will not be able to fight
+and overcome him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She waited for me to go on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What remains?&nbsp; Mine is the role of the weak.&nbsp; I
+remain silent and suffer ignominy, as you will remain silent and suffer
+ignominy.&nbsp; And it is well.&nbsp; It is the best we can do if we
+wish to live.&nbsp; The battle is not always to the strong.&nbsp; We
+have not the strength with which to fight this man; we must dissimulate,
+and win, if win we can, by craft.&nbsp; If you will be advised by me,
+this is what you will do.&nbsp; I know my position is perilous, and
+I may say frankly that yours is even more perilous.&nbsp; We must stand
+together, without appearing to do so, in secret alliance.&nbsp; I shall
+not be able to side with you openly, and, no matter what indignities
+may be put upon me, you are to remain likewise silent.&nbsp; We must
+provoke no scenes with this man, nor cross his will.&nbsp; And we must
+keep smiling faces and be friendly with him no matter how repulsive
+it may be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She brushed her hand across her forehead in a puzzled way, saying,
+&ldquo;Still I do not understand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must do as I say,&rdquo; I interrupted authoritatively,
+for I saw Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s gaze wandering toward us from where he
+paced up and down with Latimer amidships.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do as I say,
+and ere long you will find I am right.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What shall I do, then?&rdquo; she asked, detecting the anxious
+glance I had shot at the object of our conversation, and impressed,
+I flatter myself, with the earnestness of my manner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dispense with all the moral courage you can,&rdquo; I said
+briskly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t arouse this man&rsquo;s animosity.&nbsp;
+Be quite friendly with him, talk with him, discuss literature and art
+with him&mdash;he is fond of such things.&nbsp; You will find him an
+interested listener and no fool.&nbsp; And for your own sake try to
+avoid witnessing, as much as you can, the brutalities of the ship.&nbsp;
+It will make it easier for you to act your part.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am to lie,&rdquo; she said in steady, rebellious tones,
+&ldquo;by speech and action to lie.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen had separated from Latimer and was coming toward us.&nbsp;
+I was desperate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please, please understand me,&rdquo; I said hurriedly, lowering
+my voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;All your experience of men and things is worthless
+here.&nbsp; You must begin over again.&nbsp; I know,&mdash;I can see
+it&mdash;you have, among other ways, been used to managing people with
+your eyes, letting your moral courage speak out through them, as it
+were.&nbsp; You have already managed me with your eyes, commanded me
+with them.&nbsp; But don&rsquo;t try it on Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; You could
+as easily control a lion, while he would make a mock of you.&nbsp; He
+would&mdash;I have always been proud of the fact that I discovered him,&rdquo;
+I said, turning the conversation as Wolf Larsen stepped on the poop
+and joined us.&nbsp; &ldquo;The editors were afraid of him and the publishers
+would have none of him.&nbsp; But I knew, and his genius and my judgment
+were vindicated when he made that magnificent hit with his &lsquo;Forge.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And it was a newspaper poem,&rdquo; she said glibly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It did happen to see the light in a newspaper,&rdquo; I replied,
+&ldquo;but not because the magazine editors had been denied a glimpse
+at it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We were talking of Harris,&rdquo; I said to Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; he acknowledged.&nbsp; &ldquo;I remember the
+&lsquo;Forge.&rsquo;&nbsp; Filled with pretty sentiments and an almighty
+faith in human illusions.&nbsp; By the way, Mr. Van Weyden, you&rsquo;d
+better look in on Cooky.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s complaining and restless.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thus was I bluntly dismissed from the poop, only to find Mugridge
+sleeping soundly from the morphine I had given him.&nbsp; I made no
+haste to return on deck, and when I did I was gratified to see Miss
+Brewster in animated conversation with Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; As I say,
+the sight gratified me.&nbsp; She was following my advice.&nbsp; And
+yet I was conscious of a slight shock or hurt in that she was able to
+do the thing I had begged her to do and which she had notably disliked.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Brave winds, blowing fair, swiftly drove the <i>Ghost</i> northward
+into the seal herd.&nbsp; We encountered it well up to the forty-fourth
+parallel, in a raw and stormy sea across which the wind harried the
+fog-banks in eternal flight.&nbsp; For days at a time we could never
+see the sun nor take an observation; then the wind would sweep the face
+of the ocean clean, the waves would ripple and flash, and we would learn
+where we were.&nbsp; A day of clear weather might follow, or three days
+or four, and then the fog would settle down upon us, seemingly thicker
+than ever.</p>
+<p>The hunting was perilous; yet the boats, lowered day after day, were
+swallowed up in the grey obscurity, and were seen no more till nightfall,
+and often not till long after, when they would creep in like sea-wraiths,
+one by one, out of the grey.&nbsp; Wainwright&mdash;the hunter whom
+Wolf Larsen had stolen with boat and men&mdash;took advantage of the
+veiled sea and escaped.&nbsp; He disappeared one morning in the encircling
+fog with his two men, and we never saw them again, though it was not
+many days when we learned that they had passed from schooner to schooner
+until they finally regained their own.</p>
+<p>This was the thing I had set my mind upon doing, but the opportunity
+never offered.&nbsp; It was not in the mate&rsquo;s province to go out
+in the boats, and though I manoeuvred cunningly for it, Wolf Larsen
+never granted me the privilege.&nbsp; Had he done so, I should have
+managed somehow to carry Miss Brewster away with me.&nbsp; As it was,
+the situation was approaching a stage which I was afraid to consider.&nbsp;
+I involuntarily shunned the thought of it, and yet the thought continually
+arose in my mind like a haunting spectre.</p>
+<p>I had read sea-romances in my time, wherein figured, as a matter
+of course, the lone woman in the midst of a shipload of men; but I learned,
+now, that I had never comprehended the deeper significance of such a
+situation&mdash;the thing the writers harped upon and exploited so thoroughly.&nbsp;
+And here it was, now, and I was face to face with it.&nbsp; That it
+should be as vital as possible, it required no more than that the woman
+should be Maud Brewster, who now charmed me in person as she had long
+charmed me through her work.</p>
+<p>No one more out of environment could be imagined.&nbsp; She was a
+delicate, ethereal creature, swaying and willowy, light and graceful
+of movement.&nbsp; It never seemed to me that she walked, or, at least,
+walked after the ordinary manner of mortals.&nbsp; Hers was an extreme
+lithesomeness, and she moved with a certain indefinable airiness, approaching
+one as down might float or as a bird on noiseless wings.</p>
+<p>She was like a bit of Dresden china, and I was continually impressed
+with what I may call her fragility.&nbsp; As at the time I caught her
+arm when helping her below, so at any time I was quite prepared, should
+stress or rough handling befall her, to see her crumble away.&nbsp;
+I have never seen body and spirit in such perfect accord.&nbsp; Describe
+her verse, as the critics have described it, as sublimated and spiritual,
+and you have described her body.&nbsp; It seemed to partake of her soul,
+to have analogous attributes, and to link it to life with the slenderest
+of chains.&nbsp; Indeed, she trod the earth lightly, and in her constitution
+there was little of the robust clay.</p>
+<p>She was in striking contrast to Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; Each was nothing
+that the other was, everything that the other was not.&nbsp; I noted
+them walking the deck together one morning, and I likened them to the
+extreme ends of the human ladder of evolution&mdash;the one the culmination
+of all savagery, the other the finished product of the finest civilization.&nbsp;
+True, Wolf Larsen possessed intellect to an unusual degree, but it was
+directed solely to the exercise of his savage instincts and made him
+but the more formidable a savage.&nbsp; He was splendidly muscled, a
+heavy man, and though he strode with the certitude and directness of
+the physical man, there was nothing heavy about his stride.&nbsp; The
+jungle and the wilderness lurked in the uplift and downput of his feet.&nbsp;
+He was cat-footed, and lithe, and strong, always strong.&nbsp; I likened
+him to some great tiger, a beast of prowess and prey.&nbsp; He looked
+it, and the piercing glitter that arose at times in his eyes was the
+same piercing glitter I had observed in the eyes of caged leopards and
+other preying creatures of the wild.</p>
+<p>But this day, as I noted them pacing up and down, I saw that it was
+she who terminated the walk.&nbsp; They came up to where I was standing
+by the entrance to the companion-way.&nbsp; Though she betrayed it by
+no outward sign, I felt, somehow, that she was greatly perturbed.&nbsp;
+She made some idle remark, looking at me, and laughed lightly enough;
+but I saw her eyes return to his, involuntarily, as though fascinated;
+then they fell, but not swiftly enough to veil the rush of terror that
+filled them.</p>
+<p>It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation.&nbsp;
+Ordinarily grey and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and
+golden, and all a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled
+up till the full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance.&nbsp; Perhaps
+it was to this that the golden colour was due; but golden his eyes were,
+enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and
+speaking a demand and clamour of the blood which no woman, much less
+Maud Brewster, could misunderstand.</p>
+<p>Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear&mdash;the
+most terrible fear a man can experience&mdash;I knew that in inexpressible
+ways she was dear to me.&nbsp; The knowledge that I loved her rushed
+upon me with the terror, and with both emotions gripping at my heart
+and causing my blood at the same time to chill and to leap riotously,
+I felt myself drawn by a power without me and beyond me, and found my
+eyes returning against my will to gaze into the eyes of Wolf Larsen.&nbsp;
+But he had recovered himself.&nbsp; The golden colour and the dancing
+lights were gone.&nbsp; Cold and grey and glittering they were as he
+bowed brusquely and turned away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am afraid,&rdquo; she whispered, with a shiver.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+am so afraid.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I, too, was afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant
+to me my mind was in a turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite
+calmly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All will come right, Miss Brewster.&nbsp; Trust me, it will
+come right.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She answered with a grateful little smile that sent my heart pounding,
+and started to descend the companion-stairs.</p>
+<p>For a long while I remained standing where she had left me.&nbsp;
+There was imperative need to adjust myself, to consider the significance
+of the changed aspect of things.&nbsp; It had come, at last, love had
+come, when I least expected it and under the most forbidding conditions.&nbsp;
+Of course, my philosophy had always recognized the inevitableness of
+the love-call sooner or later; but long years of bookish silence had
+made me inattentive and unprepared.</p>
+<p>And now it had come!&nbsp; Maud Brewster!&nbsp; My memory flashed
+back to that first thin little volume on my desk, and I saw before me,
+as though in the concrete, the row of thin little volumes on my library
+shelf.&nbsp; How I had welcomed each of them!&nbsp; Each year one had
+come from the press, and to me each was the advent of the year.&nbsp;
+They had voiced a kindred intellect and spirit, and as such I had received
+them into a camaraderie of the mind; but now their place was in my heart.</p>
+<p>My heart?&nbsp; A revulsion of feeling came over me.&nbsp; I seemed
+to stand outside myself and to look at myself incredulously.&nbsp; Maud
+Brewster!&nbsp; Humphrey Van Weyden, &ldquo;the cold-blooded fish,&rdquo;
+the &ldquo;emotionless monster,&rdquo; the &ldquo;analytical demon,&rdquo;
+of Charley Furuseth&rsquo;s christening, in love!&nbsp; And then, without
+rhyme or reason, all sceptical, my mind flew back to a small biographical
+note in the red-bound <i>Who&rsquo;s Who</i>, and I said to myself,
+&ldquo;She was born in Cambridge, and she is twenty-seven years old.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And then I said, &ldquo;Twenty-seven years old and still free and fancy
+free?&rdquo;&nbsp; But how did I know she was fancy free?&nbsp; And
+the pang of new-born jealousy put all incredulity to flight.&nbsp; There
+was no doubt about it.&nbsp; I was jealous; therefore I loved.&nbsp;
+And the woman I loved was Maud Brewster.</p>
+<p>I, Humphrey Van Weyden, was in love!&nbsp; And again the doubt assailed
+me.&nbsp; Not that I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet
+it.&nbsp; On the contrary, idealist that I was to the most pronounced
+degree, my philosophy had always recognized and guerdoned love as the
+greatest thing in the world, the aim and the summit of being, the most
+exquisite pitch of joy and happiness to which life could thrill, the
+thing of all things to be hailed and welcomed and taken into the heart.&nbsp;
+But now that it had come I could not believe.&nbsp; I could not be so
+fortunate.&nbsp; It was too good, too good to be true.&nbsp; Symons&rsquo;s
+lines came into my head:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I wandered all these years among<br />A world of women, seeking
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>And then I had ceased seeking.&nbsp; It was not for me, this greatest
+thing in the world, I had decided.&nbsp; Furuseth was right; I was abnormal,
+an &ldquo;emotionless monster,&rdquo; a strange bookish creature, capable
+of pleasuring in sensations only of the mind.&nbsp; And though I had
+been surrounded by women all my days, my appreciation of them had been
+aesthetic and nothing more.&nbsp; I had actually, at times, considered
+myself outside the pale, a monkish fellow denied the eternal or the
+passing passions I saw and understood so well in others.&nbsp; And now
+it had come!&nbsp; Undreamed of and unheralded, it had come.&nbsp; In
+what could have been no less than an ecstasy, I left my post at the
+head of the companion-way and started along the deck, murmuring to myself
+those beautiful lines of Mrs. Browning:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I lived with visions for my company<br />Instead of men and
+women years ago,<br />And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know<br />A
+sweeter music than they played to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and
+oblivious to all about me.&nbsp; The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused
+me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What the hell are you up to?&rdquo; he was demanding.</p>
+<p>I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came
+to myself to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sleep-walking, sunstroke,&mdash;what?&rdquo; he barked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No; indigestion,&rdquo; I retorted, and continued my walk
+as if nothing untoward had occurred.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Among the most vivid memories of my life are those of the events
+on the <i>Ghost</i> which occurred during the forty hours succeeding
+the discovery of my love for Maud Brewster.&nbsp; I, who had lived my
+life in quiet places, only to enter at the age of thirty-five upon a
+course of the most irrational adventure I could have imagined, never
+had more incident and excitement crammed into any forty hours of my
+experience.&nbsp; Nor can I quite close my ears to a small voice of
+pride which tells me I did not do so badly, all things considered.</p>
+<p>To begin with, at the midday dinner, Wolf Larsen informed the hunters
+that they were to eat thenceforth in the steerage.&nbsp; It was an unprecedented
+thing on sealing-schooners, where it is the custom for the hunters to
+rank, unofficially as officers.&nbsp; He gave no reason, but his motive
+was obvious enough.&nbsp; Horner and Smoke had been displaying a gallantry
+toward Maud Brewster, ludicrous in itself and inoffensive to her, but
+to him evidently distasteful.</p>
+<p>The announcement was received with black silence, though the other
+four hunters glanced significantly at the two who had been the cause
+of their banishment.&nbsp; Jock Horner, quiet as was his way, gave no
+sign; but the blood surged darkly across Smoke&rsquo;s forehead, and
+he half opened his mouth to speak.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was watching him,
+waiting for him, the steely glitter in his eyes; but Smoke closed his
+mouth again without having said anything.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Anything to say?&rdquo; the other demanded aggressively.</p>
+<p>It was a challenge, but Smoke refused to accept it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;About what?&rdquo; he asked, so innocently that Wolf Larsen
+was disconcerted, while the others smiled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, nothing,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said lamely.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+just thought you might want to register a kick.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;About what?&rdquo; asked the imperturbable Smoke.</p>
+<p>Smoke&rsquo;s mates were now smiling broadly.&nbsp; His captain could
+have killed him, and I doubt not that blood would have flowed had not
+Maud Brewster been present.&nbsp; For that matter, it was her presence
+which enabled.&nbsp; Smoke to act as he did.&nbsp; He was too discreet
+and cautious a man to incur Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s anger at a time when
+that anger could be expressed in terms stronger than words.&nbsp; I
+was in fear that a struggle might take place, but a cry from the helmsman
+made it easy for the situation to save itself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Smoke ho!&rdquo; the cry came down the open companion-way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How&rsquo;s it bear?&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dead astern, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Maybe it&rsquo;s a Russian,&rdquo; suggested Latimer.</p>
+<p>His words brought anxiety into the faces of the other hunters.&nbsp;
+A Russian could mean but one thing&mdash;a cruiser.&nbsp; The hunters,
+never more than roughly aware of the position of the ship, nevertheless
+knew that we were close to the boundaries of the forbidden sea, while
+Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s record as a poacher was notorious.&nbsp; All eyes
+centred upon him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re dead safe,&rdquo; he assured them with a laugh.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;No salt mines this time, Smoke.&nbsp; But I&rsquo;ll tell you
+what&mdash;I&rsquo;ll lay odds of five to one it&rsquo;s the <i>Macedonia</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>No one accepted his offer, and he went on: &ldquo;In which event,
+I&rsquo;ll lay ten to one there&rsquo;s trouble breezing up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, thank you,&rdquo; Latimer spoke up.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+object to losing my money, but I like to get a run for it anyway.&nbsp;
+There never was a time when there wasn&rsquo;t trouble when you and
+that brother of yours got together, and I&rsquo;ll lay twenty to one
+on that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A general smile followed, in which Wolf Larsen joined, and the dinner
+went on smoothly, thanks to me, for he treated me abominably the rest
+of the meal, sneering at me and patronizing me till I was all a-tremble
+with suppressed rage.&nbsp; Yet I knew I must control myself for Maud
+Brewster&rsquo;s sake, and I received my reward when her eyes caught
+mine for a fleeting second, and they said, as distinctly as if she spoke,
+&ldquo;Be brave, be brave.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We left the table to go on deck, for a steamer was a welcome break
+in the monotony of the sea on which we floated, while the conviction
+that it was Death Larsen and the <i>Macedonia</i> added to the excitement.&nbsp;
+The stiff breeze and heavy sea which had sprung up the previous afternoon
+had been moderating all morning, so that it was now possible to lower
+the boats for an afternoon&rsquo;s hunt.&nbsp; The hunting promised
+to be profitable.&nbsp; We had sailed since daylight across a sea barren
+of seals, and were now running into the herd.</p>
+<p>The smoke was still miles astern, but overhauling us rapidly, when
+we lowered our boats.&nbsp; They spread out and struck a northerly course
+across the ocean.&nbsp; Now and again we saw a sail lower, heard the
+reports of the shot-guns, and saw the sail go up again.&nbsp; The seals
+were thick, the wind was dying away; everything favoured a big catch.&nbsp;
+As we ran off to get our leeward position of the last lee boat, we found
+the ocean fairly carpeted with sleeping seals.&nbsp; They were all about
+us, thicker than I had ever seen them before, in twos and threes and
+bunches, stretched full length on the surface and sleeping for all the
+world like so many lazy young dogs.</p>
+<p>Under the approaching smoke the hull and upper-works of a steamer
+were growing larger.&nbsp; It was the <i>Macedonia</i>.&nbsp; I read
+her name through the glasses as she passed by scarcely a mile to starboard.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen looked savagely at the vessel, while Maud Brewster was curious.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where is the trouble you were so sure was breezing up, Captain
+Larsen?&rdquo; she asked gaily.</p>
+<p>He glanced at her, a moment&rsquo;s amusement softening his features.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What did you expect?&nbsp; That they&rsquo;d come aboard and
+cut our throats?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something like that,&rdquo; she confessed.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+understand, seal-hunters are so new and strange to me that I am quite
+ready to expect anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He nodded his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;Quite right, quite right.&nbsp;
+Your error is that you failed to expect the worst.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, what can be worse than cutting our throats?&rdquo; she
+asked, with pretty naive surprise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cutting our purses,&rdquo; he answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;Man is
+so made these days that his capacity for living is determined by the
+money he possesses.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Who steals my purse steals trash,&rsquo;&rdquo; she
+quoted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who steals my purse steals my right to live,&rdquo; was the
+reply, &ldquo;old saws to the contrary.&nbsp; For he steals my bread
+and meat and bed, and in so doing imperils my life.&nbsp; There are
+not enough soup-kitchens and bread-lines to go around, you know, and
+when men have nothing in their purses they usually die, and die miserably&mdash;unless
+they are able to fill their purses pretty speedily.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I fail to see that this steamer has any designs on your
+purse.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wait and you will see,&rdquo; he answered grimly.</p>
+<p>We did not have long to wait.&nbsp; Having passed several miles beyond
+our line of boats, the <i>Macedonia</i> proceeded to lower her own.&nbsp;
+We knew she carried fourteen boats to our five (we were one short through
+the desertion of Wainwright), and she began dropping them far to leeward
+of our last boat, continued dropping them athwart our course, and finished
+dropping them far to windward of our first weather boat.&nbsp; The hunting,
+for us, was spoiled.&nbsp; There were no seals behind us, and ahead
+of us the line of fourteen boats, like a huge broom, swept the herd
+before it.</p>
+<p>Our boats hunted across the two or three miles of water between them
+and the point where the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> had been dropped, and
+then headed for home.&nbsp; The wind had fallen to a whisper, the ocean
+was growing calmer and calmer, and this, coupled with the presence of
+the great herd, made a perfect hunting day&mdash;one of the two or three
+days to be encountered in the whole of a lucky season.&nbsp; An angry
+lot of men, boat-pullers and steerers as well as hunters, swarmed over
+our side.&nbsp; Each man felt that he had been robbed; and the boats
+were hoisted in amid curses, which, if curses had power, would have
+settled Death Larsen for all eternity&mdash;&ldquo;Dead and damned for
+a dozen iv eternities,&rdquo; commented Louis, his eyes twinkling up
+at me as he rested from hauling taut the lashings of his boat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen to them, and find if it is hard to discover the most
+vital thing in their souls,&rdquo; said Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; &ldquo;Faith?
+and love? and high ideals?&nbsp; The good? the beautiful? the true?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Their innate sense of right has been violated,&rdquo; Maud
+Brewster said, joining the conversation.</p>
+<p>She was standing a dozen feet away, one hand resting on the main-shrouds
+and her body swaying gently to the slight roll of the ship.&nbsp; She
+had not raised her voice, and yet I was struck by its clear and bell-like
+tone.&nbsp; Ah, it was sweet in my ears!&nbsp; I scarcely dared look
+at her just then, for the fear of betraying myself.&nbsp; A boy&rsquo;s
+cap was perched on her head, and her hair, light brown and arranged
+in a loose and fluffy order that caught the sun, seemed an aureole about
+the delicate oval of her face.&nbsp; She was positively bewitching,
+and, withal, sweetly spirituelle, if not saintly.&nbsp; All my old-time
+marvel at life returned to me at sight of this splendid incarnation
+of it, and Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s cold explanation of life and its meaning
+was truly ridiculous and laughable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A sentimentalist,&rdquo; he sneered, &ldquo;like Mr. Van Weyden.&nbsp;
+Those men are cursing because their desires have been outraged.&nbsp;
+That is all.&nbsp; What desires?&nbsp; The desires for the good grub
+and soft beds ashore which a handsome pay-day brings them&mdash;the
+women and the drink, the gorging and the beastliness which so truly
+expresses them, the best that is in them, their highest aspirations,
+their ideals, if you please.&nbsp; The exhibition they make of their
+feelings is not a touching sight, yet it shows how deeply they have
+been touched, how deeply their purses have been touched, for to lay
+hands on their purses is to lay hands on their souls.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;You hardly behave as if your purse had been touched,&rdquo;
+she said, smilingly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then it so happens that I am behaving differently, for my
+purse and my soul have both been touched.&nbsp; At the current price
+of skins in the London market, and based on a fair estimate of what
+the afternoon&rsquo;s catch would have been had not the <i>Macedonia</i>
+hogged it, the <i>Ghost</i> has lost about fifteen hundred dollars&rsquo;
+worth of skins.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You speak so calmly&mdash;&rdquo; she began.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I do not feel calm; I could kill the man who robbed me,&rdquo;
+he interrupted.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, yes, I know, and that man my brother&mdash;more
+sentiment!&nbsp; Bah!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His face underwent a sudden change.&nbsp; His voice was less harsh
+and wholly sincere as he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must be happy, you sentimentalists, really and truly happy
+at dreaming and finding things good, and, because you find some of them
+good, feeling good yourself.&nbsp; Now, tell me, you two, do you find
+me good?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are good to look upon&mdash;in a way,&rdquo; I qualified.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are in you all powers for good,&rdquo; was Maud Brewster&rsquo;s
+answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There you are!&rdquo; he cried at her, half angrily.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Your words are empty to me.&nbsp; There is nothing clear and
+sharp and definite about the thought you have expressed.&nbsp; You cannot
+pick it up in your two hands and look at it.&nbsp; In point of fact,
+it is not a thought.&nbsp; It is a feeling, a sentiment, a something
+based upon illusion and not a product of the intellect at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came
+into it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing
+that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies
+and illusions.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re wrong, all wrong, of course, and
+contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong
+and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight.&nbsp;
+And after all, delight is the wage for living.&nbsp; Without delight,
+living is a worthless act.&nbsp; To labour at living and be unpaid is
+worse than to be dead.&nbsp; He who delights the most lives the most,
+and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more
+gratifying than are my facts to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his head slowly, pondering.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason.&nbsp;
+Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying.&nbsp; Emotional delight
+is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides,
+you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues.&nbsp;
+Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily
+recuperate.&nbsp; I envy you, I envy you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange
+quizzical smiles, as he added:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not
+from my heart.&nbsp; My reason dictates it.&nbsp; The envy is an intellectual
+product.&nbsp; I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and,
+greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too,
+were a fool,&rdquo; I laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are a blessed,
+bankrupt pair of fools.&nbsp; You have no facts in your pocketbook.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yet we spend as freely as you,&rdquo; was Maud Brewster&rsquo;s
+contribution.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;More freely, because it costs you nothing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And because we draw upon eternity,&rdquo; she retorted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whether you do or think you do, it&rsquo;s the same thing.&nbsp;
+You spend what you haven&rsquo;t got, and in return you get greater
+value from spending what you haven&rsquo;t got than I get from spending
+what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you change the basis of your coinage, then?&rdquo;
+she queried teasingly.</p>
+<p>He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully:
+&ldquo;Too late.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d like to, perhaps, but I can&rsquo;t.&nbsp;
+My pocketbook is stuffed with the old coinage, and it&rsquo;s a stubborn
+thing.&nbsp; I can never bring myself to recognize anything else as
+valid.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He ceased speaking, and his gaze wandered absently past her and became
+lost in the placid sea.&nbsp; The old primal melancholy was strong upon
+him.&nbsp; He was quivering to it.&nbsp; He had reasoned himself into
+a spell of the blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil
+within him to be up and stirring.&nbsp; I remembered Charley Furuseth,
+and knew this man&rsquo;s sadness as the penalty which the materialist
+ever pays for his materialism.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+said, the following morning at the breakfast-table, &ldquo;How do things
+look?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Clear enough,&rdquo; I answered, glancing at the sunshine
+which streamed down the open companion-way.&nbsp; &ldquo;Fair westerly
+breeze, with a promise of stiffening, if Louis predicts correctly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He nodded his head in a pleased way.&nbsp; &ldquo;Any signs of fog?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thick banks in the north and north-west.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He nodded his head again, evincing even greater satisfaction than
+before.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What of the <i>Macedonia</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not sighted,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>I could have sworn his face fell at the intelligence, but why he
+should be disappointed I could not conceive.</p>
+<p>I was soon to learn.&nbsp; &ldquo;Smoke ho!&rdquo; came the hail
+from on deck, and his face brightened.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he exclaimed, and left the table at once to go
+on deck and into the steerage, where the hunters were taking the first
+breakfast of their exile.</p>
+<p>Maud Brewster and I scarcely touched the food before us, gazing,
+instead, in silent anxiety at each other, and listening to Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+voice, which easily penetrated the cabin through the intervening bulkhead.&nbsp;
+He spoke at length, and his conclusion was greeted with a wild roar
+of cheers.&nbsp; The bulkhead was too thick for us to hear what he said;
+but whatever it was it affected the hunters strongly, for the cheering
+was followed by loud exclamations and shouts of joy.</p>
+<p>From the sounds on deck I knew that the sailors had been routed out
+and were preparing to lower the boats.&nbsp; Maud Brewster accompanied
+me on deck, but I left her at the break of the poop, where she might
+watch the scene and not be in it.&nbsp; The sailors must have learned
+whatever project was on hand, and the vim and snap they put into their
+work attested their enthusiasm.&nbsp; The hunters came trooping on deck
+with shot-guns and ammunition-boxes, and, most unusual, their rifles.&nbsp;
+The latter were rarely taken in the boats, for a seal shot at long range
+with a rifle invariably sank before a boat could reach it.&nbsp; But
+each hunter this day had his rifle and a large supply of cartridges.&nbsp;
+I noticed they grinned with satisfaction whenever they looked at the
+<i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> smoke, which was rising higher and higher as
+she approached from the west.</p>
+<p>The five boats went over the side with a rush, spread out like the
+ribs of a fan, and set a northerly course, as on the preceding afternoon,
+for us to follow.&nbsp; I watched for some time, curiously, but there
+seemed nothing extraordinary about their behaviour.&nbsp; They lowered
+sails, shot seals, and hoisted sails again, and continued on their way
+as I had always seen them do.&nbsp; The <i>Macedonia</i> repeated her
+performance of yesterday, &ldquo;hogging&rdquo; the sea by dropping
+her line of boats in advance of ours and across our course.&nbsp; Fourteen
+boats require a considerable spread of ocean for comfortable hunting,
+and when she had completely lapped our line she continued steaming into
+the north-east, dropping more boats as she went.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s up?&rdquo; I asked Wolf Larsen, unable longer
+to keep my curiosity in check.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never mind what&rsquo;s up,&rdquo; he answered gruffly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t be a thousand years in finding out, and in the
+meantime just pray for plenty of wind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, well, I don&rsquo;t mind telling you,&rdquo; he said the
+next moment.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to give that brother of mine
+a taste of his own medicine.&nbsp; In short, I&rsquo;m going to play
+the hog myself, and not for one day, but for the rest of the season,&mdash;if
+we&rsquo;re in luck.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And if we&rsquo;re not?&rdquo; I queried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not to be considered,&rdquo; he laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;We simply
+must be in luck, or it&rsquo;s all up with us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had the wheel at the time, and I went forward to my hospital in
+the forecastle, where lay the two crippled men, Nilson and Thomas Mugridge.&nbsp;
+Nilson was as cheerful as could be expected, for his broken leg was
+knitting nicely; but the Cockney was desperately melancholy, and I was
+aware of a great sympathy for the unfortunate creature.&nbsp; And the
+marvel of it was that still he lived and clung to life.&nbsp; The brutal
+years had reduced his meagre body to splintered wreckage, and yet the
+spark of life within burned brightly as ever.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With an artificial foot&mdash;and they make excellent ones&mdash;you
+will be stumping ships&rsquo; galleys to the end of time,&rdquo; I assured
+him jovially.</p>
+<p>But his answer was serious, nay, solemn.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+know about wot you s&rsquo;y, Mr. Van W&rsquo;yden, but I do know I&rsquo;ll
+never rest &rsquo;appy till I see that &rsquo;ell-&rsquo;ound bloody
+well dead.&nbsp; &rsquo;E cawn&rsquo;t live as long as me.&nbsp; &rsquo;E&rsquo;s
+got no right to live, an&rsquo; as the Good Word puts it, &lsquo;&rsquo;E
+shall shorely die,&rsquo; an&rsquo; I s&rsquo;y, &lsquo;Amen, an&rsquo;
+damn soon at that.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When I returned on deck I found Wolf Larsen steering mainly with
+one hand, while with the other hand he held the marine glasses and studied
+the situation of the boats, paying particular attention to the position
+of the <i>Macedonia</i>.&nbsp; The only change noticeable in our boats
+was that they had hauled close on the wind and were heading several
+points west of north.&nbsp; Still, I could not see the expediency of
+the manoeuvre, for the free sea was still intercepted by the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i>
+five weather boats, which, in turn, had hauled close on the wind.&nbsp;
+Thus they slowly diverged toward the west, drawing farther away from
+the remainder of the boats in their line.&nbsp; Our boats were rowing
+as well as sailing.&nbsp; Even the hunters were pulling, and with three
+pairs of oars in the water they rapidly overhauled what I may appropriately
+term the enemy.</p>
+<p>The smoke of the <i>Macedonia</i> had dwindled to a dim blot on the
+north-eastern horizon.&nbsp; Of the steamer herself nothing was to be
+seen.&nbsp; We had been loafing along, till now, our sails shaking half
+the time and spilling the wind; and twice, for short periods, we had
+been hove to.&nbsp; But there was no more loafing.&nbsp; Sheets were
+trimmed, and Wolf Larsen proceeded to put the <i>Ghost</i> through her
+paces.&nbsp; We ran past our line of boats and bore down upon the first
+weather boat of the other line.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Down that flying jib, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen commanded.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And stand by to back over the jibs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I ran forward and had the downhaul of the flying jib all in and fast
+as we slipped by the boat a hundred feet to leeward.&nbsp; The three
+men in it gazed at us suspiciously.&nbsp; They had been hogging the
+sea, and they knew Wolf Larsen, by reputation at any rate.&nbsp; I noted
+that the hunter, a huge Scandinavian sitting in the bow, held his rifle,
+ready to hand, across his knees.&nbsp; It should have been in its proper
+place in the rack.&nbsp; When they came opposite our stern, Wolf Larsen
+greeted them with a wave of the hand, and cried:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come on board and have a &rsquo;gam&rsquo;!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To gam,&rdquo; among the sealing-schooners, is a substitute
+for the verbs &ldquo;to visit,&rdquo; &ldquo;to gossip.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It expresses the garrulity of the sea, and is a pleasant break in the
+monotony of the life.</p>
+<p>The <i>Ghost</i> swung around into the wind, and I finished my work
+forward in time to run aft and lend a hand with the mainsheet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will please stay on deck, Miss Brewster,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+said, as he started forward to meet his guest.&nbsp; &ldquo;And you
+too, Mr. Van Weyden.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boat had lowered its sail and run alongside.&nbsp; The hunter,
+golden bearded like a sea-king, came over the rail and dropped on deck.&nbsp;
+But his hugeness could not quite overcome his apprehensiveness.&nbsp;
+Doubt and distrust showed strongly in his face.&nbsp; It was a transparent
+face, for all of its hairy shield, and advertised instant relief when
+he glanced from Wolf Larsen to me, noted that there was only the pair
+of us, and then glanced over his own two men who had joined him.&nbsp;
+Surely he had little reason to be afraid.&nbsp; He towered like a Goliath
+above Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; He must have measured six feet eight or nine
+inches in stature, and I subsequently learned his weight&mdash;240 pounds.&nbsp;
+And there was no fat about him.&nbsp; It was all bone and muscle.</p>
+<p>A return of apprehension was apparent when, at the top of the companion-way,
+Wolf Larsen invited him below.&nbsp; But he reassured himself with a
+glance down at his host&mdash;a big man himself but dwarfed by the propinquity
+of the giant.&nbsp; So all hesitancy vanished, and the pair descended
+into the cabin.&nbsp; In the meantime, his two men, as was the wont
+of visiting sailors, had gone forward into the forecastle to do some
+visiting themselves.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, from the cabin came a great, choking bellow, followed by
+all the sounds of a furious struggle.&nbsp; It was the leopard and the
+lion, and the lion made all the noise.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was the leopard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see the sacredness of our hospitality,&rdquo; I said bitterly
+to Maud Brewster.</p>
+<p>She nodded her head that she heard, and I noted in her face the signs
+of the same sickness at sight or sound of violent struggle from which
+I had suffered so severely during my first weeks on the <i>Ghost.</i></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t it be better if you went forward, say by the
+steerage companion-way, until it is over?&rdquo; I suggested.</p>
+<p>She shook her head and gazed at me pitifully.&nbsp; She was not frightened,
+but appalled, rather, at the human animality of it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will understand,&rdquo; I took advantage of the opportunity
+to say, &ldquo;whatever part I take in what is going on and what is
+to come, that I am compelled to take it&mdash;if you and I are ever
+to get out of this scrape with our lives.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is not nice&mdash;for me,&rdquo; I added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; she said, in a weak, far-away voice,
+and her eyes showed me that she did understand.</p>
+<p>The sounds from below soon died away.&nbsp; Then Wolf Larsen came
+alone on deck.&nbsp; There was a slight flush under his bronze, but
+otherwise he bore no signs of the battle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Send those two men aft, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>I obeyed, and a minute or two later they stood before him.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Hoist in your boat,&rdquo; he said to them.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your
+hunter&rsquo;s decided to stay aboard awhile and doesn&rsquo;t want
+it pounding alongside.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hoist in your boat, I said,&rdquo; he repeated, this time
+in sharper tones as they hesitated to do his bidding.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who knows? you may have to sail with me for a time,&rdquo;
+he said, quite softly, with a silken threat that belied the softness,
+as they moved slowly to comply, &ldquo;and we might as well start with
+a friendly understanding.&nbsp; Lively now!&nbsp; Death Larsen makes
+you jump better than that, and you know it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Their movements perceptibly quickened under his coaching, and as
+the boat swung inboard I was sent forward to let go the jibs.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen, at the wheel, directed the <i>Ghost</i> after the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i>
+second weather boat.</p>
+<p>Under way, and with nothing for the time being to do, I turned my
+attention to the situation of the boats.&nbsp; The <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i>
+third weather boat was being attacked by two of ours, the fourth by
+our remaining three; and the fifth, turn about, was taking a hand in
+the defence of its nearest mate.&nbsp; The fight had opened at long
+distance, and the rifles were cracking steadily.&nbsp; A quick, snappy
+sea was being kicked up by the wind, a condition which prevented fine
+shooting; and now and again, as we drew closer, we could see the bullets
+zip-zipping from wave to wave.</p>
+<p>The boat we were pursuing had squared away and was running before
+the wind to escape us, and, in the course of its flight, to take part
+in repulsing our general boat attack.</p>
+<p>Attending to sheets and tacks now left me little time to see what
+was taking place, but I happened to be on the poop when Wolf Larsen
+ordered the two strange sailors forward and into the forecastle.&nbsp;
+They went sullenly, but they went.&nbsp; He next ordered Miss Brewster
+below, and smiled at the instant horror that leapt into her eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find nothing gruesome down there,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;only an unhurt man securely made fast to the ring-bolts.&nbsp;
+Bullets are liable to come aboard, and I don&rsquo;t want you killed,
+you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Even as he spoke, a bullet was deflected by a brass-capped spoke
+of the wheel between his hands and screeched off through the air to
+windward.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said to her; and then to me, &ldquo;Mr.
+Van Weyden, will you take the wheel?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Maud Brewster had stepped inside the companion-way so that only her
+head was exposed.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen had procured a rifle and was throwing
+a cartridge into the barrel.&nbsp; I begged her with my eyes to go below,
+but she smiled and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We may be feeble land-creatures without legs, but we can show
+Captain Larsen that we are at least as brave as he.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He gave her a quick look of admiration.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I like you a hundred per cent. better for that,&rdquo; he
+said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Books, and brains, and bravery.&nbsp; You are well-rounded,
+a blue-stocking fit to be the wife of a pirate chief.&nbsp; Ahem, we&rsquo;ll
+discuss that later,&rdquo; he smiled, as a bullet struck solidly into
+the cabin wall.</p>
+<p>I saw his eyes flash golden as he spoke, and I saw the terror mount
+in her own.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are braver,&rdquo; I hastened to say.&nbsp; &ldquo;At least,
+speaking for myself, I know I am braver than Captain Larsen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was I who was now favoured by a quick look.&nbsp; He was wondering
+if I were making fun of him.&nbsp; I put three or four spokes over to
+counteract a sheer toward the wind on the part of the <i>Ghost</i>,
+and then steadied her.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen was still waiting an explanation,
+and I pointed down to my knees.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will observe there,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;a slight trembling.&nbsp;
+It is because I am afraid, the flesh is afraid; and I am afraid in my
+mind because I do not wish to die.&nbsp; But my spirit masters the trembling
+flesh and the qualms of the mind.&nbsp; I am more than brave.&nbsp;
+I am courageous.&nbsp; Your flesh is not afraid.&nbsp; You are not afraid.&nbsp;
+On the one hand, it costs you nothing to encounter danger; on the other
+hand, it even gives you delight.&nbsp; You enjoy it.&nbsp; You may be
+unafraid, Mr. Larsen, but you must grant that the bravery is mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right,&rdquo; he acknowledged at once.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I never thought of it in that way before.&nbsp; But is the opposite
+true?&nbsp; If you are braver than I, am I more cowardly than you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We both laughed at the absurdity, and he dropped down to the deck
+and rested his rifle across the rail.&nbsp; The bullets we had received
+had travelled nearly a mile, but by now we had cut that distance in
+half.&nbsp; He fired three careful shots.&nbsp; The first struck fifty
+feet to windward of the boat, the second alongside; and at the third
+the boat-steerer let loose his steering-oar and crumpled up in the bottom
+of the boat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess that&rsquo;ll fix them,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said, rising
+to his feet.&nbsp; &ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t afford to let the hunter
+have it, and there is a chance the boat-puller doesn&rsquo;t know how
+to steer.&nbsp; In which case, the hunter cannot steer and shoot at
+the same time&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His reasoning was justified, for the boat rushed at once into the
+wind and the hunter sprang aft to take the boat-steerer&rsquo;s place.&nbsp;
+There was no more shooting, though the rifles were still cracking merrily
+from the other boats.</p>
+<p>The hunter had managed to get the boat before the wind again, but
+we ran down upon it, going at least two feet to its one.&nbsp; A hundred
+yards away, I saw the boat-puller pass a rifle to the hunter.&nbsp;
+Wolf Larsen went amidships and took the coil of the throat-halyards
+from its pin.&nbsp; Then he peered over the rail with levelled rifle.&nbsp;
+Twice I saw the hunter let go the steering-oar with one hand, reach
+for his rifle, and hesitate.&nbsp; We were now alongside and foaming
+past.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, you!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen cried suddenly to the boat-puller.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Take a turn!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At the same time he flung the coil of rope.&nbsp; It struck fairly,
+nearly knocking the man over, but he did not obey.&nbsp; Instead, he
+looked to his hunter for orders.&nbsp; The hunter, in turn, was in a
+quandary.&nbsp; His rifle was between his knees, but if he let go the
+steering-oar in order to shoot, the boat would sweep around and collide
+with the schooner.&nbsp; Also he saw Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s rifle bearing
+upon him and knew he would be shot ere he could get his rifle into play.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take a turn,&rdquo; he said quietly to the man.</p>
+<p>The boat-puller obeyed, taking a turn around the little forward thwart
+and paying the line as it jerked taut.&nbsp; The boat sheered out with
+a rush, and the hunter steadied it to a parallel course some twenty
+feet from the side of the <i>Ghost.</i></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, get that sail down and come alongside!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen
+ordered.</p>
+<p>He never let go his rifle, even passing down the tackles with one
+hand.&nbsp; When they were fast, bow and stern, and the two uninjured
+men prepared to come aboard, the hunter picked up his rifle as if to
+place it in a secure position.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Drop it!&rdquo; Wolf Larsen cried, and the hunter dropped
+it as though it were hot and had burned him.</p>
+<p>Once aboard, the two prisoners hoisted in the boat and under Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s direction carried the wounded boat-steerer down into
+the forecastle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If our five boats do as well as you and I have done, we&rsquo;ll
+have a pretty full crew,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The man you shot&mdash;he is&mdash;I hope?&rdquo; Maud Brewster
+quavered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In the shoulder,&rdquo; he answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nothing
+serious, Mr. Van Weyden will pull him around as good as ever in three
+or four weeks.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But he won&rsquo;t pull those chaps around, from the look
+of it,&rdquo; he added, pointing at the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> third
+boat, for which I had been steering and which was now nearly abreast
+of us.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s Horner&rsquo;s and Smoke&rsquo;s work.&nbsp;
+I told them we wanted live men, not carcasses.&nbsp; But the joy of
+shooting to hit is a most compelling thing, when once you&rsquo;ve learned
+how to shoot.&nbsp; Ever experienced it, Mr. Van Weyden?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I shook my head and regarded their work.&nbsp; It had indeed been
+bloody, for they had drawn off and joined our other three boats in the
+attack on the remaining two of the enemy.&nbsp; The deserted boat was
+in the trough of the sea, rolling drunkenly across each comber, its
+loose spritsail out at right angles to it and fluttering and flapping
+in the wind.&nbsp; The hunter and boat-puller were both lying awkwardly
+in the bottom, but the boat-steerer lay across the gunwale, half in
+and half out, his arms trailing in the water and his head rolling from
+side to side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t look, Miss Brewster, please don&rsquo;t look,&rdquo;
+I had begged of her, and I was glad that she had minded me and been
+spared the sight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Head right into the bunch, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; was Wolf
+Larsen&rsquo;s command.</p>
+<p>As we drew nearer, the firing ceased, and we saw that the fight was
+over.&nbsp; The remaining two boats had been captured by our five, and
+the seven were grouped together, waiting to be picked up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look at that!&rdquo; I cried involuntarily, pointing to the
+north-east.</p>
+<p>The blot of smoke which indicated the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> position
+had reappeared.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;ve been watching it,&rdquo; was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+calm reply.&nbsp; He measured the distance away to the fog-bank, and
+for an instant paused to feel the weight of the wind on his cheek.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll make it, I think; but you can depend upon it that
+blessed brother of mine has twigged our little game and is just a-humping
+for us.&nbsp; Ah, look at that!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The blot of smoke had suddenly grown larger, and it was very black.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll beat you out, though, brother mine,&rdquo; he chuckled.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll beat you out, and I hope you no worse than that you
+rack your old engines into scrap.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When we hove to, a hasty though orderly confusion reigned.&nbsp;
+The boats came aboard from every side at once.&nbsp; As fast as the
+prisoners came over the rail they were marshalled forward to the forecastle
+by our hunters, while our sailors hoisted in the boats, pell-mell, dropping
+them anywhere upon the deck and not stopping to lash them.&nbsp; We
+were already under way, all sails set and drawing, and the sheets being
+slacked off for a wind abeam, as the last boat lifted clear of the water
+and swung in the tackles.</p>
+<p>There was need for haste.&nbsp; The <i>Macedonia</i>, belching the
+blackest of smoke from her funnel, was charging down upon us from out
+of the north-east.&nbsp; Neglecting the boats that remained to her,
+she had altered her course so as to anticipate ours.&nbsp; She was not
+running straight for us, but ahead of us.&nbsp; Our courses were converging
+like the sides of an angle, the vertex of which was at the edge of the
+fog-bank.&nbsp; It was there, or not at all, that the <i>Macedonia</i>
+could hope to catch us.&nbsp; The hope for the <i>Ghost</i> lay in that
+she should pass that point before the <i>Macedonia</i> arrived at it.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen was steering, his eyes glistening and snapping as they
+dwelt upon and leaped from detail to detail of the chase.&nbsp; Now
+he studied the sea to windward for signs of the wind slackening or freshening,
+now the <i>Macedonia</i>; and again, his eyes roved over every sail,
+and he gave commands to slack a sheet here a trifle, to come in on one
+there a trifle, till he was drawing out of the <i>Ghost</i> the last
+bit of speed she possessed.&nbsp; All feuds and grudges were forgotten,
+and I was surprised at the alacrity with which the men who had so long
+endured his brutality sprang to execute his orders.&nbsp; Strange to
+say, the unfortunate Johnson came into my mind as we lifted and surged
+and heeled along, and I was aware of a regret that he was not alive
+and present; he had so loved the <i>Ghost</i> and delighted in her sailing
+powers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better get your rifles, you fellows,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen called
+to our hunters; and the five men lined the lee rail, guns in hand, and
+waited.</p>
+<p>The <i>Macedonia</i> was now but a mile away, the black smoke pouring
+from her funnel at a right angle, so madly she raced, pounding through
+the sea at a seventeen-knot gait&mdash;&ldquo;&rsquo;Sky-hooting through
+the brine,&rdquo; as Wolf Larsen quoted while gazing at her.&nbsp; We
+were not making more than nine knots, but the fog-bank was very near.</p>
+<p>A puff of smoke broke from the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> deck, we
+heard a heavy report, and a round hole took form in the stretched canvas
+of our mainsail.&nbsp; They were shooting at us with one of the small
+cannon which rumour had said they carried on board.&nbsp; Our men, clustering
+amidships, waved their hats and raised a derisive cheer.&nbsp; Again
+there was a puff of smoke and a loud report, this time the cannon-ball
+striking not more than twenty feet astern and glancing twice from sea
+to sea to windward ere it sank.</p>
+<p>But there was no rifle-firing for the reason that all their hunters
+were out in the boats or our prisoners.&nbsp; When the two vessels were
+half-a-mile apart, a third shot made another hole in our mainsail.&nbsp;
+Then we entered the fog.&nbsp; It was about us, veiling and hiding us
+in its dense wet gauze.</p>
+<p>The sudden transition was startling.&nbsp; The moment before we had
+been leaping through the sunshine, the clear sky above us, the sea breaking
+and rolling wide to the horizon, and a ship, vomiting smoke and fire
+and iron missiles, rushing madly upon us.&nbsp; And at once, as in an
+instant&rsquo;s leap, the sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even
+our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded
+eyes may see.&nbsp; The grey mist drove by us like a rain.&nbsp; Every
+woollen filament of our garments, every hair of our heads and faces,
+was jewelled with a crystal globule.&nbsp; The shrouds were wet with
+moisture; it dripped from our rigging overhead; and on the underside
+of our booms drops of water took shape in long swaying lines, which
+were detached and flung to the deck in mimic showers at each surge of
+the schooner.&nbsp; I was aware of a pent, stifled feeling.&nbsp; As
+the sounds of the ship thrusting herself through the waves were hurled
+back upon us by the fog, so were one&rsquo;s thoughts.&nbsp; The mind
+recoiled from contemplation of a world beyond this wet veil which wrapped
+us around.&nbsp; This was the world, the universe itself, its bounds
+so near one felt impelled to reach out both arms and push them back.&nbsp;
+It was impossible, that the rest could be beyond these walls of grey.&nbsp;
+The rest was a dream, no more than the memory of a dream.</p>
+<p>It was weird, strangely weird.&nbsp; I looked at Maud Brewster and
+knew that she was similarly affected.&nbsp; Then I looked at Wolf Larsen,
+but there was nothing subjective about his state of consciousness.&nbsp;
+His whole concern was with the immediate, objective present.&nbsp; He
+still held the wheel, and I felt that he was timing Time, reckoning
+the passage of the minutes with each forward lunge and leeward roll
+of the <i>Ghost.</i></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go for&rsquo;ard and hard alee without any noise,&rdquo; he
+said to me in a low voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Clew up the topsails first.&nbsp;
+Set men at all the sheets.&nbsp; Let there be no rattling of blocks,
+no sound of voices.&nbsp; No noise, understand, no noise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When all was ready, the word &ldquo;hard-a-lee&rdquo; was passed
+forward to me from man to man; and the <i>Ghost</i> heeled about on
+the port tack with practically no noise at all.&nbsp; And what little
+there was,&mdash;the slapping of a few reef-points and the creaking
+of a sheave in a block or two,&mdash;was ghostly under the hollow echoing
+pall in which we were swathed.</p>
+<p>We had scarcely filled away, it seemed, when the fog thinned abruptly
+and we were again in the sunshine, the wide-stretching sea breaking
+before us to the sky-line.&nbsp; But the ocean was bare.&nbsp; No wrathful
+<i>Macedonia</i> broke its surface nor blackened the sky with her smoke.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen at once squared away and ran down along the rim of the
+fog-bank.&nbsp; His trick was obvious.&nbsp; He had entered the fog
+to windward of the steamer, and while the steamer had blindly driven
+on into the fog in the chance of catching him, he had come about and
+out of his shelter and was now running down to re-enter to leeward.&nbsp;
+Successful in this, the old simile of the needle in the haystack would
+be mild indeed compared with his brother&rsquo;s chance of finding him.&nbsp;
+He did not run long.&nbsp; Jibing the fore- and main-sails and setting
+the topsails again, we headed back into the bank.&nbsp; As we entered
+I could have sworn I saw a vague bulk emerging to windward.&nbsp; I
+looked quickly at Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; Already we were ourselves buried
+in the fog, but he nodded his head.&nbsp; He, too, had seen it&mdash;the
+<i>Macedonia</i>, guessing his manoeuvre and failing by a moment in
+anticipating it.&nbsp; There was no doubt that we had escaped unseen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He can&rsquo;t keep this up,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll have to go back for the rest of his boats.&nbsp;
+Send a man to the wheel, Mr. Van Weyden, keep this course for the present,
+and you might as well set the watches, for we won&rsquo;t do any lingering
+to-night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d give five hundred dollars, though,&rdquo; he added,
+&ldquo;just to be aboard the <i>Macedonia</i> for five minutes, listening
+to my brother curse.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; he said to me when he had
+been relieved from the wheel, &ldquo;we must make these new-comers welcome.&nbsp;
+Serve out plenty of whisky to the hunters and see that a few bottles
+slip for&rsquo;ard.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll wager every man Jack of them is
+over the side to-morrow, hunting for Wolf Larsen as contentedly as ever
+they hunted for Death Larsen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But won&rsquo;t they escape as Wainwright did?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>He laughed shrewdly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not as long as our old hunters
+have anything to say about it.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m dividing amongst them
+a dollar a skin for all the skins shot by our new hunters.&nbsp; At
+least half of their enthusiasm to-day was due to that.&nbsp; Oh, no,
+there won&rsquo;t be any escaping if they have anything to say about
+it.&nbsp; And now you&rsquo;d better get for&rsquo;ard to your hospital
+duties.&nbsp; There must be a full ward waiting for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Wolf Larsen took the distribution of the whisky off my hands, and
+the bottles began to make their appearance while I worked over the fresh
+batch of wounded men in the forecastle.&nbsp; I had seen whisky drunk,
+such as whisky-and-soda by the men of the clubs, but never as these
+men drank it, from pannikins and mugs, and from the bottles&mdash;great
+brimming drinks, each one of which was in itself a debauch.&nbsp; But
+they did not stop at one or two.&nbsp; They drank and drank, and ever
+the bottles slipped forward and they drank more.</p>
+<p>Everybody drank; the wounded drank; Oofty-Oofty, who helped me, drank.&nbsp;
+Only Louis refrained, no more than cautiously wetting his lips with
+the liquor, though he joined in the revels with an abandon equal to
+that of most of them.&nbsp; It was a saturnalia.&nbsp; In loud voices
+they shouted over the day&rsquo;s fighting, wrangled about details,
+or waxed affectionate and made friends with the men whom they had fought.&nbsp;
+Prisoners and captors hiccoughed on one another&rsquo;s shoulders, and
+swore mighty oaths of respect and esteem.&nbsp; They wept over the miseries
+of the past and over the miseries yet to come under the iron rule of
+Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; And all cursed him and told terrible tales of his
+brutality.</p>
+<p>It was a strange and frightful spectacle&mdash;the small, bunk-lined
+space, the floor and walls leaping and lurching, the dim light, the
+swaying shadows lengthening and fore-shortening monstrously, the thick
+air heavy with smoke and the smell of bodies and iodoform, and the inflamed
+faces of the men&mdash;half-men, I should call them.&nbsp; I noted Oofty-Oofty,
+holding the end of a bandage and looking upon the scene, his velvety
+and luminous eyes glistening in the light like a deer&rsquo;s eyes,
+and yet I knew the barbaric devil that lurked in his breast and belied
+all the softness and tenderness, almost womanly, of his face and form.&nbsp;
+And I noticed the boyish face of Harrison,&mdash;a good face once, but
+now a demon&rsquo;s,&mdash;convulsed with passion as he told the new-comers
+of the hell-ship they were in and shrieked curses upon the head of Wolf
+Larsen.</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen it was, always Wolf Larsen, enslaver and tormentor of
+men, a male Circe and these his swine, suffering brutes that grovelled
+before him and revolted only in drunkenness and in secrecy.&nbsp; And
+was I, too, one of his swine? I thought.&nbsp; And Maud Brewster?&nbsp;
+No!&nbsp; I ground my teeth in my anger and determination till the man
+I was attending winced under my hand and Oofty-Oofty looked at me with
+curiosity.&nbsp; I felt endowed with a sudden strength.&nbsp; What of
+my new-found love, I was a giant.&nbsp; I feared nothing.&nbsp; I would
+work my will through it all, in spite of Wolf Larsen and of my own thirty-five
+bookish years.&nbsp; All would be well.&nbsp; I would make it well.&nbsp;
+And so, exalted, upborne by a sense of power, I turned my back on the
+howling inferno and climbed to the deck, where the fog drifted ghostly
+through the night and the air was sweet and pure and quiet.</p>
+<p>The steerage, where were two wounded hunters, was a repetition of
+the forecastle, except that Wolf Larsen was not being cursed; and it
+was with a great relief that I again emerged on deck and went aft to
+the cabin.&nbsp; Supper was ready, and Wolf Larsen and Maud were waiting
+for me.</p>
+<p>While all his ship was getting drunk as fast as it could, he remained
+sober.&nbsp; Not a drop of liquor passed his lips.&nbsp; He did not
+dare it under the circumstances, for he had only Louis and me to depend
+upon, and Louis was even now at the wheel.&nbsp; We were sailing on
+through the fog without a look-out and without lights.&nbsp; That Wolf
+Larsen had turned the liquor loose among his men surprised me, but he
+evidently knew their psychology and the best method of cementing in
+cordiality, what had begun in bloodshed.</p>
+<p>His victory over Death Larsen seemed to have had a remarkable effect
+upon him.&nbsp; The previous evening he had reasoned himself into the
+blues, and I had been waiting momentarily for one of his characteristic
+outbursts.&nbsp; Yet nothing had occurred, and he was now in splendid
+trim.&nbsp; Possibly his success in capturing so many hunters and boats
+had counteracted the customary reaction.&nbsp; At any rate, the blues
+were gone, and the blue devils had not put in an appearance.&nbsp; So
+I thought at the time; but, ah me, little I knew him or knew that even
+then, perhaps, he was meditating an outbreak more terrible than any
+I had seen.</p>
+<p>As I say, he discovered himself in splendid trim when I entered the
+cabin.&nbsp; He had had no headaches for weeks, his eyes were clear
+blue as the sky, his bronze was beautiful with perfect health; life
+swelled through his veins in full and magnificent flood.&nbsp; While
+waiting for me he had engaged Maud in animated discussion.&nbsp; Temptation
+was the topic they had hit upon, and from the few words I heard I made
+out that he was contending that temptation was temptation only when
+a man was seduced by it and fell.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For look you,&rdquo; he was saying, &ldquo;as I see it, a
+man does things because of desire.&nbsp; He has many desires.&nbsp;
+He may desire to escape pain, or to enjoy pleasure.&nbsp; But whatever
+he does, he does because he desires to do it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But suppose he desires to do two opposite things, neither
+of which will permit him to do the other?&rdquo; Maud interrupted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The very thing I was coming to,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And between these two desires is just where the soul of the
+man is manifest,&rdquo; she went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;If it is a good soul,
+it will desire and do the good action, and the contrary if it is a bad
+soul.&nbsp; It is the soul that decides.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bosh and nonsense!&rdquo; he exclaimed impatiently.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It is the desire that decides.&nbsp; Here is a man who wants
+to, say, get drunk.&nbsp; Also, he doesn&rsquo;t want to get drunk.&nbsp;
+What does he do?&nbsp; How does he do it?&nbsp; He is a puppet.&nbsp;
+He is the creature of his desires, and of the two desires he obeys the
+strongest one, that is all.&nbsp; His soul hasn&rsquo;t anything to
+do with it.&nbsp; How can he be tempted to get drunk and refuse to get
+drunk?&nbsp; If the desire to remain sober prevails, it is because it
+is the strongest desire.&nbsp; Temptation plays no part, unless&mdash;&rdquo;
+he paused while grasping the new thought which had come into his mind&mdash;&ldquo;unless
+he is tempted to remain sober.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha! ha!&rdquo; he laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;What do you think
+of that, Mr. Van Weyden?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That both of you are hair-splitting,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The man&rsquo;s soul is his desires.&nbsp; Or, if you will, the
+sum of his desires is his soul.&nbsp; Therein you are both wrong.&nbsp;
+You lay the stress upon the desire apart from the soul, Miss Brewster
+lays the stress on the soul apart from the desire, and in point of fact
+soul and desire are the same thing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;However,&rdquo; I continued, &ldquo;Miss Brewster is right
+in contending that temptation is temptation whether the man yield or
+overcome.&nbsp; Fire is fanned by the wind until it leaps up fiercely.&nbsp;
+So is desire like fire.&nbsp; It is fanned, as by a wind, by sight of
+the thing desired, or by a new and luring description or comprehension
+of the thing desired.&nbsp; There lies the temptation.&nbsp; It is the
+wind that fans the desire until it leaps up to mastery.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+temptation.&nbsp; It may not fan sufficiently to make the desire overmastering,
+but in so far as it fans at all, that far is it temptation.&nbsp; And,
+as you say, it may tempt for good as well as for evil.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I felt proud of myself as we sat down to the table.&nbsp; My words
+had been decisive.&nbsp; At least they had put an end to the discussion.</p>
+<p>But Wolf Larsen seemed voluble, prone to speech as I had never seen
+him before.&nbsp; It was as though he were bursting with pent energy
+which must find an outlet somehow.&nbsp; Almost immediately he launched
+into a discussion on love.&nbsp; As usual, his was the sheer materialistic
+side, and Maud&rsquo;s was the idealistic.&nbsp; For myself, beyond
+a word or so of suggestion or correction now and again, I took no part.</p>
+<p>He was brilliant, but so was Maud, and for some time I lost the thread
+of the conversation through studying her face as she talked.&nbsp; It
+was a face that rarely displayed colour, but to-night it was flushed
+and vivacious.&nbsp; Her wit was playing keenly, and she was enjoying
+the tilt as much as Wolf Larsen, and he was enjoying it hugely.&nbsp;
+For some reason, though I know not why in the argument, so utterly had
+I lost it in the contemplation of one stray brown lock of Maud&rsquo;s
+hair, he quoted from Iseult at Tintagel, where she says:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Blessed am I beyond women even herein,<br />That beyond all
+born women is my sin,<br />And perfect my transgression.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>As he had read pessimism into Omar, so now he read triumph, stinging
+triumph and exultation, into Swinburne&rsquo;s lines.&nbsp; And he read
+rightly, and he read well.&nbsp; He had hardly ceased reading when Louis
+put his head into the companion-way and whispered down:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Be easy, will ye?&nbsp; The fog&rsquo;s lifted, an&rsquo;
+&rsquo;tis the port light iv a steamer that&rsquo;s crossin&rsquo; our
+bow this blessed minute.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen sprang on deck, and so swiftly that by the time we followed
+him he had pulled the steerage-slide over the drunken clamour and was
+on his way forward to close the forecastle-scuttle.&nbsp; The fog, though
+it remained, had lifted high, where it obscured the stars and made the
+night quite black.&nbsp; Directly ahead of us I could see a bright red
+light and a white light, and I could hear the pulsing of a steamer&rsquo;s
+engines.&nbsp; Beyond a doubt it was the <i>Macedonia.</i></p>
+<p>Wolf Larsen had returned to the poop, and we stood in a silent group,
+watching the lights rapidly cross our bow.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lucky for me he doesn&rsquo;t carry a searchlight,&rdquo;
+Wolf Larsen said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What if I should cry out loudly?&rdquo; I queried in a whisper.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be all up,&rdquo; he answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;But have
+you thought upon what would immediately happen?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Before I had time to express any desire to know, he had me by the
+throat with his gorilla grip, and by a faint quiver of the muscles&mdash;a
+hint, as it were&mdash;he suggested to me the twist that would surely
+have broken my neck.&nbsp; The next moment he had released me and we
+were gazing at the <i>Macedonia&rsquo;s</i> lights.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What if I should cry out?&rdquo; Maud asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I like you too well to hurt you,&rdquo; he said softly&mdash;nay,
+there was a tenderness and a caress in his voice that made me wince.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t do it, just the same, for I&rsquo;d promptly
+break Mr. Van Weyden&rsquo;s neck.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then she has my permission to cry out,&rdquo; I said defiantly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hardly think you&rsquo;ll care to sacrifice the Dean of
+American Letters the Second,&rdquo; he sneered.</p>
+<p>We spoke no more, though we had become too used to one another for
+the silence to be awkward; and when the red light and the white had
+disappeared we returned to the cabin to finish the interrupted supper.</p>
+<p>Again they fell to quoting, and Maud gave Dowson&rsquo;s &ldquo;Impenitentia
+Ultima.&rdquo;&nbsp; She rendered it beautifully, but I watched not
+her, but Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; I was fascinated by the fascinated look
+he bent upon Maud.&nbsp; He was quite out of himself, and I noticed
+the unconscious movement of his lips as he shaped word for word as fast
+as she uttered them.&nbsp; He interrupted her when she gave the lines:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;And her eyes should be my light while the sun went out behind
+me,<br />And the viols in her voice be the last sound in my ear.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;There are viols in your voice,&rdquo; he said bluntly, and
+his eyes flashed their golden light.</p>
+<p>I could have shouted with joy at her control.&nbsp; She finished
+the concluding stanza without faltering and then slowly guided the conversation
+into less perilous channels.&nbsp; And all the while I sat in a half-daze,
+the drunken riot of the steerage breaking through the bulkhead, the
+man I feared and the woman I loved talking on and on.&nbsp; The table
+was not cleared.&nbsp; The man who had taken Mugridge&rsquo;s place
+had evidently joined his comrades in the forecastle.</p>
+<p>If ever Wolf Larsen attained the summit of living, he attained it
+then.&nbsp; From time to time I forsook my own thoughts to follow him,
+and I followed in amaze, mastered for the moment by his remarkable intellect,
+under the spell of his passion, for he was preaching the passion of
+revolt.&nbsp; It was inevitable that Milton&rsquo;s Lucifer should be
+instanced, and the keenness with which Wolf Larsen analysed and depicted
+the character was a revelation of his stifled genius.&nbsp; It reminded
+me of Taine, yet I knew the man had never heard of that brilliant though
+dangerous thinker.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God&rsquo;s
+thunderbolts,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen was saying.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hurled into
+hell, he was unbeaten.&nbsp; A third of God&rsquo;s angels he had led
+with him, and straightway he incited man to rebel against God, and gained
+for himself and hell the major portion of all the generations of man.&nbsp;
+Why was he beaten out of heaven?&nbsp; Because he was less brave than
+God? less proud? less aspiring?&nbsp; No!&nbsp; A thousand times no!&nbsp;
+God was more powerful, as he said, Whom thunder hath made greater.&nbsp;
+But Lucifer was a free spirit.&nbsp; To serve was to suffocate.&nbsp;
+He preferred suffering in freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable
+servility.&nbsp; He did not care to serve God.&nbsp; He cared to serve
+nothing.&nbsp; He was no figure-head.&nbsp; He stood on his own legs.&nbsp;
+He was an individual.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The first Anarchist,&rdquo; Maud laughed, rising and preparing
+to withdraw to her state-room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then it is good to be an anarchist!&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp;
+He, too, had risen, and he stood facing her, where she had paused at
+the door of her room, as he went on:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Here at least<br />We shall be free; the Almighty hath
+not built<br />Here for his envy; will not drive us hence;<br />Here
+we may reign secure; and in my choice<br />To reign is worth ambition,
+though in hell:<br />Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>It was the defiant cry of a mighty spirit.&nbsp; The cabin still
+rang with his voice, as he stood there, swaying, his bronzed face shining,
+his head up and dominant, and his eyes, golden and masculine, intensely
+masculine and insistently soft, flashing upon Maud at the door.</p>
+<p>Again that unnamable and unmistakable terror was in her eyes, and
+she said, almost in a whisper, &ldquo;You are Lucifer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The door closed and she was gone.&nbsp; He stood staring after her
+for a minute, then returned to himself and to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll relieve Louis at the wheel,&rdquo; he said shortly,
+&ldquo;and call upon you to relieve at midnight.&nbsp; Better turn in
+now and get some sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He pulled on a pair of mittens, put on his cap, and ascended the
+companion-stairs, while I followed his suggestion by going to bed.&nbsp;
+For some unknown reason, prompted mysteriously, I did not undress, but
+lay down fully clothed.&nbsp; For a time I listened to the clamour in
+the steerage and marvelled upon the love which had come to me; but my
+sleep on the <i>Ghost</i> had become most healthful and natural, and
+soon the songs and cries died away, my eyes closed, and my consciousness
+sank down into the half-death of slumber.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>I knew not what had aroused me, but I found myself out of my bunk,
+on my feet, wide awake, my soul vibrating to the warning of danger as
+it might have thrilled to a trumpet call.&nbsp; I threw open the door.&nbsp;
+The cabin light was burning low.&nbsp; I saw Maud, my Maud, straining
+and struggling and crushed in the embrace of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s arms.&nbsp;
+I could see the vain beat and flutter of her as she strove, pressing
+her face against his breast, to escape from him.&nbsp; All this I saw
+on the very instant of seeing and as I sprang forward.</p>
+<p>I struck him with my fist, on the face, as he raised his head, but
+it was a puny blow.&nbsp; He roared in a ferocious, animal-like way,
+and gave me a shove with his hand.&nbsp; It was only a shove, a flirt
+of the wrist, yet so tremendous was his strength that I was hurled backward
+as from a catapult.&nbsp; I struck the door of the state-room which
+had formerly been Mugridge&rsquo;s, splintering and smashing the panels
+with the impact of my body.&nbsp; I struggled to my feet, with difficulty
+dragging myself clear of the wrecked door, unaware of any hurt whatever.&nbsp;
+I was conscious only of an overmastering rage.&nbsp; I think I, too,
+cried aloud, as I drew the knife at my hip and sprang forward a second
+time.</p>
+<p>But something had happened.&nbsp; They were reeling apart.&nbsp;
+I was close upon him, my knife uplifted, but I withheld the blow.&nbsp;
+I was puzzled by the strangeness of it.&nbsp; Maud was leaning against
+the wall, one hand out for support; but he was staggering, his left
+hand pressed against his forehead and covering his eyes, and with the
+right he was groping about him in a dazed sort of way.&nbsp; It struck
+against the wall, and his body seemed to express a muscular and physical
+relief at the contact, as though he had found his bearings, his location
+in space as well as something against which to lean.</p>
+<p>Then I saw red again.&nbsp; All my wrongs and humiliations flashed
+upon me with a dazzling brightness, all that I had suffered and others
+had suffered at his hands, all the enormity of the man&rsquo;s very
+existence.&nbsp; I sprang upon him, blindly, insanely, and drove the
+knife into his shoulder.&nbsp; I knew, then, that it was no more than
+a flesh wound,&mdash;I had felt the steel grate on his shoulder-blade,&mdash;and
+I raised the knife to strike at a more vital part.</p>
+<p>But Maud had seen my first blow, and she cried, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t!&nbsp;
+Please don&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I dropped my arm for a moment, and a moment only.&nbsp; Again the
+knife was raised, and Wolf Larsen would have surely died had she not
+stepped between.&nbsp; Her arms were around me, her hair was brushing
+my face.&nbsp; My pulse rushed up in an unwonted manner, yet my rage
+mounted with it.&nbsp; She looked me bravely in the eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For my sake,&rdquo; she begged.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I would kill him for your sake!&rdquo; I cried, trying to
+free my arm without hurting her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; she said, and laid her fingers lightly on my
+lips.&nbsp; I could have kissed them, had I dared, even then, in my
+rage, the touch of them was so sweet, so very sweet.&nbsp; &ldquo;Please,
+please,&rdquo; she pleaded, and she disarmed me by the words, as I was
+to discover they would ever disarm me.</p>
+<p>I stepped back, separating from her, and replaced the knife in its
+sheath.&nbsp; I looked at Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; He still pressed his left
+hand against his forehead.&nbsp; It covered his eyes.&nbsp; His head
+was bowed.&nbsp; He seemed to have grown limp.&nbsp; His body was sagging
+at the hips, his great shoulders were drooping and shrinking forward.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Van, Weyden!&rdquo; he called hoarsely, and with a note of
+fright in his voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, Van Weyden! where are you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I looked at Maud.&nbsp; She did not speak, but nodded her head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here I am,&rdquo; I answered, stepping to his side.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Help me to a seat,&rdquo; he said, in the same hoarse, frightened
+voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am a sick man; a very sick man, Hump,&rdquo; he said, as
+he left my sustaining grip and sank into a chair.</p>
+<p>His head dropped forward on the table and was buried in his hands.&nbsp;
+From time to time it rocked back and forward as with pain.&nbsp; Once,
+when he half raised it, I saw the sweat standing in heavy drops on his
+forehead about the roots of his hair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am a sick man, a very sick man,&rdquo; he repeated again,
+and yet once again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo; I asked, resting my hand on his
+shoulder.&nbsp; &ldquo;What can I do for you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But he shook my hand off with an irritated movement, and for a long
+time I stood by his side in silence.&nbsp; Maud was looking on, her
+face awed and frightened.&nbsp; What had happened to him we could not
+imagine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;I must get into my bunk.&nbsp;
+Lend me a hand.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll be all right in a little while.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s those damn headaches, I believe.&nbsp; I was afraid of them.&nbsp;
+I had a feeling&mdash;no, I don&rsquo;t know what I&rsquo;m talking
+about.&nbsp; Help me into my bunk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But when I got him into his bunk he again buried his face in his
+hands, covering his eyes, and as I turned to go I could hear him murmuring,
+&ldquo;I am a sick man, a very sick man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Maud looked at me inquiringly as I emerged.&nbsp; I shook my head,
+saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something has happened to him.&nbsp; What, I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp;
+He is helpless, and frightened, I imagine, for the first time in his
+life.&nbsp; It must have occurred before he received the knife-thrust,
+which made only a superficial wound.&nbsp; You must have seen what happened.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head.&nbsp; &ldquo;I saw nothing.&nbsp; It is just
+as mysterious to me.&nbsp; He suddenly released me and staggered away.&nbsp;
+But what shall we do?&nbsp; What shall I do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you will wait, please, until I come back,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>I went on deck.&nbsp; Louis was at the wheel.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may go for&rsquo;ard and turn in,&rdquo; I said, taking
+it from him.</p>
+<p>He was quick to obey, and I found myself alone on the deck of the
+<i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; As quietly as was possible, I clewed up the topsails,
+lowered the flying jib and staysail, backed the jib over, and flattened
+the mainsail.&nbsp; Then I went below to Maud.&nbsp; I placed my finger
+on my lips for silence, and entered Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s room.&nbsp;
+He was in the same position in which I had left him, and his head was
+rocking&mdash;almost writhing&mdash;from side to side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Anything I can do for you?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>He made no reply at first, but on my repeating the question he answered,
+&ldquo;No, no; I&rsquo;m all right.&nbsp; Leave me alone till morning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But as I turned to go I noted that his head had resumed its rocking
+motion.&nbsp; Maud was waiting patiently for me, and I took notice,
+with a thrill of joy, of the queenly poise of her head and her glorious,
+calm eyes.&nbsp; Calm and sure they were as her spirit itself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you trust yourself to me for a journey of six hundred
+miles or so?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean&mdash;?&rdquo; she asked, and I knew she had guessed
+aright.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I mean just that,&rdquo; I replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;There
+is nothing left for us but the open boat.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For me, you mean,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are certainly
+as safe here as you have been.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, there is nothing left for us but the open boat,&rdquo;
+I iterated stoutly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Will you please dress as warmly as
+you can, at once, and make into a bundle whatever you wish to bring
+with you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And make all haste,&rdquo; I added, as she turned toward her
+state-room.</p>
+<p>The lazarette was directly beneath the cabin, and, opening the trap-door
+in the floor and carrying a candle with me, I dropped down and began
+overhauling the ship&rsquo;s stores.&nbsp; I selected mainly from the
+canned goods, and by the time I was ready, willing hands were extended
+from above to receive what I passed up.</p>
+<p>We worked in silence.&nbsp; I helped myself also to blankets, mittens,
+oilskins, caps, and such things, from the slop-chest.&nbsp; It was no
+light adventure, this trusting ourselves in a small boat to so raw and
+stormy a sea, and it was imperative that we should guard ourselves against
+the cold and wet.</p>
+<p>We worked feverishly at carrying our plunder on deck and depositing
+it amidships, so feverishly that Maud, whose strength was hardly a positive
+quantity, had to give over, exhausted, and sit on the steps at the break
+of the poop.&nbsp; This did not serve to recover her, and she lay on
+her back, on the hard deck, arms stretched out, and whole body relaxed.&nbsp;
+It was a trick I remembered of my sister, and I knew she would soon
+be herself again.&nbsp; I knew, also, that weapons would not come in
+amiss, and I re-entered Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s state-room to get his rifle
+and shot-gun.&nbsp; I spoke to him, but he made no answer, though his
+head was still rocking from side to side and he was not asleep.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-bye, Lucifer,&rdquo; I whispered to myself as I softly
+closed the door.</p>
+<p>Next to obtain was a stock of ammunition,&mdash;an easy matter, though
+I had to enter the steerage companion-way to do it.&nbsp; Here the hunters
+stored the ammunition-boxes they carried in the boats, and here, but
+a few feet from their noisy revels, I took possession of two boxes.</p>
+<p>Next, to lower a boat.&nbsp; Not so simple a task for one man.&nbsp;
+Having cast off the lashings, I hoisted first on the forward tackle,
+then on the aft, till the boat cleared the rail, when I lowered away,
+one tackle and then the other, for a couple of feet, till it hung snugly,
+above the water, against the schooner&rsquo;s side.&nbsp; I made certain
+that it contained the proper equipment of oars, rowlocks, and sail.&nbsp;
+Water was a consideration, and I robbed every boat aboard of its breaker.&nbsp;
+As there were nine boats all told, it meant that we should have plenty
+of water, and ballast as well, though there was the chance that the
+boat would be overloaded, what of the generous supply of other things
+I was taking.</p>
+<p>While Maud was passing me the provisions and I was storing them in
+the boat, a sailor came on deck from the forecastle.&nbsp; He stood
+by the weather rail for a time (we were lowering over the lee rail),
+and then sauntered slowly amidships, where he again paused and stood
+facing the wind, with his back toward us.&nbsp; I could hear my heart
+beating as I crouched low in the boat.&nbsp; Maud had sunk down upon
+the deck and was, I knew, lying motionless, her body in the shadow of
+the bulwark.&nbsp; But the man never turned, and, after stretching his
+arms above his head and yawning audibly, he retraced his steps to the
+forecastle scuttle and disappeared.</p>
+<p>A few minutes sufficed to finish the loading, and I lowered the boat
+into the water.&nbsp; As I helped Maud over the rail and felt her form
+close to mine, it was all I could do to keep from crying out, &ldquo;I
+love you!&nbsp; I love you!&rdquo;&nbsp; Truly Humphrey Van Weyden was
+at last in love, I thought, as her fingers clung to mine while I lowered
+her down to the boat.&nbsp; I held on to the rail with one hand and
+supported her weight with the other, and I was proud at the moment of
+the feat.&nbsp; It was a strength I had not possessed a few months before,
+on the day I said good-bye to Charley Furuseth and started for San Francisco
+on the ill-fated <i>Martinez.</i></p>
+<p>As the boat ascended on a sea, her feet touched and I released her
+hands.&nbsp; I cast off the tackles and leaped after her.&nbsp; I had
+never rowed in my life, but I put out the oars and at the expense of
+much effort got the boat clear of the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Then I experimented
+with the sail.&nbsp; I had seen the boat-steerers and hunters set their
+spritsails many times, yet this was my first attempt.&nbsp; What took
+them possibly two minutes took me twenty, but in the end I succeeded
+in setting and trimming it, and with the steering-oar in my hands hauled
+on the wind.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There lies Japan,&rdquo; I remarked, &ldquo;straight before
+us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Humphrey Van Weyden,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you are a brave
+man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; I answered, &ldquo;it is you who are a brave woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We turned our heads, swayed by a common impulse to see the last of
+the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Her low hull lifted and rolled to windward on
+a sea; her canvas loomed darkly in the night; her lashed wheel creaked
+as the rudder kicked; then sight and sound of her faded away, and we
+were alone on the dark sea.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Day broke, grey and chill.&nbsp; The boat was close-hauled on a fresh
+breeze and the compass indicated that we were just making the course
+which would bring us to Japan.&nbsp; Though stoutly mittened, my fingers
+were cold, and they pained from the grip on the steering-oar.&nbsp;
+My feet were stinging from the bite of the frost, and I hoped fervently
+that the sun would shine.</p>
+<p>Before me, in the bottom of the boat, lay Maud.&nbsp; She, at least,
+was warm, for under her and over her were thick blankets.&nbsp; The
+top one I had drawn over her face to shelter it from the night, so I
+could see nothing but the vague shape of her, and her light-brown hair,
+escaped from the covering and jewelled with moisture from the air.</p>
+<p>Long I looked at her, dwelling upon that one visible bit of her as
+only a man would who deemed it the most precious thing in the world.&nbsp;
+So insistent was my gaze that at last she stirred under the blankets,
+the top fold was thrown back and she smiled out on me, her eyes yet
+heavy with sleep.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-morning, Mr. Van Weyden,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Have
+you sighted land yet?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I answered, &ldquo;but we are approaching it at
+a rate of six miles an hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made a <i>mou&egrave;</i> of disappointment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But that is equivalent to one hundred and forty-four miles
+in twenty-four hours,&rdquo; I added reassuringly.</p>
+<p>Her face brightened.&nbsp; &ldquo;And how far have we to go?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Siberia lies off there,&rdquo; I said, pointing to the west.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But to the south-west, some six hundred miles, is Japan.&nbsp;
+If this wind should hold, we&rsquo;ll make it in five days.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And if it storms?&nbsp; The boat could not live?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had a way of looking one in the eyes and demanding the truth,
+and thus she looked at me as she asked the question.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would have to storm very hard,&rdquo; I temporized.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And if it storms very hard?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I nodded my head.&nbsp; &ldquo;But we may be picked up any moment
+by a sealing-schooner.&nbsp; They are plentifully distributed over this
+part of the ocean.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, you are chilled through!&rdquo; she cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Look!&nbsp;
+You are shivering.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t deny it; you are.&nbsp; And here
+I have been lying warm as toast.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see that it would help matters if you, too,
+sat up and were chilled,&rdquo; I laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It will, though, when I learn to steer, which I certainly
+shall.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She sat up and began making her simple toilet.&nbsp; She shook down
+her hair, and it fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and
+shoulders.&nbsp; Dear, damp brown hair!&nbsp; I wanted to kiss it, to
+ripple it through my fingers, to bury my face in it.&nbsp; I gazed entranced,
+till the boat ran into the wind and the flapping sail warned me I was
+not attending to my duties.&nbsp; Idealist and romanticist that I was
+and always had been in spite of my analytical nature, yet I had failed
+till now in grasping much of the physical characteristics of love.&nbsp;
+The love of man and woman, I had always held, was a sublimated something
+related to spirit, a spiritual bond that linked and drew their souls
+together.&nbsp; The bonds of the flesh had little part in my cosmos
+of love.&nbsp; But I was learning the sweet lesson for myself that the
+soul transmuted itself, expressed itself, through the flesh; that the
+sight and sense and touch of the loved one&rsquo;s hair was as much
+breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the light that shone from
+the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips.&nbsp; After all,
+pure spirit was unknowable, a thing to be sensed and divined only; nor
+could it express itself in terms of itself.&nbsp; Jehovah was anthropomorphic
+because he could address himself to the Jews only in terms of their
+understanding; so he was conceived as in their own image, as a cloud,
+a pillar of fire, a tangible, physical something which the mind of the
+Israelites could grasp.</p>
+<p>And so I gazed upon Maud&rsquo;s light-brown hair, and loved it,
+and learned more of love than all the poets and singers had taught me
+with all their songs and sonnets.&nbsp; She flung it back with a sudden
+adroit movement, and her face emerged, smiling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t women wear their hair down always?&rdquo;
+I asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is so much more beautiful.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If it didn&rsquo;t tangle so dreadfully,&rdquo; she laughed.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;There!&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve lost one of my precious hair-pins!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and
+again, such was my delight in following her every movement as she searched
+through the blankets for the pin.&nbsp; I was surprised, and joyfully,
+that she was so much the woman, and the display of each trait and mannerism
+that was characteristically feminine gave me keener joy.&nbsp; For I
+had been elevating her too highly in my concepts of her, removing her
+too far from the plane of the human, and too far from me.&nbsp; I had
+been making of her a creature goddess-like and unapproachable.&nbsp;
+So I hailed with delight the little traits that proclaimed her only
+woman after all, such as the toss of the head which flung back the cloud
+of hair, and the search for the pin.&nbsp; She was woman, my kind, on
+my plane, and the delightful intimacy of kind, of man and woman, was
+possible, as well as the reverence and awe in which I knew I should
+always hold her.</p>
+<p>She found the pin with an adorable little cry, and I turned my attention
+more fully to my steering.&nbsp; I proceeded to experiment, lashing
+and wedging the steering-oar until the boat held on fairly well by the
+wind without my assistance.&nbsp; Occasionally it came up too close,
+or fell off too freely; but it always recovered itself and in the main
+behaved satisfactorily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now we shall have breakfast,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+first you must be more warmly clad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I got out a heavy shirt, new from the slop-chest and made from blanket
+goods.&nbsp; I knew the kind, so thick and so close of texture that
+it could resist the rain and not be soaked through after hours of wetting.&nbsp;
+When she had slipped this on over her head, I exchanged the boy&rsquo;s
+cap she wore for a man&rsquo;s cap, large enough to cover her hair,
+and, when the flap was turned down, to completely cover her neck and
+ears.&nbsp; The effect was charming.&nbsp; Her face was of the sort
+that cannot but look well under all circumstances.&nbsp; Nothing could
+destroy its exquisite oval, its well-nigh classic lines, its delicately
+stencilled brows, its large brown eyes, clear-seeing and calm, gloriously
+calm.</p>
+<p>A puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us just then.&nbsp;
+The boat was caught as it obliquely crossed the crest of a wave.&nbsp;
+It went over suddenly, burying its gunwale level with the sea and shipping
+a bucketful or so of water.&nbsp; I was opening a can of tongue at the
+moment, and I sprang to the sheet and cast it off just in time.&nbsp;
+The sail flapped and fluttered, and the boat paid off.&nbsp; A few minutes
+of regulating sufficed to put it on its course again, when I returned
+to the preparation of breakfast.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It does very well, it seems, though I am not versed in things
+nautical,&rdquo; she said, nodding her head with grave approval at my
+steering contrivance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind,&rdquo;
+I explained.&nbsp; &ldquo;When running more freely, with the wind astern
+abeam, or on the quarter, it will be necessary for me to steer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must say I don&rsquo;t understand your technicalities,&rdquo;
+she said, &ldquo;but I do your conclusion, and I don&rsquo;t like it.&nbsp;
+You cannot steer night and day and for ever.&nbsp; So I shall expect,
+after breakfast, to receive my first lesson.&nbsp; And then you shall
+lie down and sleep.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll stand watches just as they do
+on ships.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see how I am to teach you,&rdquo; I made protest.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I am just learning for myself.&nbsp; You little thought when
+you trusted yourself to me that I had had no experience whatever with
+small boats.&nbsp; This is the first time I have ever been in one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then we&rsquo;ll learn together, sir.&nbsp; And since you&rsquo;ve
+had a night&rsquo;s start you shall teach me what you have learned.&nbsp;
+And now, breakfast.&nbsp; My! this air does give one an appetite!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No coffee,&rdquo; I said regretfully, passing her buttered
+sea-biscuits and a slice of canned tongue.&nbsp; &ldquo;And there will
+be no tea, no soups, nothing hot, till we have made land somewhere,
+somehow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>After the simple breakfast, capped with a cup of cold water, Maud
+took her lesson in steering.&nbsp; In teaching her I learned quite a
+deal myself, though I was applying the knowledge already acquired by
+sailing the <i>Ghost</i> and by watching the boat-steerers sail the
+small boats.&nbsp; She was an apt pupil, and soon learned to keep the
+course, to luff in the puffs and to cast off the sheet in an emergency.</p>
+<p>Having grown tired, apparently, of the task, she relinquished the
+oar to me.&nbsp; I had folded up the blankets, but she now proceeded
+to spread them out on the bottom.&nbsp; When all was arranged snugly,
+she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, sir, to bed.&nbsp; And you shall sleep until luncheon.&nbsp;
+Till dinner-time,&rdquo; she corrected, remembering the arrangement
+on the <i>Ghost.</i></p>
+<p>What could I do?&nbsp; She insisted, and said, &ldquo;Please, please,&rdquo;
+whereupon I turned the oar over to her and obeyed.&nbsp; I experienced
+a positive sensuous delight as I crawled into the bed she had made with
+her hands.&nbsp; The calm and control which were so much a part of her
+seemed to have been communicated to the blankets, so that I was aware
+of a soft dreaminess and content, and of an oval face and brown eyes
+framed in a fisherman&rsquo;s cap and tossing against a background now
+of grey cloud, now of grey sea, and then I was aware that I had been
+asleep.</p>
+<p>I looked at my watch.&nbsp; It was one o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; I had
+slept seven hours!&nbsp; And she had been steering seven hours!&nbsp;
+When I took the steering-oar I had first to unbend her cramped fingers.&nbsp;
+Her modicum of strength had been exhausted, and she was unable even
+to move from her position.&nbsp; I was compelled to let go the sheet
+while I helped her to the nest of blankets and chafed her hands and
+arms.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am so tired,&rdquo; she said, with a quick intake of the
+breath and a sigh, drooping her head wearily.</p>
+<p>But she straightened it the next moment.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t
+scold, don&rsquo;t you dare scold,&rdquo; she cried with mock defiance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope my face does not appear angry,&rdquo; I answered seriously;
+&ldquo;for I assure you I am not in the least angry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;N-no,&rdquo; she considered.&nbsp; &ldquo;It looks only reproachful.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then it is an honest face, for it looks what I feel.&nbsp;
+You were not fair to yourself, nor to me.&nbsp; How can I ever trust
+you again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked penitent.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be good,&rdquo; she
+said, as a naughty child might say it.&nbsp; &ldquo;I promise&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To obey as a sailor would obey his captain?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was stupid of me,
+I know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you must promise something else,&rdquo; I ventured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Readily.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That you will not say, &lsquo;Please, please,&rsquo; too often;
+for when you do you are sure to override my authority.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed with amused appreciation.&nbsp; She, too, had noticed
+the power of the repeated &ldquo;please.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is a good word&mdash;&rdquo; I began.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I must not overwork it,&rdquo; she broke in.</p>
+<p>But she laughed weakly, and her head drooped again.&nbsp; I left
+the oar long enough to tuck the blankets about her feet and to pull
+a single fold across her face.&nbsp; Alas! she was not strong.&nbsp;
+I looked with misgiving toward the south-west and thought of the six
+hundred miles of hardship before us&mdash;ay, if it were no worse than
+hardship.&nbsp; On this sea a storm might blow up at any moment and
+destroy us.&nbsp; And yet I was unafraid.&nbsp; I was without confidence
+in the future, extremely doubtful, and yet I felt no underlying fear.&nbsp;
+It must come right, it must come right, I repeated to myself, over and
+over again.</p>
+<p>The wind freshened in the afternoon, raising a stiffer sea and trying
+the boat and me severely.&nbsp; But the supply of food and the nine
+breakers of water enabled the boat to stand up to the sea and wind,
+and I held on as long as I dared.&nbsp; Then I removed the sprit, tightly
+hauling down the peak of the sail, and we raced along under what sailors
+call a leg-of-mutton.</p>
+<p>Late in the afternoon I sighted a steamer&rsquo;s smoke on the horizon
+to leeward, and I knew it either for a Russian cruiser, or, more likely,
+the <i>Macedonia</i> still seeking the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; The sun had
+not shone all day, and it had been bitter cold.&nbsp; As night drew
+on, the clouds darkened and the wind freshened, so that when Maud and
+I ate supper it was with our mittens on and with me still steering and
+eating morsels between puffs.</p>
+<p>By the time it was dark, wind and sea had become too strong for the
+boat, and I reluctantly took in the sail and set about making a drag
+or sea-anchor.&nbsp; I had learned of the device from the talk of the
+hunters, and it was a simple thing to manufacture.&nbsp; Furling the
+sail and lashing it securely about the mast, boom, sprit, and two pairs
+of spare oars, I threw it overboard.&nbsp; A line connected it with
+the bow, and as it floated low in the water, practically unexposed to
+the wind, it drifted less rapidly than the boat.&nbsp; In consequence
+it held the boat bow on to the sea and wind&mdash;the safest position
+in which to escape being swamped when the sea is breaking into whitecaps.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now?&rdquo; Maud asked cheerfully, when the task was accomplished
+and I pulled on my mittens.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now we are no longer travelling toward Japan,&rdquo; I
+answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;Our drift is to the south-east, or south-south-east,
+at the rate of at least two miles an hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That will be only twenty-four miles,&rdquo; she urged, &ldquo;if
+the wind remains high all night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, and only one hundred and forty miles if it continues
+for three days and nights.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it won&rsquo;t continue,&rdquo; she said with easy confidence.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It will turn around and blow fair.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The sea is the great faithless one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But the wind!&rdquo; she retorted.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have heard
+you grow eloquent over the brave trade-wind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish I had thought to bring Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s chronometer
+and sextant,&rdquo; I said, still gloomily.&nbsp; &ldquo;Sailing one
+direction, drifting another direction, to say nothing of the set of
+the current in some third direction, makes a resultant which dead reckoning
+can never calculate.&nbsp; Before long we won&rsquo;t know where we
+are by five hundred miles.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then I begged her pardon and promised I should not be disheartened
+any more.&nbsp; At her solicitation I let her take the watch till midnight,&mdash;it
+was then nine o&rsquo;clock, but I wrapped her in blankets and put an
+oilskin about her before I lay down.&nbsp; I slept only cat-naps.&nbsp;
+The boat was leaping and pounding as it fell over the crests, I could
+hear the seas rushing past, and spray was continually being thrown aboard.&nbsp;
+And still, it was not a bad night, I mused&mdash;nothing to the nights
+I had been through on the <i>Ghost</i>; nothing, perhaps, to the nights
+we should go through in this cockle-shell.&nbsp; Its planking was three-quarters
+of an inch thick.&nbsp; Between us and the bottom of the sea was less
+than an inch of wood.</p>
+<p>And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid.&nbsp; The
+death which Wolf Larsen and even Thomas Mugridge had made me fear, I
+no longer feared.&nbsp; The coming of Maud Brewster into my life seemed
+to have transformed me.&nbsp; After all, I thought, it is better and
+finer to love than to be loved, if it makes something in life so worth
+while that one is not loath to die for it.&nbsp; I forget my own life
+in the love of another life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted
+so much to live as right now when I place the least value upon my own
+life.&nbsp; I never had so much reason for living, was my concluding
+thought; and after that, until I dozed, I contented myself with trying
+to pierce the darkness to where I knew Maud crouched low in the stern-sheets,
+watchful of the foaming sea and ready to call me on an instant&rsquo;s
+notice.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>There is no need of going into an extended recital of our suffering
+in the small boat during the many days we were driven and drifted, here
+and there, willy-nilly, across the ocean.&nbsp; The high wind blew from
+the north-west for twenty-four hours, when it fell calm, and in the
+night sprang up from the south-west.&nbsp; This was dead in our teeth,
+but I took in the sea-anchor and set sail, hauling a course on the wind
+which took us in a south-south-easterly direction.&nbsp; It was an even
+choice between this and the west-north-westerly course which the wind
+permitted; but the warm airs of the south fanned my desire for a warmer
+sea and swayed my decision.</p>
+<p>In three hours&mdash;it was midnight, I well remember, and as dark
+as I had ever seen it on the sea&mdash;the wind, still blowing out of
+the south-west, rose furiously, and once again I was compelled to set
+the sea-anchor.</p>
+<p>Day broke and found me wan-eyed and the ocean lashed white, the boat
+pitching, almost on end, to its drag.&nbsp; We were in imminent danger
+of being swamped by the whitecaps.&nbsp; As it was, spray and spume
+came aboard in such quantities that I bailed without cessation.&nbsp;
+The blankets were soaking.&nbsp; Everything was wet except Maud, and
+she, in oilskins, rubber boots, and sou&rsquo;wester, was dry, all but
+her face and hands and a stray wisp of hair.&nbsp; She relieved me at
+the bailing-hole from time to time, and bravely she threw out the water
+and faced the storm.&nbsp; All things are relative.&nbsp; It was no
+more than a stiff blow, but to us, fighting for life in our frail craft,
+it was indeed a storm.</p>
+<p>Cold and cheerless, the wind beating on our faces, the white seas
+roaring by, we struggled through the day.&nbsp; Night came, but neither
+of us slept.&nbsp; Day came, and still the wind beat on our faces and
+the white seas roared past.&nbsp; By the second night Maud was falling
+asleep from exhaustion.&nbsp; I covered her with oilskins and a tarpaulin.&nbsp;
+She was comparatively dry, but she was numb with the cold.&nbsp; I feared
+greatly that she might die in the night; but day broke, cold and cheerless,
+with the same clouded sky and beating wind and roaring seas.</p>
+<p>I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours.&nbsp; I was wet and chilled
+to the marrow, till I felt more dead than alive.&nbsp; My body was stiff
+from exertion as well as from cold, and my aching muscles gave me the
+severest torture whenever I used them, and I used them continually.&nbsp;
+And all the time we were being driven off into the north-east, directly
+away from Japan and toward bleak Bering Sea.</p>
+<p>And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated.&nbsp;
+In fact, toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle and
+something more.&nbsp; The boat&rsquo;s bow plunged under a crest, and
+we came through quarter-full of water.&nbsp; I bailed like a madman.&nbsp;
+The liability of shipping another such sea was enormously increased
+by the water that weighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy.&nbsp;
+And another such sea meant the end.&nbsp; When I had the boat empty
+again I was forced to take away the tarpaulin which covered Maud, in
+order that I might lash it down across the bow.&nbsp; It was well I
+did, for it covered the boat fully a third of the way aft, and three
+times, in the next several hours, it flung off the bulk of the down-rushing
+water when the bow shoved under the seas.</p>
+<p>Maud&rsquo;s condition was pitiable.&nbsp; She sat crouched in the
+bottom of the boat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing
+the pain she suffered.&nbsp; But ever her eyes looked bravely at me,
+and ever her lips uttered brave words.</p>
+<p>The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little
+I noticed it.&nbsp; I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-sheets.&nbsp;
+The morning of the fourth day found the wind diminished to a gentle
+whisper, the sea dying down and the sun shining upon us.&nbsp; Oh, the
+blessed sun!&nbsp; How we bathed our poor bodies in its delicious warmth,
+reviving like bugs and crawling things after a storm.&nbsp; We smiled
+again, said amusing things, and waxed optimistic over our situation.&nbsp;
+Yet it was, if anything, worse than ever.&nbsp; We were farther from
+Japan than the night we left the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; Nor could I more
+than roughly guess our latitude and longitude.&nbsp; At a calculation
+of a two-mile drift per hour, during the seventy and odd hours of the
+storm, we had been driven at least one hundred and fifty miles to the
+north-east.&nbsp; But was such calculated drift correct?&nbsp; For all
+I knew, it might have been four miles per hour instead of two.&nbsp;
+In which case we were another hundred and fifty miles to the bad.</p>
+<p>Where we were I did not know, though there was quite a likelihood
+that we were in the vicinity of the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; There were seals
+about us, and I was prepared to sight a sealing-schooner at any time.&nbsp;
+We did sight one, in the afternoon, when the north-west breeze had sprung
+up freshly once more.&nbsp; But the strange schooner lost itself on
+the sky-line and we alone occupied the circle of the sea.</p>
+<p>Came days of fog, when even Maud&rsquo;s spirit drooped and there
+were no merry words upon her lips; days of calm, when we floated on
+the lonely immensity of sea, oppressed by its greatness and yet marvelling
+at the miracle of tiny life, for we still lived and struggled to live;
+days of sleet and wind and snow-squalls, when nothing could keep us
+warm; or days of drizzling rain, when we filled our water-breakers from
+the drip of the wet sail.</p>
+<p>And ever I loved Maud with an increasing love.&nbsp; She was so many-sided,
+so many-mooded&mdash;&ldquo;protean-mooded&rdquo; I called her.&nbsp;
+But I called her this, and other and dearer things, in my thoughts only.&nbsp;
+Though the declaration of my love urged and trembled on my tongue a
+thousand times, I knew that it was no time for such a declaration.&nbsp;
+If for no other reason, it was no time, when one was protecting and
+trying to save a woman, to ask that woman for her love.&nbsp; Delicate
+as was the situation, not alone in this but in other ways, I flattered
+myself that I was able to deal delicately with it; and also I flattered
+myself that by look or sign I gave no advertisement of the love I felt
+for her.&nbsp; We were like good comrades, and we grew better comrades
+as the days went by.</p>
+<p>One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and
+fear.&nbsp; The terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering,
+the strangeness and isolation of the situation,&mdash;all that should
+have frightened a robust woman,&mdash;seemed to make no impression upon
+her who had known life only in its most sheltered and consummately artificial
+aspects, and who was herself all fire and dew and mist, sublimated spirit,
+all that was soft and tender and clinging in woman.&nbsp; And yet I
+am wrong.&nbsp; She <i>was</i> timid and afraid, but she possessed courage.&nbsp;
+The flesh and the qualms of the flesh she was heir to, but the flesh
+bore heavily only on the flesh.&nbsp; And she was spirit, first and
+always spirit, etherealized essence of life, calm as her calm eyes,
+and sure of permanence in the changing order of the universe.</p>
+<p>Came days of storm, days and nights of storm, when the ocean menaced
+us with its roaring whiteness, and the wind smote our struggling boat
+with a Titan&rsquo;s buffets.&nbsp; And ever we were flung off, farther
+and farther, to the north-east.&nbsp; It was in such a storm, and the
+worst that we had experienced, that I cast a weary glance to leeward,
+not in quest of anything, but more from the weariness of facing the
+elemental strife, and in mute appeal, almost, to the wrathful powers
+to cease and let us be.&nbsp; What I saw I could not at first believe.&nbsp;
+Days and nights of sleeplessness and anxiety had doubtless turned my
+head.&nbsp; I looked back at Maud, to identify myself, as it were, in
+time and space.&nbsp; The sight of her dear wet cheeks, her flying hair,
+and her brave brown eyes convinced me that my vision was still healthy.&nbsp;
+Again I turned my face to leeward, and again I saw the jutting promontory,
+black and high and naked, the raging surf that broke about its base
+and beat its front high up with spouting fountains, the black and forbidden
+coast-line running toward the south-east and fringed with a tremendous
+scarf of white.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Maud,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Maud.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She turned her head and beheld the sight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It cannot be Alaska!&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Alas, no,&rdquo; I answered, and asked, &ldquo;Can you swim?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Neither can I,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;So we must get
+ashore without swimming, in some opening between the rocks through which
+we can drive the boat and clamber out.&nbsp; But we must be quick, most
+quick&mdash;and sure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I spoke with a confidence she knew I did not feel, for she looked
+at me with that unfaltering gaze of hers and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have not thanked you yet for all you have done for me but&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She hesitated, as if in doubt how best to word her gratitude.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said, brutally, for I was not quite pleased
+with her thanking me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You might help me,&rdquo; she smiled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To acknowledge your obligations before you die?&nbsp; Not
+at all.&nbsp; We are not going to die.&nbsp; We shall land on that island,
+and we shall be snug and sheltered before the day is done.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I spoke stoutly, but I did not believe a word.&nbsp; Nor was I prompted
+to lie through fear.&nbsp; I felt no fear, though I was sure of death
+in that boiling surge amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing nearer.&nbsp;
+It was impossible to hoist sail and claw off that shore.&nbsp; The wind
+would instantly capsize the boat; the seas would swamp it the moment
+it fell into the trough; and, besides, the sail, lashed to the spare
+oars, dragged in the sea ahead of us.</p>
+<p>As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few hundred
+yards to leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that Maud must die.&nbsp;
+My cursed imagination saw her beaten and mangled against the rocks,
+and it was too terrible.&nbsp; I strove to compel myself to think we
+would make the landing safely, and so I spoke, not what I believed,
+but what I preferred to believe.</p>
+<p>I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for
+a moment I entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and
+leaping overboard.&nbsp; Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment,
+when we entered on the final stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim
+my love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the desperate struggle
+and die.</p>
+<p>Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat.&nbsp;
+I felt her mittened hand come out to mine.&nbsp; And thus, without speech,
+we waited the end.&nbsp; We were not far off the line the wind made
+with the western edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that
+some set of the current or send of the sea would drift us past before
+we reached the surf.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We shall go clear,&rdquo; I said, with a confidence which
+I knew deceived neither of us.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By God, we <i>will</i> go clear!&rdquo; I cried, five minutes
+later.</p>
+<p>The oath left my lips in my excitement&mdash;the first, I do believe,
+in my life, unless &ldquo;trouble it,&rdquo; an expletive of my youth,
+be accounted an oath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have convinced me of your sincerity,&rdquo; she said,
+with a faint smile.&nbsp; &ldquo;I do know, now, that we shall go clear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory,
+and as we looked we could see grow the intervening coastline of what
+was evidently a deep cove.&nbsp; At the same time there broke upon our
+ears a continuous and mighty bellowing.&nbsp; It partook of the magnitude
+and volume of distant thunder, and it came to us directly from leeward,
+rising above the crash of the surf and travelling directly in the teeth
+of the storm.&nbsp; As we passed the point the whole cove burst upon
+our view, a half-moon of white sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf,
+and which was covered with myriads of seals.&nbsp; It was from them
+that the great bellowing went up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A rookery!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now are we indeed
+saved.&nbsp; There must be men and cruisers to protect them from the
+seal-hunters.&nbsp; Possibly there is a station ashore.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, &ldquo;Still
+bad, but not so bad.&nbsp; And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall
+drift by that next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered beach,
+where we may land without wetting our feet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And the gods were kind.&nbsp; The first and second headlands were
+directly in line with the south-west wind; but once around the second,&mdash;and
+we went perilously near,&mdash;we picked up the third headland, still
+in line with the wind and with the other two.&nbsp; But the cove that
+intervened!&nbsp; It penetrated deep into the land, and the tide, setting
+in, drifted us under the shelter of the point.&nbsp; Here the sea was
+calm, save for a heavy but smooth ground-swell, and I took in the sea-anchor
+and began to row.&nbsp; From the point the shore curved away, more and
+more to the south and west, until at last it disclosed a cove within
+the cove, a little land-locked harbour, the water level as a pond, broken
+only by tiny ripples where vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled
+down from over the frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred
+feet inshore.</p>
+<p>Here were no seals whatever.&nbsp; The boat&rsquo;s stern touched
+the hard shingle.&nbsp; I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud.&nbsp;
+The next moment she was beside me.&nbsp; As my fingers released hers,
+she clutched for my arm hastily.&nbsp; At the same moment I swayed,
+as about to fall to the sand.&nbsp; This was the startling effect of
+the cessation of motion.&nbsp; We had been so long upon the moving,
+rocking sea that the stable land was a shock to us.&nbsp; We expected
+the beach to lift up this way and that, and the rocky walls to swing
+back and forth like the sides of a ship; and when we braced ourselves,
+automatically, for these various expected movements, their non-occurrence
+quite overcame our equilibrium.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I really must sit down,&rdquo; Maud said, with a nervous laugh
+and a dizzy gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.</p>
+<p>I attended to making the boat secure and joined her.&nbsp; Thus we
+landed on Endeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long custom
+of the sea.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Fool!&rdquo; I cried aloud in my vexation.</p>
+<p>I had unloaded the boat and carried its contents high up on the beach,
+where I had set about making a camp.&nbsp; There was driftwood, though
+not much, on the beach, and the sight of a coffee tin I had taken from
+the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> larder had given me the idea of a fire.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Blithering idiot!&rdquo; I was continuing.</p>
+<p>But Maud said, &ldquo;Tut, tut,&rdquo; in gentle reproval, and then
+asked why I was a blithering idiot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No matches,&rdquo; I groaned.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not a match did
+I bring.&nbsp; And now we shall have no hot coffee, soup, tea, or anything!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wasn&rsquo;t it&mdash;er&mdash;Crusoe who rubbed sticks together?&rdquo;
+she drawled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I have read the personal narratives of a score of shipwrecked
+men who tried, and tried in vain,&rdquo; I answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+remember Winters, a newspaper fellow with an Alaskan and Siberian reputation.&nbsp;
+Met him at the Bibelot once, and he was telling us how he attempted
+to make a fire with a couple of sticks.&nbsp; It was most amusing.&nbsp;
+He told it inimitably, but it was the story of a failure.&nbsp; I remember
+his conclusion, his black eyes flashing as he said, &lsquo;Gentlemen,
+the South Sea Islander may do it, the Malay may do it, but take my word
+it&rsquo;s beyond the white man.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, well, we&rsquo;ve managed so far without it,&rdquo; she
+said cheerfully.&nbsp; &ldquo;And there&rsquo;s no reason why we cannot
+still manage without it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But think of the coffee!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+good coffee, too, I know.&nbsp; I took it from Larsen&rsquo;s private
+stores.&nbsp; And look at that good wood.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I confess, I wanted the coffee badly; and I learned, not long afterward,
+that the berry was likewise a little weakness of Maud&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+Besides, we had been so long on a cold diet that we were numb inside
+as well as out.&nbsp; Anything warm would have been most gratifying.&nbsp;
+But I complained no more and set about making a tent of the sail for
+Maud.</p>
+<p>I had looked upon it as a simple task, what of the oars, mast, boom,
+and sprit, to say nothing of plenty of lines.&nbsp; But as I was without
+experience, and as every detail was an experiment and every successful
+detail an invention, the day was well gone before her shelter was an
+accomplished fact.&nbsp; And then, that night, it rained, and she was
+flooded out and driven back into the boat.</p>
+<p>The next morning I dug a shallow ditch around the tent, and, an hour
+later, a sudden gust of wind, whipping over the rocky wall behind us,
+picked up the tent and smashed it down on the sand thirty yards away.</p>
+<p>Maud laughed at my crestfallen expression, and I said, &ldquo;As
+soon as the wind abates I intend going in the boat to explore the island.&nbsp;
+There must be a station somewhere, and men.&nbsp; And ships must visit
+the station.&nbsp; Some Government must protect all these seals.&nbsp;
+But I wish to have you comfortable before I start.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should like to go with you,&rdquo; was all she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be better if you remained.&nbsp; You have had enough
+of hardship.&nbsp; It is a miracle that you have survived.&nbsp; And
+it won&rsquo;t be comfortable in the boat rowing and sailing in this
+rainy weather.&nbsp; What you need is rest, and I should like you to
+remain and get it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Something suspiciously akin to moistness dimmed her beautiful eyes
+before she dropped them and partly turned away her head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should prefer going with you,&rdquo; she said in a low voice,
+in which there was just a hint of appeal.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I might be able to help you a&mdash;&rdquo; her voice broke,&mdash;&ldquo;a
+little.&nbsp; And if anything should happen to you, think of me left
+here alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I intend being very careful,&rdquo; I answered.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And I shall not go so far but what I can get back before night.&nbsp;
+Yes, all said and done, I think it vastly better for you to remain,
+and sleep, and rest and do nothing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She turned and looked me in the eyes.&nbsp; Her gaze was unfaltering,
+but soft.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please, please,&rdquo; she said, oh, so softly.</p>
+<p>I stiffened myself to refuse, and shook my head.&nbsp; Still she
+waited and looked at me.&nbsp; I tried to word my refusal, but wavered.&nbsp;
+I saw the glad light spring into her eyes and knew that I had lost.&nbsp;
+It was impossible to say no after that.</p>
+<p>The wind died down in the afternoon, and we were prepared to start
+the following morning.&nbsp; There was no way of penetrating the island
+from our cove, for the walls rose perpendicularly from the beach, and,
+on either side of the cove, rose from the deep water.</p>
+<p>Morning broke dull and grey, but calm, and I was awake early and
+had the boat in readiness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fool!&nbsp; Imbecile!&nbsp; Yahoo!&rdquo; I shouted, when
+I thought it was meet to arouse Maud; but this time I shouted in merriment
+as I danced about the beach, bareheaded, in mock despair.</p>
+<p>Her head appeared under the flap of the sail.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What now?&rdquo; she asked sleepily, and, withal, curiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Coffee!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;What do you say to a
+cup of coffee? hot coffee? piping hot?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My!&rdquo; she murmured, &ldquo;you startled me, and you are
+cruel.&nbsp; Here I have been composing my soul to do without it, and
+here you are vexing me with your vain suggestions.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Watch me,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>From under clefts among the rocks I gathered a few dry sticks and
+chips.&nbsp; These I whittled into shavings or split into kindling.&nbsp;
+From my note-book I tore out a page, and from the ammunition box took
+a shot-gun shell.&nbsp; Removing the wads from the latter with my knife,
+I emptied the powder on a flat rock.&nbsp; Next I pried the primer,
+or cap, from the shell, and laid it on the rock, in the midst of the
+scattered powder.&nbsp; All was ready.&nbsp; Maud still watched from
+the tent.&nbsp; Holding the paper in my lelf hand, I smashed down upon
+the cap with a rock held in my right.&nbsp; There was a puff of white
+smoke, a burst of flame, and the rough edge of the paper was alight.</p>
+<p>Maud clapped her hands gleefully.&nbsp; &ldquo;Prometheus!&rdquo;
+she cried.</p>
+<p>But I was too occupied to acknowledge her delight.&nbsp; The feeble
+flame must be cherished tenderly if it were to gather strength and live.&nbsp;
+I fed it, shaving by shaving, and sliver by sliver, till at last it
+was snapping and crackling as it laid hold of the smaller chips and
+sticks.&nbsp; To be cast away on an island had not entered into my calculations,
+so we were without a kettle or cooking utensils of any sort; but I made
+shift with the tin used for bailing the boat, and later, as we consumed
+our supply of canned goods, we accumulated quite an imposing array of
+cooking vessels.</p>
+<p>I boiled the water, but it was Maud who made the coffee.&nbsp; And
+how good it was!&nbsp; My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled
+sea-biscuit and water.&nbsp; The breakfast was a success, and we sat
+about the fire much longer than enterprising explorers should have done,
+sipping the hot black coffee and talking over our situation.</p>
+<p>I was confident that we should find a station in some one of the
+coves, for I knew that the rookeries of Bering Sea were thus guarded;
+but Maud advanced the theory&mdash;to prepare me for disappointment,
+I do believe, if disappointment were to come&mdash;that we had discovered
+an unknown rookery.&nbsp; She was in very good spirits, however, and
+made quite merry in accepting our plight as a grave one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you are right,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;then we must prepare
+to winter here.&nbsp; Our food will not last, but there are the seals.&nbsp;
+They go away in the fall, so I must soon begin to lay in a supply of
+meat.&nbsp; Then there will be huts to build and driftwood to gather.&nbsp;
+Also we shall try out seal fat for lighting purposes.&nbsp; Altogether,
+we&rsquo;ll have our hands full if we find the island uninhabited.&nbsp;
+Which we shall not, I know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But she was right.&nbsp; We sailed with a beam wind along the shore,
+searching the coves with our glasses and landing occasionally, without
+finding a sign of human life.&nbsp; Yet we learned that we were not
+the first who had landed on Endeavour Island.&nbsp; High up on the beach
+of the second cove from ours, we discovered the splintered wreck of
+a boat&mdash;a sealer&rsquo;s boat, for the rowlocks were bound in sennit,
+a gun-rack was on the starboard side of the bow, and in white letters
+was faintly visible <i>Gazelle</i> No. 2.&nbsp; The boat had lain there
+for a long time, for it was half filled with sand, and the splintered
+wood had that weather-worn appearance due to long exposure to the elements.&nbsp;
+In the stern-sheets I found a rusty ten-gauge shot-gun and a sailor&rsquo;s
+sheath-knife broken short across and so rusted as to be almost unrecognizable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They got away,&rdquo; I said cheerfully; but I felt a sinking
+at the heart and seemed to divine the presence of bleached bones somewhere
+on that beach.</p>
+<p>I did not wish Maud&rsquo;s spirits to be dampened by such a find,
+so I turned seaward again with our boat and skirted the north-eastern
+point of the island.&nbsp; There were no beaches on the southern shore,
+and by early afternoon we rounded the black promontory and completed
+the circumnavigation of the island.&nbsp; I estimated its circumference
+at twenty-five miles, its width as varying from two to five miles; while
+my most conservative calculation placed on its beaches two hundred thousand
+seals.&nbsp; The island was highest at its extreme south-western point,
+the headlands and backbone diminishing regularly until the north-eastern
+portion was only a few feet above the sea.&nbsp; With the exception
+of our little cove, the other beaches sloped gently back for a distance
+of half-a-mile or so, into what I might call rocky meadows, with here
+and there patches of moss and tundra grass.&nbsp; Here the seals hauled
+out, and the old bulls guarded their harems, while the young bulls hauled
+out by themselves.</p>
+<p>This brief description is all that Endeavour Island merits.&nbsp;
+Damp and soggy where it was not sharp and rocky, buffeted by storm winds
+and lashed by the sea, with the air continually a-tremble with the bellowing
+of two hundred thousand amphibians, it was a melancholy and miserable
+sojourning-place.&nbsp; Maud, who had prepared me for disappointment,
+and who had been sprightly and vivacious all day, broke down as we landed
+in our own little cove.&nbsp; She strove bravely to hide it from me,
+but while I was kindling another fire I knew she was stifling her sobs
+in the blankets under the sail-tent.</p>
+<p>It was my turn to be cheerful, and I played the part to the best
+of my ability, and with such success that I brought the laughter back
+into her dear eyes and song on her lips; for she sang to me before she
+went to an early bed.&nbsp; It was the first time I had heard her sing,
+and I lay by the fire, listening and transported, for she was nothing
+if not an artist in everything she did, and her voice, though not strong,
+was wonderfully sweet and expressive.</p>
+<p>I still slept in the boat, and I lay awake long that night, gazing
+up at the first stars I had seen in many nights and pondering the situation.&nbsp;
+Responsibility of this sort was a new thing to me.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen
+had been quite right.&nbsp; I had stood on my father&rsquo;s legs.&nbsp;
+My lawyers and agents had taken care of my money for me.&nbsp; I had
+had no responsibilities at all.&nbsp; Then, on the <i>Ghost</i> I had
+learned to be responsible for myself.&nbsp; And now, for the first time
+in my life, I found myself responsible for some one else.&nbsp; And
+it was required of me that this should be the gravest of responsibilities,
+for she was the one woman in the world&mdash;the one small woman, as
+I loved to think of her.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXX</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>No wonder we called it Endeavour Island.&nbsp; For two weeks we toiled
+at building a hut.&nbsp; Maud insisted on helping, and I could have
+wept over her bruised and bleeding hands.&nbsp; And still, I was proud
+of her because of it.&nbsp; There was something heroic about this gently-bred
+woman enduring our terrible hardship and with her pittance of strength
+bending to the tasks of a peasant woman.&nbsp; She gathered many of
+the stones which I built into the walls of the hut; also, she turned
+a deaf ear to my entreaties when I begged her to desist.&nbsp; She compromised,
+however, by taking upon herself the lighter labours of cooking and gathering
+driftwood and moss for our winter&rsquo;s supply.</p>
+<p>The hut&rsquo;s walls rose without difficulty, and everything went
+smoothly until the problem of the roof confronted me.&nbsp; Of what
+use the four walls without a roof?&nbsp; And of what could a roof be
+made?&nbsp; There were the spare oars, very true.&nbsp; They would serve
+as roof-beams; but with what was I to cover them?&nbsp; Moss would never
+do.&nbsp; Tundra grass was impracticable.&nbsp; We needed the sail for
+the boat, and the tarpaulin had begun to leak.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Winters used walrus skins on his hut,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are the seals,&rdquo; she suggested.</p>
+<p>So next day the hunting began.&nbsp; I did not know how to shoot,
+but I proceeded to learn.&nbsp; And when I had expended some thirty
+shells for three seals, I decided that the ammunition would be exhausted
+before I acquired the necessary knowledge.&nbsp; I had used eight shells
+for lighting fires before I hit upon the device of banking the embers
+with wet moss, and there remained not over a hundred shells in the box.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We must club the seals,&rdquo; I announced, when convinced
+of my poor marksmanship.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have heard the sealers talk
+about clubbing them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They are so pretty,&rdquo; she objected.&nbsp; &ldquo;I cannot
+bear to think of it being done.&nbsp; It is so directly brutal, you
+know; so different from shooting them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That roof must go on,&rdquo; I answered grimly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Winter
+is almost here.&nbsp; It is our lives against theirs.&nbsp; It is unfortunate
+we haven&rsquo;t plenty of ammunition, but I think, anyway, that they
+suffer less from being clubbed than from being all shot up.&nbsp; Besides,
+I shall do the clubbing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s just it,&rdquo; she began eagerly, and broke
+off in sudden confusion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I began, &ldquo;if you prefer&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what shall I be doing?&rdquo; she interrupted, with that
+softness I knew full well to be insistence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gathering firewood and cooking dinner,&rdquo; I answered lightly.</p>
+<p>She shook her head.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is too dangerous for you to attempt
+alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know, I know,&rdquo; she waived my protest.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+am only a weak woman, but just my small assistance may enable you to
+escape disaster.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But the clubbing?&rdquo; I suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, you will do that.&nbsp; I shall probably scream.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;ll look away when&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The danger is most serious,&rdquo; I laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall use my judgment when to look and when not to look,&rdquo;
+she replied with a grand air.</p>
+<p>The upshot of the affair was that she accompanied me next morning.&nbsp;
+I rowed into the adjoining cove and up to the edge of the beach.&nbsp;
+There were seals all about us in the water, and the bellowing thousands
+on the beach compelled us to shout at each other to make ourselves heard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know men club them,&rdquo; I said, trying to reassure myself,
+and gazing doubtfully at a large bull, not thirty feet away, upreared
+on his fore-flippers and regarding me intently.&nbsp; &ldquo;But the
+question is, How do they club them?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let us gather tundra grass and thatch the roof,&rdquo; Maud
+said.</p>
+<p>She was as frightened as I at the prospect, and we had reason to
+be gazing at close range at the gleaming teeth and dog-like mouths.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I always thought they were afraid of men,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do I know they are not afraid?&rdquo; I queried a moment
+later, after having rowed a few more strokes along the beach.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Perhaps, if I were to step boldly ashore, they would cut for
+it, and I could not catch up with one.&rdquo;&nbsp; And still I hesitated.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I heard of a man, once, who invaded the nesting grounds of
+wild geese,&rdquo; Maud said.&nbsp; &ldquo;They killed him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The geese?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, the geese.&nbsp; My brother told me about it when I was
+a little girl.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I know men club them,&rdquo; I persisted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think the tundra grass will make just as good a roof,&rdquo;
+she said.</p>
+<p>Far from her intention, her words were maddening me, driving me on.&nbsp;
+I could not play the coward before her eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here goes,&rdquo;
+I said, backing water with one oar and running the bow ashore.</p>
+<p>I stepped out and advanced valiantly upon a long-maned bull in the
+midst of his wives.&nbsp; I was armed with the regular club with which
+the boat-pullers killed the wounded seals gaffed aboard by the hunters.&nbsp;
+It was only a foot and a half long, and in my superb ignorance I never
+dreamed that the club used ashore when raiding the rookeries measured
+four to five feet.&nbsp; The cows lumbered out of my way, and the distance
+between me and the bull decreased.&nbsp; He raised himself on his flippers
+with an angry movement.&nbsp; We were a dozen feet apart.&nbsp; Still
+I advanced steadily, looking for him to turn tail at any moment and
+run.</p>
+<p>At six feet the panicky thought rushed into my mind, What if he will
+not run?&nbsp; Why, then I shall club him, came the answer.&nbsp; In
+my fear I had forgotten that I was there to get the bull instead of
+to make him run.&nbsp; And just then he gave a snort and a snarl and
+rushed at me.&nbsp; His eyes were blazing, his mouth was wide open;
+the teeth gleamed cruelly white.&nbsp; Without shame, I confess that
+it was I who turned and footed it.&nbsp; He ran awkwardly, but he ran
+well.&nbsp; He was but two paces behind when I tumbled into the boat,
+and as I shoved off with an oar his teeth crunched down upon the blade.&nbsp;
+The stout wood was crushed like an egg-shell.&nbsp; Maud and I were
+astounded.&nbsp; A moment later he had dived under the boat, seized
+the keel in his mouth, and was shaking the boat violently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My!&rdquo; said Maud.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go back.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I shook my head.&nbsp; &ldquo;I can do what other men have done,
+and I know that other men have clubbed seals.&nbsp; But I think I&rsquo;ll
+leave the bulls alone next time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t say, &lsquo;Please, please,&rsquo;&rdquo;
+I cried, half angrily, I do believe.</p>
+<p>She made no reply, and I knew my tone must have hurt her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; I said, or shouted, rather, in order
+to make myself heard above the roar of the rookery.&nbsp; &ldquo;If
+you say so, I&rsquo;ll turn and go back; but honestly, I&rsquo;d rather
+stay.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t say that this is what you get for bringing
+a woman along,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; She smiled at me whimsically,
+gloriously, and I knew there was no need for forgiveness.</p>
+<p>I rowed a couple of hundred feet along the beach so as to recover
+my nerves, and then stepped ashore again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do be cautious,&rdquo; she called after me.</p>
+<p>I nodded my head and proceeded to make a flank attack on the nearest
+harem.&nbsp; All went well until I aimed a blow at an outlying cowls
+head and fell short.&nbsp; She snorted and tried to scramble away.&nbsp;
+I ran in close and struck another blow, hitting the shoulder instead
+of the head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Watch out!&rdquo; I heard Maud scream.</p>
+<p>In my excitement I had not been taking notice of other things, and
+I looked up to see the lord of the harem charging down upon me.&nbsp;
+Again I fled to the boat, hotly pursued; but this time Maud made no
+suggestion of turning back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be better, I imagine, if you let harems alone and
+devoted your attention to lonely and inoffensive-looking seals,&rdquo;
+was what she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think I have read something about
+them.&nbsp; Dr. Jordan&rsquo;s book, I believe.&nbsp; They are the young
+bulls, not old enough to have harems of their own.&nbsp; He called them
+the holluschickie, or something like that.&nbsp; It seems to me if we
+find where they haul out&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It seems to me that your fighting instinct is aroused,&rdquo;
+I laughed.</p>
+<p>She flushed quickly and prettily.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll admit I
+don&rsquo;t like defeat any more than you do, or any more than I like
+the idea of killing such pretty, inoffensive creatures.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pretty!&rdquo; I sniffed.&nbsp; &ldquo;I failed to mark anything
+pre-eminently pretty about those foamy-mouthed beasts that raced me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your point of view,&rdquo; she laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;You lacked
+perspective.&nbsp; Now if you did not have to get so close to the subject&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The very thing!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;What I need is
+a longer club.&nbsp; And there&rsquo;s that broken oar ready to hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It just comes to me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that Captain
+Larsen was telling me how the men raided the rookeries.&nbsp; They drive
+the seals, in small herds, a short distance inland before they kill
+them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care to undertake the herding of one of those
+harems,&rdquo; I objected.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But there are the holluschickie,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+holluschickie haul out by themselves, and Dr. Jordan says that paths
+are left between the harems, and that as long as the holluschickie keep
+strictly to the path they are unmolested by the masters of the harem.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s one now,&rdquo; I said, pointing to a young
+bull in the water.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s watch him, and follow him
+if he hauls out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He swam directly to the beach and clambered out into a small opening
+between two harems, the masters of which made warning noises but did
+not attack him.&nbsp; We watched him travel slowly inward, threading
+about among the harems along what must have been the path.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here goes,&rdquo; I said, stepping out; but I confess my heart
+was in my mouth as I thought of going through the heart of that monstrous
+herd.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be wise to make the boat fast,&rdquo; Maud said.</p>
+<p>She had stepped out beside me, and I regarded her with wonderment.</p>
+<p>She nodded her head determinedly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;m going
+with you, so you may as well secure the boat and arm me with a club.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go back,&rdquo; I said dejectedly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+think tundra grass, will do, after all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know it won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; was her reply.&nbsp; &ldquo;Shall
+I lead?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With a shrug of the shoulders, but with the warmest admiration and
+pride at heart for this woman, I equipped her with the broken oar and
+took another for myself.&nbsp; It was with nervous trepidation that
+we made the first few rods of the journey.&nbsp; Once Maud screamed
+in terror as a cow thrust an inquisitive nose toward her foot, and several
+times I quickened my pace for the same reason.&nbsp; But, beyond warning
+coughs from either side, there were no signs of hostility.&nbsp; It
+was a rookery which had never been raided by the hunters, and in consequence
+the seals were mild-tempered and at the same time unafraid.</p>
+<p>In the very heart of the herd the din was terrific.&nbsp; It was
+almost dizzying in its effect.&nbsp; I paused and smiled reassuringly
+at Maud, for I had recovered my equanimity sooner than she.&nbsp; I
+could see that she was still badly frightened.&nbsp; She came close
+to me and shouted:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m dreadfully afraid!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And I was not.&nbsp; Though the novelty had not yet worn off, the
+peaceful comportment of the seals had quieted my alarm.&nbsp; Maud was
+trembling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid, and I&rsquo;m not afraid,&rdquo; she chattered
+with shaking jaws.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s my miserable body, not I.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right, it&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; I reassured
+her, my arm passing instinctively and protectingly around her.</p>
+<p>I shall never forget, in that moment, how instantly conscious I became
+of my manhood.&nbsp; The primitive deeps of my nature stirred.&nbsp;
+I felt myself masculine, the protector of the weak, the fighting male.&nbsp;
+And, best of all, I felt myself the protector of my loved one.&nbsp;
+She leaned against me, so light and lily-frail, and as her trembling
+eased away it seemed as though I became aware of prodigious strength.&nbsp;
+I felt myself a match for the most ferocious bull in the herd, and I
+know, had such a bull charged upon me, that I should have met it unflinchingly
+and quite coolly, and I know that I should have killed it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am all right now,&rdquo; she said, looking up at me gratefully.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Let us go on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And that the strength in me had quieted her and given her confidence,
+filled me with an exultant joy.&nbsp; The youth of the race seemed burgeoning
+in me, over-civilized man that I was, and I lived for myself the old
+hunting days and forest nights of my remote and forgotten ancestry.&nbsp;
+I had much for which to thank Wolf Larsen, was my thought as we went
+along the path between the jostling harems.</p>
+<p>A quarter of a mile inland we came upon the holluschickie&mdash;sleek
+young bulls, living out the loneliness of their bachelorhood and gathering
+strength against the day when they would fight their way into the ranks
+of the Benedicts.</p>
+<p>Everything now went smoothly.&nbsp; I seemed to know just what to
+do and how to do it.&nbsp; Shouting, making threatening gestures with
+my club, and even prodding the lazy ones, I quickly cut out a score
+of the young bachelors from their companions.&nbsp; Whenever one made
+an attempt to break back toward the water, I headed it off.&nbsp; Maud
+took an active part in the drive, and with her cries and flourishings
+of the broken oar was of considerable assistance.&nbsp; I noticed, though,
+that whenever one looked tired and lagged, she let it slip past.&nbsp;
+But I noticed, also, whenever one, with a show of fight, tried to break
+past, that her eyes glinted and showed bright, and she rapped it smartly
+with her club.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My, it&rsquo;s exciting!&rdquo; she cried, pausing from sheer
+weakness.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll sit down.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I drove the little herd (a dozen strong, now, what of the escapes
+she had permitted) a hundred yards farther on; and by the time she joined
+me I had finished the slaughter and was beginning to skin.&nbsp; An
+hour later we went proudly back along the path between the harems.&nbsp;
+And twice again we came down the path burdened with skins, till I thought
+we had enough to roof the hut.&nbsp; I set the sail, laid one tack out
+of the cove, and on the other tack made our own little inner cove.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s just like home-coming,&rdquo; Maud said, as I ran
+the boat ashore.</p>
+<p>I heard her words with a responsive thrill, it was all so dearly
+intimate and natural, and I said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It seems as though I have lived this life always.&nbsp; The
+world of books and bookish folk is very vague, more like a dream memory
+than an actuality.&nbsp; I surely have hunted and forayed and fought
+all the days of my life.&nbsp; And you, too, seem a part of it.&nbsp;
+You are&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp; I was on the verge of saying, &ldquo;my
+woman, my mate,&rdquo; but glibly changed it to&mdash;&ldquo;standing
+the hardship well.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But her ear had caught the flaw.&nbsp; She recognized a flight that
+midmost broke.&nbsp; She gave me a quick look.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not that.&nbsp; You were saying&mdash;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That the American Mrs. Meynell was living the life of a savage
+and living it quite successfully,&rdquo; I said easily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; was all she replied; but I could have sworn there
+was a note of disappointment in her voice.</p>
+<p>But &ldquo;my woman, my mate&rdquo; kept ringing in my head for the
+rest of the day and for many days.&nbsp; Yet never did it ring more
+loudly than that night, as I watched her draw back the blanket of moss
+from the coals, blow up the fire, and cook the evening meal.&nbsp; It
+must have been latent savagery stirring in me, for the old words, so
+bound up with the roots of the race, to grip me and thrill me.&nbsp;
+And grip and thrill they did, till I fell asleep, murmuring them to
+myself over and over again.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXI</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;It will smell,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;but it will keep in the
+heat and keep out the rain and snow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We were surveying the completed seal-skin roof.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is clumsy, but it will serve the purpose, and that is the
+main thing,&rdquo; I went on, yearning for her praise.</p>
+<p>And she clapped her hands and declared that she was hugely pleased.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it is dark in here,&rdquo; she said the next moment, her
+shoulders shrinking with a little involuntary shiver.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You might have suggested a window when the walls were going
+up,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was for you, and you should have
+seen the need of a window.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I never do see the obvious, you know,&rdquo; she laughed
+back.&nbsp; &ldquo;And besides, you can knock a hole in the wall at
+any time.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Quite true; I had not thought of it,&rdquo; I replied, wagging
+my head sagely.&nbsp; &ldquo;But have you thought of ordering the window-glass?&nbsp;
+Just call up the firm,&mdash;Red, 4451, I think it is,&mdash;and tell
+them what size and kind of glass you wish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That means&mdash;&rdquo; she began.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No window.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was a dark and evil-appearing thing, that hut, not fit for aught
+better than swine in a civilized land; but for us, who had known the
+misery of the open boat, it was a snug little habitation.&nbsp; Following
+the housewarming, which was accomplished by means of seal-oil and a
+wick made from cotton calking, came the hunting for our winter&rsquo;s
+meat and the building of the second hut.&nbsp; It was a simple affair,
+now, to go forth in the morning and return by noon with a boatload of
+seals.&nbsp; And then, while I worked at building the hut, Maud tried
+out the oil from the blubber and kept a slow fire under the frames of
+meat.&nbsp; I had heard of jerking beef on the plains, and our seal-meat,
+cut in thin strips and hung in the smoke, cured excellently.</p>
+<p>The second hut was easier to erect, for I built it against the first,
+and only three walls were required.&nbsp; But it was work, hard work,
+all of it.&nbsp; Maud and I worked from dawn till dark, to the limit
+of our strength, so that when night came we crawled stiffly to bed and
+slept the animal-like sleep exhaustion.&nbsp; And yet Maud declared
+that she had never felt better or stronger in her life.&nbsp; I knew
+this was true of myself, but hers was such a lily strength that I feared
+she would break down.&nbsp; Often and often, her last-reserve force
+gone, I have seen her stretched flat on her back on the sand in the
+way she had of resting and recuperating.&nbsp; And then she would be
+up on her feet and toiling hard as ever.&nbsp; Where she obtained this
+strength was the marvel to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Think of the long rest this winter,&rdquo; was her reply to
+my remonstrances.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why, we&rsquo;ll be clamorous for something
+to do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We held a housewarming in my hut the night it was roofed.&nbsp; It
+was the end of the third day of a fierce storm which had swung around
+the compass from the south-east to the north-west, and which was then
+blowing directly in upon us.&nbsp; The beaches of the outer cove were
+thundering with the surf, and even in our land-locked inner cove a respectable
+sea was breaking.&nbsp; No high backbone of island sheltered us from
+the wind, and it whistled and bellowed about the hut till at times I
+feared for the strength of the walls.&nbsp; The skin roof, stretched
+tightly as a drumhead, I had thought, sagged and bellied with every
+gust; and innumerable interstices in the walls, not so tightly stuffed
+with moss as Maud had supposed, disclosed themselves.&nbsp; Yet the
+seal-oil burned brightly and we were warm and comfortable.</p>
+<p>It was a pleasant evening indeed, and we voted that as a social function
+on Endeavour Island it had not yet been eclipsed.&nbsp; Our minds were
+at ease.&nbsp; Not only had we resigned ourselves to the bitter winter,
+but we were prepared for it.&nbsp; The seals could depart on their mysterious
+journey into the south at any time, now, for all we cared; and the storms
+held no terror for us.&nbsp; Not only were we sure of being dry and
+warm and sheltered from the wind, but we had the softest and most luxurious
+mattresses that could be made from moss.&nbsp; This had been Maud&rsquo;s
+idea, and she had herself jealously gathered all the moss.&nbsp; This
+was to be my first night on the mattress, and I knew I should sleep
+the sweeter because she had made it.</p>
+<p>As she rose to go she turned to me with the whimsical way she had,
+and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something is going to happen&mdash;is happening, for that
+matter.&nbsp; I feel it.&nbsp; Something is coming here, to us.&nbsp;
+It is coming now.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what, but it is coming.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good or bad?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>She shook her head.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, but it is there,
+somewhere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She pointed in the direction of the sea and wind.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lee shore,&rdquo; I laughed, &ldquo;and I am
+sure I&rsquo;d rather be here than arriving, a night like this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are not frightened?&rdquo; I asked, as I stepped to open
+the door for her.</p>
+<p>Her eyes looked bravely into mine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you feel well? perfectly well?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never better,&rdquo; was her answer.</p>
+<p>We talked a little longer before she went.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-night, Maud,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-night, Humphrey,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>This use of our given names had come about quite as a matter of course,
+and was as unpremeditated as it was natural.&nbsp; In that moment I
+could have put my arms around her and drawn her to me.&nbsp; I should
+certainly have done so out in that world to which we belonged.&nbsp;
+As it was, the situation stopped there in the only way it could; but
+I was left alone in my little but, glowing warmly through and through
+with a pleasant satisfaction; and I knew that a tie, or a tacit something,
+existed between us which had not existed before.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>I awoke, oppressed by a mysterious sensation.&nbsp; There seemed
+something missing in my environment.&nbsp; But the mystery and oppressiveness
+vanished after the first few seconds of waking, when I identified the
+missing something as the wind.&nbsp; I had fallen asleep in that state
+of nerve tension with which one meets the continuous shock of sound
+or movement, and I had awakened, still tense, bracing myself to meet
+the pressure of something which no longer bore upon me.</p>
+<p>It was the first night I had spent under cover in several months,
+and I lay luxuriously for some minutes under my blankets (for once not
+wet with fog or spray), analysing, first, the effect produced upon me
+by the cessation of the wind, and next, the joy which was mine from
+resting on the mattress made by Maud&rsquo;s hands.&nbsp; When I had
+dressed and opened the door, I heard the waves still lapping on the
+beach, garrulously attesting the fury of the night.&nbsp; It was a clear
+day, and the sun was shining.&nbsp; I had slept late, and I stepped
+outside with sudden energy, bent upon making up lost time as befitted
+a dweller on Endeavour Island.</p>
+<p>And when outside, I stopped short.&nbsp; I believed my eyes without
+question, and yet I was for the moment stunned by what they disclosed
+to me.&nbsp; There, on the beach, not fifty feet away, bow on, dismasted,
+was a black-hulled vessel.&nbsp; Masts and booms, tangled with shrouds,
+sheets, and rent canvas, were rubbing gently alongside.&nbsp; I could
+have rubbed my eyes as I looked.&nbsp; There was the home-made galley
+we had built, the familiar break of the poop, the low yacht-cabin scarcely
+rising above the rail.&nbsp; It was the <i>Ghost.</i></p>
+<p>What freak of fortune had brought it here&mdash;here of all spots?
+what chance of chances?&nbsp; I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall
+at my back and know the profundity of despair.&nbsp; Escape was hopeless,
+out of the question.&nbsp; I thought of Maud, asleep there in the hut
+we had reared; I remembered her &ldquo;Good-night, Humphrey&rdquo;;
+&ldquo;my woman, my mate,&rdquo; went ringing through my brain, but
+now, alas, it was a knell that sounded.&nbsp; Then everything went black
+before my eyes.</p>
+<p>Possibly it was the fraction of a second, but I had no knowledge
+of how long an interval had lapsed before I was myself again.&nbsp;
+There lay the <i>Ghost</i>, bow on to the beach, her splintered bowsprit
+projecting over the sand, her tangled spars rubbing against her side
+to the lift of the crooning waves.&nbsp; Something must be done, must
+be done.</p>
+<p>It came upon me suddenly, as strange, that nothing moved aboard.&nbsp;
+Wearied from the night of struggle and wreck, all hands were yet asleep,
+I thought.&nbsp; My next thought was that Maud and I might yet escape.&nbsp;
+If we could take to the boat and make round the point before any one
+awoke?&nbsp; I would call her and start.&nbsp; My hand was lifted at
+her door to knock, when I recollected the smallness of the island.&nbsp;
+We could never hide ourselves upon it.&nbsp; There was nothing for us
+but the wide raw ocean.&nbsp; I thought of our snug little huts, our
+supplies of meat and oil and moss and firewood, and I knew that we could
+never survive the wintry sea and the great storms which were to come.</p>
+<p>So I stood, with hesitant knuckle, without her door.&nbsp; It was
+impossible, impossible.&nbsp; A wild thought of rushing in and killing
+her as she slept rose in my mind.&nbsp; And then, in a flash, the better
+solution came to me.&nbsp; All hands were asleep.&nbsp; Why not creep
+aboard the <i>Ghost</i>,&mdash;well I knew the way to Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+bunk,&mdash;and kill him in his sleep?&nbsp; After that&mdash;well,
+we would see.&nbsp; But with him dead there was time and space in which
+to prepare to do other things; and besides, whatever new situation arose,
+it could not possibly be worse than the present one.</p>
+<p>My knife was at my hip.&nbsp; I returned to my hut for the shot-gun,
+made sure it was loaded, and went down to the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; With
+some difficulty, and at the expense of a wetting to the waist, I climbed
+aboard.&nbsp; The forecastle scuttle was open.&nbsp; I paused to listen
+for the breathing of the men, but there was no breathing.&nbsp; I almost
+gasped as the thought came to me: What if the <i>Ghost</i> is deserted?&nbsp;
+I listened more closely.&nbsp; There was no sound.&nbsp; I cautiously
+descended the ladder.&nbsp; The place had the empty and musty feel and
+smell usual to a dwelling no longer inhabited.&nbsp; Everywhere was
+a thick litter of discarded and ragged garments, old sea-boots, leaky
+oilskins&mdash;all the worthless forecastle dunnage of a long voyage.</p>
+<p>Abandoned hastily, was my conclusion, as I ascended to the deck.&nbsp;
+Hope was alive again in my breast, and I looked about me with greater
+coolness.&nbsp; I noted that the boats were missing.&nbsp; The steerage
+told the same tale as the forecastle.&nbsp; The hunters had packed their
+belongings with similar haste.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i> was deserted.&nbsp;
+It was Maud&rsquo;s and mine.&nbsp; I thought of the ship&rsquo;s stores
+and the lazarette beneath the cabin, and the idea came to me of surprising
+Maud with something nice for breakfast.</p>
+<p>The reaction from my fear, and the knowledge that the terrible deed
+I had come to do was no longer necessary, made me boyish and eager.&nbsp;
+I went up the steerage companion-way two steps at a time, with nothing
+distinct in my mind except joy and the hope that Maud would sleep on
+until the surprise breakfast was quite ready for her.&nbsp; As I rounded
+the galley, a new satisfaction was mine at thought of all the splendid
+cooking utensils inside.&nbsp; I sprang up the break of the poop, and
+saw&mdash;Wolf Larsen.&nbsp; What of my impetus and the stunning surprise,
+I clattered three or four steps along the deck before I could stop myself.&nbsp;
+He was standing in the companion-way, only his head and shoulders visible,
+staring straight at me.&nbsp; His arms were resting on the half-open
+slide.&nbsp; He made no movement whatever&mdash;simply stood there,
+staring at me.</p>
+<p>I began to tremble.&nbsp; The old stomach sickness clutched me.&nbsp;
+I put one hand on the edge of the house to steady myself.&nbsp; My lips
+seemed suddenly dry and I moistened them against the need of speech.&nbsp;
+Nor did I for an instant take my eyes off him.&nbsp; Neither of us spoke.&nbsp;
+There was something ominous in his silence, his immobility.&nbsp; All
+my old fear of him returned and by new fear was increased an hundred-fold.&nbsp;
+And still we stood, the pair of us, staring at each other.</p>
+<p>I was aware of the demand for action, and, my old helplessness strong
+upon me, I was waiting for him to take the initiative.&nbsp; Then, as
+the moments went by, it came to me that the situation was analogous
+to the one in which I had approached the long-maned bull, my intention
+of clubbing obscured by fear until it became a desire to make him run.&nbsp;
+So it was at last impressed upon me that I was there, not to have Wolf
+Larsen take the initiative, but to take it myself.</p>
+<p>I cocked both barrels and levelled the shot-gun at him.&nbsp; Had
+he moved, attempted to drop down the companion-way, I know I would have
+shot him.&nbsp; But he stood motionless and staring as before.&nbsp;
+And as I faced him, with levelled gun shaking in my hands, I had time
+to note the worn and haggard appearance of his face.&nbsp; It was as
+if some strong anxiety had wasted it.&nbsp; The cheeks were sunken,
+and there was a wearied, puckered expression on the brow.&nbsp; And
+it seemed to me that his eyes were strange, not only the expression,
+but the physical seeming, as though the optic nerves and supporting
+muscles had suffered strain and slightly twisted the eyeballs.</p>
+<p>All this I saw, and my brain now working rapidly, I thought a thousand
+thoughts; and yet I could not pull the triggers.&nbsp; I lowered the
+gun and stepped to the corner of the cabin, primarily to relieve the
+tension on my nerves and to make a new start, and incidentally to be
+closer.&nbsp; Again I raised the gun.&nbsp; He was almost at arm&rsquo;s
+length.&nbsp; There was no hope for him.&nbsp; I was resolved.&nbsp;
+There was no possible chance of missing him, no matter how poor my marksmanship.&nbsp;
+And yet I wrestled with myself and could not pull the triggers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he demanded impatiently.</p>
+<p>I strove vainly to force my fingers down on the triggers, and vainly
+I strove to say something.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you shoot?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>I cleared my throat of a huskiness which prevented speech.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Hump,&rdquo; he said slowly, &ldquo;you can&rsquo;t do it.&nbsp;
+You are not exactly afraid.&nbsp; You are impotent.&nbsp; Your conventional
+morality is stronger than you.&nbsp; You are the slave to the opinions
+which have credence among the people you have known and have read about.&nbsp;
+Their code has been drummed into your head from the time you lisped,
+and in spite of your philosophy, and of what I have taught you, it won&rsquo;t
+let you kill an unarmed, unresisting man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; I said hoarsely.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you know that I would kill an unarmed man as readily as
+I would smoke a cigar,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;You know me for
+what I am,&mdash;my worth in the world by your standard.&nbsp; You have
+called me snake, tiger, shark, monster, and Caliban.&nbsp; And yet,
+you little rag puppet, you little echoing mechanism, you are unable
+to kill me as you would a snake or a shark, because I have hands, feet,
+and a body shaped somewhat like yours.&nbsp; Bah! I had hoped better
+things of you, Hump.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stepped out of the companion-way and came up to me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Put down that gun.&nbsp; I want to ask you some questions.&nbsp;
+I haven&rsquo;t had a chance to look around yet.&nbsp; What place is
+this?&nbsp; How is the <i>Ghost</i> lying?&nbsp; How did you get wet?&nbsp;
+Where&rsquo;s Maud?&mdash;I beg your pardon, Miss Brewster&mdash;or
+should I say, &lsquo;Mrs. Van Weyden&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had backed away from him, almost weeping at my inability to shoot
+him, but not fool enough to put down the gun.&nbsp; I hoped, desperately,
+that he might commit some hostile act, attempt to strike me or choke
+me; for in such way only I knew I could be stirred to shoot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is Endeavour Island,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never heard of it,&rdquo; he broke in.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At least, that&rsquo;s our name for it,&rdquo; I amended.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our?&rdquo; he queried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s our?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Brewster and myself.&nbsp; And the <i>Ghost</i> is lying,
+as you can see for yourself, bow on to the beach.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are seals here,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;They woke
+me up with their barking, or I&rsquo;d be sleeping yet.&nbsp; I heard
+them when I drove in last night.&nbsp; They were the first warning that
+I was on a lee shore.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a rookery, the kind of a thing
+I&rsquo;ve hunted for years.&nbsp; Thanks to my brother Death, I&rsquo;ve
+lighted on a fortune.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a mint.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s its
+bearings?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t the least idea,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+you ought to know quite closely.&nbsp; What were your last observations?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled inscrutably, but did not answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, where&rsquo;s all hands?&rdquo; I asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;How
+does it come that you are alone?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I was prepared for him again to set aside my question, and was surprised
+at the readiness of his reply.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My brother got me inside forty-eight hours, and through no
+fault of mine.&nbsp; Boarded me in the night with only the watch on
+deck.&nbsp; Hunters went back on me.&nbsp; He gave them a bigger lay.&nbsp;
+Heard him offering it.&nbsp; Did it right before me.&nbsp; Of course
+the crew gave me the go-by.&nbsp; That was to be expected.&nbsp; All
+hands went over the side, and there I was, marooned on my own vessel.&nbsp;
+It was Death&rsquo;s turn, and it&rsquo;s all in the family anyway.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how did you lose the masts?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Walk over and examine those lanyards,&rdquo; he said, pointing
+to where the mizzen-rigging should have been.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They have been cut with a knife!&rdquo; I exclaimed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not quite,&rdquo; he laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was a neater
+job.&nbsp; Look again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I looked.&nbsp; The lanyards had been almost severed, with just enough
+left to hold the shrouds till some severe strain should be put upon
+them</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cooky did that,&rdquo; he laughed again.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know,
+though I didn&rsquo;t spot him at it.&nbsp; Kind of evened up the score
+a bit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good for Mugridge!&rdquo; I cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s what I thought when everything went over
+the side.&nbsp; Only I said it on the other side of my mouth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what were you doing while all this was going on?&rdquo;
+I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My best, you may be sure, which wasn&rsquo;t much under the
+circumstances.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I turned to re-examine Thomas Mugridge&rsquo;s work.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess I&rsquo;ll sit down and take the sunshine,&rdquo;
+I heard Wolf Larsen saying.</p>
+<p>There was a hint, just a slight hint, of physical feebleness in his
+voice, and it was so strange that I looked quickly at him.&nbsp; His
+hand was sweeping nervously across his face, as though he were brushing
+away cobwebs.&nbsp; I was puzzled.&nbsp; The whole thing was so unlike
+the Wolf Larsen I had known.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How are your headaches?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They still trouble me,&rdquo; was his answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+think I have one coming on now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He slipped down from his sitting posture till he lay on the deck.&nbsp;
+Then he rolled over on his side, his head resting on the biceps of the
+under arm, the forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.&nbsp; I stood
+regarding him wonderingly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now&rsquo;s your chance, Hump,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; I lied, for I thoroughly
+understood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, nothing,&rdquo; he added softly, as if he were drowsing;
+&ldquo;only you&rsquo;ve got me where you want me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I haven&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I retorted; &ldquo;for I want
+you a few thousand miles away from here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He chuckled, and thereafter spoke no more.&nbsp; He did not stir
+as I passed by him and went down into the cabin.&nbsp; I lifted the
+trap in the floor, but for some moments gazed dubiously into the darkness
+of the lazarette beneath.&nbsp; I hesitated to descend.&nbsp; What if
+his lying down were a ruse?&nbsp; Pretty, indeed, to be caught there
+like a rat.&nbsp; I crept softly up the companion-way and peeped at
+him.&nbsp; He was lying as I had left him.&nbsp; Again I went below;
+but before I dropped into the lazarette I took the precaution of casting
+down the door in advance.&nbsp; At least there would be no lid to the
+trap.&nbsp; But it was all needless.&nbsp; I regained the cabin with
+a store of jams, sea-biscuits, canned meats, and such things,&mdash;all
+I could carry,&mdash;and replaced the trap-door.</p>
+<p>A peep at Wolf Larsen showed me that he had not moved.&nbsp; A bright
+thought struck me.&nbsp; I stole into his state-room and possessed myself
+of his revolvers.&nbsp; There were no other weapons, though I thoroughly
+ransacked the three remaining state-rooms.&nbsp; To make sure, I returned
+and went through the steerage and forecastle, and in the galley gathered
+up all the sharp meat and vegetable knives.&nbsp; Then I bethought me
+of the great yachtsman&rsquo;s knife he always carried, and I came to
+him and spoke to him, first softly, then loudly.&nbsp; He did not move.&nbsp;
+I bent over and took it from his pocket.&nbsp; I breathed more freely.&nbsp;
+He had no arms with which to attack me from a distance; while I, armed,
+could always forestall him should he attempt to grapple me with his
+terrible gorilla arms.</p>
+<p>Filling a coffee-pot and frying-pan with part of my plunder, and
+taking some chinaware from the cabin pantry, I left Wolf Larsen lying
+in the sun and went ashore.</p>
+<p>Maud was still asleep.&nbsp; I blew up the embers (we had not yet
+arranged a winter kitchen), and quite feverishly cooked the breakfast.&nbsp;
+Toward the end, I heard her moving about within the hut, making her
+toilet.&nbsp; Just as all was ready and the coffee poured, the door
+opened and she came forth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not fair of you,&rdquo; was her greeting.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You are usurping one of my prerogatives.&nbsp; You know you I
+agreed that the cooking should be mine, and&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But just this once,&rdquo; I pleaded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you promise not to do it again,&rdquo; she smiled.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Unless, of course, you have grown tired of my poor efforts.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To my delight she never once looked toward the beach, and I maintained
+the banter with such success all unconsciously she sipped coffee from
+the china cup, ate fried evaporated potatoes, and spread marmalade on
+her biscuit.&nbsp; But it could not last.&nbsp; I saw the surprise that
+came over her.&nbsp; She had discovered the china plate from which she
+was eating.&nbsp; She looked over the breakfast, noting detail after
+detail.&nbsp; Then she looked at me, and her face turned slowly toward
+the beach.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Humphrey!&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>The old unnamable terror mounted into her eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is&mdash;he?&rdquo; she quavered.</p>
+<p>I nodded my head.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXIIII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>We waited all day for Wolf Larsen to come ashore.&nbsp; It was an
+intolerable period of anxiety.&nbsp; Each moment one or the other of
+us cast expectant glances toward the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; But he did
+not come.&nbsp; He did not even appear on deck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps it is his headache,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+left him lying on the poop.&nbsp; He may lie there all night.&nbsp;
+I think I&rsquo;ll go and see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Maud looked entreaty at me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is all right,&rdquo; I assured her.&nbsp; &ldquo;I shall
+take the revolvers.&nbsp; You know I collected every weapon on board.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But there are his arms, his hands, his terrible, terrible
+hands!&rdquo; she objected.&nbsp; And then she cried, &ldquo;Oh, Humphrey,
+I am afraid of him!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t go&mdash;please don&rsquo;t go!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She rested her hand appealingly on mine, and sent my pulse fluttering.&nbsp;
+My heart was surely in my eyes for a moment.&nbsp; The dear and lovely
+woman!&nbsp; And she was so much the woman, clinging and appealing,
+sunshine and dew to my manhood, rooting it deeper and sending through
+it the sap of a new strength.&nbsp; I was for putting my arm around
+her, as when in the midst of the seal herd; but I considered, and refrained.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall not take any risks,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll
+merely peep over the bow and see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She pressed my hand earnestly and let me go.&nbsp; But the space
+on deck where I had left him lying was vacant.&nbsp; He had evidently
+gone below.&nbsp; That night we stood alternate watches, one of us sleeping
+at a time; for there was no telling what Wolf Larsen might do.&nbsp;
+He was certainly capable of anything.</p>
+<p>The next day we waited, and the next, and still he made no sign.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;These headaches of his, these attacks,&rdquo; Maud said, on
+the afternoon of the fourth day; &ldquo;Perhaps he is ill, very ill.&nbsp;
+He may be dead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Or dying,&rdquo; was her afterthought when she had waited
+some time for me to speak.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better so,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But think, Humphrey, a fellow-creature in his last lonely
+hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; I suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, even perhaps,&rdquo; she acknowledged.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+we do not know.&nbsp; It would be terrible if he were.&nbsp; I could
+never forgive myself.&nbsp; We must do something.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; I suggested again.</p>
+<p>I waited, smiling inwardly at the woman of her which compelled a
+solicitude for Wolf Larsen, of all creatures.&nbsp; Where was her solicitude
+for me, I thought,&mdash;for me whom she had been afraid to have merely
+peep aboard?</p>
+<p>She was too subtle not to follow the trend of my silence.&nbsp; And
+she was as direct as she was subtle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must go aboard, Humphrey, and find out,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And if you want to laugh at me, you have my consent and forgiveness.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I arose obediently and went down the beach.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do be careful,&rdquo; she called after me.</p>
+<p>I waved my arm from the forecastle head and dropped down to the deck.&nbsp;
+Aft I walked to the cabin companion, where I contented myself with hailing
+below.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen answered, and as he started to ascend the stairs
+I cocked my revolver.&nbsp; I displayed it openly during our conversation,
+but he took no notice of it.&nbsp; He appeared the same, physically,
+as when last I saw him, but he was gloomy and silent.&nbsp; In fact,
+the few words we spoke could hardly be called a conversation.&nbsp;
+I did not inquire why he had not been ashore, nor did he ask why I had
+not come aboard.&nbsp; His head was all right again, he said, and so,
+without further parley, I left him.</p>
+<p>Maud received my report with obvious relief, and the sight of smoke
+which later rose in the galley put her in a more cheerful mood.&nbsp;
+The next day, and the next, we saw the galley smoke rising, and sometimes
+we caught glimpses of him on the poop.&nbsp; But that was all.&nbsp;
+He made no attempt to come ashore.&nbsp; This we knew, for we still
+maintained our night-watches.&nbsp; We were waiting for him to do something,
+to show his hand, so to say, and his inaction puzzled and worried us.</p>
+<p>A week of this passed by.&nbsp; We had no other interest than Wolf
+Larsen, and his presence weighed us down with an apprehension which
+prevented us from doing any of the little things we had planned.</p>
+<p>But at the end of the week the smoke ceased rising from the galley,
+and he no longer showed himself on the poop.&nbsp; I could see Maud&rsquo;s
+solicitude again growing, though she timidly&mdash;and even proudly,
+I think&mdash;forbore a repetition of her request.&nbsp; After all,
+what censure could be put upon her?&nbsp; She was divinely altruistic,
+and she was a woman.&nbsp; Besides, I was myself aware of hurt at thought
+of this man whom I had tried to kill, dying alone with his fellow-creatures
+so near.&nbsp; He was right.&nbsp; The code of my group was stronger
+than I.&nbsp; The fact that he had hands, feet, and a body shaped somewhat
+like mine, constituted a claim which I could not ignore.</p>
+<p>So I did not wait a second time for Maud to send me.&nbsp; I discovered
+that we stood in need of condensed milk and marmalade, and announced
+that I was going aboard.&nbsp; I could see that she wavered.&nbsp; She
+even went so far as to murmur that they were non-essentials and that
+my trip after them might be inexpedient.&nbsp; And as she had followed
+the trend of my silence, she now followed the trend of my speech, and
+she knew that I was going aboard, not because of condensed milk and
+marmalade, but because of her and of her anxiety, which she knew she
+had failed to hide.</p>
+<p>I took off my shoes when I gained the forecastle head, and went noiselessly
+aft in my stocking feet.&nbsp; Nor did I call this time from the top
+of the companion-way.&nbsp; Cautiously descending, I found the cabin
+deserted.&nbsp; The door to his state-room was closed.&nbsp; At first
+I thought of knocking, then I remembered my ostensible errand and resolved
+to carry it out.&nbsp; Carefully avoiding noise, I lifted the trap-door
+in the floor and set it to one side.&nbsp; The slop-chest, as well as
+the provisions, was stored in the lazarette, and I took advantage of
+the opportunity to lay in a stock of underclothing.</p>
+<p>As I emerged from the lazarette I heard sounds in Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+state-room.&nbsp; I crouched and listened.&nbsp; The door-knob rattled.&nbsp;
+Furtively, instinctively, I slunk back behind the table and drew and
+cocked my revolver.&nbsp; The door swung open and he came forth.&nbsp;
+Never had I seen so profound a despair as that which I saw on his face,&mdash;the
+face of Wolf Larsen the fighter, the strong man, the indomitable one.&nbsp;
+For all the world like a woman wringing her hands, he raised his clenched
+fists and groaned.&nbsp; One fist unclosed, and the open palm swept
+across his eyes as though brushing away cobwebs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;God!&nbsp; God!&rdquo; he groaned, and the clenched fists
+were raised again to the infinite despair with which his throat vibrated.</p>
+<p>It was horrible.&nbsp; I was trembling all over, and I could feel
+the shivers running up and down my spine and the sweat standing out
+on my forehead.&nbsp; Surely there can be little in this world more
+awful than the spectacle of a strong man in the moment when he is utterly
+weak and broken.</p>
+<p>But Wolf Larsen regained control of himself by an exertion of his
+remarkable will.&nbsp; And it was exertion.&nbsp; His whole frame shook
+with the struggle.&nbsp; He resembled a man on the verge of a fit.&nbsp;
+His face strove to compose itself, writhing and twisting in the effort
+till he broke down again.&nbsp; Once more the clenched fists went upward
+and he groaned.&nbsp; He caught his breath once or twice and sobbed.&nbsp;
+Then he was successful.&nbsp; I could have thought him the old Wolf
+Larsen, and yet there was in his movements a vague suggestion of weakness
+and indecision.&nbsp; He started for the companion-way, and stepped
+forward quite as I had been accustomed to see him do; and yet again,
+in his very walk, there seemed that suggestion of weakness and indecision.</p>
+<p>I was now concerned with fear for myself.&nbsp; The open trap lay
+directly in his path, and his discovery of it would lead instantly to
+his discovery of me.&nbsp; I was angry with myself for being caught
+in so cowardly a position, crouching on the floor.&nbsp; There was yet
+time.&nbsp; I rose swiftly to my feet, and, I know, quite unconsciously
+assumed a defiant attitude.&nbsp; He took no notice of me.&nbsp; Nor
+did he notice the open trap.&nbsp; Before I could grasp the situation,
+or act, he had walked right into the trap.&nbsp; One foot was descending
+into the opening, while the other foot was just on the verge of beginning
+the uplift.&nbsp; But when the descending foot missed the solid flooring
+and felt vacancy beneath, it was the old Wolf Larsen and the tiger muscles
+that made the falling body spring across the opening, even as it fell,
+so that he struck on his chest and stomach, with arms outstretched,
+on the floor of the opposite side.&nbsp; The next instant he had drawn
+up his legs and rolled clear.&nbsp; But he rolled into my marmalade
+and underclothes and against the trap-door.</p>
+<p>The expression on his face was one of complete comprehension.&nbsp;
+But before I could guess what he had comprehended, he had dropped the
+trap-door into place, closing the lazarette.&nbsp; Then I understood.&nbsp;
+He thought he had me inside.&nbsp; Also, he was blind, blind as a bat.&nbsp;
+I watched him, breathing carefully so that he should not hear me.&nbsp;
+He stepped quickly to his state-room.&nbsp; I saw his hand miss the
+door-knob by an inch, quickly fumble for it, and find it.&nbsp; This
+was my chance.&nbsp; I tiptoed across the cabin and to the top of the
+stairs.&nbsp; He came back, dragging a heavy sea-chest, which he deposited
+on top of the trap.&nbsp; Not content with this he fetched a second
+chest and placed it on top of the first.&nbsp; Then he gathered up the
+marmalade and underclothes and put them on the table.&nbsp; When he
+started up the companion-way, I retreated, silently rolling over on
+top of the cabin.</p>
+<p>He shoved the slide part way back and rested his arms on it, his
+body still in the companion-way.&nbsp; His attitude was of one looking
+forward the length of the schooner, or staring, rather, for his eyes
+were fixed and unblinking.&nbsp; I was only five feet away and directly
+in what should have been his line of vision.&nbsp; It was uncanny.&nbsp;
+I felt myself a ghost, what of my invisibility.&nbsp; I waved my hand
+back and forth, of course without effect; but when the moving shadow
+fell across his face I saw at once that he was susceptible to the impression.&nbsp;
+His face became more expectant and tense as he tried to analyze and
+identify the impression.&nbsp; He knew that he had responded to something
+from without, that his sensibility had been touched by a changing something
+in his environment; but what it was he could not discover.&nbsp; I ceased
+waving my hand, so that the shadow remained stationary.&nbsp; He slowly
+moved his head back and forth under it and turned from side to side,
+now in the sunshine, now in the shade, feeling the shadow, as it were,
+testing it by sensation.</p>
+<p>I, too, was busy, trying to reason out how he was aware of the existence
+of so intangible a thing as a shadow.&nbsp; If it were his eyeballs
+only that were affected, or if his optic nerve were not wholly destroyed,
+the explanation was simple.&nbsp; If otherwise, then the only conclusion
+I could reach was that the sensitive skin recognized the difference
+of temperature between shade and sunshine.&nbsp; Or, perhaps,&mdash;who
+can tell?&mdash;it was that fabled sixth sense which conveyed to him
+the loom and feel of an object close at hand.</p>
+<p>Giving over his attempt to determine the shadow, he stepped on deck
+and started forward, walking with a swiftness and confidence which surprised
+me.&nbsp; And still there was that hint of the feebleness of the blind
+in his walk.&nbsp; I knew it now for what it was.</p>
+<p>To my amused chagrin, he discovered my shoes on the forecastle head
+and brought them back with him into the galley.&nbsp; I watched him
+build the fire and set about cooking food for himself; then I stole
+into the cabin for my marmalade and underclothes, slipped back past
+the galley, and climbed down to the beach to deliver my barefoot report.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXIV</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too bad the <i>Ghost</i> has lost her masts.&nbsp;
+Why we could sail away in her.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you think we could,
+Humphrey?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I sprang excitedly to my feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder, I wonder,&rdquo; I repeated, pacing up and down.</p>
+<p>Maud&rsquo;s eyes were shining with anticipation as they followed
+me.&nbsp; She had such faith in me!&nbsp; And the thought of it was
+so much added power.&nbsp; I remembered Michelet&rsquo;s &ldquo;To man,
+woman is as the earth was to her legendary son; he has but to fall down
+and kiss her breast and he is strong again.&rdquo;&nbsp; For the first
+time I knew the wonderful truth of his words.&nbsp; Why, I was living
+them.&nbsp; Maud was all this to me, an unfailing, source of strength
+and courage.&nbsp; I had but to look at her, or think of her, and be
+strong again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It can be done, it can be done,&rdquo; I was thinking and
+asserting aloud.&nbsp; &ldquo;What men have done, I can do; and if they
+have never done this before, still I can do it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What? for goodness&rsquo; sake,&rdquo; Maud demanded.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Do be merciful.&nbsp; What is it you can do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We can do it,&rdquo; I amended.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why, nothing
+else than put the masts back into the <i>Ghost</i> and sail away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Humphrey!&rdquo; she exclaimed.</p>
+<p>And I felt as proud of my conception as if it were already a fact
+accomplished.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how is it possible to be done?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; was my answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know
+only that I am capable of doing anything these days.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I smiled proudly at her&mdash;too proudly, for she dropped her eyes
+and was for the moment silent.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But there is Captain Larsen,&rdquo; she objected.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Blind and helpless,&rdquo; I answered promptly, waving him
+aside as a straw.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But those terrible hands of his!&nbsp; You know how he leaped
+across the opening of the lazarette.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you know also how I crept about and avoided him,&rdquo;
+I contended gaily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And lost your shoes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d hardly expect them to avoid Wolf Larsen without
+my feet inside of them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We both laughed, and then went seriously to work constructing the
+plan whereby we were to step the masts of the <i>Ghost</i> and return
+to the world.&nbsp; I remembered hazily the physics of my school days,
+while the last few months had given me practical experience with mechanical
+purchases.&nbsp; I must say, though, when we walked down to the <i>Ghost</i>
+to inspect more closely the task before us, that the sight of the great
+masts lying in the water almost disheartened me.&nbsp; Where were we
+to begin?&nbsp; If there had been one mast standing, something high
+up to which to fasten blocks and tackles!&nbsp; But there was nothing.&nbsp;
+It reminded me of the problem of lifting oneself by one&rsquo;s boot-straps.&nbsp;
+I understood the mechanics of levers; but where was I to get a fulcrum?</p>
+<p>There was the mainmast, fifteen inches in diameter at what was now
+the butt, still sixty-five feet in length, and weighing, I roughly calculated,
+at least three thousand pounds.&nbsp; And then came the foremast, larger
+in diameter, and weighing surely thirty-five hundred pounds.&nbsp; Where
+was I to begin?&nbsp; Maud stood silently by my side, while I evolved
+in my mind the contrivance known among sailors as &ldquo;shears.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+But, though known to sailors, I invented it there on Endeavour Island.&nbsp;
+By crossing and lashing the ends of two spars, and then elevating them
+in the air like an inverted &ldquo;V,&rdquo; I could get a point above
+the deck to which to make fast my hoisting tackle.&nbsp; To this hoisting
+tackle I could, if necessary, attach a second hoisting tackle.&nbsp;
+And then there was the windlass!</p>
+<p>Maud saw that I had achieved a solution, and her eyes warmed sympathetically.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Clear that raffle,&rdquo; I answered, pointing to the tangled
+wreckage overside.</p>
+<p>Ah, the decisiveness, the very sound of the words, was good in my
+ears.&nbsp; &ldquo;Clear that raffle!&rdquo;&nbsp; Imagine so salty
+a phrase on the lips of the Humphrey Van Weyden of a few months gone!</p>
+<p>There must have been a touch of the melodramatic in my pose and voice,
+for Maud smiled.&nbsp; Her appreciation of the ridiculous was keen,
+and in all things she unerringly saw and felt, where it existed, the
+touch of sham, the overshading, the overtone.&nbsp; It was this which
+had given poise and penetration to her own work and made her of worth
+to the world.&nbsp; The serious critic, with the sense of humour and
+the power of expression, must inevitably command the world&rsquo;s ear.&nbsp;
+And so it was that she had commanded.&nbsp; Her sense of humour was
+really the artist&rsquo;s instinct for proportion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure I&rsquo;ve heard it before, somewhere, in books,&rdquo;
+she murmured gleefully.</p>
+<p>I had an instinct for proportion myself, and I collapsed forthwith,
+descending from the dominant pose of a master of matter to a state of
+humble confusion which was, to say the least, very miserable.</p>
+<p>Her hand leapt out at once to mine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m so sorry,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No need to be,&rdquo; I gulped.&nbsp; &ldquo;It does me good.&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s too much of the schoolboy in me.&nbsp; All of which is
+neither here nor there.&nbsp; What we&rsquo;ve got to do is actually
+and literally to clear that raffle.&nbsp; If you&rsquo;ll come with
+me in the boat, we&rsquo;ll get to work and straighten things out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;When the topmen clear the raffle with their clasp-knives
+in their teeth,&rsquo;&rdquo; she quoted at me; and for the rest of
+the afternoon we made merry over our labour.</p>
+<p>Her task was to hold the boat in position while I worked at the tangle.&nbsp;
+And such a tangle&mdash;halyards, sheets, guys, down-hauls, shrouds,
+stays, all washed about and back and forth and through, and twined and
+knotted by the sea.&nbsp; I cut no more than was necessary, and what
+with passing the long ropes under and around the booms and masts, of
+unreeving the halyards and sheets, of coiling down in the boat and uncoiling
+in order to pass through another knot in the bight, I was soon wet to
+the skin.</p>
+<p>The sails did require some cutting, and the canvas, heavy with water,
+tried my strength severely; but I succeeded before nightfall in getting
+it all spread out on the beach to dry.&nbsp; We were both very tired
+when we knocked off for supper, and we had done good work, too, though
+to the eye it appeared insignificant.</p>
+<p>Next morning, with Maud as able assistant, I went into the hold of
+the <i>Ghost</i> to clear the steps of the mast-butts.&nbsp; We had
+no more than begun work when the sound of my knocking and hammering
+brought Wolf Larsen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hello below!&rdquo; he cried down the open hatch.</p>
+<p>The sound of his voice made Maud quickly draw close to me, as for
+protection, and she rested one hand on my arm while we parleyed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hello on deck,&rdquo; I replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;Good-morning
+to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you doing down there?&rdquo; he demanded.&nbsp; &ldquo;Trying
+to scuttle my ship for me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Quite the opposite; I&rsquo;m repairing her,&rdquo; was my
+answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what in thunder are you repairing?&rdquo;&nbsp; There
+was puzzlement in his voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, I&rsquo;m getting everything ready for re-stepping the
+masts,&rdquo; I replied easily, as though it were the simplest project
+imaginable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It seems as though you&rsquo;re standing on your own legs
+at last, Hump,&rdquo; we heard him say; and then for some time he was
+silent.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I say, Hump,&rdquo; he called down.&nbsp; &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t
+do it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes, I can,&rdquo; I retorted.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+doing it now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But this is my vessel, my particular property.&nbsp; What
+if I forbid you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You forget,&rdquo; I replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are no longer
+the biggest bit of the ferment.&nbsp; You were, once, and able to eat
+me, as you were pleased to phrase it; but there has been a diminishing,
+and I am now able to eat you.&nbsp; The yeast has grown stale.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He gave a short, disagreeable laugh.&nbsp; &ldquo;I see you&rsquo;re
+working my philosophy back on me for all it is worth.&nbsp; But don&rsquo;t
+make the mistake of under-estimating me.&nbsp; For your own good I warn
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Since when have you become a philanthropist?&rdquo; I queried.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Confess, now, in warning me for my own good, that you are very
+consistent.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He ignored my sarcasm, saying, &ldquo;Suppose I clap the hatch on,
+now?&nbsp; You won&rsquo;t fool me as you did in the lazarette.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wolf Larsen,&rdquo; I said sternly, for the first time addressing
+him by this his most familiar name, &ldquo;I am unable to shoot a helpless,
+unresisting man.&nbsp; You have proved that to my satisfaction as well
+as yours.&nbsp; But I warn you now, and not so much for your own good
+as for mine, that I shall shoot you the moment you attempt a hostile
+act.&nbsp; I can shoot you now, as I stand here; and if you are so minded,
+just go ahead and try to clap on the hatch.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nevertheless, I forbid you, I distinctly forbid your tampering
+with my ship.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But, man!&rdquo; I expostulated, &ldquo;you advance the fact
+that it is your ship as though it were a moral right.&nbsp; You have
+never considered moral rights in your dealings with others.&nbsp; You
+surely do not dream that I&rsquo;ll consider them in dealing with you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I had stepped underneath the open hatchway so that I could see him.&nbsp;
+The lack of expression on his face, so different from when I had watched
+him unseen, was enhanced by the unblinking, staring eyes.&nbsp; It was
+not a pleasant face to look upon.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And none so poor, not even Hump, to do him reverence,&rdquo;
+he sneered.</p>
+<p>The sneer was wholly in his voice.&nbsp; His face remained expressionless
+as ever.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you do, Miss Brewster,&rdquo; he said suddenly, after
+a pause.</p>
+<p>I started.&nbsp; She had made no noise whatever, had not even moved.&nbsp;
+Could it be that some glimmer of vision remained to him? or that his
+vision was coming back?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you do, Captain Larsen,&rdquo; she answered.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Pray, how did you know I was here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heard you breathing, of course.&nbsp; I say, Hump&rsquo;s
+improving, don&rsquo;t you think so?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; she answered, smiling at me.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I have never seen him otherwise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You should have seen him before, then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wolf Larsen, in large doses,&rdquo; I murmured, &ldquo;before
+and after taking.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I want to tell you again, Hump,&rdquo; he said threateningly,
+&ldquo;that you&rsquo;d better leave things alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you care to escape as well as we?&rdquo; I
+asked incredulously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; was his answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;I intend dying here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, we don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I concluded defiantly, beginning
+again my knocking and hammering.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXV</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Next day, the mast-steps clear and everything in readiness, we started
+to get the two topmasts aboard.&nbsp; The maintopmast was over thirty
+feet in length, the foretopmast nearly thirty, and it was of these that
+I intended making the shears.&nbsp; It was puzzling work.&nbsp; Fastening
+one end of a heavy tackle to the windlass, and with the other end fast
+to the butt of the foretopmast, I began to heave.&nbsp; Maud held the
+turn on the windlass and coiled down the slack.</p>
+<p>We were astonished at the ease with which the spar was lifted.&nbsp;
+It was an improved crank windlass, and the purchase it gave was enormous.&nbsp;
+Of course, what it gave us in power we paid for in distance; as many
+times as it doubled my strength, that many times was doubled the length
+of rope I heaved in.&nbsp; The tackle dragged heavily across the rail,
+increasing its drag as the spar arose more and more out of the water,
+and the exertion on the windlass grew severe.</p>
+<p>But when the butt of the topmast was level with the rail, everything
+came to a standstill.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I might have known it,&rdquo; I said impatiently.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now
+we have to do it all over again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why not fasten the tackle part way down the mast?&rdquo; Maud
+suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s what I should have done at first,&rdquo; I answered,
+hugely disgusted with myself.</p>
+<p>Slipping off a turn, I lowered the mast back into the water and fastened
+the tackle a third of the way down from the butt.&nbsp; In an hour,
+what of this and of rests between the heaving, I had hoisted it to the
+point where I could hoist no more.&nbsp; Eight feet of the butt was
+above the rail, and I was as far away as ever from getting the spar
+on board.&nbsp; I sat down and pondered the problem.&nbsp; It did not
+take long.&nbsp; I sprang jubilantly to my feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now I have it!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;I ought to make
+the tackle fast at the point of balance.&nbsp; And what we learn of
+this will serve us with everything else we have to hoist aboard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Once again I undid all my work by lowering the mast into the water.&nbsp;
+But I miscalculated the point of balance, so that when I heaved the
+top of the mast came up instead of the butt.&nbsp; Maud looked despair,
+but I laughed and said it would do just as well.</p>
+<p>Instructing her how to hold the turn and be ready to slack away at
+command, I laid hold of the mast with my hands and tried to balance
+it inboard across the rail.&nbsp; When I thought I had it I cried to
+her to slack away; but the spar righted, despite my efforts, and dropped
+back toward the water.&nbsp; Again I heaved it up to its old position,
+for I had now another idea.&nbsp; I remembered the watch-tackle&mdash;a
+small double and single block affair&mdash;and fetched it.</p>
+<p>While I was rigging it between the top of the spar and the opposite
+rail, Wolf Larsen came on the scene.&nbsp; We exchanged nothing more
+than good-mornings, and, though he could not see, he sat on the rail
+out of the way and followed by the sound all that I did.</p>
+<p>Again instructing Maud to slack away at the windlass when I gave
+the word, I proceeded to heave on the watch-tackle.&nbsp; Slowly the
+mast swung in until it balanced at right angles across the rail; and
+then I discovered to my amazement that there was no need for Maud to
+slack away.&nbsp; In fact, the very opposite was necessary.&nbsp; Making
+the watch-tackle fast, I hove on the windlass and brought in the mast,
+inch by inch, till its top tilted down to the deck and finally its whole
+length lay on the deck.</p>
+<p>I looked at my watch.&nbsp; It was twelve o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; My
+back was aching sorely, and I felt extremely tired and hungry.&nbsp;
+And there on the deck was a single stick of timber to show for a whole
+morning&rsquo;s work.&nbsp; For the first time I thoroughly realized
+the extent of the task before us.&nbsp; But I was learning, I was learning.&nbsp;
+The afternoon would show far more accomplished.&nbsp; And it did; for
+we returned at one o&rsquo;clock, rested and strengthened by a hearty
+dinner.</p>
+<p>In less than an hour I had the maintopmast on deck and was constructing
+the shears.&nbsp; Lashing the two topmasts together, and making allowance
+for their unequal length, at the point of intersection I attached the
+double block of the main throat-halyards.&nbsp; This, with the single
+block and the throat-halyards themselves, gave me a hoisting tackle.&nbsp;
+To prevent the butts of the masts from slipping on the deck, I nailed
+down thick cleats.&nbsp; Everything in readiness, I made a line fast
+to the apex of the shears and carried it directly to the windlass.&nbsp;
+I was growing to have faith in that windlass, for it gave me power beyond
+all expectation.&nbsp; As usual, Maud held the turn while I heaved.&nbsp;
+The shears rose in the air.</p>
+<p>Then I discovered I had forgotten guy-ropes.&nbsp; This necessitated
+my climbing the shears, which I did twice, before I finished guying
+it fore and aft and to either side.&nbsp; Twilight had set in by the
+time this was accomplished.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen, who had sat about and
+listened all afternoon and never opened his mouth, had taken himself
+off to the galley and started his supper.&nbsp; I felt quite stiff across
+the small of the back, so much so that I straightened up with an effort
+and with pain.&nbsp; I looked proudly at my work.&nbsp; It was beginning
+to show.&nbsp; I was wild with desire, like a child with a new toy,
+to hoist something with my shears.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish it weren&rsquo;t so late,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;d
+like to see how it works.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be a glutton, Humphrey,&rdquo; Maud chided me.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Remember, to-morrow is coming, and you&rsquo;re so tired now
+that you can hardly stand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you?&rdquo; I said, with sudden solicitude.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+must be very tired.&nbsp; You have worked hard and nobly.&nbsp; I am
+proud of you, Maud.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not half so proud as I am of you, nor with half the reason,&rdquo;
+she answered, looking me straight in the eyes for a moment with an expression
+in her own and a dancing, tremulous light which I had not seen before
+and which gave me a pang of quick delight, I know not why, for I did
+not understand it.&nbsp; Then she dropped her eyes, to lift them again,
+laughing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If our friends could see us now,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Look
+at us.&nbsp; Have you ever paused for a moment to consider our appearance?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I have considered yours, frequently,&rdquo; I answered,
+puzzling over what I had seen in her eyes and puzzled by her sudden
+change of subject.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mercy!&rdquo; she cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;And what do I look like,
+pray?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A scarecrow, I&rsquo;m afraid,&rdquo; I replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;Just
+glance at your draggled skirts, for instance.&nbsp; Look at those three-cornered
+tears.&nbsp; And such a waist!&nbsp; It would not require a Sherlock
+Holmes to deduce that you have been cooking over a camp-fire, to say
+nothing of trying out seal-blubber.&nbsp; And to cap it all, that cap!&nbsp;
+And all that is the woman who wrote &lsquo;A Kiss Endured.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made me an elaborate and stately courtesy, and said, &ldquo;As
+for you, sir&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And yet, through the five minutes of banter which followed, there
+was a serious something underneath the fun which I could not but relate
+to the strange and fleeting expression I had caught in her eyes.&nbsp;
+What was it?&nbsp; Could it be that our eyes were speaking beyond the
+will of our speech?&nbsp; My eyes had spoken, I knew, until I had found
+the culprits out and silenced them.&nbsp; This had occurred several
+times.&nbsp; But had she seen the clamour in them and understood?&nbsp;
+And had her eyes so spoken to me?&nbsp; What else could that expression
+have meant&mdash;that dancing, tremulous light, and a something more
+which words could not describe.&nbsp; And yet it could not be.&nbsp;
+It was impossible.&nbsp; Besides, I was not skilled in the speech of
+eyes.&nbsp; I was only Humphrey Van Weyden, a bookish fellow who loved.&nbsp;
+And to love, and to wait and win love, that surely was glorious enough
+for me.&nbsp; And thus I thought, even as we chaffed each other&rsquo;s
+appearance, until we arrived ashore and there were other things to think
+about.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a shame, after working hard all day, that we cannot
+have an uninterrupted night&rsquo;s sleep,&rdquo; I complained, after
+supper.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But there can be no danger now? from a blind man?&rdquo; she
+queried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall never be able to trust him,&rdquo; I averred, &ldquo;and
+far less now that he is blind.&nbsp; The liability is that his part
+helplessness will make him more malignant than ever.&nbsp; I know what
+I shall do to-morrow, the first thing&mdash;run out a light anchor and
+kedge the schooner off the beach.&nbsp; And each night when we come
+ashore in the boat, Mr. Wolf Larsen will be left a prisoner on board.&nbsp;
+So this will be the last night we have to stand watch, and because of
+that it will go the easier.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We were awake early and just finishing breakfast as daylight came.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Humphrey!&rdquo; I heard Maud cry in dismay and suddenly
+stop.</p>
+<p>I looked at her.&nbsp; She was gazing at the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp;
+I followed her gaze, but could see nothing unusual.&nbsp; She looked
+at me, and I looked inquiry back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The shears,&rdquo; she said, and her voice trembled.</p>
+<p>I had forgotten their existence.&nbsp; I looked again, but could
+not see them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If he has&mdash;&rdquo; I muttered savagely.</p>
+<p>She put her hand sympathetically on mine, and said, &ldquo;You will
+have to begin over again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, believe me, my anger means nothing; I could not hurt a
+fly,&rdquo; I smiled back bitterly.&nbsp; &ldquo;And the worst of it
+is, he knows it.&nbsp; You are right.&nbsp; If he has destroyed the
+shears, I shall do nothing except begin over again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I&rsquo;ll stand my watch on board hereafter,&rdquo; I
+blurted out a moment later.&nbsp; &ldquo;And if he interferes&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I dare not stay ashore all night alone,&rdquo; Maud was
+saying when I came back to myself.&nbsp; &ldquo;It would be so much
+nicer if he would be friendly with us and help us.&nbsp; We could all
+live comfortably aboard.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We will,&rdquo; I asserted, still savagely, for the destruction
+of my beloved shears had hit me hard.&nbsp; &ldquo;That is, you and
+I will live aboard, friendly or not with Wolf Larsen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s childish,&rdquo; I laughed later, &ldquo;for him
+to do such things, and for me to grow angry over them, for that matter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But my heart smote me when we climbed aboard and looked at the havoc
+he had done.&nbsp; The shears were gone altogether.&nbsp; The guys had
+been slashed right and left.&nbsp; The throat-halyards which I had rigged
+were cut across through every part.&nbsp; And he knew I could not splice.&nbsp;
+A thought struck me.&nbsp; I ran to the windlass.&nbsp; It would not
+work.&nbsp; He had broken it.&nbsp; We looked at each other in consternation.&nbsp;
+Then I ran to the side.&nbsp; The masts, booms, and gaffs I had cleared
+were gone.&nbsp; He had found the lines which held them, and cast them
+adrift.</p>
+<p>Tears were in Maud&rsquo;s eyes, and I do believe they were for me.&nbsp;
+I could have wept myself.&nbsp; Where now was our project of remasting
+the <i>Ghost</i>?&nbsp; He had done his work well.&nbsp; I sat down
+on the hatch-combing and rested my chin on my hands in black despair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He deserves to die,&rdquo; I cried out; &ldquo;and God forgive
+me, I am not man enough to be his executioner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But Maud was by my side, passing her hand soothingly through my hair
+as though I were a child, and saying, &ldquo;There, there; it will all
+come right.&nbsp; We are in the right, and it must come right.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I remembered Michelet and leaned my head against her; and truly I
+became strong again.&nbsp; The blessed woman was an unfailing fount
+of power to me.&nbsp; What did it matter?&nbsp; Only a set-back, a delay.&nbsp;
+The tide could not have carried the masts far to seaward, and there
+had been no wind.&nbsp; It meant merely more work to find them and tow
+them back.&nbsp; And besides, it was a lesson.&nbsp; I knew what to
+expect.&nbsp; He might have waited and destroyed our work more effectually
+when we had more accomplished.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here he comes now,&rdquo; she whispered.</p>
+<p>I glanced up.&nbsp; He was strolling leisurely along the poop on
+the port side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take no notice of him,&rdquo; I whispered.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s
+coming to see how we take it.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t let him know that we
+know.&nbsp; We can deny him that satisfaction.&nbsp; Take off your shoes&mdash;that&rsquo;s
+right&mdash;and carry them in your hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then we played hide-and-seek with the blind man.&nbsp; As he
+came up the port side we slipped past on the starboard; and from the
+poop we watched him turn and start aft on our track.</p>
+<p>He must have known, somehow, that we were on board, for he said &ldquo;Good-morning&rdquo;
+very confidently, and waited, for the greeting to be returned.&nbsp;
+Then he strolled aft, and we slipped forward.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I know you&rsquo;re aboard,&rdquo; he called out, and
+I could see him listen intently after he had spoken.</p>
+<p>It reminded me of the great hoot-owl, listening, after its booming
+cry, for the stir of its frightened prey.&nbsp; But we did not fir,
+and we moved only when he moved.&nbsp; And so we dodged about the deck,
+hand in hand, like a couple of children chased by a wicked ogre, till
+Wolf Larsen, evidently in disgust, left the deck for the cabin.&nbsp;
+There was glee in our eyes, and suppressed titters in our mouths, as
+we put on our shoes and clambered over the side into the boat.&nbsp;
+And as I looked into Maud&rsquo;s clear brown eyes I forgot the evil
+he had done, and I knew only that I loved her, and that because of her
+the strength was mine to win our way back to the world.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXVI</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>For two days Maud and I ranged the sea and explored the beaches in
+search of the missing masts.&nbsp; But it was not till the third day
+that we found them, all of them, the shears included, and, of all perilous
+places, in the pounding surf of the grim south-western promontory.&nbsp;
+And how we worked!&nbsp; At the dark end of the first day we returned,
+exhausted, to our little cove, towing the mainmast behind us.&nbsp;
+And we had been compelled to row, in a dead calm, practically every
+inch of the way.</p>
+<p>Another day of heart-breaking and dangerous toil saw us in camp with
+the two topmasts to the good.&nbsp; The day following I was desperate,
+and I rafted together the foremast, the fore and main booms, and the
+fore and main gaffs.&nbsp; The wind was favourable, and I had thought
+to tow them back under sail, but the wind baffled, then died away, and
+our progress with the oars was a snail&rsquo;s pace.&nbsp; And it was
+such dispiriting effort.&nbsp; To throw one&rsquo;s whole strength and
+weight on the oars and to feel the boat checked in its forward lunge
+by the heavy drag behind, was not exactly exhilarating.</p>
+<p>Night began to fall, and to make matters worse, the wind sprang up
+ahead.&nbsp; Not only did all forward motion cease, but we began to
+drift back and out to sea.&nbsp; I struggled at the oars till I was
+played out.&nbsp; Poor Maud, whom I could never prevent from working
+to the limit of her strength, lay weakly back in the stern-sheets.&nbsp;
+I could row no more.&nbsp; My bruised and swollen hands could no longer
+close on the oar handles.&nbsp; My wrists and arms ached intolerably,
+and though I had eaten heartily of a twelve-o&rsquo;clock lunch, I had
+worked so hard that I was faint from hunger.</p>
+<p>I pulled in the oars and bent forward to the line which held the
+tow.&nbsp; But Maud&rsquo;s hand leaped out restrainingly to mine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo; she asked in a strained,
+tense voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cast it off,&rdquo; I answered, slipping a turn of the rope.</p>
+<p>But her fingers closed on mine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she begged.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is useless,&rdquo; I answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here is night
+and the wind blowing us off the land.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But think, Humphrey.&nbsp; If we cannot sail away on the <i>Ghost</i>,
+we may remain for years on the island&mdash;for life even.&nbsp; If
+it has never been discovered all these years, it may never be discovered.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You forget the boat we found on the beach,&rdquo; I reminded
+her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was a seal-hunting boat,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;and
+you know perfectly well that if the men had escaped they would have
+been back to make their fortunes from the rookery.&nbsp; You know they
+never escaped.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I remained silent, undecided.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Besides,&rdquo; she added haltingly, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s your
+idea, and I want to see you succeed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now I could harden my heart.&nbsp; As soon as she put it on a flattering
+personal basis, generosity compelled me to deny her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better years on the island than to die to-night, or to-morrow,
+or the next day, in the open boat.&nbsp; We are not prepared to brave
+the sea.&nbsp; We have no food, no water, no blankets, nothing.&nbsp;
+Why, you&rsquo;d not survive the night without blankets: I know how
+strong you are.&nbsp; You are shivering now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is only nervousness,&rdquo; she answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+am afraid you will cast off the masts in spite of me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, please, please, Humphrey, don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; she burst
+out, a moment later.</p>
+<p>And so it ended, with the phrase she knew had all power over me.&nbsp;
+We shivered miserably throughout the night.&nbsp; Now and again I fitfully
+slept, but the pain of the cold always aroused me.&nbsp; How Maud could
+stand it was beyond me.&nbsp; I was too tired to thrash my arms about
+and warm myself, but I found strength time and again to chafe her hands
+and feet to restore the circulation.&nbsp; And still she pleaded with
+me not to cast off the masts.&nbsp; About three in the morning she was
+caught by a cold cramp, and after I had rubbed her out of that she became
+quite numb.&nbsp; I was frightened.&nbsp; I got out the oars and made
+her row, though she was so weak I thought she would faint at every stroke.</p>
+<p>Morning broke, and we looked long in the growing light for our island.&nbsp;
+At last it showed, small and black, on the horizon, fully fifteen miles
+away.&nbsp; I scanned the sea with my glasses.&nbsp; Far away in the
+south-west I could see a dark line on the water, which grew even as
+I looked at it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fair wind!&rdquo; I cried in a husky voice I did not recognize
+as my own.</p>
+<p>Maud tried to reply, but could not speak.&nbsp; Her lips were blue
+with cold, and she was hollow-eyed&mdash;but oh, how bravely her brown
+eyes looked at me!&nbsp; How piteously brave!</p>
+<p>Again I fell to chafing her hands and to moving her arms up and down
+and about until she could thrash them herself.&nbsp; Then I compelled
+her to stand up, and though she would have fallen had I not supported
+her, I forced her to walk back and forth the several steps between the
+thwart and the stern-sheets, and finally to spring up and down.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you brave, brave woman,&rdquo; I said, when I saw the
+life coming back into her face.&nbsp; &ldquo;Did you know that you were
+brave?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never used to be,&rdquo; she answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;I was
+never brave till I knew you.&nbsp; It is you who have made me brave.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nor I, until I knew you,&rdquo; I answered.</p>
+<p>She gave me a quick look, and again I caught that dancing, tremulous
+light and something more in her eyes.&nbsp; But it was only for the
+moment.&nbsp; Then she smiled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It must have been the conditions,&rdquo; she said; but I knew
+she was wrong, and I wondered if she likewise knew.&nbsp; Then the wind
+came, fair and fresh, and the boat was soon labouring through a heavy
+sea toward the island.&nbsp; At half-past three in the afternoon we
+passed the south-western promontory.&nbsp; Not only were we hungry,
+but we were now suffering from thirst.&nbsp; Our lips were dry and cracked,
+nor could we longer moisten them with our tongues.&nbsp; Then the wind
+slowly died down.&nbsp; By night it was dead calm and I was toiling
+once more at the oars&mdash;but weakly, most weakly.&nbsp; At two in
+the morning the boat&rsquo;s bow touched the beach of our own inner
+cove and I staggered out to make the painter fast.&nbsp; Maud could
+not stand, nor had I strength to carry her.&nbsp; I fell in the sand
+with her, and, when I had recovered, contented myself with putting my
+hands under her shoulders and dragging her up the beach to the hut.</p>
+<p>The next day we did no work.&nbsp; In fact, we slept till three in
+the afternoon, or at least I did, for I awoke to find Maud cooking dinner.&nbsp;
+Her power of recuperation was wonderful.&nbsp; There was something tenacious
+about that lily-frail body of hers, a clutch on existence which one
+could not reconcile with its patent weakness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know I was travelling to Japan for my health,&rdquo; she
+said, as we lingered at the fire after dinner and delighted in the movelessness
+of loafing.&nbsp; &ldquo;I was not very strong.&nbsp; I never was.&nbsp;
+The doctors recommended a sea voyage, and I chose the longest.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You little knew what you were choosing,&rdquo; I laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I shall be a different women for the experience, as well
+as a stronger woman,&rdquo; she answered; &ldquo;and, I hope a better
+woman.&nbsp; At least I shall understand a great deal more life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then, as the short day waned, we fell to discussing Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+blindness.&nbsp; It was inexplicable.&nbsp; And that it was grave, I
+instanced his statement that he intended to stay and die on Endeavour
+Island.&nbsp; When he, strong man that he was, loving life as he did,
+accepted his death, it was plain that he was troubled by something more
+than mere blindness.&nbsp; There had been his terrific headaches, and
+we were agreed that it was some sort of brain break-down, and that in
+his attacks he endured pain beyond our comprehension.</p>
+<p>I noticed as we talked over his condition, that Maud&rsquo;s sympathy
+went out to him more and more; yet I could not but love her for it,
+so sweetly womanly was it.&nbsp; Besides, there was no false sentiment
+about her feeling.&nbsp; She was agreed that the most rigorous treatment
+was necessary if we were to escape, though she recoiled at the suggestion
+that I might some time be compelled to take his life to save my own&mdash;&ldquo;our
+own,&rdquo; she put it.</p>
+<p>In the morning we had breakfast and were at work by daylight.&nbsp;
+I found a light kedge anchor in the fore-hold, where such things were
+kept; and with a deal of exertion got it on deck and into the boat.&nbsp;
+With a long running-line coiled down in the stem, I rowed well out into
+our little cove and dropped the anchor into the water.&nbsp; There was
+no wind, the tide was high, and the schooner floated.&nbsp; Casting
+off the shore-lines, I kedged her out by main strength (the windlass
+being broken), till she rode nearly up and down to the small anchor&mdash;too
+small to hold her in any breeze.&nbsp; So I lowered the big starboard
+anchor, giving plenty of slack; and by afternoon I was at work on the
+windlass.</p>
+<p>Three days I worked on that windlass.&nbsp; Least of all things was
+I a mechanic, and in that time I accomplished what an ordinary machinist
+would have done in as many hours.&nbsp; I had to learn my tools to begin
+with, and every simple mechanical principle which such a man would have
+at his finger ends I had likewise to learn.&nbsp; And at the end of
+three days I had a windlass which worked clumsily.&nbsp; It never gave
+the satisfaction the old windlass had given, but it worked and made
+my work possible.</p>
+<p>In half a day I got the two topmasts aboard and the shears rigged
+and guyed as before.&nbsp; And that night I slept on board and on deck
+beside my work.&nbsp; Maud, who refused to stay alone ashore, slept
+in the forecastle.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen had sat about, listening to my
+repairing the windlass and talking with Maud and me upon indifferent
+subjects.&nbsp; No reference was made on either side to the destruction
+of the shears; nor did he say anything further about my leaving his
+ship alone.&nbsp; But still I had feared him, blind and helpless and
+listening, always listening, and I never let his strong arms get within
+reach of me while I worked.</p>
+<p>On this night, sleeping under my beloved shears, I was aroused by
+his footsteps on the deck.&nbsp; It was a starlight night, and I could
+see the bulk of him dimly as he moved about.&nbsp; I rolled out of my
+blankets and crept noiselessly after him in my stocking feet.&nbsp;
+He had armed himself with a draw-knife from the tool-locker, and with
+this he prepared to cut across the throat-halyards I had again rigged
+to the shears.&nbsp; He felt the halyards with his hands and discovered
+that I had not made them fast.&nbsp; This would not do for a draw-knife,
+so he laid hold of the running part, hove taut, and made fast.&nbsp;
+Then he prepared to saw across with the draw-knife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t, if I were you,&rdquo; I said quietly.</p>
+<p>He heard the click of my pistol and laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hello, Hump,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I knew you were
+here all the time.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t fool my ears.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a lie, Wolf Larsen,&rdquo; I said, just as quietly
+as before.&nbsp; &ldquo;However, I am aching for a chance to kill you,
+so go ahead and cut.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have the chance always,&rdquo; he sneered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go ahead and cut,&rdquo; I threatened ominously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather disappoint you,&rdquo; he laughed, and turned
+on his heel and went aft.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something must be done, Humphrey,&rdquo; Maud said, next morning,
+when I had told her of the night&rsquo;s occurrence.&nbsp; &ldquo;If
+he has liberty, he may do anything.&nbsp; He may sink the vessel, or
+set fire to it.&nbsp; There is no telling what he may do.&nbsp; We must
+make him a prisoner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how?&rdquo; I asked, with a helpless shrug.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+dare not come within reach of his arms, and he knows that so long as
+his resistance is passive I cannot shoot him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There must be some way,&rdquo; she contended.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let
+me think.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is one way,&rdquo; I said grimly.</p>
+<p>She waited.</p>
+<p>I picked up a seal-club.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It won&rsquo;t kill him,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;And before
+he could recover I&rsquo;d have him bound hard and fast.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head with a shudder.&nbsp; &ldquo;No, not that.&nbsp;
+There must be some less brutal way.&nbsp; Let us wait.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But we did not have to wait long, and the problem solved itself.&nbsp;
+In the morning, after several trials, I found the point of balance in
+the foremast and attached my hoisting tackle a few feet above it.&nbsp;
+Maud held the turn on the windlass and coiled down while I heaved.&nbsp;
+Had the windlass been in order it would not have been so difficult;
+as it was, I was compelled to apply all my weight and strength to every
+inch of the heaving.&nbsp; I had to rest frequently.&nbsp; In truth,
+my spells of resting were longer than those of working.&nbsp; Maud even
+contrived, at times when all my efforts could not budge the windlass,
+to hold the turn with one hand and with the other to throw the weight
+of her slim body to my assistance.</p>
+<p>At the end of an hour the single and double blocks came together
+at the top of the shears.&nbsp; I could hoist no more.&nbsp; And yet
+the mast was not swung entirely inboard.&nbsp; The butt rested against
+the outside of the port rail, while the top of the mast overhung the
+water far beyond the starboard rail.&nbsp; My shears were too short.&nbsp;
+All my work had been for nothing.&nbsp; But I no longer despaired in
+the old way.&nbsp; I was acquiring more confidence in myself and more
+confidence in the possibilities of windlasses, shears, and hoisting
+tackles.&nbsp; There was a way in which it could be done, and it remained
+for me to find that way.</p>
+<p>While I was considering the problem, Wolf Larsen came on deck.&nbsp;
+We noticed something strange about him at once.&nbsp; The indecisiveness,
+or feebleness, of his movements was more pronounced.&nbsp; His walk
+was actually tottery as he came down the port side of the cabin.&nbsp;
+At the break of the poop he reeled, raised one hand to his eyes with
+the familiar brushing gesture, and fell down the steps&mdash;still on
+his feet&mdash;to the main deck, across which he staggered, falling
+and flinging out his arms for support.&nbsp; He regained his balance
+by the steerage companion-way and stood there dizzily for a space, when
+he suddenly crumpled up and collapsed, his legs bending under him as
+he sank to the deck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One of his attacks,&rdquo; I whispered to Maud.</p>
+<p>She nodded her head; and I could see sympathy warm in eyes.</p>
+<p>We went up to him, but he seemed unconscious, breathing spasmodically.&nbsp;
+She took charge of him, lifting his head to keep the blood out of it
+and despatching me to the cabin for a pillow.&nbsp; I also brought blankets,
+and we made him comfortable.&nbsp; I took his pulse.&nbsp; It beat steadily
+and strong, and was quite normal.&nbsp; This puzzled me.&nbsp; I became
+suspicious.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What if he should be feigning this?&rdquo; I asked, still
+holding his wrist.</p>
+<p>Maud shook her head, and there was reproof in her eyes.&nbsp; But
+just then the wrist I held leaped from my hand, and the hand clasped
+like a steel trap about my wrist.&nbsp; I cried aloud in awful fear,
+a wild inarticulate cry; and I caught one glimpse of his face, malignant
+and triumphant, as his other hand compassed my body and I was drawn
+down to him in a terrible grip.</p>
+<p>My wrist was released, but his other arm, passed around my back,
+held both my arms so that I could not move.&nbsp; His free hand went
+to my throat, and in that moment I knew the bitterest foretaste of death
+earned by one&rsquo;s own idiocy.&nbsp; Why had I trusted myself within
+reach of those terrible arms?&nbsp; I could feel other hands at my throat.&nbsp;
+They were Maud&rsquo;s hands, striving vainly to tear loose the hand
+that was throttling me.&nbsp; She gave it up, and I heard her scream
+in a way that cut me to the soul, for it was a woman&rsquo;s scream
+of fear and heart-breaking despair.&nbsp; I had heard it before, during
+the sinking of the <i>Martinez.</i></p>
+<p>My face was against his chest and I could not see, but I heard Maud
+turn and run swiftly away along the deck.&nbsp; Everything was happening
+quickly.&nbsp; I had not yet had a glimmering of unconsciousness, and
+it seemed that an interminable period of time was lapsing before I heard
+her feet flying back.&nbsp; And just then I felt the whole man sink
+under me.&nbsp; The breath was leaving his lungs and his chest was collapsing
+under my weight.&nbsp; Whether it was merely the expelled breath, or
+his consciousness of his growing impotence, I know not, but his throat
+vibrated with a deep groan.&nbsp; The hand at my throat relaxed.&nbsp;
+I breathed.&nbsp; It fluttered and tightened again.&nbsp; But even his
+tremendous will could not overcome the dissolution that assailed it.&nbsp;
+That will of his was breaking down.&nbsp; He was fainting.</p>
+<p>Maud&rsquo;s footsteps were very near as his hand fluttered for the
+last time and my throat was released.&nbsp; I rolled off and over to
+the deck on my back, gasping and blinking in the sunshine.&nbsp; Maud
+was pale but composed,&mdash;my eyes had gone instantly to her face,&mdash;and
+she was looking at me with mingled alarm and relief.&nbsp; A heavy seal-club
+in her hand caught my eyes, and at that moment she followed my gaze
+down to it.&nbsp; The club dropped from her hand as though it had suddenly
+stung her, and at the same moment my heart surged with a great joy.&nbsp;
+Truly she was my woman, my mate-woman, fighting with me and for me as
+the mate of a caveman would have fought, all the primitive in her aroused,
+forgetful of her culture, hard under the softening civilization of the
+only life she had ever known.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dear woman!&rdquo; I cried, scrambling to my feet.</p>
+<p>The next moment she was in my arms, weeping convulsively on my shoulder
+while I clasped her close.&nbsp; I looked down at the brown glory of
+her hair, glinting gems in the sunshine far more precious to me than
+those in the treasure-chests of kings.&nbsp; And I bent my head and
+kissed her hair softly, so softly that she did not know.</p>
+<p>Then sober thought came to me.&nbsp; After all, she was only a woman,
+crying her relief, now that the danger was past, in the arms of her
+protector or of the one who had been endangered.&nbsp; Had I been father
+or brother, the situation would have been in nowise different.&nbsp;
+Besides, time and place were not meet, and I wished to earn a better
+right to declare my love.&nbsp; So once again I softly kissed her hair
+as I felt her receding from my clasp.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was a real attack this time,&rdquo; I said: &ldquo;another
+shock like the one that made him blind.&nbsp; He feigned at first, and
+in doing so brought it on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Maud was already rearranging his pillow.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;not yet.&nbsp; Now that I have him
+helpless, helpless he shall remain.&nbsp; From this day we live in the
+cabin.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen shall live in the steerage.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I caught him under the shoulders and dragged him to the companion-way.&nbsp;
+At my direction Maud fetched a rope.&nbsp; Placing this under his shoulders,
+I balanced him across the threshold and lowered him down the steps to
+the floor.&nbsp; I could not lift him directly into a bunk, but with
+Maud&rsquo;s help I lifted first his shoulders and head, then his body,
+balanced him across the edge, and rolled him into a lower bunk.</p>
+<p>But this was not to be all.&nbsp; I recollected the handcuffs in
+his state-room, which he preferred to use on sailors instead of the
+ancient and clumsy ship irons.&nbsp; So, when we left him, he lay handcuffed
+hand and foot.&nbsp; For the first time in many days I breathed freely.&nbsp;
+I felt strangely light as I came on deck, as though a weight had been
+lifted off my shoulders.&nbsp; I felt, also, that Maud and I had drawn
+more closely together.&nbsp; And I wondered if she, too, felt it, as
+we walked along the deck side by side to where the stalled foremast
+hung in the shears.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXVII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>At once we moved aboard the <i>Ghost</i>, occupying our old state-rooms
+and cooking in the galley.&nbsp; The imprisonment of Wolf Larsen had
+happened most opportunely, for what must have been the Indian summer
+of this high latitude was gone and drizzling stormy weather had set
+in.&nbsp; We were very comfortable, and the inadequate shears, with
+the foremast suspended from them, gave a business-like air to the schooner
+and a promise of departure.</p>
+<p>And now that we had Wolf Larsen in irons, how little did we need
+it!&nbsp; Like his first attack, his second had been accompanied by
+serious disablement.&nbsp; Maud made the discovery in the afternoon
+while trying to give him nourishment.&nbsp; He had shown signs of consciousness,
+and she had spoken to him, eliciting no response.&nbsp; He was lying
+on his left side at the time, and in evident pain.&nbsp; With a restless
+movement he rolled his head around, clearing his left ear from the pillow
+against which it had been pressed.&nbsp; At once he heard and answered
+her, and at once she came to me.</p>
+<p>Pressing the pillow against his left ear, I asked him if he heard
+me, but he gave no sign.&nbsp; Removing the pillow and, repeating the
+question he answered promptly that he did.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know you are deaf in the right ear?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered in a low, strong voice, &ldquo;and
+worse than that.&nbsp; My whole right side is affected.&nbsp; It seems
+asleep.&nbsp; I cannot move arm or leg.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Feigning again?&rdquo; I demanded angrily.</p>
+<p>He shook his head, his stern mouth shaping the strangest, twisted
+smile.&nbsp; It was indeed a twisted smile, for it was on the left side
+only, the facial muscles of the right side moving not at all.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That was the last play of the Wolf,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I am paralysed.&nbsp; I shall never walk again.&nbsp; Oh, only
+on the other side,&rdquo; he added, as though divining the suspicious
+glance I flung at his left leg, the knee of which had just then drawn
+up, and elevated the blankets.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s unfortunate,&rdquo; he continued.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;d
+liked to have done for you first, Hump.&nbsp; And I thought I had that
+much left in me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But why?&rdquo; I asked; partly in horror, partly out of curiosity.</p>
+<p>Again his stern mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest
+bit of the ferment to the end, to eat you.&nbsp; But to die this way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders, or attempted to shrug them, rather, for
+the left shoulder alone moved.&nbsp; Like the smile, the shrug was twisted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how can you account for it?&rdquo; I asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;Where
+is the seat of your trouble?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The brain,&rdquo; he said at once.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was those
+cursed headaches brought it on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Symptoms,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>He nodded his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;There is no accounting for it.&nbsp;
+I was never sick in my life.&nbsp; Something&rsquo;s gone wrong with
+my brain.&nbsp; A cancer, a tumour, or something of that nature,&mdash;a
+thing that devours and destroys.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s attacking my nerve-centres,
+eating them up, bit by bit, cell by cell&mdash;from the pain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The motor-centres, too,&rdquo; I suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here,
+conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going down,
+breaking bit by bit communication with the world.&nbsp; I cannot see,
+hearing and feeling are leaving me, at this rate I shall soon cease
+to speak; yet all the time I shall be here, alive, active, and powerless.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When you say <i>you</i> are here, I&rsquo;d suggest the likelihood
+of the soul,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bosh!&rdquo; was his retort.&nbsp; &ldquo;It simply means
+that in the attack on my brain the higher psychical centres are untouched.&nbsp;
+I can remember, I can think and reason.&nbsp; When that goes, I go.&nbsp;
+I am not.&nbsp; The soul?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He broke out in mocking laughter, then turned his left ear to the
+pillow as a sign that he wished no further conversation.</p>
+<p>Maud and I went about our work oppressed by the fearful fate which
+had overtaken him,&mdash;how fearful we were yet fully to realize.&nbsp;
+There was the awfulness of retribution about it.&nbsp; Our thoughts
+were deep and solemn, and we spoke to each other scarcely above whispers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You might remove the handcuffs,&rdquo; he said that night,
+as we stood in consultation over him.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s dead safe.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;m a paralytic now.&nbsp; The next thing to watch out for is
+bed sores.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled his twisted smile, and Maud, her eyes wide with horror,
+was compelled to turn away her head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know that your smile is crooked?&rdquo; I asked him;
+for I knew that she must attend him, and I wished to save her as much
+as possible.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I shall smile no more,&rdquo; he said calmly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+thought something was wrong.&nbsp; My right cheek has been numb all
+day.&nbsp; Yes, and I&rsquo;ve had warnings of this for the last three
+days; by spells, my right side seemed going to sleep, sometimes arm
+or hand, sometimes leg or foot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So my smile is crooked?&rdquo; he queried a short while after.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Well, consider henceforth that I smile internally, with my soul,
+if you please, my soul.&nbsp; Consider that I am smiling now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And for the space of several minutes he lay there, quiet, indulging
+his grotesque fancy.</p>
+<p>The man of him was not changed.&nbsp; It was the old, indomitable,
+terrible Wolf Larsen, imprisoned somewhere within that flesh which had
+once been so invincible and splendid.&nbsp; Now it bound him with insentient
+fetters, walling his soul in darkness and silence, blocking it from
+the world which to him had been a riot of action.&nbsp; No more would
+he conjugate the verb &ldquo;to do in every mood and tense.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;To be&rdquo; was all that remained to him&mdash;to be, as he
+had defined death, without movement; to will, but not to execute; to
+think and reason and in the spirit of him to be as alive as ever, but
+in the flesh to be dead, quite dead.</p>
+<p>And yet, though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust
+ourselves to his condition.&nbsp; Our minds revolted.&nbsp; To us he
+was full of potentiality.&nbsp; We knew not what to expect of him next,
+what fearful thing, rising above the flesh, he might break out and do.&nbsp;
+Our experience warranted this state of mind, and we went about our work
+with anxiety always upon us.</p>
+<p>I had solved the problem which had arisen through the shortness of
+the shears.&nbsp; By means of the watch-tackle (I had made a new one),
+I heaved the butt of the foremast across the rail and then lowered it
+to the deck.&nbsp; Next, by means of the shears, I hoisted the main
+boom on board.&nbsp; Its forty feet of length would supply the height
+necessary properly to swing the mast.&nbsp; By means of a secondary
+tackle I had attached to the shears, I swung the boom to a nearly perpendicular
+position, then lowered the butt to the deck, where, to prevent slipping,
+I spiked great cleats around it.&nbsp; The single block of my original
+shears-tackle I had attached to the end of the boom.&nbsp; Thus, by
+carrying this tackle to the windlass, I could raise and lower the end
+of the boom at will, the butt always remaining stationary, and, by means
+of guys, I could swing the boom from side to side.&nbsp; To the end
+of the boom I had likewise rigged a hoisting tackle; and when the whole
+arrangement was completed I could not but be startled by the power and
+latitude it gave me.</p>
+<p>Of course, two days&rsquo; work was required for the accomplishment
+of this part of my task, and it was not till the morning of the third
+day that I swung the foremast from the deck and proceeded to square
+its butt to fit the step.&nbsp; Here I was especially awkward.&nbsp;
+I sawed and chopped and chiselled the weathered wood till it had the
+appearance of having been gnawed by some gigantic mouse.&nbsp; But it
+fitted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It will work, I know it will work,&rdquo; I cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know Dr. Jordan&rsquo;s final test of truth?&rdquo;
+Maud asked.</p>
+<p>I shook my head and paused in the act of dislodging the shavings
+which had drifted down my neck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can we make it work?&nbsp; Can we trust our lives to it? is
+the test.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is a favourite of yours,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When I dismantled my old Pantheon and cast out Napoleon and
+Caesar and their fellows, I straightway erected a new Pantheon,&rdquo;
+she answered gravely, &ldquo;and the first I installed as Dr. Jordan.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A modern hero.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And a greater because modern,&rdquo; she added.&nbsp; &ldquo;How
+can the Old World heroes compare with ours?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I shook my head.&nbsp; We were too much alike in many things for
+argument.&nbsp; Our points of view and outlook on life at least were
+very alike.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For a pair of critics we agree famously,&rdquo; I laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And as shipwright and able assistant,&rdquo; she laughed back.</p>
+<p>But there was little time for laughter in those days, what of our
+heavy work and of the awfulness of Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s living death.</p>
+<p>He had received another stroke.&nbsp; He had lost his voice, or he
+was losing it.&nbsp; He had only intermittent use of it.&nbsp; As he
+phrased it, the wires were like the stock market, now up, now down.&nbsp;
+Occasionally the wires were up and he spoke as well as ever, though
+slowly and heavily.&nbsp; Then speech would suddenly desert him, in
+the middle of a sentence perhaps, and for hours, sometimes, we would
+wait for the connection to be re-established.&nbsp; He complained of
+great pain in his head, and it was during this period that he arranged
+a system of communication against the time when speech should leave
+him altogether&mdash;one pressure of the hand for &ldquo;yes,&rdquo;
+two for &ldquo;no.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was well that it was arranged, for
+by evening his voice had gone from him.&nbsp; By hand pressures, after
+that, he answered our questions, and when he wished to speak he scrawled
+his thoughts with his left hand, quite legibly, on a sheet of paper.</p>
+<p>The fierce winter had now descended upon us.&nbsp; Gale followed
+gale, with snow and sleet and rain.&nbsp; The seals had started on their
+great southern migration, and the rookery was practically deserted.&nbsp;
+I worked feverishly.&nbsp; In spite of the bad weather, and of the wind
+which especially hindered me, I was on deck from daylight till dark
+and making substantial progress.</p>
+<p>I profited by my lesson learned through raising the shears and then
+climbing them to attach the guys.&nbsp; To the top of the foremast,
+which was just lifted conveniently from the deck, I attached the rigging,
+stays and throat and peak halyards.&nbsp; As usual, I had underrated
+the amount of work involved in this portion of the task, and two long
+days were necessary to complete it.&nbsp; And there was so much yet
+to be done&mdash;the sails, for instance, which practically had to be
+made over.</p>
+<p>While I toiled at rigging the foremast, Maud sewed on canvas, ready
+always to drop everything and come to my assistance when more hands
+than two were required.&nbsp; The canvas was heavy and hard, and she
+sewed with the regular sailor&rsquo;s palm and three-cornered sail-needle.&nbsp;
+Her hands were soon sadly blistered, but she struggled bravely on, and
+in addition doing the cooking and taking care of the sick man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A fig for superstition,&rdquo; I said on Friday morning.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;That mast goes in to-day.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Everything was ready for the attempt.&nbsp; Carrying the boom-tackle
+to the windlass, I hoisted the mast nearly clear of the deck.&nbsp;
+Making this tackle fast, I took to the windlass the shears-tackle (which
+was connected with the end of the boom), and with a few turns had the
+mast perpendicular and clear.</p>
+<p>Maud clapped her hands the instant she was relieved from holding
+the turn, crying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It works!&nbsp; It works!&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll trust our lives
+to it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then she assumed a rueful expression.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not over the hole,&rdquo; she add.&nbsp; &ldquo;Will
+you have to begin all over?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I smiled in superior fashion, and, slacking off on one of the boom-guys
+and taking in on the other, swung the mast perfectly in the centre of
+the deck.&nbsp; Still it was not over the hole.&nbsp; Again the rueful
+expression came on her face, and again I smiled in a superior way.&nbsp;
+Slacking away on the boom-tackle and hoisting an equivalent amount on
+the shears-tackle, I brought the butt of the mast into position directly
+over the hole in the deck.&nbsp; Then I gave Maud careful instructions
+for lowering away and went into the hold to the step on the schooner&rsquo;s
+bottom.</p>
+<p>I called to her, and the mast moved easily and accurately.&nbsp;
+Straight toward the square hole of the step the square butt descended;
+but as it descended it slowly twisted so that square would not fit into
+square.&nbsp; But I had not even a moment&rsquo;s indecision.&nbsp;
+Calling to Maud to cease lowering, I went on deck and made the watch-tackle
+fast to the mast with a rolling hitch.&nbsp; I left Maud to pull on
+it while I went below.&nbsp; By the light of the lantern I saw the butt
+twist slowly around till its sides coincided with the sides of the step.&nbsp;
+Maud made fast and returned to the windlass.&nbsp; Slowly the butt descended
+the several intervening inches, at the same time slightly twisting again.&nbsp;
+Again Maud rectified the twist with the watch-tackle, and again she
+lowered away from the windlass.&nbsp; Square fitted into square.&nbsp;
+The mast was stepped.</p>
+<p>I raised a shout, and she ran down to see.&nbsp; In the yellow lantern
+light we peered at what we had accomplished.&nbsp; We looked at each
+other, and our hands felt their way and clasped.&nbsp; The eyes of both
+of us, I think, were moist with the joy of success.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was done so easily after all,&rdquo; I remarked.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;All the work was in the preparation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And all the wonder in the completion,&rdquo; Maud added.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I can scarcely bring myself to realize that that great mast is
+really up and in; that you have lifted it from the water, swung it through
+the air, and deposited it here where it belongs.&nbsp; It is a Titan&rsquo;s
+task.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And they made themselves many inventions,&rdquo; I began merrily,
+then paused to sniff the air.</p>
+<p>I looked hastily at the lantern.&nbsp; It was not smoking.&nbsp;
+Again I sniffed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something is burning,&rdquo; Maud said, with sudden conviction.</p>
+<p>We sprang together for the ladder, but I raced past her to the deck.&nbsp;
+A dense volume of smoke was pouring out of the steerage companion-way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The Wolf is not yet dead,&rdquo; I muttered to myself as I
+sprang down through the smoke.</p>
+<p>It was so thick in the confined space that I was compelled to feel
+my way; and so potent was the spell of Wolf Larsen on my imagination,
+I was quite prepared for the helpless giant to grip my neck in a strangle
+hold.&nbsp; I hesitated, the desire to race back and up the steps to
+the deck almost overpowering me.&nbsp; Then I recollected Maud.&nbsp;
+The vision of her, as I had last seen her, in the lantern light of the
+schooner&rsquo;s hold, her brown eyes warm and moist with joy, flashed
+before me, and I knew that I could not go back.</p>
+<p>I was choking and suffocating by the time I reached Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s
+bunk.&nbsp; I reached my hand and felt for his.&nbsp; He was lying motionless,
+but moved slightly at the touch of my hand.&nbsp; I felt over and under
+his blankets.&nbsp; There was no warmth, no sign of fire.&nbsp; Yet
+that smoke which blinded me and made me cough and gasp must have a source.&nbsp;
+I lost my head temporarily and dashed frantically about the steerage.&nbsp;
+A collision with the table partially knocked the wind from my body and
+brought me to myself.&nbsp; I reasoned that a helpless man could start
+a fire only near to where he lay.</p>
+<p>I returned to Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s bunk.&nbsp; There I encountered
+Maud.&nbsp; How long she had been there in that suffocating atmosphere
+I could not guess.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go up on deck!&rdquo; I commanded peremptorily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But, Humphrey&mdash;&rdquo; she began to protest in a queer,
+husky voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please! please!&rdquo; I shouted at her harshly.</p>
+<p>She drew away obediently, and then I thought, What if she cannot
+find the steps?&nbsp; I started after her, to stop at the foot of the
+companion-way.&nbsp; Perhaps she had gone up.&nbsp; As I stood there,
+hesitant, I heard her cry softly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Humphrey, I am lost.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I found her fumbling at the wall of the after bulkhead, and, half
+leading her, half carrying her, I took her up the companion-way.&nbsp;
+The pure air was like nectar.&nbsp; Maud was only faint and dizzy, and
+I left her lying on the deck when I took my second plunge below.</p>
+<p>The source of the smoke must be very close to Wolf Larsen&mdash;my
+mind was made up to this, and I went straight to his bunk.&nbsp; As
+I felt about among his blankets, something hot fell on the back of my
+hand.&nbsp; It burned me, and I jerked my hand away.&nbsp; Then I understood.&nbsp;
+Through the cracks in the bottom of the upper bunk he had set fire to
+the mattress.&nbsp; He still retained sufficient use of his left arm
+to do this.&nbsp; The damp straw of the mattress, fired from beneath
+and denied air, had been smouldering all the while.</p>
+<p>As I dragged the mattress out of the bunk it seemed to disintegrate
+in mid-air, at the same time bursting into flames.&nbsp; I beat out
+the burning remnants of straw in the bunk, then made a dash for the
+deck for fresh air.</p>
+<p>Several buckets of water sufficed to put out the burning mattress
+in the middle of the steerage floor; and ten minutes later, when the
+smoke had fairly cleared, I allowed Maud to come below.&nbsp; Wolf Larsen
+was unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the fresh air to
+restore him.&nbsp; We were working over him, however, when he signed
+for paper and pencil.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pray do not interrupt me,&rdquo; he wrote.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+am smiling.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am still a bit of the ferment, you see,&rdquo; he wrote
+a little later.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am glad you are as small a bit as you are,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; he wrote.&nbsp; &ldquo;But just think of
+how much smaller I shall be before I die.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And yet I am all here, Hump,&rdquo; he wrote with a final
+flourish.&nbsp; &ldquo;I can think more clearly than ever in my life
+before.&nbsp; Nothing to disturb me.&nbsp; Concentration is perfect.&nbsp;
+I am all here and more than here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man&rsquo;s
+body had become his mausoleum.&nbsp; And there, in so strange sepulchre,
+his spirit fluttered and lived.&nbsp; It would flutter and live till
+the last line of communication was broken, and after that who was to
+say how much longer it might continue to flutter and live?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXVIII</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;I think my left side is going,&rdquo; Wolf Larsen wrote, the
+morning after his attempt to fire the ship.&nbsp; &ldquo;The numbness
+is growing.&nbsp; I can hardly move my hand.&nbsp; You will have to
+speak louder.&nbsp; The last lines are going down.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you in pain?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>I was compelled to repeat my question loudly before he answered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not all the time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and
+it was with extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl.&nbsp;
+It was like a &ldquo;spirit message,&rdquo; such as are delivered at
+s&eacute;ances of spiritualists for a dollar admission.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I am still here, all here,&rdquo; the hand scrawled more
+slowly and painfully than ever.</p>
+<p>The pencil dropped, and we had to replace it in the hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When there is no pain I have perfect peace and quiet.&nbsp;
+I have never thought so clearly.&nbsp; I can ponder life and death like
+a Hindoo sage.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And immortality?&rdquo; Maud queried loudly in the ear.</p>
+<p>Three times the hand essayed to write but fumbled hopelessly.&nbsp;
+The pencil fell.&nbsp; In vain we tried to replace it.&nbsp; The fingers
+could not close on it.&nbsp; Then Maud pressed and held the fingers
+about the pencil with her own hand and the hand wrote, in large letters,
+and so slowly that the minutes ticked off to each letter:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;B-O-S-H.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s last word, &ldquo;bosh,&rdquo; sceptical
+and invincible to the end.&nbsp; The arm and hand relaxed.&nbsp; The
+trunk of the body moved slightly.&nbsp; Then there was no movement.&nbsp;
+Maud released the hand.&nbsp; The fingers spread slightly, falling apart
+of their own weight, and the pencil rolled away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you still hear?&rdquo; I shouted, holding the fingers and
+waiting for the single pressure which would signify &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+There was no response.&nbsp; The hand was dead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I noticed the lips slightly move,&rdquo; Maud said.</p>
+<p>I repeated the question.&nbsp; The lips moved.&nbsp; She placed the
+tips of her fingers on them.&nbsp; Again I repeated the question.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Maud announced.&nbsp; We looked at each other expectantly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What good is it?&rdquo; I asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;What can we
+say now?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, ask him&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She hesitated.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ask him something that requires no for an answer,&rdquo; I
+suggested.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then we will know for certainty.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you hungry?&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+<p>The lips moved under her fingers, and she answered, &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you have some beef?&rdquo; was her next query.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she announced.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Beef-tea?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, he will have some beef-tea,&rdquo; she said, quietly,
+looking up at me.&nbsp; &ldquo;Until his hearing goes we shall be able
+to communicate with him.&nbsp; And after that&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked at me queerly.&nbsp; I saw her lips trembling and the
+tears swimming up in her eyes.&nbsp; She swayed toward me and I caught
+her in my arms.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Humphrey,&rdquo; she sobbed, &ldquo;when will it all end?&nbsp;
+I am so tired, so tired.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She buried her head on my shoulder, her frail form shaken with a
+storm of weeping.&nbsp; She was like a feather in my arms, so slender,
+so ethereal.&nbsp; &ldquo;She has broken down at last,&rdquo; I thought.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;What can I do without her help?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But I soothed and comforted her, till she pulled herself bravely
+together and recuperated mentally as quickly as she was wont to do physically.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I ought to be ashamed of myself,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; Then
+added, with the whimsical smile I adored, &ldquo;but I am only one,
+small woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That phrase, the &ldquo;one small woman,&rdquo; startled me like
+an electric shock.&nbsp; It was my own phrase, my pet, secret phrase,
+my love phrase for her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where did you get that phrase?&rdquo; I demanded, with an
+abruptness that in turn startled her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What phrase?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One small woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it yours?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;Mine.&nbsp; I made it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you must have talked in your sleep,&rdquo; she smiled.</p>
+<p>The dancing, tremulous light was in her eyes.&nbsp; Mine, I knew,
+were speaking beyond the will of my speech.&nbsp; I leaned toward her.&nbsp;
+Without volition I leaned toward her, as a tree is swayed by the wind.&nbsp;
+Ah, we were very close together in that moment.&nbsp; But she shook
+her head, as one might shake off sleep or a dream, saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have known it all my life.&nbsp; It was my father&rsquo;s
+name for my mother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is my phrase too,&rdquo; I said stubbornly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For your mother?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I answered, and she questioned no further, though
+I could have sworn her eyes retained for some time a mocking, teasing
+expression.</p>
+<p>With the foremast in, the work now went on apace.&nbsp; Almost before
+I knew it, and without one serious hitch, I had the mainmast stepped.&nbsp;
+A derrick-boom, rigged to the foremast, had accomplished this; and several
+days more found all stays and shrouds in place, and everything set up
+taut.&nbsp; Topsails would be a nuisance and a danger for a crew of
+two, so I heaved the topmasts on deck and lashed them fast.</p>
+<p>Several more days were consumed in finishing the sails and putting
+them on.&nbsp; There were only three&mdash;the jib, foresail, and mainsail;
+and, patched, shortened, and distorted, they were a ridiculously ill-fitting
+suit for so trim a craft as the <i>Ghost.</i></p>
+<p>&ldquo;But they&rsquo;ll work!&rdquo; Maud cried jubilantly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll make them work, and trust our lives to them!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Certainly, among my many new trades, I shone least as a sail-maker.&nbsp;
+I could sail them better than make them, and I had no doubt of my power
+to bring the schooner to some northern port of Japan.&nbsp; In fact,
+I had crammed navigation from text-books aboard; and besides, there
+was Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s star-scale, so simple a device that a child
+could work it.</p>
+<p>As for its inventor, beyond an increasing deafness and the movement
+of the lips growing fainter and fainter, there had been little change
+in his condition for a week.&nbsp; But on the day we finished bending
+the schooner&rsquo;s sails, he heard his last, and the last movement
+of his lips died away&mdash;but not before I had asked him, &ldquo;Are
+you all there?&rdquo; and the lips had answered, &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The last line was down.&nbsp; Somewhere within that tomb of the flesh
+still dwelt the soul of the man.&nbsp; Walled by the living clay, that
+fierce intelligence we had known burned on; but it burned on in silence
+and darkness.&nbsp; And it was disembodied.&nbsp; To that intelligence
+there could be no objective knowledge of a body.&nbsp; It knew no body.&nbsp;
+The very world was not.&nbsp; It knew only itself and the vastness and
+profundity of the quiet and the dark.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXIX</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The day came for our departure.&nbsp; There was no longer anything
+to detain us on Endeavour Island.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> stumpy
+masts were in place, her crazy sails bent.&nbsp; All my handiwork was
+strong, none of it beautiful; but I knew that it would work, and I felt
+myself a man of power as I looked at it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I did it!&nbsp; I did it!&nbsp; With my own hands I did it!&rdquo;
+I wanted to cry aloud.</p>
+<p>But Maud and I had a way of voicing each other&rsquo;s thoughts,
+and she said, as we prepared to hoist the mainsail:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To think, Humphrey, you did it all with your own hands?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But there were two other hands,&rdquo; I answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;Two
+small hands, and don&rsquo;t say that was a phrase, also, of your father.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She laughed and shook her head, and held her hands up for inspection.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can never get them clean again,&rdquo; she wailed, &ldquo;nor
+soften the weather-beat.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then dirt and weather-beat shall be your guerdon of honour,&rdquo;
+I said, holding them in mine; and, spite of my resolutions, I would
+have kissed the two dear hands had she not swiftly withdrawn them.</p>
+<p>Our comradeship was becoming tremulous, I had mastered my love long
+and well, but now it was mastering me.&nbsp; Wilfully had it disobeyed
+and won my eyes to speech, and now it was winning my tongue&mdash;ay,
+and my lips, for they were mad this moment to kiss the two small hands
+which had toiled so faithfully and hard.&nbsp; And I, too, was mad.&nbsp;
+There was a cry in my being like bugles calling me to her.&nbsp; And
+there was a wind blowing upon me which I could not resist, swaying the
+very body of me till I leaned toward her, all unconscious that I leaned.&nbsp;
+And she knew it.&nbsp; She could not but know it as she swiftly drew
+away her hands, and yet, could not forbear one quick searching look
+before she turned away her eyes.</p>
+<p>By means of deck-tackles I had arranged to carry the halyards forward
+to the windlass; and now I hoisted the mainsail, peak and throat, at
+the same time.&nbsp; It was a clumsy way, but it did not take long,
+and soon the foresail as well was up and fluttering.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We can never get that anchor up in this narrow place, once
+it has left the bottom,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;We should be on
+the rocks first.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What can you do?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Slip it,&rdquo; was my answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;And when I do,
+you must do your first work on the windlass.&nbsp; I shall have to run
+at once to the wheel, and at the same time you must be hoisting the
+jib.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This manoeuvre of getting under way I had studied and worked out
+a score of times; and, with the jib-halyard to the windlass, I knew
+Maud was capable of hoisting that most necessary sail.&nbsp; A brisk
+wind was blowing into the cove, and though the water was calm, rapid
+work was required to get us safely out.</p>
+<p>When I knocked the shackle-bolt loose, the chain roared out through
+the hawse-hole and into the sea.&nbsp; I raced aft, putting the wheel
+up.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i> seemed to start into life as she heeled to
+the first fill of her sails.&nbsp; The jib was rising.&nbsp; As it filled,
+the <i>Ghost&rsquo;s</i> bow swung off and I had to put the wheel down
+a few spokes and steady her.</p>
+<p>I had devised an automatic jib-sheet which passed the jib across
+of itself, so there was no need for Maud to attend to that; but she
+was still hoisting the jib when I put the wheel hard down.&nbsp; It
+was a moment of anxiety, for the <i>Ghost</i> was rushing directly upon
+the beach, a stone&rsquo;s throw distant.&nbsp; But she swung obediently
+on her heel into the wind.&nbsp; There was a great fluttering and flapping
+of canvas and reef-points, most welcome to my ears, then she filled
+away on the other tack.</p>
+<p>Maud had finished her task and come aft, where she stood beside me,
+a small cap perched on her wind-blown hair, her cheeks flushed from
+exertion, her eyes wide and bright with the excitement, her nostrils
+quivering to the rush and bite of the fresh salt air.&nbsp; Her brown
+eyes were like a startled deer&rsquo;s.&nbsp; There was a wild, keen
+look in them I had never seen before, and her lips parted and her breath
+suspended as the <i>Ghost</i>, charging upon the wall of rock at the
+entrance to the inner cove, swept into the wind and filled away into
+safe water.</p>
+<p>My first mate&rsquo;s berth on the sealing grounds stood me in good
+stead, and I cleared the inner cove and laid a long tack along the shore
+of the outer cove.&nbsp; Once again about, and the <i>Ghost</i> headed
+out to open sea.&nbsp; She had now caught the bosom-breathing of the
+ocean, and was herself a-breath with the rhythm of it as she smoothly
+mounted and slipped down each broad-backed wave.&nbsp; The day had been
+dull and overcast, but the sun now burst through the clouds, a welcome
+omen, and shone upon the curving beach where together we had dared the
+lords of the harem and slain the holluschickie.&nbsp; All Endeavour
+Island brightened under the sun.&nbsp; Even the grim south-western promontory
+showed less grim, and here and there, where the sea-spray wet its surface,
+high lights flashed and dazzled in the sun.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall always think of it with pride,&rdquo; I said to Maud.</p>
+<p>She threw her head back in a queenly way but said, &ldquo;Dear, dear
+Endeavour Island!&nbsp; I shall always love it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I,&rdquo; I said quickly.</p>
+<p>It seemed our eyes must meet in a great understanding, and yet, loath,
+they struggled away and did not meet.</p>
+<p>There was a silence I might almost call awkward, till I broke it,
+saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;See those black clouds to windward.&nbsp; You remember, I
+told you last night the barometer was falling.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And the sun is gone,&rdquo; she said, her eyes still fixed
+upon our island, where we had proved our mastery over matter and attained
+to the truest comradeship that may fall to man and woman.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s slack off the sheets for Japan!&rdquo; I cried
+gaily.&nbsp; &ldquo;A fair wind and a flowing sheet, you know, or however
+it goes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lashing the wheel I ran forward, eased the fore and mainsheets, took
+in on the boom-tackles and trimmed everything for the quartering breeze
+which was ours.&nbsp; It was a fresh breeze, very fresh, but I resolved
+to run as long as I dared.&nbsp; Unfortunately, when running free, it
+is impossible to lash the wheel, so I faced an all-night watch.&nbsp;
+Maud insisted on relieving me, but proved that she had not the strength
+to steer in a heavy sea, even if she could have gained the wisdom on
+such short notice.&nbsp; She appeared quite heart-broken over the discovery,
+but recovered her spirits by coiling down tackles and halyards and all
+stray ropes.&nbsp; Then there were meals to be cooked in the galley,
+beds to make, Wolf Larsen to be attended upon, and she finished the
+day with a grand house-cleaning attack upon the cabin and steerage.</p>
+<p>All night I steered, without relief, the wind slowly and steadily
+increasing and the sea rising.&nbsp; At five in the morning Maud brought
+me hot coffee and biscuits she had baked, and at seven a substantial
+and piping hot breakfast put new lift into me.</p>
+<p>Throughout the day, and as slowly and steadily as ever, the wind
+increased.&nbsp; It impressed one with its sullen determination to blow,
+and blow harder, and keep on blowing.&nbsp; And still the <i>Ghost</i>
+foamed along, racing off the miles till I was certain she was making
+at least eleven knots.&nbsp; It was too good to lose, but by nightfall
+I was exhausted.&nbsp; Though in splendid physical trim, a thirty-six-hour
+trick at the wheel was the limit of my endurance.&nbsp; Besides, Maud
+begged me to heave to, and I knew, if the wind and sea increased at
+the same rate during the night, that it would soon be impossible to
+heave to.&nbsp; So, as twilight deepened, gladly and at the same time
+reluctantly, I brought the <i>Ghost</i> up on the wind.</p>
+<p>But I had not reckoned upon the colossal task the reefing of three
+sails meant for one man.&nbsp; While running away from the wind I had
+not appreciated its force, but when we ceased to run I learned to my
+sorrow, and well-nigh to my despair, how fiercely it was really blowing.&nbsp;
+The wind balked my every effort, ripping the canvas out of my hands
+and in an instant undoing what I had gained by ten minutes of severest
+struggle.&nbsp; At eight o&rsquo;clock I had succeeded only in putting
+the second reef into the foresail.&nbsp; At eleven o&rsquo;clock I was
+no farther along.&nbsp; Blood dripped from every finger-end, while the
+nails were broken to the quick.&nbsp; From pain and sheer exhaustion
+I wept in the darkness, secretly, so that Maud should not know.</p>
+<p>Then, in desperation, I abandoned the attempt to reef the mainsail
+and resolved to try the experiment of heaving to under the close-reefed
+foresail.&nbsp; Three hours more were required to gasket the mainsail
+and jib, and at two in the morning, nearly dead, the life almost buffeted
+and worked out of me, I had barely sufficient consciousness to know
+the experiment was a success.&nbsp; The close-reefed foresail worked.&nbsp;
+The <i>Ghost</i> clung on close to the wind and betrayed no inclination
+to fall off broadside to the trough.</p>
+<p>I was famished, but Maud tried vainly to get me to eat.&nbsp; I dozed
+with my mouth full of food.&nbsp; I would fall asleep in the act of
+carrying food to my mouth and waken in torment to find the act yet uncompleted.&nbsp;
+So sleepily helpless was I that she was compelled to hold me in my chair
+to prevent my being flung to the floor by the violent pitching of the
+schooner.</p>
+<p>Of the passage from the galley to the cabin I knew nothing.&nbsp;
+It was a sleep-walker Maud guided and supported.&nbsp; In fact, I was
+aware of nothing till I awoke, how long after I could not imagine, in
+my bunk with my boots off.&nbsp; It was dark.&nbsp; I was stiff and
+lame, and cried out with pain when the bed-clothes touched my poor finger-ends.</p>
+<p>Morning had evidently not come, so I closed my eyes and went to sleep
+again.&nbsp; I did not know it, but I had slept the clock around and
+it was night again.</p>
+<p>Once more I woke, troubled because I could sleep no better.&nbsp;
+I struck a match and looked at my watch.&nbsp; It marked midnight.&nbsp;
+And I had not left the deck until three!&nbsp; I should have been puzzled
+had I not guessed the solution.&nbsp; No wonder I was sleeping brokenly.&nbsp;
+I had slept twenty-one hours.&nbsp; I listened for a while to the behaviour
+of the <i>Ghost</i>, to the pounding of the seas and the muffled roar
+of the wind on deck, and then turned over on my ride and slept peacefully
+until morning.</p>
+<p>When I arose at seven I saw no sign of Maud and concluded she was
+in the galley preparing breakfast.&nbsp; On deck I found the <i>Ghost</i>
+doing splendidly under her patch of canvas.&nbsp; But in the galley,
+though a fire was burning and water boiling, I found no Maud.</p>
+<p>I discovered her in the steerage, by Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s bunk.&nbsp;
+I looked at him, the man who had been hurled down from the topmost pitch
+of life to be buried alive and be worse than dead.&nbsp; There seemed
+a relaxation of his expressionless face which was new.&nbsp; Maud looked
+at me and I understood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;His life flickered out in the storm,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But he still lives,&rdquo; she answered, infinite faith in
+her voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He had too great strength.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but now it no longer shackles
+him.&nbsp; He is a free spirit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is a free spirit surely,&rdquo; I answered; and, taking
+her hand, I led her on deck.</p>
+<p>The storm broke that night, which is to say that it diminished as
+slowly as it had arisen.&nbsp; After breakfast next morning, when I
+had hoisted Wolf Larsen&rsquo;s body on deck ready for burial, it was
+still blowing heavily and a large sea was running.&nbsp; The deck was
+continually awash with the sea which came inboard over the rail and
+through the scuppers.&nbsp; The wind smote the schooner with a sudden
+gust, and she heeled over till her lee rail was buried, the roar in
+her rigging rising in pitch to a shriek.&nbsp; We stood in the water
+to our knees as I bared my head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I remember only one part of the service,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and
+that is, &lsquo;And the body shall be cast into the sea.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Maud looked at me, surprised and shocked; but the spirit of something
+I had seen before was strong upon me, impelling me to give service to
+Wolf Larsen as Wolf Larsen had once given service to another man.&nbsp;
+I lifted the end of the hatch cover and the canvas-shrouded body slipped
+feet first into the sea.&nbsp; The weight of iron dragged it down.&nbsp;
+It was gone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-bye, Lucifer, proud spirit,&rdquo; Maud whispered, so
+low that it was drowned by the shouting of the wind; but I saw the movement
+of her lips and knew.</p>
+<p>As we clung to the lee rail and worked our way aft, I happened to
+glance to leeward.&nbsp; The <i>Ghost</i>, at the moment, was uptossed
+on a sea, and I caught a clear view of a small steamship two or three
+miles away, rolling and pitching, head on to the sea, as it steamed
+toward us.&nbsp; It was painted black, and from the talk of the hunters
+of their poaching exploits I recognized it as a United States revenue
+cutter.&nbsp; I pointed it out to Maud and hurriedly led her aft to
+the safety of the poop.</p>
+<p>I started to rush below to the flag-locker, then remembered that
+in rigging the <i>Ghost</i>.&nbsp; I had forgotten to make provision
+for a flag-halyard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We need no distress signal,&rdquo; Maud said.&nbsp; &ldquo;They
+have only to see us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We are saved,&rdquo; I said, soberly and solemnly.&nbsp; And
+then, in an exuberance of joy, &ldquo;I hardly know whether to be glad
+or not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I looked at her.&nbsp; Our eyes were not loath to meet.&nbsp; We
+leaned toward each other, and before I knew it my arms were about her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Need I?&rdquo; I asked.</p>
+<p>And she answered, &ldquo;There is no need, though the telling of
+it would be sweet, so sweet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her lips met the press of mine, and, by what strange trick of the
+imagination I know not, the scene in the cabin of the <i>Ghost</i> flashed
+upon me, when she had pressed her fingers lightly on my lips and said,
+&ldquo;Hush, hush.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My woman, my one small woman,&rdquo; I said, my free hand
+petting her shoulder in the way all lovers know though never learn in
+school.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My man,&rdquo; she said, looking at me for an instant with
+tremulous lids which fluttered down and veiled her eyes as she snuggled
+her head against my breast with a happy little sigh.</p>
+<p>I looked toward the cutter.&nbsp; It was very close.&nbsp; A boat
+was being lowered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One kiss, dear love,&rdquo; I whispered.&nbsp; &ldquo;One
+kiss more before they come.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And rescue us from ourselves,&rdquo; she completed, with a
+most adorable smile, whimsical as I had never seen it, for it was whimsical
+with love.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SEA WOLF ***</p>
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