The Sea Wolf
by Jack London
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

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 he 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 he 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 Rubeiyet, 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 dea