ad any link been missing from this
chain of events, the _Mary Turner_ would have undoubtedly reached the
Marquesas, filled her water-barrels, and returned to the
treasure-hunting; and the destinies of Michael, Daughtry, Kwaque, and
Cocky would have been quite different and possibly less terrible.

But every link was present for the occasion. The schooner, in a dead
calm, was rolling over the huge, smooth seas, her boom sheets and tackles
crashing to the hollow thunder of her great sails, when Simon Nishikanta
put a bullet into the body of the little whale calf. By an almost
miracle of chance, the shot killed the calf. It was equivalent to
killing an elephant with a pea-rifle. Not at once did the calf die. It
merely immediately ceased its gambols and for a while lay quivering on
the surface of the ocean. The mother was beside it the moment after it
was struck, and to those on board, looking almost directly down upon her,
her dismay and alarm were very patent. She would nudge the calf with her
huge shoulder, circle around and around it, then range up alongside and
repeat her nudgings and shoulderings.

All on the _Mary Turner_, fore and aft, lined the rail and stared down
apprehensively at the leviathan that was as long as the schooner.

"If she should do to us, sir, what that other one did to the _Essex_,"
Dag Daughtry observed to the Ancient Mariner.

"It would be no more than we deserve," was the response. "It was
uncalled-for--a wanton, cruel act."

Michael, aware of the excitement overside but unable to see because of
the rail, leaped on top of the cabin and at sight of the monster barked
defiantly. Every eye turned on him in startlement and fear, and Steward
hushed him with a whispered command.

"This is the last time," Grimshaw muttered in a low voice, tense with
anger, to Nishikanta. "If ever again, on this voyage, you take a shot at
a whale, I'll wring your dirty neck for you. Get me. I mean it. I'll
choke your eye-balls out of you."

The Jew smiled in a sickly way and whined, "There ain't nothing going to
happen. I don't believe that _Essex_ ever was sunk by a whale."

Urged on by its mother, the dying calf made spasmodic efforts to swim
that were futile and caused it to veer and wallow from side to side.

In the course of circling about it, the mother accidentally brushed her
shoulder under the port quarter of the _Mary Turner_, and the _Mary
Turner_ listed to starboard as her stern was l