h a quick upstanding, and
hooking out-reach of hand, caught the fat pawnbroker around the back of
the neck, and with anything but gentle suasion jerked him half into the
air and flung him face downward on the bottom boards.

"Ha-ah!" said Daughtry across the hundred yards of ocean.

Next, and without hurry, Grimshaw took the more comfortable seat for
himself.

"Want to come along?" he called to Daughtry.

"No, thank you, sir," was the latter's reply. "There's too many of us,
an' we'll make out better in the other boat."

With some bailing, and with others bending to the oars, the boat rowed
frantically away, while Daughtry took Ah Moy with him down into the
lazarette beneath the cabin floor and broke out and passed up more
provisions.

It was when he was thus below that the cow grazed the schooner just
for'ard of amidships on the port side, lashed out with her mighty tail as
she sounded, and ripped clean away the chain plates and rail of the
mizzen-shrouds. In the next roll of the huge, glassy sea, the mizzen-
mast fell overside.

"My word, some whale," Daughtry said to Ah Moy, as they emerged from the
cabin companionway and gazed at this latest wreckage.

Ah Moy found need to get more food from the galley, when Daughtry,
Kwaque, and Big John swung their weight on the falls, one at a time, and
hoisted the port boat, one end at a time, over the rail and swung her
out.

"We'll wait till the next smash, then lower away, throw everything in,
an' get outa this," the steward told the Ancient Mariner. "Lots of time.
The schooner'll sink no faster when she's awash than she's sinkin' now."

Even as he spoke, the scuppers were nearly level with the ocean, and her
rolling in the big sea was sluggish.

"Hey!" he called with sudden forethought across the widening stretch of
sea to Captain Doane. "What's the course to the Marquesas? Right now?
And how far away, sir?"

"Nor'-nor'-east-quarter-east!" came the faint reply. "Will fetch Nuka-
Hiva! About two hundred miles! Haul on the south-east trade with a good
full and you'll make it!"

"Thank you, sir," was the steward's acknowledgment, ere he ran aft,
disrupted the binnacle, and carried the steering compass back to the
boat.

Almost, from the whale's delay in renewing her charging, did they think
she had given over. And while they waited and watched her rolling on the
sea an eighth of a mile away, the _Mary Turner_ steadily sank.

"We might almost chance