be the end of us.

"'One of the chaps, however, insisted on scoopin' up with his hands the
briny water that flowed from the pumps. It was mixed with bilge water
and smelt horribly. He went mad, too. But we couldn't afford to lose any
man's work and we lashed his hands to the pump handle. He went mad in a
happy fashion and pumped wildly, singin' and talkin' in a way that made
your heart curdle to hear it. Still, he pumped. The clouds began to form
again round us, the same racin' clouds, the orange rim came nearer and
we knew that we were once again approachin' the edge of the hurricane.
There happened to be a little food in the galley and a scrap was given
to each man. If we were going under, there was no need to drown hungry.
So, faintly, but with quickenin' loudness, the whirring roar of the
hurricane rose into a shriek and the fury hit us again.

"'I suppose I went on pumpin', I suppose we all went on pumpin', for the
vessel stayed afloat, but what happened after we passed into the
hurricane again, I can't tell you. I was deafened, stunned, blinded. I
think I must have gone mad, too. Our trysail blew out right away, and
the tiller that we had rigged up went as well. The bulwarks were laid
flat with the deck. The skipper and one of the men were lashed to the
stump of the mizzen mast, Bill, who had come to again and was ravin',
was lashed to the jury foremast, and the other four of us were lashed to
the pumps.

"'Whether I pumped for a day, a week, or a century, I'll never tell you.
It seemed to me that I had been drivin' round that pump wheel for
thousands and thousands of years. I remember that I thought that I was
dead and that I had been sentenced to turn the wheel of a ship's pump
forever. On Saturday afternoon I started my trick at the pumps, and
maybe half a dozen times before midnight, I had ten minutes' spell. On
Sunday I never left the handles and the last bite I had to eat was in
the evenin'. All day Monday the four of us, lashed to the pumps, had
never a stop, nor a bite to eat, nor a drop to drink. We laughed; how we
laughed! I must have laughed for hours. We would have killed each other
to stop, but the skipper had lashed our wrists to the pump handles. Did
we stop? No one could ever tell. Did we pump without stoppin'? No one
could ever tell that, either. Once in a while my brain cleared, and I
saw the skipper, sagged, unconscious, dead, I thought, by the mizzen
mast, and I heard the ravin's of Bill, la