thering Block Island to the south with a leeway of several
miles. Indisputably the Atlantic held them in the hollow of its
tremendous hand. The slow, eternal deep-sea swell was most perceptible:
a ceaseless impulse of infinite power running through the pettier, if
more threatening, drive of waves kicked up by the wind. Fortunately the
course, shifting to northeast by east, presently took them out of the
swinging trough of the sea. The rollers now led them on, an endless
herd, one after another falling sullenly behind as the two boats shot
down into their shallow intervals and began to creep slowly up over the
long gray backs of those that ran before.

It was after three in the morning, and, though Whitaker had no means of
knowing it, they were on the last and longest leg of the cruise. They
still had moonlight, but it was more wan and ghastly and threatened
presently to fail them altogether, blotted out by the thickening
weather. The wind was blowing with an insistent, unintermittent force it
had not before developed. A haze, vaguely opalescent, encircled the
horizon like a ghost of absinthe. The cold, formless, wavering dusk of
dawn in time lent it a sickly hue of gray together with a seeming more
substantial. Swathed in its smothering folds, the moon faded to the
semblance of a plaque of dull silver, then vanished altogether. By
four-thirty, when the twilight was moderately bright, Whitaker was
barely able to distinguish the leading boat. The two seemed as if
suspended, struggling like impaled insects, the one in the midst, the
other near the edge, of a watery pit walled in by vapours.

He recognized in this phenomenon of the weather an exceptionally
striking variation of what his sea-going experience had taught him to
term a smoky sou'wester.

That hour found him on the verge of the admission that he was, as he
would have said, about all in: the limit of endurance nearly approached.
He was half-dazed with fatigue; his wet skin crawled with goose-flesh;
his flesh itself was cold as stone. In the pit of his stomach lurked an
indefinite, sickening sensation of chilled emptiness. His throat was
sore and parched, his limbs stiff and aching, his face crusted with
stinging particles of salt, his eyes red, sore and smarting. If his
ankle troubled him, he was not aware of it; it would need sharp agony to
penetrate the aura of dull, interminable misery that benumbed his
consciousness.

With all this, he tormented himself w