ry of Mark's
derision. And--for the honor of the House of Shore, it were well to prove
the matter, if Mark were dead. It is not well for a Shore to abandon his
ship in strange seas.

He asked Aaron, two weeks after their first talk, whether they had
questioned the white men on the pearling schooner.

"Oh, aye," said Aaron cheerfully. "I sought 'em out, myself. Three of
them, they was; and ill-favored. A slinky small man, and a rat-eyed large
man, and a fat man in between; all unshaven, and filthy, and drunken as
owls. They'd seen naught of Mark Shore, they said. I'm thinking he'd let
them see but little of him. He had no tenderness for dirt."

Joel told Priss nothing of what he hoped and feared; nor did he question
Jim Finch in the matter. Finch was a good man at set tasks, but he was
too amiable, and he had no clamp upon his lips.... Joel did not wish the
word to go abroad among the men. He was glad that most of the crew were
new since last voyage; but the officers were unchanged, save that he
stood in his brother's shoes.

They left Trinidad behind them, and shouldered their way southward, the
blunt bow of the _Nathan Ross_ battering the seas. And they came to the
Straits, and worked in, and made their westing day by day, while little
Priss, wide-eyed on the deck, watched the gaunt cliffs past whose
wave-gnawed feet they stole. And so at last the Pacific opened out before
them, and they caught the winds, and worked toward Easter Island.

But their progress was slow. To men unschooled in the patience of the
whaling trade, it would have been insufferably slow. For they struck
fish; and day after day they hung idle on the waves while the trypots
boiled; and day after day they loitered on good whaling grounds, when the
boats were out thrice and four times between sun's rise and set. If Joel
was impatient, he gave no sign. If his desires would have made him hasten
on, his duty held him here, where rich catches waited for the taking; and
while there were fish to be taken, he would not leave them behind.

Priscilla hated it. She hated the grime, and the smoke, and the smell of
boiling oil; and she hated this dawdling on the open seas, with never a
glimpse of land. More than once she made Joel bear the brunt of her own
unrest; and because it is not always good for two people to be too much
together, and because she had nothing better to do, she began to pick
Joel to pieces in her thoughts, and fret at his patience and st