ate. She drank
whiskey after her meals, and when angry, which was often, swore like a
buccaneer. As yet she was almost, as one might say, without sex--savage,
unconquered, untamed, glorying in her own independence, her sullen
isolation. Her neck was thick, strong, and very white, her hands
roughened and calloused. In her men's clothes she looked tall, vigorous,
and unrestrained, and on more than one occasion, as Wilbur passed
close to her, he was made aware that her hair, her neck, her entire
personality exhaled a fine, sweet, natural redolence that savored of the
ocean and great winds.

One day, as he saw her handling a huge water-barrel by the chines only,
with a strength he knew to be greater than his own, her brows contracted
with the effort, her hair curling about her thick neck, her large, round
arms bare to the elbow, a sudden thrill of enthusiasm smote through him,
and between his teeth he exclaimed to himself:

"By Jove, you're a woman!"

The "Bertha Millner" continued to the southward, gliding quietly over
the oil-smoothness of the ocean under airs so light as hardly to ruffle
the surface. Sometimes at high noon the shimmer of the ocean floor
blended into the shimmer of the sky at the horizon, and then it was no
longer water and blue heavens; the little craft seemed to be poised in
a vast crystalline sphere, where there was neither height nor
depth--poised motionless in warm, coruscating, opalescent space, alone
with the sun.

At length one morning the schooner, which for the preceding twenty-four
hours had been heading eastward, raised the land, and by the middle
of the afternoon had come up to within a mile of a low, sandy shore,
quivering with heat, and had tied up to the kelp in Magdalena Bay.

Charlie now took over entire charge of operations. For two days previous
the Chinese hands had been getting out the deck-tubs, tackles, gaffs,
spades, and the other shark-fishing gear that had been stowed
forward. The sails were lowered and gasketed, the decks cleared of all
impedimenta, hogsheads and huge vats stood ready in the waist, and the
lazy indolence of the previous week was replaced by an extraordinary
activity.

The day after their arrival in the bay was occupied by all hands in
catching bait. This bait was a kind of rock-fish, of a beautiful red
gold color, and about the size of an ordinary cod. They bit readily
enough, but out of every ten hooked three were taken off the lines by
the sharks befo