e felt that his frail shallop would never live through one.

Though in the tropics, he became chilly as the night advanced, while
the pain of hunger was but partially eased by the drafts of water of
which he still partook from time to time. He finally lay down in the
stern and wrapped himself in the sail.

The pitching and rolling soon sent him to sleep, in a merciful relief
to the gnawing sense of misery that now never left his mind while awake.

A ship's yawl, being both broad and deep, is one of the safest of small
boats in a seaway. Therefore Ralph passed the hours in temporary
security while unconscious. Unless a gale should rise, there was
little danger of his craft's swamping, nor, except from hunger, was his
physical situation any worse than during the day.

The most appalling thing connected with such a position was the
feelings which it must necessarily arouse, and until day Ralph was
exempted from these.

When he rubbed his eyes at dawn he lay there dreading to rise. The
loneliness of the sea renewed its terrors at once, and he feared to
look upon a scene of which he was the sole living element.

"I'm getting to be a regular baby," he said aloud. "I wonder what
grandfather would say could he see me now. I am at least away from
that old feud, if I never was before."

This allusion led him into a reverie upon the strangeness of the fate
that had led him half across the world in order to free himself from a
senseless quarrel, and to be pursued by it to an extent that had left
him free from its influence only when he was facing death in his
present forlorn condition.

He had been sent to Shard, whom he should have avoided as a relative of
the Vaughn faction. Shard had sent him to Gary, while Gary, five
thousand miles away, was wreaking upon the boy all the hatred inspired
by the haters of his family far back in the Southern mountains.

At last he raised his head and peered out upon the watery waste. As
his gaze swept from one side to the other an exclamation of amazement
dropped from his lips and he sprang to his feet.

Scarcely a quarter of a mile away was the Wanderer, with her sails all
spread and flapping idly from side to side as she rolled gently upon
the dead swell of the sea. The wind had died away and the slaver lay
between the yawl and the eastern dawn, a dim yet recognizable bulk.
Her dark, graceful proportions were not to be mistaken.

"This beats the nation!" was Ralph's next eja