t."

"We'll have a word with them, Mr. Bangs."

The survivors of the _Warren_ were forward in the crew's quarters, and
they were still dazed. They had not recovered from their fright; they
were sullen.

"I'm sorry, men! Sailor to sailor, you know what I mean if I don't say
any more. It's bad business on both sides. But what were you doing in
the fairway?"

"We wa'n't in the fairway," protested a grizzled man, evidently the
mate. He was uneasy in his borrowed clothes--he had surrendered his own
garments to a pantryman who had volunteered to dry them.

"You must have been," insisted Captain Mayo.

"I know we was all of two miles north of the regular course. I 'ain't
sailed across these shoals for thirty years not to know soundings when
I make 'em myself. Furthermore, she'll speak for herself, where she's
sunk."

The captain could not gainsay that dictum.

The mate scowled at the young man.

"I've got a question of my own. What ye doing, yourself, all of two
miles out of your course, whanging along, tooting your old whistle as
if you owned the sea and had rollers under you to go across dry ground
with, too?"

"I was not two miles out of my course," protested the captain, and yet
the sickening feeling came to him that there had been some dreadful
error, somewhere, somehow.

"When they put these steamers into the hands of real men instead of
having dudes and kids run 'em, then shipping will stand a fair show on
this coast," declared the mate, casting a disparaging glance at Mayo's
new uniform. "It was my watch on deck, and I know what I'm talking
about. You came belting along straight at us, two points out of your
course, and I thought the fog was playing tricks, and I didn't believe
my own ears. You have drowned my captain and four honest men. When I
stand up in court they'll get the straight facts from me, I can tell you
that. And they tell me it's your first trip. I might have knowed it
was some greenhorn, when I heard you coming two points off your course.
You'd better take off them clothes. I reckon you've made your _last_
trip, too!"

It was the querulous railing of a man who had been near death; it
was the everlasting grouch of the sailing-man against the lordly
steamboater. Mayo had no heart for rebuke or retort. What had happened
to him, anyway? This old schooner man seemed to know exactly what he was
talking about.

"If you don't believe what I'm telling you, go out on deck and see if
you can't h