Montana Block, S.F.'"

"Well," returned Nares, "I won't say but what an old navy quartermaster
might telegraph all that, if you gave him a day to do it in and a pound
of tobacco for himself. But it's above my register. I must try something
short and sweet: KB, urgent signal, 'Heave all aback'; or LM, urgent,
'The berth you're now in is not safe'; or what do you say to PQH?--'Tell
my owners the ship answers remarkably well.'"

"It's premature," I replied; "but it seems calculated to give pain to
Trent. PQH for me."

The flags were found in Trent's cabin, neatly stored behind a lettered
grating; Nares chose what he required, and (I following) returned on
deck, where the sun had already dipped, and the dusk was coming.

"Here! don't touch that, you fool!" shouted the captain to one of the
hands, who was drinking from the scuttle-butt. "That water's rotten!"

"Beg pardon, sir," replied the man. "Tastes quite sweet."

"Let me see," returned Nares, and he took the dipper and held it to his
lips. "Yes, it's all right," he said. "Must have rotted and come sweet
again.--Queer, isn't it, Mr. Dodd? Though I've known the same on a Cape
Horner."

There was something in his intonation that made me look him in the face;
he stood a little on tiptoe to look right and left about the ship, like
a man filled with curiosity, and his whole expression and bearing
testified to some suppressed excitement.

"You don't believe what you're saying!" I broke out.

"O, I don't know but what I do!" he replied, laying a hand upon me
soothingly. "The thing's very possible. Only, I'm bothered about
something else."

And with that he called a hand, gave him the code flags, and stepped
himself to the main signal halliards, which vibrated under the weight of
the ensign overhead. A minute later, the American colours, which we had
brought in the boat, replaced the English red, and PQH was fluttering at
the fore.

"Now, then," said Nares, who had watched the breaking out of his signal
with the old-maidish particularity of an American sailor, "out with
those handspikes, and let's see what water there is in the lagoon."

The bars were shoved home; the barbarous cacophony of the clanking pump
rose in the waist; and streams of ill-smelling water gushed on deck and
made valleys in the slab guano. Nares leaned on the rail, watching the
steady stream of bilge as though he found some interest in it.

"What is it that bothers you?" I asked.

"Well, I'