evidently trying to intercept the steamship.
Elisha yelled in delight.

"They've abandoned ship--just what I hoped for--in the dories. They've
no case at all now."

"But what for, Elisha?" asked Martin. "Mus' be hungry, I t'ink."

"Mebbe, or else they think that liner, who can stop only to save
life,--carries the mails, you see,--will turn round and put 'em in
charge here. Why, nothin' but an English man-o'-war could do that now."

They saw the steamship slow down, while the black specks flocked up to
her, and then go on her way. And they went on theirs; but three days
later they had reasoned out a better explanation of the Englishmen's
conduct. Martin came on deck with a worried face, and announced that,
running short of salt meat in the harness-cask, he had broken out the
barrels of beef, pork, and hard bread that he had counted upon, and
found their contents absolutely uneatable, far gone in putrescence,
alive with crawling things.

"Must ha' thought he was fitting out a Yankee hell-ship when he bought
this," said Elisha, in disgust, as he looked into the ill-smelling
barrels. "Overboard with it, boys!"

Overboard went the provisions, for starving animals could not eat of
them, and the odor permeated the ship. They resigned themselves to a
gloomy outlook--gloomier when Amos reported that the coal in the
bunkers would last but two days longer. He had been mistaken, he said;
he had calculated to run compound engines with Scotch boilers, not a
full-powered blast-furnace with six inches of scale on the
crown-sheets.

"And they knew this," groaned Elisha. "That's why they chucked the
stuff overboard--to bring us to terms, and never thinkin' they'd starve
first. They were dead luny, but we're lunier."

They stopped the engines and visited the schooner in the dory. Not a
scrap of food was there, and the fish-kettle was scraped bright. They
returned and went on. With plenty of coal there was still six days' run
ahead to New York. How many with wood fuel, chopped on empty stomachs
and burned in coal-furnaces, they could not guess. But they went to
work. There were three axes, two top-mauls, and several handspikes and
pinch-bars aboard, and with these they attacked bulkheads and spare
woodwork, and fed the fires with the fragments; for a glance down the
hatches had shown them nothing more combustible and detachable in the
cargo than a few layers of railroad iron, which covered and blocked the
openings to the lower ho