nted for nothing, was a
cipher in the arithmetic of commerce. I must say, however, that the
sailors themselves were sympathetic, as instance the case of Johnson; but
the masters (the hunters and the captain) were heartlessly indifferent.
Even the protest of Standish arose out of the fact that he did not wish
to lose his boat-puller. Had it been some other hunter's boat-puller,
he, like them, would have been no more than amused.

But to return to Harrison. It took Johansen, insulting and reviling the
poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started again. A little later
he made the end of the gaff, where, astride the spar itself, he had a
better chance for holding on. He cleared the sheet, and was free to
return, slightly downhill now, along the halyards to the mast. But he
had lost his nerve. Unsafe as was his present position, he was loath to
forsake it for the more unsafe position on the halyards.

He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down to the
deck. His eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling violently. I
had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human face. Johansen
called vainly for him to come down. At any moment he was liable to be
snapped off the gaff, but he was helpless with fright. Wolf Larsen,
walking up and down with Smoke and in conversation, took no more notice
of him, though he cried sharply, once, to the man at the wheel:

"You're off your course, my man! Be careful, unless you're looking for
trouble!"

"Ay, ay, sir," the helmsman responded, putting a couple of spokes down.

He had been guilty of running the _Ghost_ several points off her course
in order that what little wind there was should fill the foresail and
hold it steady. He had striven to help the unfortunate Harrison at the
risk of incurring Wolf Larsen's anger.

The time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible. Thomas
Mugridge, on the other hand, considered it a laughable affair, and was
continually bobbing his head out the galley door to make jocose remarks.
How I hated him! And how my hatred for him grew and grew, during that
fearful time, to cyclopean dimensions. For the first time in my life I
experienced the desire to murder--"saw red," as some of our picturesque
writers phrase it. Life in general might still be sacred, but life in
the particular case of Thomas Mugridge had become very profane indeed. I
was frightened when I became conscious that I was seeing red, and th